Free Republic

On the day it closed, Solyndra said it was laying off 1,100 full-time and temporary employees. But 1,861 workers lost their jobs as the solar panel manufacturer shut its doors, according to U.S. Labor Department documents provided to The Bay Citizen under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents also show the Fremont-based company increased production in 2011, even though it failed to sell all the panels it made the previous year. By the time it closed last August, Solyndra had an unsold inventory of more than 23 megawatts – enough solar panels to power about 23,000 homes. Analysts said...

Top White House national security advisers are considering much more significant troop reductions in Afghanistan than those discussed even a few weeks ago, The New York Times reported. The newspaper said some officials were arguing that such a change is justified by the rising cost of the war and the death of Osama bin Laden. President Barack Obama is expected to address these decisions in a speech to the nation this month, the report said. The National Security Council is convening its monthly meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan on Monday, and assessments from that meeting are likely to inform decisions...

According to Darwinian theory, in the past we had a common ancestor with baboons, further back with bananas and still further with bacteria. This dogma has spread like a ‘meme’, which is a contagious idea that propagates in a similar way as a virus by infecting brains, according to inventor of the word, Richard Dawkins.1 In 2002, Roy Britten dispelled the first monkey meme that human and chimpanzee DNA sequences are 98.5% identical.2 He showed that when indelmutations were also taken into account, the difference suddenly became about 5%. The fact that chimpanzee genomes are about 10% larger than that...

WASHINGTON, June 13, 2008 – The current number of forces in Afghanistan is enough to accomplish the mission, but it’ll take awhile to do so, the U.S. officer who just finished his tour as commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan said here today. “Let’s just say that somebody waved a magic wand, and by gosh, between the Afghans and the international force you’d produced a force that was well over 400,000,” Army Gen. Dan K. McNeill said to reporters at a Pentagon news conference. That larger force, McNeill said, likely would produce “instant quiet” across much of Afghanistan. Yet, “in...

Earth Barely Big Enough for Life, Study Says Richard A. Lovett for National Geographic News January 10, 2008 Astronomers searching for habitable worlds might do best to look for rocky planets several times larger than Earth. That's because, according to a new study, our planet is at the lower end of the size range needed for plate tectonics—which scientists believe are vital for stabilizing temperatures enough for life. Tectonics—the continent-shifting forces that build mountains and fuel volcanoes—recycle Earth's crust by drawing it underground, where it melts and later re-emerges as magma, pointed out Diana Valencia of Harvard University. That helps...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 22, 2006 -- The Marine Corps may have to grow to keep up a tempo of operations that has caused individual and institutional stress in the force, the service's commandant said here today. At a roundtable discussion with the Pentagon press corps, Gen. James Conway said working to alleviate the individual and institutional strain on the Marine Corps is his major goal as commandant.Marines spend seven months deployed to Iraq and seven months home. In 2003, the general told reporters, he said the stress would show by the third deployment. “I was wrong,” he said today. Turnover in the units has...

Santorini eruption much larger than originally believed Media Contact: Todd McLeish, 401-874-7892 Santorini eruption much larger than originally believed; likely had significant impact on civilization KINGSTON, R.I. – August 23, 2006 – An international team of scientists has found that the second largest volcanic eruption in human history, the massive Bronze Age eruption of Thera in Greece, was much larger and more widespread than previously believed. During research expeditions in April and June, the scientists from the University of Rhode Island and the Hellenic Center for Marine Research found deposits of volcanic pumice and ash 10 to 80 meters thick...

WASHINGTON, May 26, 2006 – More and more Iraqi national police are working alongside U.S. soldiers in securing southern Baghdad, a U.S. Army colonel working there said today. Terrorists would like the American public to believe violent groups are winning the fight in Baghdad, Army Col. Michael Beech, commander of 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, said from Forward Operating Base Prosperity in central Baghdad. "But, of course, that's not what's happening here," he said. Beech's brigade includes 4,400 U.S. troops, a battalion of soldiers from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and about 2,000 Iraq soldiers and police....

Military to plan for larger role in disaster relief: Pentagon WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US military will plan to assume a larger role in domestic disaster relief, including taking the lead in major catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina, a Pentagon spokesman said. A White House report on the lessons of Katrina said the military and the coast guard proved to be the only federal entities capable of turning the president's orders into prompt action on the ground. A key recommendation of the report was for the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to plan for "those extraordinary circumstances when it is...

Recent Landslides In La Conchita, California Belong To Much Larger Prehistoric Slide The deadly landslide that killed 10 people and destroyed approximately 30 homes in La Conchita, California last January is but a tiny part of a much larger slide, called the Rincon Mountain slide, discovered by Larry D. Gurrola, geologist and graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The slide started many thousands of years ago and will continue generating slides in the future, reported Gurrola at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America today in Salt Lake City. Mudslides at La Conchita. (Image courtesy...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Andromeda galaxy just got bigger -- three times bigger, astronomers said on Monday. The galaxy is not actually expanding. But new measurements suggest that the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way is three times broader than astronomers had thought. They now believe a thin sprinkling of stars once thought to be a halo is in fact part of Andromeda's main disk. That makes the spiral galaxy, so close to Earth that it appeared as a fuzzy blob to the ancients, more than 220,000 light-years across -- triple the previous estimate of 70,000 to 80,000 light-years....

House conservatives harden backing for Social Security plan By Stephen Dinan THE WASHINGTON TIMES BALTIMORE — House conservatives said yesterday they will fight for a Social Security plan that goes into effect immediately and includes larger private accounts than the president is calling for, and they will not accept an overall increase in Social Security entitlement spending. "Conservatives want to see personal retirement accounts that have immediate relevance to younger Americans, that they can see the value, and that will require that they be big and that they be implemented in the final bill without delay," said Rep. Mike Pence,...

Thursday, December 23, 2004 - Page updated at 12:03 A.M. Ancient Peru site older, much larger By Thomas H. Maugh II Los Angeles Times A Peruvian site previously reported as the oldest city in the Americas actually is a much larger complex of as many as 20 cities with huge pyramids and sunken plazas sprawled over three river valleys, researchers report. Construction started about 5,000 years ago — nearly 400 years before the first pyramid was built in Egypt — at a time when most people around the world were simple hunters and gatherers, a team from Northern Illinois University...