Free Republic

They are called the PIGS -- Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain. What they have in common is that all are facing deficits and debts that could bring on national defaults and break up the European Union. What brought the PIGS to the edge of the abyss? All are neo-socialist states that provide welfare for poor people, generous unemployment, universal health care, early retirement and comfortable pensions. Most consume 40 percent to 50 percent of their gross domestic product annually, a crushing burden on the private sector. Dying populations is a second cause. -------------------------------------------- In Western Europe, the passing of the native-born...

State-linked Dubai entities have started talks to divest Asian assets as the emirate steps up the pace of its overseas asset sales to help ease its debt ­burden. Dubai-based Emaar Properties is talking to potential buyers of its majority stake in Singapore-based distributor and retailer RSH, according to people familiar with the matter. RSH, which works with brands including Zara and Mango, operates across Asia and the Middle East. A unit of Dubai Holding, which is looking to sell its 40 per cent stake in Malaysia’s Bank Islam, has appointed Rothschild to seek potential buyers. Dubai Holding is owned by...

SEATTLE - The KING 5 Investigators have uncovered a disturbing video-tape captured on five different security cameras underneath downtown Seattle.  It shows the graphic beating of a teenage girl in Seattle's Metro bus tunnel, while uniformed security guards simply look on. (edit) The video shows the two girls hitting each other for a few seconds. Then, the scene gets vicious. The young attacker punches the victim in the head and face 10 times. "It looks like a very egregious assault, which in fact it was," said Sgt. John Urquhart of the King County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the...

Almost daily, we learn about new problems with the formerly respected UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):  In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was "unusual" and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases.  Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000AD, when Vikings were able to settle in Southern Greenland and grow crops there) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800AD).  Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis. The most...

How should we characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s...

Smug sages of mainstream politics shouldn't underestimate her ### "No new ideas." That was the most prominent of the criticisms of Sarah Palin's speech at MSNBC's too-cool-for-school "Morning Joe" on Monday. The more general critique of former Gov. Palin's future was that while she certainly had star power, she could never speak to more than a fraction of even Republicans. The proof of the latter point was made with the evidence that many important Washington Republicans could never support her for more than cheerleader to her marginal people. They also pointed out that she had kept out of races in...

It's the Seven Nation Army against the U.S. Air Force Reserve: the White Stripes have taken "strong insult and objection" to a recruitment ad that aired during the Super Bowl. Jack and Meg White's issue with the TV spot? They claim the music used in the commercial is a rip-off of their 2002 breakout single, "Fell in Love with a Girl." "We believe our song was re-recorded and used without permission of the White Stripes, our publishers, label or management," the band wrote in a statement posted on their official website. "We have not licensed this song to the Air...

A MAN has been airlifted to hospital with 60 per cent burns to his body following a gas explosion at an Islamic school in Sydney's southwest. The explosion occurred shortly before 9am (AEDT) in a room next to the canteen of Unity Grammar College, Austral, a police spokesman said. A man in his 50s was injured. He was conscious and breathing, and has been airlifted to Royal North Shore Hospital with third degree burns to 60 per cent of his body. An ambulance spokesman said the burns were on the man's face, back and neck. Police are not yet sure...

Audi car commercial "hits home" for Gavin Newsom and other city dwellersAudi's "Green Police" Super Bowl ad was clearly out to mock environmentalist fervor -- and it hit close to home in greener-than-thou San Francisco. Perhaps that's because it was the brainchild of Audi's advertising agency, San Francisco independent Venables Bell & Partners. Sitting squarely in the "I am white, middle-class man, hear me roar" school of ads, the Cheap Trick-scored commercial suggested a world in which the type of individual decisions that seem meaningless but in the aggregate make a difference are enforced by enthusiastic law enforcement professionals in...

The Rothschild banking dynasty is to appoint a non-family member as chief executive for the first time in its 212-year history, as the group seeks to adapt its management structure to the post-crisis climate. Nigel Higgins, a 27-year veteran of the company who has co-headed the investment banking business for the past decade, will become chief executive of the family holding company in March, taking over from David de Rothschild. Mr Rothschild – he and his son are the only two Rothschild family members involved in the business – will remain as executive chairman. “We all know that organisations that...

"The Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show is a sportsman's paradise, but one where trouble is brewing. There were lots of kids here with their families, walking the nearly 300,000 square feet of the State Farm Show Complex. They were checking out the newest fishing lures, gun blinds and camouflage clothing. But many of the outfitters who set up booths at the show and sell mountain-lion stalks in New Mexico, bear hunts in Maine and African safaris are worried that they're in a dying business. Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show State Farm Show Complex Through Feb. 14 "Most kids wouldn't know...

Terrified passengers were left stranded between floors in the world’s tallest building after a lift broke as they were descending in the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai. Visitors queueing to descend from the observation deck on the 124th floor of the recently opened 828-metre (2,717ft) tower heard a crash and the sound of breaking glass from the lift shaft. Dust then billowed back into the room through the small gaps in the lift shaft doors. The 15 passengers inside the lift were left stranded for 45 minutes before they were rescued by staff who dropped a ladder into the shaft...

This kind of panic is only a small glimpse at what will happen when some real national emergency hits.

After 28 years in congress, Duncan Hunter is honored. I know first hand how much he did for our men and women in uniform!

The Red Bull Stratos team has kept itself under wraps until today’s press conference at the New York Academy of Sciences in NYC. The ambitious project marks the first major attempt at breaking an old but daunting skydiving record, one that starts at the edge of space. In 1960, U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger stepped out of a capsule at 102,800 feet above the Earth’s surface and, in just minutes returned to the surface by simply falling. The falling part was easy. The surviving part was not—his first jump, from the Excelsior I module nearly ended in disaster when...

In just about every speech at their 2008 convention, Democrats promised voters that a change in the White House would, in Barack Obama’s formulation, restore “our moral standing” in the world. Replace the unilateralist cowboy at the top with a humbler multilateralist, and the path would finally be cleared to fix vexing international issues such as curbing carbon emissions and dealing with the mullahs in Iran. Like many of the party faithful’s long-nurtured beliefs, this hope has disintegrated on contact with reality. “America is losing the free world,” said a January headline in the Financial Times. While that statement is...

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Severely obese teens who had surgery to limit what they could eat lost more weight and enjoyed more health benefits than those who did an intensive lifestyle program, researchers said on Tuesday. They said 21 of 25 severely obese teens aged 14 to 18 who underwent a form of gastric banding lost more than half of their excess weight compared with just 3 out of 25 who did a diet, exercise and behavior modification program. "In this study, gastric banding proved to be an effective intervention leading to a substantial and durable reduction in obesity and to...

Sarah Palin and The Tea Party movement are making many headlines these days as they fortify their position as the key opposition against President Barack Obama. Make no mistake about it. Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012. And, the millions of morons who follow her with every beck and call will vote for her. She'll get a lot of votes. And, she very well could unseat President Obama in 2012. Sarah Palin has now captivated the hearts and minds of conservatives across the country by being the face of the divisive Tea Party movement. She spoke...

No matter what former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin does, she's not going to win any friends in the mainstream modern feminism activist movement in the United States. But that might not be a bad thing. On HLN's Feb. 8 "The Joy Behar Show," Eve Ensler, the writer of the infamous "The Vagina Monologues" appeared on the broadcast to promote her new book "I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World." During the interview, she was asked by the show's host Joy Behar what she thought about Sarah Palin, her political prospects and her belief system....

For my tens of thousands of non-Jewish readers, a shul is the word for synagogue in Yiddish. It is the common term used by Orthodox Jews. I only want to make one point which is relevant to Jews and non-Jews: nearly everywhere I look I see non-orthodox synagogues failing, for sale or barely hanging on. I see exceptions too. The one significant phenomenon I want to point out that I see around me, in urban areas, is the development of the new informal shul. In San Francisco the biggest gathering of Jews I know of is call the Mission Minyan....

WASHINGTON – Crediting civil rights-era protest songs and their spiritual predecessors for his election, President Barack Obama on Tuesday sat in the East Room of his White House and listened to an all-star lineup of performers pay tribute to the music that he said fueled freedom marches and civil disobedience. The nation's first black president transformed the grand ballroom into a concert hall packed with members of his Cabinet, Congress, civil rights leaders and students for a program that will air on public television later this week for Black History Month... "The civil rights movement was a movement sustained by...

Software-designed cars don't always behave as expected in the real world. As Toyota dealers begin to repair sticky gas pedals on 2.3 million recalled vehicles, one question lingers: How did engineers miss the potential for friction in the pedal assembly--identified as the root cause of the problem--during the design process? One possible answer is that the simulation software widely used by automakers, aerospace companies and others to design and test products is only as smart as the humans who program it. To save money and speed development time, carmakers today design their vehicles virtually, using computer-aided design software, rather than...

SACRAMENTO (CBS 5) ― A state program that provides health, education and childcare services for preschool children could be the latest victim of California's budget crisis. ... The First 5 program is perhaps best known for preschool classes, but there are also parenting programs and other resources for new parents. Times are tough in Sacramento, and now the governor and some legislators have their eye on the $500 million-a-year the tobacco tax generates. Voters have opted twice to keep the tax in place. But on Wednesday, an Assembly Committee will look at taking half of First 5's money for the...

~ Freeper Canteen ~ Today We Want To Know... What’s Your Power Bird? Click here and take the quiz! To share your results, click "Get HTML", then copy and paste the code into a "Reply" box. Have fun! Please remember that The Canteen is here to support and entertain our troops and veterans and their families, and is family friendly.

Maricopa Co. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is urging GOPers to shelve Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in favor of ex-Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R), a challenger attacking from the right, in a new letter sent to primary voters. "Senator McCain has served this country admirably but it's time to replace his moderate or even liberal positions on taxes, the border, social causes and big bank bailouts with a consistent conservative like J.D.," Arpaio writes in the letter. ""I just wish Senator McCain had run as hard against Barack Obama as he is against a conservative like J.D. That could have prevented the harmful,...

Yesterday morning a classmate and friend of my 17 year old son--a high school senior, was found hanging in his bedroom, having committed a gruesome suicide. In commiting this senseless, unimaginable act, this handsome, intelligent and witty young man has effectively destroyed not just his own life, but his family's--his mother and father, his younger sister, his older brother's. I've not been able to stop asking "WHY"? I cannot shake the memory of his humor and boyishness when he would stay overnight with my sons--travel with us to the lakehouse--his obvious intellect, his considerate manners and his easy willingness to...

I've been trying, because I'd truly like to see health reform pass, to find something nice to say about President Obama's plans for a summit. Another summit, that is, nearly a year after the first one. Here's best I could come up with: It can't hurt. Consider it Chicken Soup for the Legislative Soul. When the president used his Super Bowl Sunday interview with CBS News' Katie Couric to launch this Hail Mary summit pass, he explained that "what I want to do is to look at the Republican ideas that are out there. ... "'How do you guys want...

February 10, 2010 Church May Split Over Women Bishops and Gay Priests, Warns Rowan Williams Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent Members of the General Synod listen to Dr Williams?s address yesterday The Archbishop of Canterbury warned yesterday that damaging infighting over women bishops and gay priests could result in a permanent split in the Anglican Communion. Dr Rowan Williams stressed that he did not “want or relish” the prospect of division. He called on the Church of England and Anglicans worldwide to step back from a “betrayal” of God’s mission and to put the work of Christ before schism. But he...

Soldiers from AustraliaÂ’s Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) conduct a medical clinic (MEDCAP) for the Chenartu villagers while more than 150 people gather for a shura.(Photo courtesy Australian Government Department of Defence) Courtesy Australian Government Department of DefenceThe Australian Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) with their Afghan partner force have facilitated a major gathering (shura) of village elders and religious leaders in Chenartu, north-east of Tarin Kowt, as part of their current focus on reaching out to Afghan communities across Uruzgan Province. During the meeting, village leaders and representatives were consulted to gain an understanding from the community of their...

SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) -- Knowing where sex offenders are in your community is ultimately up to you. One resource available to West Virginians is the State Police Web site at www.wvstatepolice.com. Officers recommend checking it regularly and often, especially if you feel a registered sex offender could be out of compliance with the law. Troopers say the key to all of this when it comes to protecting minors is parental involvement. You can access the sex offender registry Web sites for all three states. Ohio, for example, has 19,019 convicts on its registry list. In Kentucky, meanwhile, you will...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Workers with depression stay home sick more often than healthy colleagues, even when their disease is treated, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Tuesday. The report, commissioned by drug maker Sanofi Aventis, suggests that employers would benefit from better treatments of their workers for depression. Depression is the leading cause of disability among Americans aged 15 to 44, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. "Even when depressed patients are treated with antidepressants, there are substantial productivity losses. Therapies that can better manage depression may provide opportunities for savings to employers," the Thomson Reuters...

Hoaxes: Despite failures at Copenhagen, the fraud of the IPCC and the farce of Climate-gate, the administration wants an agency to monitor climate change. Why must we fund one-stop shopping for climate charlatans? As the climate freezes, there's no freeze on federal employment that will grow even more with the establishment of a new agency, the Climate Service office. The new agency was announced Monday by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This ministry of climate change propaganda will operate in tandem with NOAA's National Weather Service and National Ocean...

For much of the past decade, "declinism"--the notion that America is heading toward a deadly denouement--has largely been a philosophy of the left. But more recently, particularly in the wake of Barack Obama's election, conservatives have begun joining the chorus, albeit singing a somewhat different variation on the same tune. In a recent column in TheWashington Post George Will illustrates this conservative change of heart. Looking over the next few decades Will sees an aging, obsolescent America in retreat to a young and aggressive China. "America's destiny is demographic, and therefore is inexorable and predictable," he suggests, pointing to predictions...

The calls for broad retaliation over the planned U.S. weapons sales to the disputed island came from officers at China's National Defence University and Academy of Military Sciences, interviewed by Outlook Weekly, a Chinese-language magazine published by the official Xinhua news agency. The interviews with Major Generals Zhu Chenghu and Luo Yuan and Senior Colonel Ke Chunqiao appeared in the issue published on Monday. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) plays no role in setting policy for China's foreign exchange holdings. Officials in charge of that area have given no sign of any moves to sell U.S. Treasury bonds over the...

Rick Synder: Is He MI's Revenge Of The Nerds?

Sen. Jim DeMint twitters: D.C. snow will continue 'until Al Gore cries uncle' By Jordan Fabian - 02/09/10 01:24 PM ET Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) on Tuesday used the D.C. snowstorm to make a political jab, saying that it provides evidence for global warming skeptics. The conservative senator took to Twitter on Tuesday amid reports that the area is due to receive another 10 to 20 inches of snow this week: It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries "uncle" Some conservatives have echoed DeMint's sentiments that the snowstorm should poke holes in evidence backing global warming....

Labor Policy: And you thought card check legislation was dead? That certainly appeared to be the case last spring. But now there's talk of attaching it to a jobs bill. Dirty politics and lousy policy. Card check, known last year as the Employee Free Choice Act, is an attempt to fundamentally change the way unions organize. Under a card check law, a union would be certified if a simple majority of workers signed the cards that were used to gauge their interest in unionization. A follow-up vote through a secret ballot, the traditional method of certifying a union, would not...

The number of illegal immigrants living in the United States dropped by 1 million people in two years, according to new estimates by the Department of Homeland Security. The government thinks that 10.8 million illegal immigrants lived in the country in January 2009, down from a peak of nearly 12 million in 2007. If the official estimates are correct, not since 2005 has the population of illegal immigrants been as low as it was last year. Some private researchers, however, are questioning the magnitude of the drop. # Top countries of origin for illegal immigrants in the U.S.: Mexico: 6.65...

Meghan McCain’s scheduled GW appearance is the latest to fall victim to “Snowmageddon.” McCain’s speech at the Jack Morton Auditorium Tuesday night has been postponed due to the “blizzard-like conditions” predicted this week for the D.C. area, one of the event’s sponsors said Monday night. The event will be rescheduled later this semester, according to a press release from the Graduate School of Political Management Student Association. It did not offer details about honoring tickets already distributed for Feb. 9th. McCain is the daughter of former Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain. Her appearance sparked controversy last month when the...

Jobless Recession: Small business has been a key part of plans to stimulate the economy from the very start of the Obama presidency. So why is this crucial job-creating sector of our economy doing so poorly? The latest soundings from small business are not reassuring. In its annual poll of 2,114 members, for example, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) found that "small-business owners entered 2010 the same way they left 2009 — depressed." Meanwhile, the ADP Small Business Report for January shows companies with fewer than 50 workers shed an additional 22,000 jobs. These are the businesses that...

Federal Government Operating Status in the Washington, DC, Area the following message applies only to Wednesday, February 10, 2010 Federal agencies in the Washington, DC, area are CLOSED. This Means . . . Federal agencies in the Washington, DC, area are closed. Nonemergency employees (including employees on pre-approved leave) will be granted excused absence for the number of hours they were scheduled to work. This does not apply to employees on leave without pay, leave without pay for military duty, workers' compensation, suspension, or in another nonpay status. Telework employees may be expected to work from their telework sites, as...

Tuesday, February 9, 2010‘Prank' lands UNC student in stinky mess Teen arrested for porch fire Sharon Dunn An apparent prank gone bad put a Greeley college student in jail early Sunday. Greeley police arrived at a home in the 1100 block of Cranford Place to find a homeowner detaining Andrew Charles Donahue, 18, who he accused of leaving a burning bag of dog feces on his front porch. “We don't know, but we assume it was a prank,” said Greeley police spokesman Sgt. Joe Tymkowych. Donahue is a freshman at the University of Northern Colorado. The suspect — others may...

COLUMBUS, Ohio, February 9, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In what critics are calling an unprecedented act of bias, pro-abortion Ohio House Speaker Armond Budish (D-Beechwood) has denied Shelby County teen Elisabeth Trisler a routine legislative honor, evidently because he objects to Trisler's pro-life values. Budish is refusing to allow Trisler on the House floor to accept a legislative resolution, authored by Rep. John Adams (R-Sidney), which honors Trisler's accomplishment as the National Right to Life Oratory Contest winner.  Alongside local pro-life leaders, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio has criticized the move, indicating the refusal amounted to "teaching young...

NEW YORK, February 9, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - As nations around the world are beginning to feel the effects of plummeting birth rates, the Vatican’s representative to the United Nations has stressed that population growth is the key to overcoming poverty. Speaking before the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, Archbishop Celestino Migliore said, “too often population growth is viewed as the cause of poverty whereas it is a means of overcoming it, for only within the work force can the solution for poverty be found.”The archbishop explained: “where economic growth rates have declined, the answers lie not...

Investigators with the West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management are trying to determine if four recent deaths were caused by this past weekend's winter storm. The West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management is investigating four recent deaths in the state to determine if they were caused by the recent winter storm. Two of the deaths happened in Monongalia County, one was is Jefferson County and the final one was in Hampshire County, according to state officials. The deaths in Monongalia County were a couple in the western end of the county, according to the...

SAN FRANCISCO – Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks.The attack can force heavily secured computers to spill documents that likely were presumed to be safe. This discovery shows one way that spies and other richly financed attackers can acquire military and trade secrets, and comes as worries about state-sponsored computer espionage intensify, underscored by recent hacking attacks on Google Inc.The new attack discovered...

It's always nice to see Hollywood pitch in and do its bit for the nation. In WWII, Tinsel Town mobilized to help defeat the Axis powers. Today, the heirs of that proud tradition are going all out against today's forces of evil - medical insurance companies. At least, that's the impression fans of Fox's "House M.D." got from the show's Feb.8 episode. Detailing a hectic day in the life of Princeton Plainsboro Hospital Administrator Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), three of the episode's four story lines involved insurance. In one story line, a former patient was suing the hospital for...

Pinkerton Government Services, which is responsible for providing security at the Boeing helicopter plant in Ridley Township, Pa., reported to township police yesterday that someone stole their guns. Missing are six .40 caliber semiautomatic handguns and eight .38-caliber revolvers. They had been in a storage locker.

ALBANY -- The debate over making cervical cancer vaccines available to young women is coming to the state Legislature today. A group of anti-vaccine activists plans to attend this morning's Senate Codes Committee hearing to protest a bill that would let health care professionals give the vaccine to women younger than 18 without parental consent. The measure, sponsored in the Senate by Liz Krueger and in the Assembly by Amy Paulin -- both Democrats -- aims to protect women against preventable cervical cancer. The legislation also notes that Planned Parenthood clinics have been seeing teenagers coming in and requesting the...

Mixed up with the question of fairness to individuals and groups has been the explosive question of whether individuals and groups have the innate ability to perform at the same levels, if they are all treated alike or even given the same objective opportunities. Intellectuals have swung from one side of this question at the beginning of the 20th century to the opposite side at the end. Both those who said that achievement differences among races and classes were due to genes, in the early years of the 20th century, and those who said that these differences were due to...