Free Republic

Parents willing to write a big check have long been able to hire someone to write a college application essay or take the SAT for their kid. But now there’s a hot new admissions ploy on offer: For a mere $10,000, you can transform your teen into a published author in a peer-reviewed journal. According to a recent report from ProPublica, a cottage industry has exploded to help 17-year-old college hopefuls differentiate themselves in the ever more competitive admissions process as “acclaimed researchers.” More than 10,000 high school students have funneled through dozens of online programs such as Scholar Launch...

The editor-in-chief of the Science academic journals wants scholars to know that they should agree with him on climate change if they want to be published. Holden Thorp, a professor at Washington University who oversees the Science publications, recently praised Nature magazine for explaining why it made the rare decision to endorse politicians, including its 2020 endorsement of President Joe Biden. He argued that opposing the politicization of science “gives people the permission to say things like ‘climate change may be real, but I don’t think we should have government regulation to deal with it,’ which is unacceptable,” Thorp wrote...

The awful launch week for the over-hyped, expected bestseller The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, by controversial author Joe McGinniss, just got worse. Much worse. After a week of universally scathing pans from the reflexively anti-Palin establishment media, McGinniss now faces the fight of his literary life: the accusation that he seems to have knowingly submitted a book to his publisher, Crown/Random House, that was filled with unproved “tawdry gossip” and rumors that lacked “factual evidence.”

There have been no less than 46 “hate Obama” books published so far, and surely there are more to come, says Charles Laurence. According to a ballooning body of literature, President Obama is a Communist plant in the White House. He is bent on destroying capitalism, freedom and the American Way in favour of both socialism and a worldwide conspiracy of international bankers and oligarchs. All the while he is working tirelessly to undermine America’s military defenses in order to facilitate Islamic conquest. ‘Literature’ might not be quite the right word. But a torrent of words has been released on...

Link only due to copyright issue

In a 2005 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, epidemiologist John Ioannidis showed that among the 45 most highly cited clinical research findings of the past 15 years, 99 percent of molecular research had subsequently been refuted. Epidemiology findings had been contradicted in four-fifths of the cases he looked at, and the usually robust outcomes of clinical trials had a refutation rate of one in four. The revelations struck a chord with the scientific community at large: A recent essay by Ioannidis simply entitled "Why most published research findings are false" has been downloaded more than 100,000...

An offical report, allegedly implicating Olmert in corruption as Minister of Industry and Trade will be issued after the election. Independent journalist Yoav Yitzhak says delay is political. The State Comptroller, charged with investigating allegations of inefficiency and corruption in the government, is investigating charges that Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (Kadima) used his position as Minister of Industry and Trade to make illegal appointments of cronies to top government jobs. The report, which highlights Olmert’s involvement in the illegal appointments, is expected to be published by the comptroller’s office after the March 28 general election. Yoav Yitzhak, an independent...

The French sociologist Emmanuel Todd was one of the few experts to predict the fall of the Soviet Union. Now he is predicting the fall of the United States of America. His book After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (Columbia University Press, 2003) has been a bestseller in Europe. It plays into many Europeans' sentiments against the Iraq war and their belief that America has become an Evil Empire. (See "The Darth Vader fallacy," June 11.) But his book offers encouragement to America-phobes: Far from being an invincible hyperpower, according to Mr. Todd, the United States is...

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. (AP) - A Republican activist has acknowledged sending hundreds of bogus letters to the editorial pages of San Francisco Bay area newspapers over the past decade, many of which were published. Editors at the newspapers involved said Monday that they would intensify efforts to verify that letters to the editor are actually sent by the people who write them. However, technological advances have made bogus letters increasingly difficult to screen out, they said. "It's important to verify the authenticity of the letters we receive," San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Page Editor John Diaz told The Associated Press. "It's...

Ballots submitted by the following 1,555 King County voters weren't counted during the initial vote count and the machine recount because of apparent signature problems. In some cases, voters failed to sign envelopes enclosing absentee or provisional ballots, those signatures didn't match their signatures on file or — in the case of 573 (formerly 561) voters — their signatures hadn't been entered into the election computer system. This list includes the 573 ballots that were improperly rejected. For a specific list of those voters . . . .

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Others may have sympathized on learning that Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University, felt threatened by a graduate student at his own university, but not me. The incident began late on Sept. 27, 2004, when Victor Luria, a Ph.D. candidate in genetics and a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, wrote Dabashi an e-mail taking strong exception to what Dabashi had written about the IDF in an article, "For a Fistful of Dust: A Passage to Palestine," he published in the Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram. In response, Luria wrote to Dabashi: I have rarely seen...