Free Republic 1st Qtr 2024 Fundraising Target: $81,000 Receipts & Pledges to-date: $74,893
92%  
Woo hoo!! And we're now over 92%!! Thank you everyone!! God bless.

Forum: News/Activism

Brevity: Headers | « Text »
  • Euro has weathered debt storm, Barroso says

    01/04/2013 2:18:52 AM PST · by Olog-hai · 4 replies
    EU Observer ^ | 04.01.13 @ 09:24 (Jan. 4) | Benjamin Fox
    Business investors are confident the eurozone has weathered the worst of the sovereign debt crisis, according to European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso. In a speech given to Portuguese diplomats in Lisbon on Thursday (3 January), the former Portuguese leader said that “the perception of risk in the eurozone has disappeared.” He added: “Investors have understood that when European leaders commit themselves to doing everything to safeguard the integrity of the euro, they mean business.” … Last month, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble also told reporters the euro has survived the worst of the crisis, following a buy-back deal on...
  • Annette John-Hall: Christie is looking better and better [Praise by Media for HATING BOEHNER]

    01/04/2013 1:59:33 AM PST · by SoFloFreeper · 23 replies
    philly.com ^ | 1/4/13 | Annette John-Hall
    I said this after Hurricane Sandy and I'll say it again. Chris Christie has started to grow on me. And no, that's not meant as a joke. Christie's straight talk of late may be just more bullying by a master politician, but it sure does ring true to me. In a parched partisan landscape where every move is done for political gain - "It's why the American people hate Congress," he said - Christie's tell-it-like-it-is rhetoric serves as needed refreshment for the masses. In case you missed it, the enraged New Jersey governor went off on his fellow Republicans Wednesday...
  • Judge savagely ridicules Orly Taitz in Jan 3rd hearing.

    01/04/2013 1:34:11 AM PST · by ednoonan7 · 186 replies
    American Resistance Party ^ | 1-3-2013 | Edward C. Noonan
    For Immediate Release Jan 3, 2013: Federal Judge England's "non-stop ridicule" of Attorney Orly Taitz offended Courtroom Visitors! By Plaintiff: Edward C. Noonan There is only one term that can describe Sacramento’s Chief Federal Judge Morrison C. England Jr. And that term is a Cesspool bottom-feeder. I have nothing but contempt for this unprofessional pig. I sat at the Plaintiff’s table with Orly Taitz and I was filled with outrage at the way this scum-bag was treating my attorney. And, of course, while he was ridiculing my attorney, he was likewise ridiculing me. At the beginning, anyone with at least...
  • The 20 Most Annoying Liberals of 2012 (10th Annual)

    01/04/2013 1:16:38 AM PST · by Rummyfan · 11 replies
    Rightwing News ^ | 3 Jan 2013 | John hawkins
    Honorable Mentions: Bill Ayers, Bob Beckel, Joy Behar, Eric Boehlert, Margaret Cho, Candy Crowley, Code Pink, Lena Dunham, Dianne Feinstein, Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, Kathy Griffin, Eric Holder, Jesse Jackson, Ezra Klein, Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher, Bill Press, Ed Schultz, Al Sharpton, Jon Stewart, and Jeremiah Wright. ...
  • Infectious disease: TB's revenge

    01/04/2013 12:28:01 AM PST · by neverdem · 32 replies
    Nature News ^ | 02 January 2013 | Leigh Phillips
    The world is starting to win the war against tuberculosis, but drug-resistant forms pose a new threat. If there was any doubt that tuberculosis (TB) was fighting back, it was dispelled in 2005, at the Church of Scotland Hospital in the village of Tugela Ferry, South Africa. Doctors at the hospital, in a rough, remote corner of KwaZulu-Natal province, were hardened to people dying from gunshots and AIDS. But even they were puzzled and frightened when patients with HIV who were responding well to antiretroviral drugs began dying — rapidly — from TB. With ordinary TB, patients start to feel...
  • PA Calls Itself a State Now

    01/04/2013 12:23:35 AM PST · by Eleutheria5 · 16 replies
    Arutz Sheva ^ | 4/1/13
    Chairman Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority signed orders, Thursday, directing all PA institutions to stop using the term "Palestinian National Authority" on official documents and to replace the term with "the state of Palestine". The change went into effect immediately, and was applied to official documents, seals and medals. .....
  • Switzerland and Britain are now at currency war

    01/03/2013 11:49:37 PM PST · by bruinbirdman · 5 replies
    The Telegraph ^ | 1/3/2013 | Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
    It seems you can’t debase your coinage these days even if you try. The Bank of England is straining every sinew to drive down sterling with quantitative easing, and what happens? The Swiss National Bank trumps Threadneedle Street with an outright blitz of Gilt purchases. They just print it, and buy. The Swiss and UK central banks are effectively fighting a "low intensity" currency war against each other. It has come to this. Here is the offending chart from the IMF (Picture editor's note: apologies for poor quality, unable to find better version): And this is what the Swiss did...
  • Quantum gas goes below absolute zero - Ultracold atoms pave way for negative-Kelvin materials.

    01/03/2013 11:44:46 PM PST · by neverdem · 36 replies
    Nature News ^ | 03 January 2013 | Zeeya Merali
    It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time1. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery. Lord Kelvin defined the absolute temperature scale in the mid-1800s in such a way that nothing could be colder than absolute zero. Physicists later realized that the absolute temperature of a gas is related to the average energy of its particles. Absolute zero corresponds to the theoretical state in which particles have no...
  • Putin Makes French Film Star Depardieu a Russian

    01/03/2013 11:30:35 PM PST · by nickcarraway · 3 replies
    Reuters ^ | Thu Jan 3, 2013
    Russian President Vladimir Putin has granted citizenship to Gerard Depardieu, the French movie star whose decision to quit his homeland to avoid a tax hike prompted accusations of national betrayal. The "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "Green Card" actor bought a house across the border in Belgium last year to avoid a new tax rate for millionaires planned by France's Socialist President Francois Hollande, but said he could also seek tax exile elsewhere. Putin said last month that Depardieu would be welcome in Russia, which has a flat income tax rate of 13 percent, compared to the 75 percent on income...
  • Notre Dame's Holy Line (team prays before games, but not every member is Catholic)

    01/03/2013 11:09:36 PM PST · by WilliamIII · 60 replies
    Wall Street Journal ^ | Jan 4 2013 | Kevin Helliker
    Before Monday night's national championship game, a University of Notre Dame football captain will lead the team through a prayer called Litany of the Blessed Virgin. "Mother of our Savior," a captain will say. "Pray for us," the team will respond. It's a ritual familiar to Catholics. But most players on the Notre Dame squad aren't Catholic. So participation in that ritual is voluntary. And should any concern arise about praying to the Virgin Mary—a concept some non-Catholic Christians find objectionable—team chaplain Father Paul Doyle stands ready to respond. "We're not praying to our blessed mother," he says. "We're asking...
  • It's the Drugs, Stupid!

    01/03/2013 10:51:27 PM PST · by neverdem · 13 replies
    American Thinker ^ | January 3, 2013 | Charles Gant and Greg Lewis
    Psychotropic drugs have been used for the purpose of suppressing fear and enabling murderous rage for a long time. In Dispatches, his extraordinary book about the war in Vietnam, Michael Herr passes this along about the use of drugs by American soldiers: Going out at night the medics gave you pills. . . . I knew one 4th Division Lurp [Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol] who took his pills by the fistful, downs from the left pocket of his tiger suit and ups from the right, one to cut the trail, the other to send him down it. He told me that...
  • California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom's cable TV show going off air

    01/03/2013 10:43:09 PM PST · by WilliamIII · 5 replies
    Sacramento Bee ^ | Jan 2 2013 | David Siders
    Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom's Friday night talk show, "The Gavin Newsom Show," is going off the air. A spokesman for Newsom said in an email this afternoon that Newsom was "already moving in a new direction" before it was reported by The New York Times that the show's network, Current TV, was being acquired by Al Jazeera. "The Gavin Newsom Show was a remarkable opportunity and a truly educational experience for which he is grateful," Peter Ragone, a spokesman for Newsom, said in a prepared statement. "But the Lt. Governor's original agreement with Current had recently concluded and he was...
  • Gore Went to Bat for Al Jazeera, and Himself

    01/03/2013 10:28:54 PM PST · by Brad from Tennessee · 6 replies
    New York Times blogs ^ | Jan. 3, 2012 | By BRIAN STELTER
    Al Gore’s Current TV was never popular with viewers, but it was a hit where it counted: with cable and satellite providers. When he co-founded the channel in 2005, Mr. Gore managed to get the channel piped into tens of millions of households — a huge number for an untested network — through a combination of personal lobbying and arm-twisting of industry giants. He called on those skills again after deciding in December to sell Current TV to Al Jazeera for $500 million. To preserve the deal — and the estimated $100 million he would personally receive — he went...
  • Biden To Heitkamp: "Spread Your Legs, You're Going To Be Frisked"

    01/03/2013 10:17:52 PM PST · by Impala64ssa · 14 replies
    You Tube ^ | 1/3/13
    Vice President Joe Biden made Heidi Heitkamp's swearing-in ceremony...memorable.
  • Move Over Vegas, These Are The New Sin Cities

    01/03/2013 10:17:26 PM PST · by bruinbirdman · 14 replies
    Forbes ^ | 1/2/2013
    When Washington became the first U.S. state to legalize recreational pot possession earlier this month, scores of Seattle residents gathered to celebrate by lighting up in public places across the city. But Seattle’s not alone when it comes to enjoying newly permitted vices: With more marijuana-legalization measures, a growing number of casinos and an increasing list of relaxed nightlife laws, new Sin Cities from St. Louis to Oakland are on track to give Vegas a run for its money. In Seattle, the revelry over the Washington law followed voter approval of a ballot measure in November, allowing adults 21 and...
  • 4 Things You Need to Know About Secretary of State Nominee John Kerry

    01/03/2013 10:00:45 PM PST · by neverdem · 25 replies
    Reason ^ | January 3, 2013 | Ed Krayewski
    Don't let his reputation as a peacenik fool you. John Kerry is no anti-interventionist.On Dec. 21, President Obama nominated Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. The move was widely expected after Susan Rice, the only other prominent candidate, dropped out of consideration when the Obama administration’s response to a terror attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya promised to derail her nomination.Now serving his fifth term in the Senate, Kerry is best known for his failed 2004 presidential run, and the "swift boat" attacks he suffered during it. While America may never know a...
  • U.S. Files on Targeted Killings Protected Under FOIA, Judge Says

    01/03/2013 9:42:00 PM PST · by Behind Liberal Lines · 5 replies
    New York Law Journal ^ | January 3, 2013 | By Brendan Pierson
    A federal judge has declined to order the U.S. government to turn over documents detailing its legal rationale for the targeted killings of people thought to be terrorists, including American citizens, without trial. Southern District Judge Colleen McMahon called her ruling, which comes in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, "paradoxical" and likened it to "Alice in Wonderland." McMahon found yesterday in New York Times v. U.S. Department of Justice, 11 Civ. 9336, that the government is protected from turning over legal opinions pertaining to so-called targeted killing by various exceptions to the FOIA. The underlying FOIA requests came...
  • Inmate Ordered Retrial In ’80 ‘Waiting Ever Since’

    01/03/2013 9:37:49 PM PST · by nickcarraway · 12 replies
    CBS Houston ^ | January 3, 2013
    Jerry Hartfield was still a young man when an uncle visited him in prison to tell him that his murder conviction had been overturned and he would get a new trial. Not long afterward, he was moved off of death row. “A sergeant told me to pack my stuff and I wouldn’t return. I’ve been waiting ever since for that new trial,” Hartfield, now 56, said during a recent interview at the prison near Gatesville where he’s serving life for the 1976 robbery and killing of a Bay City bus station worker. He says he’s innocent.
  • US calls on Israel, Palestinians to ‘make a fresh start’ and rekindle peace talks

    01/03/2013 9:31:00 PM PST · by 444Flyer · 16 replies
    The Times of Israel ^ | 1-03-13 | Elie Leshem
    Now is the time for ‘real leadership’ and an end to ‘counter-productive unilateral actions,’ says State Department spokeswoman The United States on Wednesday urged Israel and the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table and resume, in earnest, long-dormant efforts to hammer out a comprehensive peace deal. “As we turn the calendar to 2013… now is the time for leaders on both sides to display real leadership, to focus on the work that’s necessary to return to direct negotiations,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in remarks cited by AFP. The US was asking both sides “to clearly demonstrate that...
  • Mr. President, the Fiscal Cliff Deal Was Not “the Right Thing to do For Our Country”

    01/03/2013 9:12:57 PM PST · by Kaslin · 4 replies
    Townhall.com ^ | January 3, 2012 | Donald Lambro
    WASHINGTON - Let's be clear what the "fiscal cliff" deal does and doesn't do. It permanently preserves the bulk of George W. Bush's tax cuts for most Americans, but it does not offer desperately needed new incentives to revive a weak economy and jobless labor market. On the contrary, the 11th hour compromise is marred by higher taxes that will hinder further growth, cost hundreds of thousands of jobs, and make life even tougher for many Americans barely surviving paycheck to paycheck. This deal, which elicited effusive praise from Obama in the wee hours of New Year's Day, would increase...