Free Republic

Lutherans sure love screwing with bulbs. Especially ones at St. Olaf College. The dynamic minds won the national Rube Goldberg competition. This is seriously the coolest science competition in the nation. All those years playing Mouse Trap don't compare to the video you are about to see. Watch the video on their website.

The most bizarre element of the two weeks of captivity suffered by Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and photographer Olaf Wiig at the hands of Gaza’s Holy Jihad Brigade was the video that surfaced depicting their conversion to Islam. Even before the journalists revealed that their conversions had been coerced, there were disturbing indications that they were not acting freely. While reading a statement he himself had ostensibly written, Centanni stumbled over words, appeared to puzzle over the handwriting, and seemed to grimace after pronouncing the words “peace be upon him” after the name of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Their...

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — The first thing Olaf Wiig told his family after militants released him in the Gaza Strip Sunday was that he was sorry he'd worried them, relatives said. "His first comment was that he was sorry he had put us through that," the Fox News cameraman's father, the Rev. Roger Wiig, told reporters in New Zealand. "We are glad to hear his voice and his concerns straight away," Wiig said. "It's been a long and difficult wait," he said. The reverend said his son, 36, told him by telephone from Gaza that he had "recognized it...

On the face of it, conversion to Islam would appear to provide a painless escape device for any hostage who happens to fall into fundamentalist terrorist hands. After all, once free, the hostage can always revert to his real faith or non-faith. It is hard to blame the two Fox News journalists, the American Steve Centanni, 60, and the New Zealander, Olaf Wiig, 36, for taking that path on to buy their way out of an uncertain fate at the hands of Palestinian terrorists – especially as they later reported they were forced to make the gesture at gunpoint. And,...

http://today.reuters.co.uk/tv/videoStory.aspx?isSummitStory=false&storyId=eb16e63077404ca28ffbcacecb56291d0ef0f9b0&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-R4-WatchVideos-2

Per Fox News

Palestinian officials said today they expected to have “good news” about the two Fox News journalists kidnapped in Gaza City within two days and believe they are unharmed. The journalists, American correspondent Steve Centanni, 60, of Washington, DC, and New Zealand cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36, who has family in West Sussex, were seized in Gaza City on August 14. Their captors demanded the release of all Muslims imprisoned by the US by midnight today, in exchange for freeing the pair. The kidnappers, a previously unknown group calling itself the Holy Jihad Brigades, did not say what it would do to...

The European Commission has been accused of trying to have troublesome staff declared mentally ill in order to provide an excuse for giving them the sack. Critics claim that the commission has resorted to tactics "worthy of the KGB" by pronouncing staff unfit for work after grillings from psychiatrists. The practice is alleged to have developed unofficially because the commission's generous employment terms make it all but impossible to dismiss staff. In the past, employees who have had run-ins with the commission, or simply underperformed, have generally had to be persuaded to leave by offers of expensive early retirement packages....

Euro-MPs expressed outrage yesterday over the treatment of an EU official driven from her job for exposing widespread fraud at the European Commission's Eurostat data office. So far, no Eurostat official has been punished for the diversion of £3m of taxpayer funds into illegal accounts over three years ago in a scam described as a "vast enterprise of looting" by investigators. All the accused - mostly French officials - are still working for the EU or have retired with full pensions. But the EU accountant who helped uncover the Eurostat abuses, Dorte Schmidt-Brown, fled home to Denmark after being subjected...

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Hans-Martin Tillack, Stern magazine's former Brussels correspondent, is taking Belgium to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The German journalist is seeking the return of some 1,000 pages of documents that were seized by Belgian police in March 2004. Officers raided Mr Tillack's home on the wishes of the European Commission's anti-fraud watchdog, OLAF. The fraud body alleged that Mr Tillack may have bribed an EU official to get secret information. But no formal charge has been brought against him to date. Mr Tillack has tried to retrieve his documents via the Belgian legal system,...

There was a report of two cyclones heading for the Cook Islands that I saw on FreeRepublic yesterday, but cannot find the link today. Anyone remember seeing it? If you thought Florida had a bad year, the Cook Islands got slammed by Cyclone Meena 2/7/05 (160mph winds, 36 foot waves), and noew two cyclones are set to hit within a 24 hr period... Any news would be much appreciated as it doesn't seem to be getting much press play...

SYDNEY, Feb 15 (Reuters) - Two tropical cyclones are bearing down on three South Pacific island nations creating a "critically dangerous situation", weather officials said on Tuesday. Cyclones Olaf and Nancy, which are expected to hit Samoa, American Samoa and the Cook islands, could cross paths creating one giant, destructive storm centre where the two cyclones spin around each other until one is flung off. "For the South Pacific it is unusual to have two cyclones this close together," said Kevin Vang at the Australian-Pacific Centre for Emergency and Disaster Information. "This has the making of an absolute mess,"...

A secret report prepared by the European Union's Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) concludes that tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid donated by the EU to the Palestinian Authority were actually used for terrorism against Israel. Remarkably, the conclusions are based on papers that Israel discovered almost two full years ago, during Operation Defensive Shield, and which it presented to the world immediately afterwards. The German weekly Die Welt reported this week that OLAF has finally accepted the Israeli claims that PA terror organs are using millions of EU aid dollars to subsidize terror by Fatah-Tanzim and even Hamas. OLAF...