Free Republic

Russian lawmaker Sergei Mironov suggested in a Wednesday post to X, the platform previously known as Twitter, that the oversight and power of the U.S. is weakening, citing the recent attempts by Venezuela to seize lands controlled by its neighbor, Guyana. The politician suggested that other nations should consider retaking old territories that are now part of the U.S., citing the examples of Mexico and Texas, and Russia and Alaska.

The American West’s megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest in at least 1,200 years and is a worst-case climate change scenario playing out live, a new study finds. A dramatic drying in 2021 — about as dry as 2002 and one of the driest years ever recorded for the region — pushed the 22-year drought past the previous record-holder for megadroughts in the late 1500s and shows no signs of easing in the near future, according to a study Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. The study calculated that 42% of this megadrought...

Could President Obama beat Rick Perry in Texas in a general-election showdown? According to a new poll by Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, Obama would beat Perry 47 percent to 45 percent. That’s within the poll’s 3.5-point margin of error. But in that same poll, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul beat Obama by 8 and 5 points respectively, while Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty would also win the state (albeit within the margin of error) in the general election. Dave Carney, a top political adviser to Perry, dismisses the PPP poll, telling National Review Online in an e-mail, “PPP has...

The genomes of man and dog have been joined in the scientific barnyard by the genome of the cow, an animal that walked beside them on the march to modern civilization. A team of hundreds of scientists working in more than a dozen countries yesterday published the entire DNA message -- the genome -- of an 8-year-old female Hereford living at an experimental farm in Montana. Hidden in her roughly 22,000 genes are hints of how natural selection sculpted the bovine body and personality over the past 60 million years, and how man greatly enhanced the job over the past...

Sarah Palin Abuse Of Power We have been given a clear warning about the vice-presidential nominee for the Republican party. We already know she is a pathological liar. We already know she refuses even basic transparency and accountability, refusing to hold a press conference as veep nominee for the first time in modern American political history and refusing to provide even minimal documentation of her fifth pregnancy. Barely into her first year as governor, as one might expect of such a person, she abused her power as governor of Alaska to persecute a former family member: Finding Number One For...

Cows also 'have regional accents' Cows moo with a regional twang Cow moo recordings(Click on site to hear) Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have suggested. They decided to examine the issue after dairy farmers noticed their cows had slightly different moos, depending on which herd they came from. John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at the University of London, said regional twangs had been seen before in birds. The farmers in Somerset who noticed the phenomenon said it may have been the result of the close bond between them and their animals. Farmer Lloyd Green, from Glastonbury, said:...

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Four U.S. soldiers face disciplinary action for burning the bodies of two Taliban rebels, but they will not be charged with crimes because their actions were motivated by hygienic concerns, the military said Saturday.

In a move unlikely only because it's taken this long to happen, pundit-about-town Arianna Huffington is extending her hosting largess to the blogosphere. This month the wannabe California governor is launching a Slate-like Web site where a cast of bigwigs, including Sen. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.), David Geffen, Barry Diller, Larry David, Tom Freston, Ari Emanuel, Jim Wiatt Tina Brown and Harold Evans will each have their own blog from which to spout Big Thoughts about politics. Huffington wouldn't comment, but it was confirmed that a soft-launch of the Huffington Report would be up and running before the end of April....

Apparently, Al Jazeera edited the 18-minute Bin Laden tape down to 6 minutes, leaving out parts that could help President Bush: Officials said that in the 18-minute long tape — of which only six minutes were aired on the al-Jazeera Arab television network in the Middle East on Friday — bin Laden bemoans the recent democratic elections in Afghanistan and the lack of violence involved with it. On the tape, bin Laden also says his terror organization has been hurt by the U.S. military’s unrelenting manhunt for him and his cohorts on the Afghan-Pakistani border. A portion of the left-out...

RICHARD BENNETT'S LIFE TESTIMONY  From Tradition to Truth Richard Peter Bennett The Early Years Born Irish, in a family of eight, my early childhood was fulfilled and happy. My father was a colonel in the Irish Army until he retired when I was about nine. As a family, we loved to play, sing, and act, all within a military camp in Dublin. We were a typical Irish Roman Catholic family. My father sometimes knelt down to pray at his bedside in a solemn manner. My mother would talk to Jesus while sewing, washing dishes, or even smoking a cigarette. Most...