Free Republic

If black lives truly mattered to civil rights organizations, they would spend more time promoting strong families and less energy pushing abortion on demand. Barack Obama's somber reflection on the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade was hardly surprising, but it signaled how the former president's own priorities have shifted in the past 15 years. As a candidate and president, Obama talked openly about marriage, family, and fatherhood. The loudest critics whenever he did so were always his black progressive supporters. Still, he gave a speech about violent crime in Chicago 10 years ago that very few elected Democrats would...

There’s a bumper crop of squirrels in New England, and the frenetic critters are frustrating farmers by chomping their way through apple orchards, pumpkin patches and corn fields. The varmints are fattening themselves for winter while destroying the crops with bite marks. Robert Randall, who has a 60-acre orchard in Standish, Maine, said he’s never seen anything like it. “They’re eating the pumpkins. They’re eating the apples. They’re raising some hell this year. It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” he said. Evidence of the squirrel population explosion is plain to see along New England’s highways, where the critters are becoming...

The speed with which the German population is shrinking seems to be even too much for the statisticians of Destatis, the official German bureau of statistics, who posit that by 2060, with a zero level of net immigration, the German population will have declined to 60.2 million. However, our research team has found out that this number is far too optimistic: in 40 years Germany will have a population of 52.6 million people, a considerable 34% drop from the current 81 million inhabitants, and by the end of the century the native German population, the indigenous people without a migration...

There is always something special about science meetings. The 109th meeting of the Texas Academy of Science at Lamar University in Beaumont on 3-5 March 2006 was especially exciting for me, because a student and his professor presented the results of a DNA study I suggested to them last year. How fulfilling to see the baldcypress ( Taxodium distichum ) leaves we collected last summer and my tree ring photographs transformed into a first class scientific presentation that's nearly ready to submit to a scientific journal (Brian Iken and Dr. Deanna McCullough, "Bald Cypress of the Texas Hill Country: Taxonomically...

“The Population Bomb” was the “Global Warming” of 1968. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…” --Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968) Try this one on for an environmental doomsday scenario: a disaster of epic proportions is threatening Earth. It is man made in nature. In ten years–-ten years!-–life as we know it will be radically changed for the worst....

The growth in human population and rising consumption have exceeded the planet's ability to support us, argues John Feeney. In this week's Green Room, he says it is time to ring the alarm bells and take radical action in order to avert unspeakable consequences. We humans face two problems of desperate importance. The first is our global ecological plight. The second is our difficulty acknowledging the first. Despite increasing climate change coverage, environmental writers remain reluctant to discuss the full scope and severity of the global dilemma we've created. Many fear sounding alarmist, but there is an alarm to sound...

August 7, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - National Geographic (NG), a leading environmentalist, de-population supporting magazine, has published a major cover story by Michael Finkel on the extraordinarily deadly and complex malaria parasite. The July 2007 NG edition article discusses possible solutions to the disease but also uncharacteristically acknowledges a leading expert's contention that the international ban on DDT was a terrible mistake which may have cost many millions of lives, especially in poor African nations. Environmental ideologues have been quick to slam Finkel's article as being flawed and damaging to the their past success in convincing the world to ban...

Its current population of 158 million may touch 305 million by 2050Islamabad: Pakistan is likely to become the world’s fourth most populous country by 2050 with an estimated population of 305 million, according to the World Population Chart issued by a UN agency. With its current population pegged around 158 million, Pakistan is already ranked sixth in the world. Its growth rate of 2.1 per cent could make it the fourth most populous country behind China, India and Indonesia by 2050, the chart by the United Nations Population Division (UNPD) said on the occasion of World Population Day. The high...

For many local minorities, this summer will probably see the loss of an established and respected voice, the 37-year-old Urban Coalition. For Mexican immigrants in the state, however, this summer has brought an unprecedented spike in national and international focus, since Mexican president Vicente Fox announced in June that Minnesota would be the next state to host a Mexican consulate. For Fox, the first Mexican head of state to visit the region, the trip was intended not only to strengthen trade relations between Mexico and Minnesota, but also to strengthen his connection to Minnesota’s roughly 96,000 Mexican immigrants. Minnesota’s mainstream...

By 2030, Will County will surpass DuPage and become the most populous collar county, according to new projections. And the population of the Will County town of New Lenox will explode by more than 500 percent, to more than 100,000, according to the figures from the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission. But there's a big catch -- the forecast assumes that a third airport in Peotone will be built by 2030, which would help draw many of the 600,000 new residents and 274,000 new jobs projected for the county. "An airport is far from certain," said Howard Lerner of the Environmental...

Our man in science goes to Congress I am testifying at an oversight hearing before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources on "The Impact of Science on Public Policy" today, Feb. 4, 2004. I was asked to submit testimony about how and why environmental predictions have gone wrong. What follows is the written version of my testimony. (I get a whole five minutes to speak.) My name is Ronald Bailey. I am the science correspondent for the public policy magazine Reason and I have written and reported on scientific and environmental policy for more than two decades for...

India is on the verge of a sociological time bomb waiting to explode, due to the large number of genetically manipulated births. As in China, everyone wants a boy and in a population which already exceeds one thousand million, the practice could create a dangerous imbalance, with many more males than females in the near future. Many women visit fertility clinics, where they are implanted with male embryos. The defenders of the practice claim that in the past, baby girls were killed or women went to have abortions when they discovered that they were carrying a female child, while others...