Free Republic

President Barack Obama wants to pierce what he is calling the “electronic curtain” shrouding the Iranian people in totalitarianism by inviting them to make contact through America’s “virtual Tehran embassy.” The American president pierced the electronic curtain by recently sending an online Internet video message to the Iranian people, letting them know the United States supports their freedom and wants to open a dialogue with them about America’s future relationship with a free Iran. “The Iranian government jams satellite signals to shut down television and radio broadcasts. It censors the Internet to control what the Iranian people can see and...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Inflation took a bigger bite out of consumers' wallets over the last 12 months, with September marking the biggest rise in three years. But at the same time, monthly price increases are starting to slow. The Consumer Price Index, the government's key measure of inflation at the retail level, jumped 3.9% in September from the year before. Higher food and energy prices again were the biggest culprits, with food 4.7% more expensive than a year earlier, and energy prices jumping 19.3%. Even core CPI, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, posted a 2% gain...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - The economy is growing so slowly that it will take years to wrench lofty unemployment rates back to normal levels, Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Sandra Pianalto said on Friday. Speaking to a community bankers' group, she said growth in 2011 was likely to be about two percent and forecast it will rise only to three percent in 2012 and 2013 -- unlikely to make much of a dent in the current 9.1 percent jobless rate. "If we're going to dig ourselves out of the hole that we're in and begin to drive down the unemployment...

Twenty years ago this Friday a tragic car accident in Crown Heights Brooklyn escalated into a pogrom against the Jewish people. The media gives it a politically correct description, violence between the area’s Blacks and Jews. However the violence was not two-sided. The Crown Heights riot was an attack on the Jews by the neighborhood’s Caribbean community, fueled in part by Al Sharpton, now an MSNBC host and adviser to President Obama. Black Antisemitism in the Summer of 1991 Jews were a key part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. made...

Addressing the ceremony on Bernauer Street, famously divided by the Wall and now site of a memorial, Mayor Wowereit said the capital was remembering the "saddest day in its recent history". "It is our common responsibility to keep alive the memories and pass them on to the next generation, to maintain freedom and democracy and to do everything so that such injustices may never happen again," he said. At a ceremony at a former crossing-point, President Wulff said the wall had been "an expression of fear" of those who created it.

A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black reporter named Joe Strickland.He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” ’I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.

Ten years ago this month, Portugal rejected the conventional approach to drug policy–more laws, stiffer prison sentences, more police–and went the other way by decriminalizing all drugs, even cocaine and heroin. The drug warriors predicted a disaster. They said drug use would spike and there would be a public health crisis. That did not happen. As Glenn Greenwald showed in a 2009 Cato report, Portugal is doing better than before and in many respects is doing better than other countries in the European Union

Former Russian Interpol head says terror threat in country worse than in Israel; 4 top transportation officials fired over airport bombing. The level of terror threats in Russia is higher than that in Israel," former head of Russian Interpol Vladimir Ovchinsky stated during an interview with Novye Ivestia newspaper Wednesday. "Our war is more intensive than the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians," he added, saying pessimistically that "The war in the Caucuses may last a hundred years." There has been no claim of responsibility for the bombing that occurred at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, killing 35 people and wounding...

The woolly mammoth, extinct for thousands of years, could be brought back to life in as little as four years thanks to a breakthrough in cloning technology. Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold. But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

IBM has announced its fifth annual Next Five in Five – a list of five technologies that the company believes “have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years.” While there are no flying cars or robot servants on the list, there are holographic friends, air-powered batteries, personal environmental sensors, customized commutes and building-heating computers.3D telepresence It may not be a flying car, but it’s definitely one we’ve seen in sci-fi movies before – the ability to converse with a life-size holographic image of another person in real time. The futurists at...

<p>US Treasuries suffered their biggest two-day sell-off since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, following a torrid month that has seen borrowing costs for western governments soar.</p> <p>Germany, Japan and the US have all seen their benchmark market interest rates rise by more than a quarter in the past month while the UK’s has risen by nearly a fifth.</p>

MONTGOMERY -- Republicans on Tuesday appeared to take control of the Alabama Legislature, with top Republicans claiming to have close to 60 seats in the 105-member House of Representatives and perhaps 22 seats in the 35-member Senate.

SALT LAKE CITY — In many ways, just looking at Elizabeth and her sister Mary Katherine today tells the story of how long "Elizabeth Smart" has been a household name throughout the nation, and how long their family has waited for justice to be served. Around the world, the picture of Elizabeth in her "missing" poster, of her in her yellow vest jacket with her hair pulled back, became ingrained in people's minds.

SAO PAULO (AP) - A man in northeastern Brazil is recovering after surgeons removed a 4-inch (10-centimeter) blade that had been stuck in his head for three years following a bar fight. Edeilson Nascimento, a 29-year-old tire repairman, tells reporters Friday he is feeling great after the three-hour surgery earlier this week. Excerpted per FR posting rules.

Last night’s “Parker-Spitzer” saw the lowest numbers yet for the program and the show did little to help the one that followed on the schedule — “Larry King Live” which had its worst numbers in more than 10 years. In its sixth outing, “Parker-Spitzer” drew 311,000 Total Viewers and 86,000 A25-54 viewers. That’s lower than the previous low for the time period set by Campbell Brown earlier this year. (332,000 / 87,000). Last week, Parker-Spitzer finished fourth in the time period averaging 465,000 Total Viewers and 124,000 A25-54. At 9pmET, “Larry King Live” put up its lowest A25-54 demo viewership...

Earliest evidence of fungus that takes over ants' behaviour for its own ends found by scientists. The oldest evidence of a fungus that turns ants into zombies and makes them stagger to their death has been uncovered by scientists. The gruesome hallmark of the fungus's handiwork was found on the leaves of plants that grew in Messel, near Darmstadt in Germany, 48m years ago. The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even before the rise of the Himalayas. The fungus, which is alive and well in forests today,...

Let me first always remind readers that polls are a snapshot in time. Two years from now, President Obama could be sitting on top of the world politically. But for now, he has lost all but 38 percent approval from the critical "independent" American voters. They're the ones that gave him the presidency. He appears headstrong in his determination to show the nation what a disastrous presidency looks like. Pundits often point to the presidency of Jimmy Carter as the modern example of a failed leader. It is no secret that I have, despite my former years as an active...

descent into irrelevancy...on King's inability (much the same as his fellow CNN hosts) to compete in the ratings with Fox News and MSNBC. At 9 p.m., the time slot King used to dominate, he's a "distant third" behind Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity. King now averages 725,000 viewers—that's about half the audience he had during the most recent presidential election; he was drawing 1.34 million in the first quarter of 2009. CNN president Jonathan Klein declined to comment on King's contract, which is up for renewal next June.

A mobile phone company has suspended the number 0888 888 888 – after every single person assigned to it died in the last 10 years. The first owner Vladimir Grashnov – the former CEO of Bulgarian mobile phone company Mobitel which issued the number – died of cancer in 2001 aged just 48. Despite a spotless business record there were persistent rumours that his cancer had been caused by a business rival using radioactive poisoning. The number then passed to Bulgarian mafia boss, Konstantin Dimitrov, who was gunned down in 2003 by a lone assassin in the Netherlands during a...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The major earthquakes that devastated Chile earlier this year and which triggered the catastrophic Indonesian tsunami of 2004 are more than just a distinct possibility to strike the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States, scientists say. There is more than a one-in-three chance that it will happen within the next 50 years. New analyses by Oregon State University marine geologist Chris Goldfinger and his colleagues have provided fresh insights into the Northwest’s turbulent seismic history – where magnitude 8.2 (or higher) earthquakes have occurred 41 times during the past 10,000 years. Those earthquakes were thought to...