Free Republic

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia—As an engineer pulls the throttle, villagers track side gawk at the bullet-shaped train as it gathers speed. Soon, forests and wooden shacks are a blur as a dashboard display reads 250 kilometers an hour (155 miles per hour). Ten years in the making, Russia's state-owned railway is testing eight aerodynamic trains that in December will rush travelers from here to Moscow in less than four hours. With fancy kitchens and leather seats in first class, the Sapsans (Russian for peregrine falcons) mark a change in Russia's egalitarian rail tradition. More broadly, though, Russia's new trains mirror a...

slowing down in the last twenty meters and he still wins.

The goal was to build a reporting system that allows the public to follow the zigzagging paths of dollars awarded under the $787 billion federal stimulus package. A financial GPS of sorts. But despite federal lawmakers' pledge of transparency, the final stages of most money trails, along with key information about job impacts, will remain invisible to users of the Recovery.org website when it debuts next month. Only details of a stimulus grant's passage through its first two stops after it leaves the federal government must be reported, according to guidance memos from the White House Office of Management and...

A former athlete at Central Connecticut State University has filed a lawsuit against the school and a retired track coach, making some pretty alarming allegations that the coach harassed him for three years, reports the New Britain Herald. Charles Ngetich, a Kenyan, claims he was forced to drink blood, among other things during his time on the track team, the New Britain Herald reports. Ngetich lost his full scholarship, and was dismissed from school on Sept 4 because he could not pay outstanding school fees, the paper reports. The suit alleges: - he was encouraged to drink a cup of...

Gov Palin skipped the Values Voter Summit since her son Track is back from Iraq this weekend....

BERLIN – Usain Bolt got the birthday present he wanted from his teammates at the world championships on Friday, and Allyson Felix spoiled the party by ending Jamaica's sprint domination. After the Jamaican relay team qualified for the 4x100 final without Bolt on the track, Felix glided to the finish with an elegance reminiscent of a long distance runner to win her third straight 200-meter world title. With a raised fist and little more than a smile at the finish, Felix broke the Jamaican hold on sprinting going back to the Beijing Olympics. She held off an early charge from...

Is this track star too go too be true?

The president's liberal allies on health care reform have a message for the president: Don't think you can drop the public option without a fight. "If the president thinks we're gonna get the votes without the public option, he's got another think coming," Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-NY, told ABC News. "That won't pass the House." Over the weekend, the President seemed to change his tone on whether a final health care reform bill had to include a public option -- something that just two months ago, he indicated was a deal-breaker.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US news agency the Associated Press, in a move aimed at protecting its content online, announced on Thursday it was building a "news registry" that would track the use of its stories on the Web. The New York-based AP, a cooperative owned by more than 1,400 US newspapers, said that the news registry will "tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use." "The system will register key identifying information about each piece of content that AP distributes as well as the terms of use of that content, and employ a...

AUSTIN, Texas — The best small high school track team in Texas is once again a freckle-faced girl named Bonnie Richardson. Valedictorian of her 14-student senior class in the tiny farming town of Rochelle, Richardson won the Class A girls team state title by herself for the second consecutive year Saturday by single-handedly beating 56 other schools. Her reward was a second state championship trophy she won't have to share with anyone — there are no other girls on the Rochelle High School track team. "It's great. It's over. It's done," Richardson said. "It's nice that I can relax now."...

In the item "Fast-Track Language In House Budget Prompts Moderates' Outcry" By Patrick Yoest and Corey Boles Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--A U.S. House budget blueprint unveiled Wednesday would reserve a fast-track option for considering health-care legislation, prompting outcry from moderate lawmakers in the Senate. Language in the House budget resolution instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee to carve out $1 billion each in deficit savings by a Sept. 29 deadline through health overhaul legislation. The language employs a tactic that is known as budget reconciliation and would allow the...

Follow the trainwreck...

Barack Obama has often said Americans need to keep a close eye on their leaders. "I learned long ago, when working as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago, that when citizens join their voices together, they can hold their leaders accountable," he said in a campaign blog last summer. "I'm not exempt from that. I'm certainly not perfect and expect to be held accountable too." He made the same point in a September campaign speech on education. "I want you to hold our government accountable," Obama said. "I want you to hold me accountable." Okay, we will. PolitiFact,...

DOVER, Del., Oct 3 (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden bid a safe farewell on Friday to 112 "citizen soldiers" headed to Iraq, including his son, and told them "thank you for answering the call of your country." "God bless you and may He protect you," Biden said a day after his debate with his Republican rival Sarah Palin, who as Alaska's governor saluted her 20-year-old son off to war last month. In brief remarks at a departure ceremony outside the Delaware state capitol, Biden made no mention of his showdown in St. Louis with Palin.

Reports that Track Palin vandalized school buses aren't true, says pal By NANCY DILLON DAILY NEWS WEST COAST BUREAU CHIEF Wednesday, September 10th 2008, 7:55 PM Despite snowballing reports and rumors, Sarah Palin's eldest son, Track, was not part of the gang of four teenagers who criminally vandalized 44 Alaska school buses in 2005, a key culprit told The News. "Track wasn't with me. Track had nothing to do with it," participant Deryck Harris, 20, said Wednesday in an exclusive interview. Citing an anonymous judicial source, the Anchorage radio station 1080 KUDO was the first to report last week that...

The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively that Sarah's oldest son, Track, was addicted to the power drug OxyContin for nearly the past two years, snorting it, eating it, smoking it and even injecting it. And as Track, 19, heads to Iraq as part of the U.S. armed forces, Sarah and her husband Todd were powerless to stop his wild antics. THE ENQUIRER also has exclusive details about Track's use of other drugs, including cocaine, and his involvement in a notorious local vandalism incident. “I’ve partied with him (Track) for years,” a source disclosed. “I’ve seen him snort cocaine, snort and smoke...

81% Say US on Wrong Track, 48% to Stay Anyway by Scott Ott for ScrappleFace · 3 Comments (2008-04-04) — The most recent New York Times/CBS News Poll indicates that while 81 percent of Americans think “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track“, roughly 48 percent have decided to stay in the United States anyway. The survey also indicates that more than 70 percent said their personal financial situation was “fairly good or very good“, but only 21 percent think “the overall economy is in good condition” thanks to the well-known economic principle that individual prosperity produces...

More than 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, the highest such number since the early 1990s, according to a new survey. The CBS News-New York Times poll released Thursday showed 81 percent of respondents said they believed "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." That was up from 69 percent a year ago, and 35 percent in early 2002.

BALAD — As the ramp slammed down in the muck, the rain came howling in drenching the men who leapt off the back of the Chinook helicopter. The troopers hurried into the field of sloppy mud where they slipped and slid through the landing zone to reorganize in the pitch black Iraqi night. Not even the moon was friendly on this mission, which would prove to be a testament to the guts of Army Infantrymen and to the determination of Charlie Company Soldiers to make even the most remote hamlets in the Salah ad-Din province safe from al Qaeda. Soldiers...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21, 2007 – Members of North American Aerospace Defense Command are gearing up to track Santa Claus’ travels on Christmas Eve, providing detailed information about his whereabouts on the command’s Web site and through a toll-free telephone line. Air Force Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., commander of NORAD and U.S. Northern Command, delivered a tongue-in-cheek assessment of the Santa-tracking mission. He reported a “consistent phenomenon” the command has tracked for decades. “Sometime around the 24th of December, this individual begins to take flight, and he makes a very rapid trip around the globe,” he said. When Continental...