Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO, Actor Sean Penn and Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan will headline "Iraq: 5 Years Too Many", an event marking the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Also featured will be Reverend Gregory Stewart, Senior Minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church; Matt Gonzalez, former President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors; and Justin Raimondo, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com. The program will begin at 5pm on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin Street (near Geary) in San Francisco. After the speakers finish, attendees will march to the War Memorial Auditorium on Van Ness...

RALEIGH - The living arrangement has a name, The Mayview Collective, which conjures '60s-era images of backyard chickens and overgrown vegetable patches. Living in a duplex with three bedrooms on each side, members of the Collective kick in $325 per month toward rent, utilities and a reserve fund for household expenses. Not long ago, they bought a vacuum cleaner. The back side of the home includes a kitchen where volunteers cook meals for the homeless and a space where more volunteers help people fix their bicycles. Within walking distance of Cameron Village, the people who live here carry a different...

People stopping to smell the roses can now take that sweet floral fragrance home with them or even send it to a faraway grandmother thanks to a new gadget in Japan that records and replicates the world's odours. The new device, developed by scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, analyzes smells through 15 sensors, records the odour's recipe in digital format and then reproduces the scent by mixing 96 chemicals and vapourizing the result. Creator Takamichi Nakamoto says the technology will have applications in food and fragrance industries where companies want to replicate odours. But it could also be...

Irked by state Sen. Sam Aanestad's continuing criticism of his wilderness bill, Rep. Mike Thompson Wednesday said the Grass Valley state legislator was ignorant. "He doesn't understand the North Coast or its economy," said Thompson, D-Napa Valley, in a telephone interview. Aanestad doesn't understand his bill, either, he added. Thompson, who represented Butte County in the state Senate before he was elected to Congress, has been promoting legislation to designate as wilderness more than 300,000 acres of land along California's northern coast. After Thompson introduced his latest version of this bill, House Resolution 233, in January, Aanestad attacked it as...