Free Republic

Beijing: The Chinese scientist behind the world’s biggest cloning factory has technology advanced enough to replicate humans, he told AFP, and is only holding off for fear of the public reaction. Boyalife Group and its partners are building the giant plant in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, where it is due to go into production within the next seven months and aims for an output of one million cloned cows a year by 2020. But cattle are only the beginning of chief executive Xu Xiaochun’s ambitions....

Among the many duties of the president, the pardoning of a turkey on Thanksgiving stands as perhaps the most important. It is for that reason that conservative online publication IJ.com invited a few Republican presidential candidates to practice their turkey-pardoning skills, thereby making the case to the American people that they are truly Oval Office material.

Marijuana legalization advocates want the support of Black Lives Matter activists in 2016. But a debate on tactics is brewing legalization groups and Black Lives Matter activists who worry people of color are being left out of the burgeoning legal marijuana industry. WASHINGTON — Leading up to his meeting with the Black Lives Matter group Campaign Zero at the Frederick Douglass House in September, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders steeled himself for an argument. He’d only previously come face-to-face with Black Lives Matter protesters who wanted to interrupt him. But over the course of the meeting, the activists spoke authoritatively...

From the army of machines that work in Amazon warehouses to automatons that milk cows, the job-taking robots of the future are among us. Now the lettuce in your salad of the future might be grown by robots too. Oh, by “future,” we mean 2017. That’s the hope of Spread, a company in Kyoto, Japan, that plans to begin constructing the world’s first large-scale lettuce factory next spring. Once it’s fully operational, the entire process of growing a head of lettuce—from seeding to harvest—will be automated and run by robots. The efficiency of machines will enable the factory to produce...

Retailers sold more than $11 million of marijuana during Oregon's first week of legal recreational sales, outpacing the early business done in other states that have legalized pot, according to the Oregon Retailers of Cannabis Association. Oregon retailers had sales of $3.5 million by the end of opening day, Casey Houlihan, executive director of the association, told the Statesman Journal ( http://is.gd/6L3fPc ). By contrast, Colorado's first week of sales reached $5 million. In Washington, sales during the first month hit $2 million....

Once again the corporatocracy wins as the so-called "Trojan horse" Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement has been finalized. As WSJ reports, the U.S., Japan and 10 countries around the Pacific reached a historic accord Monday to lower trade barriers to goods and services and set commercial rules of the road for two-fifths of the global economy, officials said. For the U.S., the TPP (reportedly) opens agricultural markets in Japan and Canada, tightens intellectual property rules to benefit drug and technology companies, and establishes a tightknit economic bloc to challenge China’s influence in the region (likely forcing their hand into separate...

Ten of the world’s largest food production companies sent a letter to the U.S. Congress on Thursday, encouraging them to take action on climate change. The letter was signed by the chief executive officers from Unilever, Mars, Kellogg, General Mills, Nestle, New Belgium Brewing, Ben & Jerry’s, Clif Bar, Stonyfield Farm, and Dannon. “The challenge presented by climate change will require all of us – government, civil society and business – to do more with less. For companies like ours, that means producing more food on less land using fewer natural resources. If we don’t take action now, we risk...

The following is a complete transcript of Senator Ted Cruz's appearance on RFD-TV's RURAL TOWN HALL hosted by Mark Oppold. Announcer: RFD-TV News and Mediacom bring you Rural Town Hall, a conversation with the presidential candidates on issues important to rural Americans with the declared candidates for President of the United States. Our guest, Ted Cruz, Republican and U.S. Senator from Texas. Mark Oppold: And from the beautiful Stine Family Barn in West Des Moines, Iowa, welcome to this Rural Town Hall meeting produced by RFD-TV News and Mediacom. I’m Mark Oppold, and for the next hour we’ll be spending...

An archaeological team excavating the ancient site of Alacahöyük, one of the most significant centers of the ancient Hittite civilization, cooked pastries belonging to Hittite cuisine that dates back 4,000 years. The foods found on Hittite tablets were cooked without modern technology or equipment. The 4,000-year-old Hittite cuisine was cooked in Alacahöyük, an important Neolithic settlement and Turkey's first nationally excavated area. Aykut Çınaroğlu, the head of the excavations and professor of archaeology at Ankara University, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that Chef Ömür Akkor, an excavation team member, prepared a special Hittite menu in light of the available archaeological findings....

Time stood still in what I now remember as a pristine, open-air, chapel, where a congregation of two melded their souls with Mother Nature’s glory After serving in World War II, my father raised cotton on two hundred Mississippi Delta acres. The wealthy doctor who owned the land loaned him enough money to buy a tractor and a cultivator. Single-handedly and determined, he worked the land, made his first crop, and launched a 50-year farming career. When a much larger farm came up for sale, the doctor loaned Dad the money to buy it. I was ten years old, and...

Black Lives Matter St. Paul is planning a march and rally during the Minnesota State Fair, the group announced Thursday. The event, called #BlackFair by the organizers, starts at 11 a.m. Aug. 29 in Hamline Park in St. Paul. The protesters will proceed up Snelling Avenue to the fairgrounds in Falcon Heights. The intent is to disrupt the State Fair on its first weekend, Black Lives Matter organizer Rashad Turner said. "The first Saturday of the Fair is one of their money-making days. We just hope to slow that down and continue to bring attention to the injustices that plague...

Presidential candidates are hitting the road and doing everything to impress ordinary Iowans. BuzzFeed UK’s Jim Waterson attempts to understand US politics. DES MOINES, Iowa – American politics reached a new level of weird for me when Donald Trump arrived at Iowa’s state fair Saturday and proceeded to destroy everything in his path. The Republican presidential candidate cantered onto the site flanked by his private security detail, his route through a crowd of thousands of corndog-eating Iowans cleared by state police, his “TRUMP” branded helicopter hovering overhead like some political take on Apocalypse Now, his entourage blocking movement across the...

Conservation Easements in Ohio and in Montana 17 Years Ago United Nations agencies working against the economic needs and wishes of U.S. citizens compiled a blueprint for achieving Sustainable Development called U.N. Agenda 21. This 40-chapter document (about 300 pages) addresses every facet of human life and how Sustainable Development should be implemented through local, state, and federal government. With its grant-making power (‘visioning grants’ and ‘challenge grants’) and conservation easements, the federal government promoted the Sustainable Development idea and policies to the state and local levels with the creation of an army of new community of Sustainable Development NGOs...

Transcend Lighting, one of the more unconventional startups accepted into Y Combinator’s latest cohort, is launching out of beta today to bring its energy-saving LED lights to indoor farmers everywhere. Founder Brian Bennett, an optical engineer by training, invented the first Transcend prototype after his father challenged him to build some LED lights for the family farm in upstate New York. When the lights he designed were successful, Bennett entered a business plan competition at Columbia, won some money to continue developing the idea, and was accepted into Y Combinator’s Spring 2015 class. “Farms today, generally speaking, use high pressure...

We’re a month away from going over budget in using this year’s planetary resources. One way to balance our ecological books is to eat more insects. By mid-summer of each year, we use up the Earth. Known as Earth Overshoot Day, it’s the day, sometime in August, when our yearly demand for ecological resources exceeds how much the planet can replenish those resources for the year. Soon after August 15, this year, Earth will be operating on a deficit. All the while, the population of Earth is growing. It’s estimated there will be 9 billion people by 2050, an additional...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) - When Americans line up for salad, you know there must be something special about it. That's exactly what's happening at the hot new restaurant chain Sweetgreen. It is already being dubbed the "next Chipotle." Sweetgreen was founded in 2007 by three Georgetown University friends who had a simple vision: make healthy food yummy, affordable and fun. "Healthy food shouldn't just be for the top 1%," Jonathan Neman, one of the co-founders, told CNNMoney. He studied abroad in Australia and was frustrated when he returned to the U.S. and felt his affordable meal options were limited. Just...

The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA), originally passed in 2010 and heartily endorsed by First Lady Michelle Obama, is set to expire in September unless Congress acts to renew it. You may recall some of the details of that initiative including forcing all grains to be “whole grain rich” (whatever that means) and wiping out most of the salt in foods. Given the less then spectacular reception the program has received from schools – not to mention students – the GOP is looking at scaling back or at least modifying the rules. But The Hill was quick to characterize the...

Would take away a state's rights once and for all to require labeling of GMO foods. 70 bills have been introduced in over 30 states to require some sort of labeling of genetically engineered (GE) or genetically modified organisms (GMO).1)http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/issues/976/ge-food-labeling/state-labeling-initiatives#  Although very few of these bills or initiatives have passed into actual law, and many have been challenged in court, a new congressional bill would take away the state’s rights once and for all to require labeling of GMO foods.H.R.1599 2)https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1599/text, ironically labeled the  Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015 has been renamed the DARK (Deny Americans the Right...

A vacant steel factory in Newark is turning into the world's largest-producing vertical farm. After it begins running later this year, the farm's indoor system of modular, stacked trays will grow around 2 million pounds of baby greens annually. The $30 million building will be the headquarters of AeroFarms, a company that has been developing vertical farm tech for the last decade. But the company sees the project as just the beginning—and hopes to build 25 farms in the next five years. AeroFarms already has eight smaller farms and five in the pipeline. "This isn't about one farm, this is...

A few weeks ago, Londoners were able to eat at the world’s first 3D printed, pop-up restaurant. In early June, a German-based company introduced the word’s first plug-and-play food printer, which may be ready for shipping as early as 2016. With the lowering cost to produce this technology, making it increasingly accessible, 3D printing could fundamentally change our relationship with food. Simply put, the process uses ingredients to generate three-dimensional meals by placing layers of compounded food on top of each other. Since 2012, the food industry has used this technology to produce ubiquitous products like candy, chocolate, pizza, noodles...