Free Republic

Iconic US coffee chain Starbucks said Tuesday it would shut most of its Australian stores within a week, having already taken the axe to hundreds of US outlets as an economic downturn bites. The company said it would shut 61 "underperforming" stores from a total 84 in Australia because it was refocusing to concentrate on the major cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and surrounding areas. "This decision will result in the closure of 61 underperforming locations throughout the country by August 3," it said without detailing how many jobs would be lost, although media reports put the figure at...

DENVER - More than 1 billion gallons of contaminated water — enough to fill 1,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools — is trapped in a tunnel in the mountains above the historic town of Leadville and threatening to blow. Lake County Commissioners have declared a local state of emergency for fear that this winter's above-average snowpack will melt and cause a catastrophic tidal wave. The water is backed up in abandoned mine shafts and a 2.1-mile drainage tunnel that is partially collapsed, creating the pooling of water contaminated with heavy metals. County officials have been nervously monitoring the rising water pressure inside...

It turns out that anybody can tune in to the world's top spy agencies talking to operatives. All you need is a cheap shortwave-radio receiver, the kind available at any drugstore. Tune it to 6855 or 8010 kHz. On the hour, you might hear a girlish voice repeating strings of numbers monotonously in Spanish. "Nueve, uno, nueve, tres, cinco-cinco, cuatro, cinco, tres, dos . . .," went one seemingly harmless message heard last month on a Grundig radio. It was the Cuban Intelligence Directorate or Russian FSB broadcasting coded instructions from Havana to spies inside the United States. Turn the...

Given the kinds of cases they’re getting these days, French courts are starting to resemble clown circuses. Last week a French court had to listen to “Goldfinger” George Soros’ whine about his human rights being violated for an inside trading conviction. This week, a French court gets to listen to Venezuelan “International Man of Mystery” Carlos The Jackal carp about not getting enough terrorist-issue Froot Loops inside his French jail cell. Apparently, pate and champagne aren’t happening for him these days in Paris. And for the Shagadelic Jackal, that’s no fair. The Austin-Powers-era Marxist terrorist is actually suing in a...

On Monday, the British newspaper "The Observer" quoted an accident investigator who claimed that three dozen U.S. military dolphins, supposedly trained in secret near Lake Pontchartrain, had been washed away by Hurricane Katrina. ...OLBERMANN: Make sure I'm right on this one point here, that dolphins could not actually fire poison dart guns, even if they are wearing them, even if they are loose, because they don't have hands. Am I right about this so far? SOLANGI: No, I think that's science fiction. And these animals are trained. It's common knowledge, to look for underwater mines and divers. But I think...

This is retarded.If George W. proposed this the Greens would be going bananasI hope this causes them as much misery as they caused during the Rape of Nan-King or the Bataan Death MarchOr perhaps they shall demand "ONE BILLION DOLLARS"

Some of the guys and I are presently at the camping lodge and we’ve got a problem that requires the help of a sensible woman. My brother-in-law managed to get something in his hair this morning, and he wanted to wash it out. I can’t tell you what that something was, because he’s refused to divulge that to us thus far (I suspect that he fabricated the “tainted hair” theory to save himself some embarrassment.) My brother-in-law believes that his wife has, at some point, told him that peanut butter is a useful household hair cleaner / conditioner. His wife...

CAPTION "THE DEAR LEADER" COMRADE KIM JONG-IL

The story of ultra-powerful strategist Maurice Strong is far stranger than fictionThe mind behind Kyoto The Kyoto Protocol was the work of thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats and politicians. But no one person is more responsible for it than a Canadian named Maurice Strong.Strong organized the UN first-world environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972 and has never stopped pressing for a world where UN resolutions would be enforced as law all over the Earth. Strong went on to chair the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio and to become senior adviser to Kofi Annan, the UN’s secretary...

Forces scouring Baghdad's upscale neighborhoods have made a startling discovery: Saddam Hussein’s '60s-themed "love shack." Replete with shag carpets, bean bag chairs, mirrored bedrooms, sunken conversation pits, and airbrushed murals that would even make Vargas blush, the "romantic" hideaway is nastier than any set Mike Meyers could have dreamed up. Yeah, baaabeee! Saddam was one wild and craaazy guy! Already the personal palace gomi of the Iraqi elite has revealed astonishing similarities between the real world of Saddam and the fictional world of Austin Powers. Watch the evening news and you will invariably catch a glimpse of super-villain flash that...

   WHEN THE TWO KOREAN leaders embraced at the summit in Pyongyang in June 2000 the cover of that week's Economist said it all: "Greetings, Earthlings." It was the world's first glimpse in a long, long time of one of its most reclusive strongmen, Kim Jong Il, of whom virtually nothing is known. The firmest personal information to emerge about the North's Dear Leader was that he's 5'3", but his shoe lifts and pompadour cast even that in doubt. Over the years, however, the media was full of his exploits gleaned from various intelligence communities and North Korean defectors --...

<p>With all the nastiness, plot twists and power struggles of the 2002 California gubernatorial race between Gray Davis and Bill Simon, it's starting to look like a grudge match between two movie villains -- say, Dr. Evil and Mini-Me.</p> <p>And California voters are increasingly turned off, complaining that a political choice between a megalomaniac and his evil clone is no choice at all.</p>