Free Republic

ABUJA, Nigeria — A suicide bomber driving a vehicle packed with explosives rammed the United Nations headquarters in the Nigerian capital of Abuja on Friday, blasting an enormous hole in the building with a thunderous explosion, witnesses and officials said. As many as 400 people may have been inside at the time of the attack, the first time United Nations offices have been a bombing target in Nigeria. Boko Haram, a shadowy Nigerian Islamist insurgency group with possible links to Al Qaeda’s affiliates in the region, claimed responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to the BBC’s Hausa language...

Explanation: Brilliant Venus and a thin crescent Moon stood together above the eastern horizon just before sunrise on June 30. The lovely celestial pairing is captured in this colorful twilight skyview overlooking a reservoir near Izmir, Turkey. For some, the close conjunction could be viewed as a daylight occultation. While Venus is nearing the end of its latest performance as planet Earth's morning star, the old lunar cresent, about 24 hours from its New Moon phase, was also bidding farewell for now to the dawn. In fact, for the next two nights a young Moon can be spotted just after...

Freshman Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) gave a speech to close this year's Conservative Political Action Conference that earned a more enthusiastic reaction from conservative activists than those given by most rumored 2012 presidential hopefuls over the past three days. The first-term congressman brought the audience to its feet several times late Saturday, repudiating President Obama's social and economic policies and promising "a new dawn in America." West took the coveted speaking slot that was rejected by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who declined to attend CPAC for the fourth straight year. West, who represents a district that voted for President...

Jake Tapper strikes again with his breaking blog news on the Obama admin "renaming" the Iraq war as of Sept 2010. In an effort to put a fresh face on a much maligned, but success Bush admin operation, Sec'y of Defense Robert Gates sent a memo to the CiC Obama yesterday, requesting a name change for US and/or coalition forces in Iraq starting Sept 1st of this year. The whoopdedoo proposition? Change Iraqe Freedom to Operation "New Dawn". From Tapper: Gates writes that by changing the name at the same time as the change of mission -- the scheduled withdrawal...

A top commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards said on Tuesday that the country's armed forces will unveil several missiles and weapons at the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution next month. Mehr news agency quoted commander Massud Jazayeri as saying: "Several missile and weapons projects will be unveiled during the 10 days of dawn (February 1 to 11) by armed forces." Jazayeri's announcement comes less than a week after Tehran said it will reveal three new satellites in February. Communications Minister Reza Taghipour said the three home-built communications satellites were Toloo (Dawn), Ya Mahdi and Mesbah-2. He did not give...

Iran will unveil three new satellites in February, a report said Wednesday, amid Western concerns that Tehran is using its nuclear and space industries to develop atomic and ballistic weapons. ISNA news agency quoted Communications Minister Reza Taghipour as saying that one of the three home-built communications satellites is still under construction. Taghipour named the three satellites as Toloo (Dawn), Ya Mahdi and Mesbah-2, but did not elaborate on exactly when they would be launched. Ya Mahdi, Taghipour said as quoted by ISNA, was an "experimental satellite" and the launch would be for testing camera and telecommunications equipment. Mesbah-2, which...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Bank of America, Verizon, Chipotle and other companies have pulled advertising from a Sacramento radio station after talk show hosts referred to transgender people as "freaks" with mental disorders. During a May 28 show, one of the three hosts on KRXQ's "Rob, Arnie & Dawn" show said he would hit his son with his shoe if he put on high heels. Another said he would tell a boy he was "a little idiot" if he asked to wear a dress. Officials with Bank of America Corp. and Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. said Friday their companies pulled...

This image of the Himiko object is a composite and in false color. The bar at the lower right represents 10,000 light years. Credit: M. Ouchi et al. This mysterious, giant object existed at a time when the universe was only about 800 million years old. It stretches for 55 thousand light years, a record for that early point in time. Its length is comparable to the radius of the Milky Way’s disk. Besides being a great candidate for a future “Where in the Universe Challenge,” what is it? In general, objects such as this one are dubbed extended...

The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day. Proverbs 4:18 I like sunrises and sunsets. I could sit and watch them for hours if they lasted that long. I spent four years in Alaska and I could do that in the Summer if I wanted. It was even easier in the Winter because the sun could rise and set within an hour in December. I was traveling across West Texas and when I commented about the flat open road, a local said that the sunsets just linger...

I'm mainly posting this because the liftoff image is one of the most impressive I've seen.

A NASA probe blasted into space early Thursday, kicking off an unprecedented mission to explore the two largest asteroids in the solar system. Riding atop a Delta 2 rocket, NASA's Dawn spacecraft launched toward the asteroids Vesta and Ceres at 7:34 a.m. EDT (1134 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla. "In my view, we're going to be visiting some of the last unexplored worlds in the solar system," said Marc Rayman, Dawn director of system engineering at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. Dawn's eight-year mission will carry the 2,685-pound (1,212-kilogram) probe across...

"This handsome indie Western damningly recounts the 1857 slayings of 120 settlers passing through Utah, but the didactic presentation, grim speechifying and tacked-on love story all signify a less-than-healthy regard for the audience's intelligence."  Variety   Justin Chang 1/4 "The film feels less like historical drama than a venomous religious tract printed on celluloid."  Minneapolis Star Tribune   Colin Covert   "September Dawn has the ham-fisted lyricism of political ads and pharmaceutical commercials."  Village Voice   J. Hoberman   "When the movie isn't doling out ham-fisted history...it gives us magnificent vistas of a pristine prairie...and there's a deep sweetness...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The planned weekend launch of a spacecraft to explore two of the solar system's largest asteroids was delayed again because of problems with a tracking ship and aircraft. NASA set Monday afternoon as a new launch time for the Dawn spacecraft, which will embark on a years-long journey to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, which lie between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft originally had been set to launch Saturday but that was nixed because thunderstorms and lightning at the launch pad prevented loading its fuel. On Friday, the space agency called off a Sunday launch, too,...

NASA this weekend is set to launch a spacecraft that will journey to the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, a mission that involves a rendezvous with two of the solar system's largest asteroids. Seeking clues about the birth of the solar system, the Dawn spacecraft will first encounter Vesta, the smaller of the two bodies, four years from now. In 2015, it will meet up with Ceres, which carries the status of both asteroid and, like Pluto, dwarf planet. "We're trying to go back in time as well as to go out there in space," said planetary...

State, federal agencies expect to have spent at least $240,000Although analysts haven't finished calculating the total cost of rerouting two humpback whales that strayed into the Delta last month, the bill to taxpayers is in the six figures. The massive rescue effort spanned more than two weeks and involved 35 groups, including agencies at every level of government and multiple nonprofit organizations. Five Delta counties and as many U.S. Coast Guard stations took part; so did a handful of universities, a couple of pharmaceutical manufacturers, and even a business that customizes medications for animals and a San Diego theme park....

NASA's campaign to send the nom de plumes of people from around the world into the heart of the asteroid belt ends Sat., Nov. 4. Submitted names will be carried on board NASA's Dawn, the first spacecraft to travel between and scrutinize two distinct worlds. Mission scientists are confident Dawn observations of asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres will answer basic questions about the nature and composition of these celestial wanderers. "How many chances do you get to fly into the very heart of the asteroid belt?" said Keyur Patel, Dawn project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif....

Dawn Sneaks: Old birds sing early, cuckold sleepyheads Susan Milius Among European birds called blue tits, the early bird gets more than a worm. Older males start singing some 5 or 6 minutes earlier in the dawn chorus and attract more of the promiscuous females than younger males do, researchers report in an upcoming issue of Animal Behaviour. SLY SONGS. Among blue tits, males' dawn chorus may be a networking system for encounters with wandering females. K. Delhey In Europe, the springtime dawn chorus includes the voices of male blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus), colorful little cousins of chickadees. Those males...

Çatalhöyük excavations unveil very dawn of human civilization Monday, July 10, 2006 ANKARA - Turkish Daily News A total of 130 houses have been unearthed to date during excavations at the 9,000-year-old site of Çatalhöyük in Konya's Çumra district, excavation assistant team leader Shahina Farid has said. The first excavations at the site -- considered one of the oldest settlements in the history of mankind, dating back to the Neolithic Age -- were conducted by British archaeologist James Mellart, who uncovered 80 houses during excavations between 1961-1964, according to the Anatolia news agency. Work at the site resumed in 1993...

A federal grand jury in Denver has indicted four people on eight counts of arson for a series of eco-terrorism fires set at the Vail ski area in 1998. Those indicted are: Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, 29, Stanislas Gregory Meyerhoff, 28, Josephine Sunshine Overaker, 31, and Rebecca Jeanette Rubin, 33. Gerlach and Meyerhoff are presently in federal custody in Oregon, facing separate arson charges. The whereabouts of Overaker and Rubin are unknown. The Two Elks Lodge and other structures on Vail Mountain were burned to the ground on Oct. 19, 1998. Damage was estimated at $12 million. A group called the...

LOS ANGELES - NASA decided Monday to restart a mission to explore two of the solar system's largest asteroids, just weeks after the project was killed because of budget woes. The space agency earlier this month scrapped the $446 million Dawn mission to orbit the asteroids Ceres and Vesta, nearly a half year after it was put on hold because of cost overruns and technical problems. NASA decided to review the cancellation after the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which managed the mission, made an appeal. "Our review determined the project team has made substantive progress on many of this mission's technical...

LOS ANGELES - In an unusual move, NASA is reviewing a recent decision by an agency head to scrap a mission to orbit two asteroids. The Dawn project was canceled on March 2, five months after it was put on standdown because of cost overruns and technical problems. NASA's unusual step to review Dawn's termination came after the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the mission, presented new evidence, the space agency said in a statement. It's the first time in recent memory that a NASA center has challenged a headquarters decision on a canceled mission, said NASA spokeswoman...

Storm the White House Multi-Day Event, Beginning March 15, come when you can and stay as long as you can - we are taking over the White House until they leave. Torture, Occupation, Genocide - Must End Now. Wednesday, March 15th 2006 12:00 AM Washington, DC USA TAKE THE WHITE HOUSE BY STORM - Stop Genocide, Torture and Occupation For Nat Turner, For Martin and Coretta, For all the Torture and Assassination in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti and many others - We will not allow the Slave Holders that Still Prevail in this Country to Rule us any longer. Imprisonment and...

Events RSVP Storm the White House Multi-Day Event, Beginning March 15, come when you can and stay as long as you can - we are taking over the White House until they leave. Torture, Occupation, Genocide - Must End Now. Wednesday, March 15th 2006 12:00 AM Washington, DC USA TAKE THE WHITE HOUSE BY STORM - Stop Genocide, Torture and Occupation U.N. SOS - We need your help to end the reign of international criminals. It is our duty and the duty of the United Nations to rescue the people of the world from the U.S. dictators. Murder for occupation...

LOS ANGELES (AP)—A NASA spacecraft built to explore two of the solar system's largest asteroids won't launch this year because the space agency is dealing with cost overruns and technical issues in the project. The planned summer launch of the Dawn spacecraft has been indefinitely postponed, said Andrew Dantzler, director of NASA's solar system division. Mission managers had been ordered to halt work on Dawn last fall while the project was assessed by an independent review team, which is expected to present its findings to NASA on Jan. 27. Even if NASA gives Dawn the green light, it would take...

US police have arrested Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq who has become a prominent war opponent, along with two dozen people for demonstrating without authorisation in front of the White House. Ms Sheehan became an icon of the anti-war movement when she camped outside President George W Bush's ranch in Texas during his August vacation, demanding he meet her for a second time. Ms Sheehan had met the President earlier with a group of families of fallen soldiers. Ms Sheehan and the other protesters staged a "die-in" in front of the the White House,...

Members of the D.C. Chapter of Free Republic played a twi-night doubleheader last Friday against anti-American leftists from Code Pink and DAWN on the Georgia Avenue corridor near the D.C.-Maryland line.The first game was at 5 p.m. outside the Silver Spring, Md. Armed Forces recruitment center. Six FReepers took a stand to defend the honor of our military on Memorial Day weekend against fifty or so angry leftists. Montgomery County police were on hand in sufficient numbers to keep the peace, but just barely.FReepers in attendance were BillF, BufordP, Doctor Raoul, tgslTakoma, kristinn and a lurker. Around 4:30, the first...

In the Know Your Enemy department, members of the DC Chapter regularly snoop around in the sewage filled websites of the leftists to gather intelligence. So today, while chatting with BillF about ongoing leftist activity in the DC area, I happened onto an interesting conflict of propaganda from two (or is it three) local clans of leftists.Take a look at the photos on this DC Code Pink website. It appears to the casual observer that Code Pink is reporting that these photos are from an action they held on May 6th.Now take a look at the photos posted in reference...

Canada--Famed Canadian balladeer, Gordon Lightfoot, whose epic ballad The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald chronicled the last minutes of an otherwise obscure, industrial maritime disaster, has weighed in again with another blow-by-blow account of a more recent near tragedy. "When I saw the Norwegian Dawn's harrowing story on C-Span, I had to act," said Lightfoot. “The thing practically wrote itself.” Some say that Lightfoot’s deft touch with haunting, almost ethereal lyrics makes his new ballad, The List of the Norwegian Dawn, a potentially instant hit. “I can hear the song in my head already,” said one fan of Lightfoot. “This...

Hello shutterbug FReepers and photo enthusiasts. Two weeks ago I started a weekly photography thread with TEXAS WINDMILLS, but last Saturday night my computer crashed, so I had to skip a week. Sorry about that. The theme now is SUNRISE/DAYBREAK. I am not usually an early bird, but I have managed to get a few sunrise shots despite my preference to sleep in. Please post your own favorite sunrise photos here -- not someone else's work, but your very own. No cheating with sunsets. ~ValerieUSA

No, this isn’t about the Star-Spangled Banner, neither the flag nor the anthem. It’s about dawn itself. The promise of a new beginning. Civilization began, thousands of years before recorded history, when men discovered how to cultivate crops. That meant communities and social organization. It also meant the beginnings of astronomy, studying the movement of the sun. Early evidence of this includes the “solar observatories” built by the Incas in South America, by the Anasazi in North America, and most famously, by Druids and others at Stonehenge in Britain. All these identified the solar equinoxes, especially in the spring. Coupled...

Published on: Sunday, Jan 16, 2005 Anti-war leaders expect crowd By Allison WilliamsStaff writer On the one-year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, hundreds gathered in Fayetteville for what some called the city's largest peace rally since the Vietnam War. Even more people are expected for the second anniversary. A rally set for March 19 at Rowan Park is being advertised nationally by United for Peace and Justice. On its Web site, the group is promoting a ''major regional protest in Fayetteville, N.C.'' The day after the rally, Iraq Veterans Against the War plans to hold its...

December 25, 2004Nativity of the Lord (Christmas)Mass at Dawn Reading IIs 62:11-12 See, the LORD proclaimsto the ends of the earth:say to daughter Zion,your savior comes!Here is his reward with him,his recompense before him.They shall be called the holy people,the redeemed of the LORD,and you shall be called "Frequented, "a city that is not forsaken. Responsorial PsalmPs 97:1, 6, 11-12 R A light will shine on us this day: the Lord is born for us.The LORD is king; let the earth rejoice;let the many islands be glad.The heavens proclaim his justice,and all peoples see his glory.R A light will shine...

When he was a child, his parents explained to him: "We use a lot of nicknames." Which would explain why his own birth certificate read Ty Emerson -- when his name was really Thai Jones. And why his father was Jeff Jones -- and Thomas Martin and Raymond Breman and Thomas Charles and a host of others. And why his mother was Eleanor Stein -- a k a Jean Hayes, Jean Silva, Claire Jordan, Marie Corey. "Our family is a little different from other families,'' they would tell the boy. Thai Jones' mother and father were fugitives, wanted by the...

(Excerpt)So, who won the tempest in Tempe? The candidate with the painting of a west Texas dawn in his office. The one who declares with an unrestrained ebullience that "God wants everybody to be free." Read more...Arizona Republic

Last weekend's hatefest in New York City, in which John Kerry endorsed the vicious attack of Hollywood hacks on the Commander-in-Chief, provides a sad portent of things to come. Leftist hate group MoveOn.org announced last week that it has enlisted the help of the Hollywood elite in its partisan campaign to smear the president and stigmatize America’s War on Terror. According to a Time magazine story (“I’m Rob Reiner, and I Approve This Ad”), such Hollywood powerhouses as Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, Rob Reiner, “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, Ed Asner, Danny Glover, Al Franken, the ubiquitous Kevin...

The first Ruad Ajlouni knew that the Israelis were moving in was as he awoke in the early hours to find a group of armed men standing over his sleeping children. The 30 or so Jewish activists had quietly clambered on to the terrace roof of the three-storey apartment block in run-down Arab east Jerusalem, drilled their way through the locks of the outside doors and surrounded the Ajlounis before they had a chance to stir. "They said they had bought the flat and were moving in," said Mr Ajlouni. "At three o'clock in the morning. I said: 'Good for...

PESHAWAR, March 17: The government has ordered regular troops and paramilitary forces to move immediately to the South Waziristan tribal region as suspected militants fired rockets into a scouts fort, officials said. They said orders had been given to Pakistan Army and the paramilitary Frontier Corps to immediately dispatch more troops into South Waziristan to reinforce the single army brigade stationed at Zari Noor and the over 4,000 militia force. The officials would not give the exact number of troops to be moved to the troubled region for security and operational reasons, but said the reinforcement would help take decisive...

December 25, 2003 Nativity of the Lord (Christmas) Mass at Dawn Psalm: Thursday 2 Reading I Responsorial Psalm Reading II Gospel Reading I Is 62:11-12 See, the LORD proclaims to the ends of the earth: say to daughter Zion, your savior comes! Here is his reward with him, his recompense before him. They shall be called the holy people, the redeemed of the LORD, and you shall be called "Frequented, " a city that is not forsaken. Responsorial Psalm Ps 97:1, 6, 11-12 R A light will shine on us this day: the Lord is born for us. The LORD...

For the wired world, the allure and the danger of high-power microwave weapons are both very real In these media-fueled times, when war is a television spectacle and wiping out large numbers of civilians is generally frowned upon, the perfect weapon would literally stop an enemy in his tracks, yet harm neither hide nor hair. Such a weapon might shut down telecommunications networks, disrupt power supplies, and fry an adversary's countless computers and electronic gadgets, yet still leave buildings, bridges, and highways intact. It would strike with precision, in an instant, and leave behind no trace of where it came...

Dawn of American religion found By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 15/04/2003) The oldest image of a deity in the Americas has been discovered by archaeologists - pushing back the origin of religion there by 1,000 years. A 4,000-year-old gourd fragment bearing an image of the Staff God A 4,250-year-old gourd fragment found in a looted cemetery on the Peruvian coast, 120 miles north of Lima, bears an archaic image of the Staff God, which was the principal deity in the region for millennia. "Like the cross, the Staff God is a clearly recognisable religious icon," said Jonathan Haas, of...

Engines were appearing to start the taxi.Would this put a possible drop at dawn?

Excalibur, the rock that may mark a new dawn for man Paleontologists claim 350,000-year-old find in Spanish cave pushes back boundary of early human evolution Giles Tremlett in Madrid Thursday January 9, 2003 The Guardian They have called it Excalibur, though it was plucked from a pit of bones rather than the stone of Arthurian legend. To the ordinary eye it is a hand-sized, triangular chunk of ochre and purple rock, its surface slightly scratched. But to the palaeontologists who found this axe-head buried in a deep cavern on a Spanish hilltop, it is proof of a terrible and defining...

I was a kid at the time of Ayub Khan's martial law and when we asked our dreaded and legendary headmistress, Ms Glegg, what martial law meant, she said that if we did not take our lessons seriously, soldiers would come and take us far away. For weeks after that revelation I worked very hard at my exercise books. I was a cadet in the Pakistan Military Academy at the time of Yahya Khan's martial law and well remember that when he once came visiting and had dinner with us in the great dining hall above the parade ground -...