Free Republic

CHICAGO - Former Gov. George Ryan, who drew international praise when he commuted the sentences of everyone on Illinois' death row, was convicted of racketeering and fraud Monday in a corruption scandal that ended his political career in 2003. Ryan, 72, sat stone-faced as the verdict was read and afterward vowed to appeal. "I believe this decision today is not in accordance with the kind of public service that I provided to the people of Illinois over 40 years, and needless to say I am disappointed in the outcome," the former governor said. Ryan faces up to 20 years in...

Typhoid May Have Caused Fall of Athens, Study Finds Nicholas Bakalar for National Geographic News February 27, 2006 An ancient medical mystery—the cause of a plague that wracked Athens from 426 to 430 B.C. and eventually led to the city's fall—has been solved by DNA analysis, researchers say. The ancient Athenians died from typhoid fever, according to a new study. Scientists from the University of Athens drew this conclusion after studying dental pulp extracted from the teeth of three people found in a mass grave in Athens' Kerameikos cemetery. The mass grave was first discovered in 1994 and was dated...

CAMP LIBERTY, Iraq (ARMY NEWS SERVICE, March 23, 2006) – Soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, discovered four caches in Abu Ghraib during a five-day period beginning March 11. The caches contained 32,000 pounds of explosives. Officials believe the sites were possible cells of operation for improvised explosive devices due to their seemingly hasty placement. “Since we began exploiting these caches, the number of IEDs in our own area of operation has dropped to almost zero,” said Lt. Col. Kevin Brown, commander, 2-22 Inf. He added that finding the caches has...

Israel finds al-Qa'eda at work in West Bank By Tim Butcher (Filed: 23/03/2006) Israel provided the first evidence of al-Qa'eda activity in the West Bank yesterday when two Palestinians were charged with receiving funds and training from the group for a double bombing in Jerusalem. While Israel has often connected its own struggle against Palestinian extremism with the international "war on terror", the case gives the most concrete proof yet of al-Qa'eda penetration of the country. However, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, recently announced he had evidence that it had tried to recruit in Gaza and the West Bank. According...

UD anthropologist finds signs of evolution in ancient skeleton Karen Rosenberg, chairperson and associate professor of anthropology at UD 10:03 a.m., March 2, 2006--Recent analysis of a Stone Age skeleton shows that human brain size relative to body size had increased dramatically from ancestors by the Middle Pleistocene, about 260,000 years ago, Karen Rosenberg, chairperson and associate professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware, said. Rosenberg, who analyzed the fossil with Lü Zuné of Peking University in Beijing and Chris B. Ruff, director of the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine...

Week of March 4, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 9 , p. 132 Ancient Andean Maize Makers: Finds push back farming, trade in highland Peru Bruce Bower Nearly 4,000 years ago, large societies emerged in the Andes Mountains of southern Peru that would culminate 1,500 years later in the rise of the Inca civilization. Now, scientists have the first evidence that these Inca predecessors cultivated maize and imported plant foods from lowland tropical forests located 180 miles to the east. HIGH TIMES. Researchers excavate Waynuna, a site in Peru's Andes Mountains that has yielded evidence of early agriculture and food...

Peru, Mexico Finds Hint At Women's RolesBy CARL HARTMAN Associated Press Writer March 3, 2006, 2:33 PM EST (In a March 2 story about an archaeological exhibit on pre-Columbian women, The Associated Press erroneously reported where it's on view. The exhibit is at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, not the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. A corrected version of the story appears below.) WASHINGTON (AP) -- Archaeological finds from Mexico and Peru show that, long before Europeans arrived, women served as warriors, governors and priestesses. An exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts...

1/13/2006 - PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. (AFPN) -- A 21st Security Forces Squadron Airman is the first military working dog handler allowed to adopt her K-9 partner from active duty. Tech. Sgt. Jamie Dana, a military working dog handler, has been waiting since August for the official word after she requested to adopt her K-9, Rex. The two were injured in an improvised explosive attack on their Humvee June 25 in Iraq. President George W. Bush signed the Defense Appropriations Bill Dec. 30 allowing military working dogs to retire early and be adopted by their handlers following traumatic events....

University Finds $275,000 in Office Sunday January 15, 2006 3:17 AM TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - Three University of South Florida officials were fired after the school discovered $275,000 in misplaced checks and cash scattered throughout an office. Nearly half the money at the school's English Language Institute - $133,647 - was in checks up to 10 years old and could not be deposited, said university spokeswoman Michelle Carlyon. The cash and checks Dec. 21 were found inside desks and underneath books and office machines, among other places, Carlyon said.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20, 2005 – A Dallas-based band has looked to the Civil War to honor today's servicemembers fighting in the global war on terrorism. TrueHeart, an adult contemporary/urban folk band, was invited to perform at a Christmas benefit for a local hospital last year. But the band's trio of siblings disagreed on what carols to play. Ross Vick said that he and his brother, Patrick, and sister, Karen Vick Cavazos, couldn't settle on what Christmas songs to play. So he wrote three songs, including a new arrangement of the 19th century hymn, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day."...

Big brain means small testes, finds bat study 12:16 07 December 2005 NewScientist.com news service Gaia Vince Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences The brainier male bats are, the smaller their testicles, according to a new study. Researchers suggest the correlation exists because both organs require a lot of energy to grow and maintain, leading individual species to find the optimum balance. The analysis of 334 species of bat found that in species where the females were promiscuous, the males had evolved larger testes but had relatively small brains. In species, where the females were monogamous, the situation...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 6, 2005 – A Task Force Band of Brothers patrol near Forward Operating Base Anaconda in Iraq found two weapons caches containing timers, watches and other items commonly used in constructing roadside bombs Nov. 5, officials said today. The seizure also yielded nearly 30 large-caliber artillery shells, more than a dozen rockets, five rocket-propelled grenade launchers, a mortar tube, a machine gun and small-arms ammunition, officials noted. An explosive ordnance disposal team collected the weapons and conducted a controlled detonation of the shells and rockets. In the air war over Iraq, coalition aircraft flew 56 close-air-support and armed-reconnaissance...

Teenager finds sperm donor dad on internet Ian Sample, science correspondent Thursday November 3, 2005 The Guardian (UK) Using nothing more than a swab of saliva and the internet, a 15-year-old boy has tracked down his anonymous sperm donor father, according to details released today. By sending a swab taken from the inside of his cheek for genetic testing, the teenager was able to use genealogy websites to trace his father by looking for men with a matching Y-chromosome, which is passed down the male line. The genetic detective work has major implications for men who have donated sperm under...

Christianity Today, October 2005 Raiders of the Lost PoolNew finds bolster the historicity of John's Gospel. by Gordon Govier | posted 10/26/2005 09:00 a.m. The Pool of Siloam, considered a metaphor in John's Gospel by some New Testament scholars, was in fact a huge basin at the lowest point in the city of Jerusalem. Recent excavations have uncovered two corners and one side of the pool that stretched for half the length of a football field. "It's very exciting," James Charlesworth, a professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, told CT. "It's very important for the study of the...

In a report released Friday, the investigative arm of Congress found that fully electronic voting machines hold promise for U.S. elections but still have security and reliability problems. E-voting failures in elections have been a problem in California, and the state's experiences are mentioned several times in the latest report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Analysts for the GAO found that crucial vote-recording and tallying files could be altered, that voting software often had weak or nonexistent password protections and that manufacturers had installed unapproved software in several places, including California. Yet fixing those problems could be years away....

AR RAMADI, Iraq (Oct. 21, 2005) -- Some people need the guidance and direction the Marine Corps provides and Pfc. David Smush, a machine gunner with Weapons Platoon, Company L, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, was one of them. A Chicago native, Smush was working odd jobs and struggling to find direction when he stumbled into a Marine Corps recruiting office one day. “It was a spur of the moment thing,” the 19-year-old said. “I was tired of being at home all the time. I worked at a gas station and sometimes at a fire station. I needed something more.”...

PASADENA, Calif. - A NASA telescope has detected for the first time the building blocks of planets around brown dwarfs, suggesting that such failed stars probably undergo the same planet-building process. Until now, the microscopic crystal building blocks that eventually collide to form planets have only been seen around stars and comets - considered the remnants of the solar system. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope recently spotted the tiny crystals and dust grains circling five brown dwarfs located 520 light years away in the Chamaeleon constellation. The crystals, composed of a green mineral commonly found on Earth known as olivine, are...

ROMAN FINDS RE-WRITE HISTORYBy Suzanne Pert AMAZING finds by archaeologists during recent excavations at Brading Roman Villa mean history will have to be re-written, not just there but at other important mosaic sites around the country.Archaeologist Kevin Trott with some of the pieces of pottery found at the Brading Roman Villa site. Picture by PETER BOAM Although his findings are still to be published, archaeologist Kevin Trott has compiled a 400-page report, which has dispelled some long-held myths and is set to take the archaeological world by storm. This week he gave the County Press an insight into the archaeologically-explosive...

MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. -- (Oct. 11, 2005) -- Not many people find a best friend in a paper sack half way around the world, in a country littered with war and terrorists. But, that is what happened when Marine Cpl. Jeffery A. Boskovitch, a Reserve Marine from Akron, Ohio, decided to befriend a tiny mutt. For some pocket change and little bit of candy, the pup became his. It would have been impossible to guess that this friendship would span half the globe, involve the Commandant of the Marine Corps, a couple of Army generals and a...

CAMP VIRGINIA, Kuwait — A square mile of Kuwaiti real estate is an American boomtown. In the American Old West there were a number of similar communities, such as the silver mining town of Tombstone. But while Tombstone depended on the precious metal for its economic well being, Camp Virginia’s source is the military. Surrounded by desert that has a few small bushes providing some glimpses of green the camp is an area where U.S. and some coalition forces come before going to or leaving Iraq. “Camp Virginia provides support for the troop units coming here,” Lt. Col. Matthew Hearon....