Free Republic

US officials overseeing preparations for next week’s visit to Israel by President Barack Obama were alarmed to see that hundreds of American flags displayed along the main highway approaching Jerusalem were suspended upside down. The flags, hanging from poles attached to streetlamps along the road, had the stars toward the base of the flag pole, Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Thursday. Workers raised thousands of flags on streetlamps in and around the capital along routes that the president will take during his three-day visit, which begins on Wednesday next week. A Jerusalem Municipality official in charge of maintenance explained that the...

EUGENE, Oregon (Reuters) - TV hardly gets much better than this. An Oregon man discovered earlier this month that his year-old Toshiba Corp. flat-screen TV was emitting an international distress signal picked up by a satellite, leading a search and rescue operation to his apartment in Corvallis, Oregon, 70 miles south of Portland. The signal from Chris van Rossmann's TV was routed by satellite to the Air Force Rescue Center at Langley Air Base in Virginia. On Oct. 2, the 20 year-old college student was visited at his apartment in the small university town by a contingent of local police,...