Free Republic

Dan, of Harrisburg, wants to eliminate tax loopholes for corporations doing business in Pennsylvania. Lewis, of Elizabethtown, wants to put state lottery money toward education instead of senior programs. Larry, of Meadville, thinks there should be containers at state parks where visitors can make donations. Those are among the 855 ideas for balancing the state budget submitted to www.yourpabudget.com since the site was activated about two weeks ago.

Mastodons Driven to Extinction by Tuberculosis, Fossils Suggest Kimberly Johnson for National Geographic News October 3, 2006 Tuberculosis was rampant in North American mastodons during the late Ice Age and may have led to their extinction, researchers say. Mastodons lived in North America starting about 2 million years ago and thrived until 11,000 years ago—around the time humans arrived on the continent—when the last of the 7-ton (6.35-metric-ton) elephantlike creatures died off. Scientists Bruce Rothschild and Richard Laub pieced together clues to the animals' widespread die-off by studying unearthed mastodon foot bones. Rothschild first noticed a telltale tuberculosis lesion on...

New Evidence Suggests Longer Paper Making History in China A 2,000-year-old piece of paper inscribed with legible handwriting has been found in Gansu Province, suggesting that China's paper-making and handwriting history are older than previously thought. The 10 square centimeter piece of paper, made from linen fibers, was found during restoration of an ancient garrison near the Yumen Pass at Dunhuang in northwest China. The garrison was in use during the Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-25 A.D.), a report in the Beijing-based Guangming Daily said. "The paper was made in 8 B.C., more than 100 years before the birth of...

A distant eruption of high-energy gamma rays is evidence for a black hole swallowing another dense object called a neutron star, astronomers announced today. A neutron star is a stellar corpse with a mass equal to a few suns packed into a space no more than 12 miles across. Black holes are even denser objects, so dense that matter and even light can't escape once inside their spheres of invisible influence. Scientists have long suspected collisions between these objects are common. Other recent bursts have looked similar, but observations from NASA's orbiting Swift satellite and other telescopes, recorded July 24...

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, signaling plans to bring change to the Port of Los Angeles, is reshaping its board of commissioners with new appointees to be named today to the five-member panel. The new slate includes a former general manager of the Department of Water and Power, a labor leader, an environmental attorney and two other lawyers, sources said Tuesday. The appointments come as the port, the nation's largest, is struggling with significant challenges, including a corruption probe, looming major expenses, security concerns, air pollution problems and major turnover among senior managers. Two of the appointments — S. David Freeman, the...

Mar. 2 (ABC7) — The governor clearly wants a special legislative session to consider three major government reform ideas. A one-man lobbying campaign is now underway targeting the voters, even as Democratic critics say his reforms won't reform much. The governor stopped in Hayward to push his latest reform agenda, carrying out his promise to take his message to the people. Some are beginning to question his use of staged events to make his point. The governor's Hollywood gimmicks are nothing new, and are most often his own ideas. His newest gimmick rolled out yesterday: a Humvee dubbed "Reform One."...

Prehistoric Knives Suggest Humans Competed By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Feb. 1, 2005 — A recent excavation of 400,000-year-old stone tools in Britain suggests that two groups of early humans could have competed with each other for food and turf. In the past, anthropologists have argued that only one group of ancient humans lived in Britain, and that these hominids created and used both axes and flake knives, which were made by flaking off small particles from a larger rock, or by breaking off a large flake that was then used as the tool. Some form of prehistoric human had...

AKRON, Ohio - President Bush (news - web sites) and John Kerry (news - web sites) battled over the economy and jobs in a small corner of the campaign's most fiercely contested state Saturday as polls showed a post-convention surge for the Republican in the White House. Late Saturday, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of the Democratic presidential candidate, was taken to a hospital in Mason City, Iowa, after complaining of an upset stomach, a spokeswoman said. She was taken to Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa by ambulance from the airport. "As a precaution, Mrs. Heinz Kerry had a series of...

<p>SPACE CENTER, Houston -- Investigators into the space shuttle disaster still believe important clues might be found in west Texas and points even farther West -- even though no debris has yet been found.</p> <p>The reason for their faith in the absence of evidence is a wealth of credible photographs, video recordings and eyewitness reports from California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. More than 1,500 photographs and videos of Columbia's re-entry have poured in to NASA.</p>