Free Republic

We do not usually favor expensive domestic-policy initiatives, but the Bush administration should consider emergency spending on mental health. So many of its critics have gone nuts. A casual tourist of the op-eds and the Internet can catalogue all the symptoms. The Bush haters begin with random abuse. "The president got reelected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule" (Maureen Dowd). She left out receiving stolen goods. "I grew up in Missouri and most of my family voted for Bush, so I am going to be the one to say it: The election...

CONDON, Mont. -- Along about Labor Day, a tall, dark stranger known as "M-23" is likely to take a 40-mile trek south to Seeley Lake. There, peering out from a wooded, marshy area, he'll see tourists sunning themselves outside lakefront cabins and motorboats buzzing through the placid waters of this popular resort. Chances are, nobody will see M-23, which may be just as well. Weighing 325 pounds and standing more than 6 feet tall, with a distinctive shoulder hump, he sports long scimitar-like claws and has a face scarred from years of vicious fights with other male grizzly bears. Though...

For a long time, the fiercest predator worrying farm livestock east of the Missouri River was a coyote or maybe a hunter who couldn't tell a white-face cow from a white-tail deer. Come now the cougars. Perhaps prodded by development in their Black Hills habitat, mountain lions have been reported with increasing frequency on the prairies to the east. One was shot in Yankton, S.D., in June, and a pair was reported crossing a road near Mitchell, S.D., two weeks later. Only one of the big cats was reported east of the Missouri in South Dakota in 1999. Last year:...

Thailand's Boonreung Buachan, holder of the Guinness Book of World Records title for spending the most time penned up with snakes, was killed by a cobra that bit him during his daily show, a hospital doctor said on Monday. Boonreung, 34 and dubbed Snake Man, was rushed unconscious to Prai Bung Hospital near his home town, 350 miles northeast of Bangkok, Dr Wipa Praituan told Reuters. "He was brought here with no signs of life. He wasn't breathing and his heart didn't beat," she said. Boonreung was listed by the "Guinness Book of World Records" in 1998 after living with...

<p>Today's question: What do you get when more than 60 of the world's top scientists, 20 Nobel Laureates among them, get together and write one of the most scathing, damning reports in the history of modern science, aimed squarely at BushCo's thoroughly atrocious record of cover-ups and obfuscations and outright lies regarding the health of the planet?</p>

A pair of orphaned grizzly bears living in a contained wildlife refuge on a popular ski hill gave officials there a fright Monday when they emerged earlier than expected from hibernation. The groggy bears, which are about three years old and stand less than two metres tall, managed to escape their sealed man-made den and climb a tree. Their unexpected appearance forced the closure of the Grouse Mountain ski hill for about two hours while conservation officers moved the bears to another sealed den on the refuge. An electric fence that keeps the bears within their designated refuge area when...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - A self-taught bear expert who once called Alaska's brown bears harmless was one of two people fatally mauled in a bear attack in the Katmai National Park and Preserve. The bodies of Timothy Treadwell, 46, and Amie Huguenard, 37, both of Malibu, Calif., were found Monday at their campsite when a pilot arrived who was supposed to take them to Kodiak, state troopers said Tuesday. Treadwell, co-author of "Among Grizzlies: Living With Wild Bears in Alaska," spent more than a dozen summers living alone with and videotaping Katmai bears. Information on Huguenard was not immediately available....