Free Republic

The Rio Olympics wrapped its first full week of competition on Friday night with more Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky and a primetime kickoff for track and field. Fast-affiliate ratings give NBC's primetime showing for the games, between 8 and 11 p.m., 23.9 million viewers and a 6.3 rating among adults 18-49. That's down from the night before and the lowest showing for a competitive night to date, but that's to be expected, given the lineup and Friday's status as a typically slower night for TV viewers. (The same Friday four years ago in London averaged 26.9 million viewers and an...

Regarding the polluted, undrinkable water now reported at Russian residences where Winter Olympic athletes are staying, I’m reminded of the opening lines in the Preface of Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.” Those lines are … “In 1949 some friends and I came upon a newsworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream – and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old....

Welcome to this G8 website devoted to the forthcoming Summit, which is due to take place in Evian-les-Bains, France, from 1 to 3 June 2003. I hope you will find the answers to all your questions here. The G8 Summit is a major event in the international calendar, when the Heads of State and Government of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Russian Federation, with the European Union, meet informally to discuss the issues relating to globalisation, and to devise responses commensurate with the responsibilities that flow from their place in the world...