Free Republic

The world's unofficially most-expensive burger made its debut in London today, costing nearly $200 for patrons with enough money to visit the fast food chain that makes it. That's right, the bourgeois burger is made by Burger King. After six months in development, Burger King today launched "The Burger," a limited edition hamburger selling for $190. Chef Mark Dowding, the director of new product development and innovation for the fast food chain, says his creation targets a certain type of consumer. "I call them burger aficionados," said Dowding. But this is Burger King. Are these "aficionados" really frequenting London's fast...

Hryhory Haraschenko tells the stories feverishly, in a voice that brooks no interruption, gesticulating wildly with veined hands. He hauls out his stash of carefully bundled newspaper clippings, witness' tales and pencil-drawn maps. ... At 89, Haraschenko is among a dwindling number of Ukrainians who survived the Soviet-era famine of the early 1930s. Like other survivors and some historians, he regards the starvation -- known here as the Holodomor, or "death by hunger" -- as an act of genocide engineered to wipe out the Ukrainians. He wants it discussed, and he wants it recognized by the world. "Russia is afraid...

Pro-life advocates are launching an e-mail campaign in an attempt to save the life of a young woman injured by a drug overdose who now is facing the possibility of a court-ordered death by dehydration and starvation.WND previously has reported on the case involve Randy Richardson, who is fighting his ex-wife, the medical establishment and the court system for the life of his 23-year-old daughter, Lauren Marie Richardson."She's committed no crime and doesn't deserve to have this death imposed on her," he told the Wilmington, Del., News Journal earlier, citing the case that carries striking parallels to the 2005...

They don't have enough to eat. Five people are dead in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after a week of food riots. Unions in Burkina Faso have called a general strike to protest the high cost of grain. Food riots have rocked Egypt, Cameroon, Indonesia, Ethiopia and other nations. In Manila, police with M-16s have supervised the sale and distribution of subsidized grain. Hoarders have been threatened with life imprisonment. In Thailand and Pakistan, troops are guarding fields and warehouses. In Egypt, the army has been called out to bake bread. Even in the United States, a run on rice caused big-box retailers...

Al Gore, Nobel laureate, former vice president of the United States and author of the global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, will deliver the opening address at a conference on "Renewable Energy and Beyond," scheduled to be held at Tel Aviv University May 20-21, the university said Sunday. Gore will be arriving on a special visit to Israel as guest of the Dan David Prize. The 2008 Dan David Prize will be awarded to Gore on May 19 for social commitment to environmental protection and the prevention of a global ecological disaster, a statement from the university read. Tel Aviv...

Ukraine's Pursuit of Genocide Designation Upsets Russians Who Say Others Died, Too MOSCOW -- Relations between Russia and Ukraine, bedeviled by disputes over natural gas supplies and NATO expansion, have lately been roiled by one of the great tragedies of Soviet history: the famine of 1932-33, which left millions dead from starvation and related diseases. Ukraine is seeking international recognition of the famine, which Ukrainians call Holodomor -- or death by hunger -- as an act of genocide. When Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin forced peasants off their homesteads and into collective farms, special military units requisitioned grain and other food...

A remarkable thing happened Thursday: a press member wanted to ask Nobel Laureate Al Gore about the growing international food crisis and how it relates to ethanol and global warming hysteria. Not surprisingly, the man who cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate fourteen years ago mandating the use of ethanol wasn't available, and a spokesman for his hysteria-driving Alliance for Climate Protection declined to comment. Isn't that convenient? Regardless, the good news is that press outlets continue to recognize this unholy connection, and that someone, even at the conservative New York Sun, would deign to report it (emphasis added...

Farewell the age of reason, welcome the idiocracy. Only George Orwell could have invented - and named - the government's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) that came into operation yesterday. It is the latest in a long line of measures intended to ease the conscience of the rich while keeping the poor miserable, in this case spectacularly so. The consequences of the RTFO have been much trumpeted on these pages. It says enough that one car tank of bio petrol needs as much grain as it takes to feed an African for a year, or that a reported one-third of...

North Korea 'faces food crisis' North Korea is facing a humanitarian crisis caused by acute food shortages, a UN agency has warned. The situation there was "clearly bad and getting worse", a senior World Food Programme official said, and help was needed to avert serious tragedy. North Korea has been dependent on international food aid for years. But severe flooding last year compounded its problems, devastating large swathes of agricultural land and leading to a poor harvest. WFP estimates that 6.5 million North Koreans, out of a total population of 23 million, do not have enough to eat - and...

Soaring food costs risk 'starvation and unrest' By Alex Spillius in Washington Last Updated: 2:41am BST 14/04/2008 The world's poorest countries face starvation and civil unrest if global food prices keep rising, the head of the International Monetary Fund has said. There have been serious disturbances in more than a dozen developing countries, including Haiti [pictured] Dominique Strauss-Kahn said in Washington that "hundreds of thousands of people will be starving". "Children will be suffering from malnutrition, with consequences for all their lives," he said. He predicted that increasing food prices would push up the cost of imports for poor countries,...

Jonah Goldberg comments on the Russian Duma's defense of the mass starvation of Russian farmers in the Ukraine in 1932-33. They deny claims of genocide by saying that the millions who died were of all ethnic classes. "There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its victims were million of citizens of the Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country," the Russian State Duma resolution said.

South Africa's pre-Mandela regime brought about one of the most racially skewed land distributions in the world. Since the collapse of apartheid in 1994, the black majority government has been trying to implement land reform, but are new injustices being created by righting past wrongs? In South Africa, one of the most intractable legacies of white-minority rule is the right to land. After the first Dutch settlers arrived in the Cape in the 1600s, they started taking over native peoples' lands. Whites gradually expropriated more and more land, and by the early 20th century, blacks had been squeezed into reservations...

Jonathan McCullum was in excellent health at 155 pounds when he left last summer to spend the school year as an exchange student in Egypt. But when he returned home to Maine just four months later, the 5-foot-9 teenager weighed a mere 97 pounds and was so weak that he struggled to carry his baggage or climb a flight of stairs. Doctors said he was at risk of a heart attack. McCullum says he was denied sufficient food while staying with a family of Coptic Christians, who fast for more than 200 days a year, a regimen unmatched by other...

A Delaware woman has become the next Terri Schiavo as her parents engage in a massive legal and philosophical debate about whether to subject her to euthanasia. Richardson is a 23-year-old woman who overdosed on heroin in August 2006 while she was three months pregnant with a baby girl. Doctors kept Lauren on life support until she delivered her baby in February 2007. Shortly thereafter, her parents began a fight that is reminiscent of the battle over Terri's life and death. As in the Terri Schiavo case, physicians have been quick to label Lauren as having a persistent vegetative state...

A convicted Nazi war criminal arrived in Italy yesterday to start a life sentence imposed in his absence for the murder and torture of prisoners in the final year of the Second World War. Michael Seifert, 83, a Ukraine-born Canadian citizen dubbed the "Beast of Bolzano", has lived in Canada since 1951. He had been fighting extradition for eight years. The former SS corporal was a guard at a prison camp in Bolzano, northern Italy - used as a transit point for Jews, Italian resistance fighters and others - in 1944 and 1945. An Italian military tribunal convicted him in...

Cashmere goats in India face starvation By AIJAZ HUSSAIN ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER An elderly man belonging to the Chang-pa mountain tribe holds his Himalayan goat as his son cuts its horn that was hurting the animal's eye in Kharnak, some 185 kilometers (116 miles) from Leh, India, in this July 21, 2007 photo. More than 100,000 Himalayan goats famed for their pashmina wool or cashmere face starvation after their desert habitat was blanketed with snow, while three people died during the region's worst storms in three decades, officials said Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin) SRINAGAR, India -- More...

DAKAR, Senegal - Some 45,000 people die each month in Congo as the world's deadliest humanitarian crisis has failed to improve despite five years of relative peace in the Central African nation, according to a report released Tuesday. An estimated 5.4 million Congolese died between 1998 and April 2007 because of conflict, most from the rampant disease and food shortages stemming from fighting, the report said. The study found that life is still alarmingly precarious for Congolese despite the end of the 1998-2002 conflict that pulled in armies from half a dozen surrounding countries, and the country's first free and...

Would You Eat Your Buddies in a Blizzard? Suppose you were stranded in a blizzard and were forced to cannibalize your friends. This short survey will tell you how likely you would be to eat your buddies. Note: Click onto the link provided to take this self survey. Bon appetit!

Liza Biggers blinked back tears and gently patted her brother Ethan's hand as he lay in his hospital bed, finally wearing the Purple Heart he earned in Iraq. Ethan's family had held off on the medal ceremony, hoping he would emerge from his year-long coma. When that didn't happen, his 22-year-old twin, Matt, made a phone call to make sure he received the award before he died. Last Sunday's private ceremony was a poignant moment in a tumultuous journey that began the day Army Spc. Ethan Biggers was critically wounded in Iraq. Biggers' family stopped trying to keep him alive...

Fred Thompson will pick up the support of the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) tomorrow, according to two Republicans familar with the decision. For a candidate who came up empty-handed last week when three prominent Christian conservatives endorsed GOP hopefuls and is falling in both national and early state polls, the move comes at a critical time. NRLC is the most prominent anti-abortion group in the country, with affiliates in all 50 states and over 3,000 local chapters. A spokesperson for the organization declined to comment on their endorsement decision, but Thompson was likely rewarded for his strong pro-life...