Free Republic

West's submarine nuclear warheads flawed, say scientistsFrancis Harris in Washington (Filed: 04/04/2005) British and American nuclear warheads carried by submarines are so poorly designed that they may fail to detonate if fired, scientists have said. The news emerged after interviews with a group of American scientists with ties to the Los Alamos nuclear research facility, where the first atomic weapon was manufactured. HMS Vanguard carries Britain's nuclear deterrent, Trident One of them, Richard Morse, of the University of Arizona and a former Los Alamos weapons designer, said the casing of the W76 nuclear warhead was so thin that it would...

One of the pillars on which the alarmist case for doing something about global warming rests is the contention that the 20th century was the warmest in the last thousand years. This proposition is most dramatically expressed in the "hockey stick" graph.............. ************ They found numerous and worrying errors. As they put it, the data "for the estimation of temperatures from 1400 to 1980 contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects." They used the original source data to correct these errors, after...

EU voices its dismay over Iran's 'flawed' election By David Blair in Teheran (Filed: 24/02/2004) Iran's clerical establishment faced international criticism yesterday when America and the European Union condemned the country's general election as flawed. The US State Department said it did not meet international standards and EU foreign ministers said a "genuine democratic choice" had been rendered "impossible". The EU voiced "deep regret and disappointment" over an election which saw Iran's hardliners retake control of parliament after the regime banned thousands of reformists from standing. Iran's only link with the West comes through trade talks with the EU. Jack...

Wanted: A Legible Voting Ballot Why it's time to redesign the ballot design process. By Jessie Scanlon Updated Monday, October 6, 2003, at 12:25 PM PT With a record 133 candidates (post-Arianna) in the California gubernatorial race, the Oct. 7 election poses a nontrivial design challenge: How to fit all those names on the ballot? In a sense, the election is a litmus test of how far we've come since the 2000 presidential election, when the now-infamous butterfly in Dade County, Fla., put ballot design on newspapers' front pages. The answer: not far. A study carried out by USA Today...

WHO: Beijing's SARS Data Seriously Flawed By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer BEIJING - Beijing's records on SARS cases do not indicate how half of the city's patients caught the highly contagious respiratory illness, and that missing information could seriously hinder efforts to contain the virus, the World Health Organization said Saturday. WHO also warned that SARS has become more serious in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei because officials cannot track down the source of infection for a high number of people — the latest sign the island was losing control of the outbreak. China reported five new SARS fatalities...