Free Republic

NOT a brick has been laid to build the first distillery on the island where Whisky Galore! was filmed – but connoisseurs have already signed up to reserve the entire batch of its first-year casks. Peter Brown will begin building the distillery on Barra in the autumn. The distillery, costing more than £1 million, will make about 5,000 gallons of Isle of Barra Single Malt Whisky a year using water from Loch Uisge, the island's highest loch.

It's AP, so the summary is that a group of gunmen attacked a police academy in Lahore, Pakistan. Latest report I've seen has more than 35 police killed.

Eugene’s naked bike riders are back, and this time they have the police on their side. This evening, cyclists in various states of undress will pedal through downtown Eugene to protest the country’s dependence on oil and other nonrenewable energy sources. City officials initially tried to prevent the ride, citing a city ordinance against public nudity. But when the bicyclists objected, the city conceded it had no legal grounds to bar the ride. Courts have found that government can’t ban public nudity that’s aimed at conveying a political message, the city acknowledged.

It's an AP story, so I'll paraphrase the first paragraph. U.S. Grant's great-great-grandson found what appears to be a picture of Lincoln standing in front of the White House in 1865. It could be the last picture of him taken before he was killed.

Something remarkable happened in a college softball game Saturday in Ellensburg(Washington). At least, I am conditioned to think it was remarkable, since it involved an act of sportsmanship, with two players helping an injured opponent complete the home run she had just slugged.

December 22, 2006—Like pulling a shadow from the darkness, researchers in Japan have captured and filmed a live giant squid—likely for the first time—shedding new light on the famously elusive creatures. Tsunemi Kubodera, a scientist with Japan's National Science Museum, caught the 24-foot (7-meter) animal earlier this month near the island of Chichijima, some 600 miles (960 kilometers) southeast of Tokyo (see Japan map). His team snared the animal using a line baited with small squid and shot video of the russet-colored giant as it was hauled to the surface. The squid, a young female, "put up quite a fight"...

ROSS ICE SHELF, Antarctica (Reuters) - From a distance, the ANDRILL operation appears out of nowhere like a mirage: a white-draped tower amid giant blue boxcars laid out on a frozen sea. But this mammoth venture to drill through ice, ocean and back through time is as real as a science lab and as practical as an oil rig: hard-hatted drillers and scientists work in concert to find clues to a time when Antarctica was warm and wet. Because the researchers are convinced that a warmer age is in prospect as a result of human-spurred global climate change, they want...

XP-running Macs give PCs a run for their money.....You’ll forgive me if I seem a little confused these days. Despite the fact that I work in a lab full of Macs, I spend more of my time lately staring at Windows XP than at Mac OS X. ....SNIP.... As you can see, the Macs running Windows gave these PCs a run for their money, with the 2.16GHz MacBook Pro turning in the fastest scores on three of the five individual tests.

Jan. 10 EUGENE, Ore. — Here's a tip: If you're cashing paychecks from the University of Oregon, treat Phil Knight with unabashed love; even genuflect at his Nikes if the occasion calls for it. Just don't tick him off or, heaven forbid, fall shy of grandiose designs for his beloved alma mater — lest you might end up following Martin Smith down Interstate 5. >>>>>> Knight, who historically has been reluctant to discuss his philanthropy, declined to be interviewed for this story. But over the last decade, the father of modern sports marketing, the guy whose push-the-envelope company sold us...

Our Abounding English Language By Richard Lederer English boasts by far the largest vocabulary of all languages, almost four times the number of words as its nearest competitor, German. As a result, English possesses a plethora of synonyms that allow greater nuances of meaning than are available in other tongues. The multitudinous choice of words in English offers both a delightful and daunting challenge to native and non-native speakers. In Sophie's Choice, the heroine, Polish-born Sophie, expresses mock horror at the infinite variety of English words: "Such a language! . . . Too many words. I mean just the word...

AN EXCITING archaeological discovery has been made at Culmore in Derry by two men who stumbled across a large stone artefact, which pre-dates the Egyptian Pyramids by a few thousand years. When Frank Gillespie began work on his garden wall in Culmore he had little idea that just below his feet lay a large stone axe estimated to be around 8-9,000 years-old. Frank's father Hugh Gillespie, of Lone Moor Road, had been digging the foundation for the wall when he unearthed the ancient tool. "My father found it and left it to one side, paying little notice, but when I...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Thanks in part to new spectroscopic technology, researchers have solved a great mystery concerning some of North America's oldest pieces of sculpture. With the use of PIMA -- a non-invasive Portable Infrared Mineral Analyzer -- an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has identified the source and meaning of "spectacular late prehistoric" figurines found in several locales in the South and the Southeast -- in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee. According to lead researcher Thomas Emerson, an archaeologist and the director of ITARP (Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program), the figurines were...

Stone age cattle herders left religious imagery which was to re-emerge in Valley of Kings Rock art etched on cliff walls in the eastern Sahara more than 6,000 years ago could spell out the answer to one of archaeology's great puzzles - where the ancient Egyptians came from. The answer? They were there all the time. The pyramid builders made their first entry in the archaeological record 5,000 years ago. This appearance was so abrupt that it has provoked fantasies of alien landings, mysterious civilisations or an invading master race. But in Genesis of the Pharaohs, published on Monday by...

An important archaeological discovery was made in the Vatican when a site for construction of car parking was being cleared. Archaeologists discovered an ancient necropolis of the times of St. Apostle Peter, the same that is mentioned in the Gospel. Now this version is studied by historians; if it proves true, this in its turn will confirm another hypothesis suggested by historian Magrherita Guarducci. She supposes that an entombment of St. Apostle Peter was found under the altar that is situated under the St.Peter's basilica dome. This version has been waiting for confirmation or refutation since 1952. Director of Vatican...

OTTAWA (CP) - Data compiled from the journals of early Arctic explorers casts doubt on the assumption that recent thinning of Arctic ice is the result of human-induced climate change. A Norwegian study using the explorers' ancient logbooks suggests that dramatic shrinkage of sea ice, widely cited as evidence for global warming in recent years, has occurred before. That doesn't necessarily prove that recent disappearance of sea ice is natural, but raises the possibility that it could be, researchers say. Adventurers of the 1700s, who took meticulous notes on their voyages, encountered ice conditions similar to those seen today, researcher...

Mobile spam on the rise Beware of mobile spam and scam Unwanted text messages are becoming a growing nuisance for UK consumers, who are often confused about how they received such messages. Complaints to regulators have soared over the last year as advertisers directly target mobile phone users. Increasingly, such unsolicited texts dupe people into phoning premium rate numbers. One method is to send a romantic message from an mystery admirer. Premium rate calls watchdog Icstis has received more than 150 complaints in the past nine months about unsolicited messages. Wireless confusion The Advertising Standards Authority has also seen a...

Martin Palmer, an English Sinologist, was searching western China in 1998 for a pagoda, which was all that was left of the monastery of Da Qin. He believed the pagoda was a remnant of the Christians who for several hundred years flourished along the ancient Silk Road. One day he and a couple of his colleagues came upon a pagoda in a field, time-worn but still standing. He asked a woman (a Buddhist nun, as it turned out) what the pagoda was. All that remained of a great Buddhist monastery, she replied. What was it before? A great Taoist monastery,...

<p>A lawsuit filed on Wednesday by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals challenges whether the California dairy industry's award-winning ad campaign featuring "Happy Cows" frolicking in verdant pastures is false advertising.</p> <p>The suit, filed in San Francisco, asks a Superior Court judge to order the California Milk Advisory Board to permanently suspend its two-year-old television and print advertising campaign.</p> <p>California Milk Advisory Board officials could not be reached for comment. With 1.6 billion pounds of cheese produced annually, California is the nation's no. 2 producer, second only to Wisconsin.</p>

Roots of Mesoamerican Writing For 7 centuries, the Maya recorded their history in elaborate stone carvings. Archaeologists have deciphered these hieroglyphs, but haven't been certain about their origins. Now a team describes what is potentially the oldest evidence of writing in the Americas. For many archaeologists, the two artifacts suggest that Maya script originated in an earlier culture known as the Olmec. Several clues have long suggested that the Olmec civilization, which flourished from 1200 B.C. to 400 B.C., was the first to develop cultural traditions, including writing, later adopted by the Maya, who reigned from about A.D. 300 to...

KEY WEST -- Research divers and marine archaeologists expect to find shells, rocks and remnants of shipwrecks when they excavate areas of the ocean bottom. But pine cones, tree branches and charred limbs -- thought to be about 8,400 years old -- were an unexpected and intriguing treasure awaiting archaeologist Corey Malcom, who spent much of the summer underwater in search of the remains of the Henrietta Marie, a British slave ship that sank 35 miles off Key West in 1700. In August, Malcom, who is director of archaeology at the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, was joined underwater by George...