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WASHINGTON – The Bush administration inherited a mess in strategic Somalia and may be leaving President-elect Barack Obama with a worse one. The explosion of piracy off Somalia's coast is an attention-grabbing product of internal chaos in the Horn of Africa country, and a problem that will outlast the administration's success this past week in winning U.N. backing for possible pirate-hunting raids on Somali territory. "We have a framework in place now to deal with this issue, but it's not going to be a very easy one," State Department spokesman Robert Wood said. Wood meant that there is more to...

Dec. 16, 2008: NASA's five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a breach in Earth's magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. Solar wind can flow in through the opening to "load up" the magnetosphere for powerful geomagnetic storms. But the breach itself is not the biggest surprise. Researchers are even more amazed at the strange and unexpected way it forms, overturning long-held ideas of space physics. "At first I didn't believe it," says THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This finding fundamentally alters our understanding of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction." The opening...

(SNIP) By the time he vacates the White House, he will have issued a record number of so-called 'midnight regulations' - so called because of the stealthy way they appear on the rule books - to undermine the administration of Barack Obama, many of which could take years to undo. (SNIP)

In his book "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse," Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor at the New Republic and contributing editor to The Atlantic, castigates the media for dwelling on minor problems without celebrating the broader, more upbeat context in which they exist. One of the broader, more upbeat events of recent years is the significant and dramatic increase in real GDP per-capita worldwide. Using world GDP data from the IMF and world population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the chart above shows real world GDP per-capita from 1985 to 2013 (data from 2008 -...

The teenager behind a "Kick a Ginger" group on Facebook is being investigated by police after reports of attacks on redhead children. Nearly 5,000 people joined the online campaign which urged members to "get them steel toes ready" for a day of booting this week. The website appears to have been inspired by a recent episode of the cartoon South Park, in which a young character called Cartman describes people with red hair as evil and soulless. Dozens of children left messages on the page claiming to have carried out attacks on "National Kick a Ginger Day" on Thursday,...

Probs with 'The Savage Nation'

It's Nature's way of healing itself. The findings help determine how much carbon that big storms have historically taken from the atmosphere and buried for thousands of years beneath the sea. More carbon could be buried by these storms if global warming increases their intensity and frequency, as some scientists have predicted. Scientists have been looking at ways to store carbon to lower the levels of carbon dioxide building up in Earth's atmosphere. Scientists have long suspected that hurricanes and typhoons (along with cyclones and tropical depressions, these are all versions of storm systems called tropical cyclones) can cleanse the...

The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, Nasa scientists have warned. Data has shown that the sun's heliosphere is shrinking New data has revealed that the heliosphere, the protective shield of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the space race began 50 years ago. Scientists are baffled at what could be causing the barrier to shrink in this way and are to launch mission to study the heliosphere....

Just turned on Fox & Friends. They said that the McCain people will be on this morning with Big news and they would immediately get a response from the Obama campaign. Meanwhile, while we wait they are FURIOUS about Acorn and are hyping the Acorn story big time.....

firebrand pastor Jeremiah Wright has helped destroy a Dallas church worker's marriage - and her job, The Post has learned. Elizabeth Payne, 37, said she had a steamy sexual affair with the controversial, racially divisive man of the cloth while she was an executive assistant at a church headed by a popular Wright protégé. Payne's husband dumped her, and she was canned from the plum job at Friendship-West Baptist Church, she told The Post. "I was involved with Rev. Wright, and that's why I lost my job and why my husband divorced me," Payne said.

LONDON (AFP) – The euro on Tuesday slid below 1.45 dollars for the first time since February as the market anticipated lower interest rates in the eurozone and stronger growth in the United States, analysts said. In early London trade, the European single currency dropped to 1.4467 dollars, the lowest point since February 12. It rose from this level to trade at 1.4524 dollars in late European trade, compared with 1.4606 dollars late on Monday in London. Elsewhere, the yen fell slightly after Monday's abrupt resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda. The pound meanwhile struck a record low versus...

A "minor planet" with the prosaic name 2006 SQ372 is just over two billion miles from Earth, a bit closer than the planet Neptune. But this lump of ice and rock is beginning the return leg of a 22,500-year journey that will take it to a distance of 150 billion miles, nearly 1,600 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, according to a team of researchers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II). The discovery of this remarkable object was reported today in Chicago, at an international symposium titled "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Asteroids to Cosmology." A...

American blunders fostered the situation, and now the United States will pay a high global price War became unavoidable in the Caucasus when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent the country's military to "liberate" the autonomous region of South Ossetia from its Moscow-backed local authorities. While Georgia and Russia bear principal responsibility for a conflict that both have been courting for years, the United States also shares the blame. And now America's interests will suffer, not only in Georgia and the former Soviet Union but around the world. South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and even Georgia itself may seem like small and distant...

ABC Radio news just announced Sen. John Edwards will admit to the affair with Rielle Hunter in an interview with the network, but insists the child is not his. We return you to your regularly-scheduled FReeping.

One fact is clear: the Kremlin's troops would not be in South Ossetia today if Georgia were a loyal ally. Instead, Mr Saakashvili is paying the price for his pro-Western foreign policy and, in particular, his ambition to join Nato. Two key events well beyond Georgia's borders have triggered Russia's fury. The first was Kosovo's declaration of independence in February and the new country's subsequent recognition by many Western states. This brought a public warning from Moscow that Kosovo's move to independence could set a precedent for Georgia's two breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The second was Nato's pledge...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) -- Oil prices resumed their descent Friday as a strengthening dollar and worries about economic growth offset supply concerns over a sabotaged pipeline in Turkey.</p> <p>Light, sweet crude for September delivery slumped $2.11 to $117.91 a barrel in early trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after dipping as low as $117.05 in electronic trading.</p>

It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but Ventura County fire officials say it's actually a naturally occurring thermal anomaly known as a "heat sink." They are worried about the phenomenon which is located 3 miles north of Fillmore on federal land owned by the BLM. Fire officials say the "heat sink" is very hot gases escaping from the ground, like hydrogen sulfide. They say the gas is so hot, it can ignite the brush around it, starting wildfires. In fact, the fire department has been up there several times during the past couple of decades dealing...

WASHINGTON — The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — from 175,914 to 123,833 — from 2005 to 2007, Bush administration officials said on Tuesday. Housing officials say the statistics, which are collected annually from more than 3,800 cities and counties, may reflect better data collection and some variation in the number of communities reporting. But officials also attribute much of the decline to a policy shift promoted by Congress and the administration that has focused federal and local resources on finding stable housing for homeless people suffering...

Oil prices plummeted today, down as much as $9.26 a barrel, as investors feared that the nation’s financial woes could cut into demand, CNNMoney.com reports. Will we see a change at the gas pump? Light, sweet crude fell $6.35 to $138.83 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Earlier prices dipped to $135.92. Prices began to fall after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that high energy prices have sapped the purchasing power of U.S. households. “It seemed to pick up steam after President Bush spoke about drilling off shore,” said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst...

On the Spot (CNSNews.com) – A top Democrat told high school students gathered at the U.S. Capitol Thursday that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Darfur, which led to the “black hawk down” battle between U.S. troops and Somali rebels. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House (Select) Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee, also equated the drive for global warming legislation with the drive for women’s suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But one global warming expert from the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) told Cybercast News Service that such a remark...

Bush may have done a service to us all. The eight years gave us lay offs and unemployment not seen since the great depresion, wars and attrocities commited in the name of advancing american multi corporate agenda and white Christianity, we saw the rich get richer and the poor become even more poor, we heard slogans such as jobless recovery, strategery, modern economy, trickledown effect Ad nauseum. The values of Bush are the values of the capitalist system, another word for fascism. the eight years of Bush proves capitalism is a failed system. We see more debt, unemployment and 100...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration misused intelligence to build a case for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report issued Thursday. The White House exploited its ability to declassify intelligence selectively to bolster its case for war, the committee chairman, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-West Virginia, said in the report. Senior officials disclosed and discussed sensitive intelligence reports that supported the administration's policy objectives and kept out of public discourse information that did not, he said. The report also found that the administration misled the American people about contacts between...

NEW YORK Sgt. Jason Dene, the nephew of actress and activist Mia Farrow, died in Iraq last week and his uncle blames George W. Bush for the loss. , "To date all the family has heard from the Army is that Jason variously died 'in his sleep' ...' in other words, natural causes." Whatever the cause, Patrick Farrow feels he knows what really killed his nephew: "Because of the arrogant, corrupt lies of George W. Bush and his neo-con handlers my nephew is dead, and I am mad as hell...Jason Dene was not killed by enemy fire nor friendly fire...

I'm currently of the opinion the disaster that has been president Bush for the last few years (yes, I was a supporter of George till he quit being a conservative) should cause Obamanation to win. I'm all for fighting the war over there. What I'm not for is letting the current congressional majority pass whatever they want and the President not showing any leadership skills with Republicans currently in congress. RINO's like McCain have ruined the party with their descent to moderation from Regan style Republican values. Obama should win this election so the nation can see the real differences...

AFTER THE war, the US was given an opportunity to actually support democratic, anti-Iranian-Syrian forces in Lebanon by supporting the Saniora government when Hizbullah abruptly bolted the ruling coalition and backed by Iran and Syria attempted to take control of the government by assassination and terror. The US could have taken action against Syria or Iran. But instead it sought to appease Iran and Syria in the hopes that they would temper their support for insurgents in Iraq. The pinnacle of this US abandonment of the March 14 movement was Rice's decision to invite Syria to participate in her peace...

LAKE ARROWHEAD, Calif. — A coyote grabbed a 2-year-old girl by the head and tried to drag her from the front yard of her mountain home in the third incident of a coyote threatening a small child in Southern California in five days, authorities said. The coyote attacked the girl around noon Tuesday when her mother, Melissa Rowley, went inside the home for a moment to put away a camera, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said in an incident report. Rowley came out of the house and saw the coyote dragging her daughter towards a street. She ran towards...

A man awaiting trial on a murder charge is suing Benton County, Arkansas, complaining that the “skimpy rations” he has been fed in the county jail caused him to lose more than 100 pounds during eight months in jail. “I used to be a sturdy 400-plus pounds,” Laswell boasted. “Now, I’m practically skin and bones. It’s cruel and unusual punishment.” Laswell is being assisted in his suit by the ACLU. “This is but another sorry example of the pattern of torture and abuse that has overtaken the U.S. penal system under the Bush Administration,” said ACLU spokesman, Bertram Petty. “Starving...

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility. "The set-up for this summer is disturbing," says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season. In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that...

I dont know if anyone ever posted this but I just thought we needed a reminder: The accomplishments of George W Bush Abortion & Traditional Values Banned Partial Birth Abortion - by far the most significant roll-back of abortion on demand since Roe v. Wade. Reversed Clinton's move to strike Reagan's anti-abortion Mexico Policy. By Executive Order (EO), reversed Clinton's policy of not requiring parental consent for abortions under the Medical Privacy Act. By EO, prohibited federal funds for international family planning groups that provide abortions and related services. Upheld the ban on abortions at military hospitals. Made $33 million...

It was a clear, hot summer day on Aug. 6, 1945, when 10-year-old Kenji Kitagawa kissed his mother and brother goodbye before leaving for school. The fifth-grader didn't know that would be the last time he would see them alive. Life was forever altered for Kitagawa and the rest of the world 62 years ago, as an American B-29 bomber, flying 26,000 feet above his hometown of Hiroshima, Japan, dropped an atomic bomb. Now 73, Kitagawa travels the world as part of an effort to educate people on the destructive power of nuclear weapons. Sponsored by the Hiroshima Peace Culture...

Iran's bad behavior blamed on Bush March 15, 2008 By Rowan Scarborough - Sen. Barack Obama's most senior military adviser says President Bush is to blame for Iran's bad behavior. The assessment from an interview with retired Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak provides a glimpse into how an Obama administration would deal with Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called repeatedly for the destruction of Israel, is pursuing nuclear weapons in the opinion of some national security experts, and his Revolutionary Guard is training Iraqis to kill American military personnel in Iraq. Earlier this month, Mr. Ahmadinejad said of Israel,...

QUITO, Ecuador - Ecuador's Tungurahua volcano shot columns of ash miles into the air on Wednesday, as officials ordered the evacuation of 3,000 villagers living near its slopes. Some 1,000 villagers from the western flanks of the 16,575-foot volcano fled their homes for shelters at dawn, said Roberto Rodriguez, director of Civil Defense. He said 11 families who refused to leave, fearing looters, were removed by force. "We've taken all of the precautions possible," President Rafael Correa told reporters on Wednesday, adding that a state of emergency already in place in the area will be extended for 60 days. Juan...

Rosie O'Donnell Blames Bush for Staph Infection Photo of Ken Shepherd. By Ken Shepherd | February 5, 2008 - 13:54 ET Greg Pollowitz of NRO's Media Blog already beat me to the punch, but it bears repeating on NewsBusters. The only fresh angle I can bring to this is that, to my recollection, this is the first time Rosie O'Donnell has attempted an original blog post in prose. For the occasion she blamed President Bush for a nasty staph infection back in 2000. I'm sure given enough time and inspiration from Joni Mitchell's greatest hits she can re-work her post...

Nonfarm private employment grew 130,000 from December 2007 to January of 2008 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the ADP National Employment ReportTM. The estimated change in employment from November to December was revised down 3,000 to 37,000. January's increase of 130,000 is consistent with nonfarm private employment growth that averaged 110,000 during the three-month period from October through December 2007.

Americans worked a median of 52 hours last year without pay. They’re called volunteers. Many organizations can’t survive without unpaid labor, and many people are glad to provide it. Sadly, though, data released Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that both the number of volunteers and the volunteer rate — the percentage of the population that volunteers — declined in 2007 from 2006. Volunteering also had fallen in 2006 from 2005. About 60.8 million Americans, age 16 and up, volunteered in 2007, compared with a high of 65.3 million in 2005. The proportion of that population that...

January 19, 2008 -- MARLTON, NJ - A high-ranking executive of a collapsed subprime-mortgage lender jumped to his death from the Delaware Memorial Bridge yesterday, shortly after his wife's body was found inside their Burlington County home, authorities said. The deaths of Walter Buczynski, 59, and his wife, Marci, 37 - the parents of two boys - were being investigated as a murder-suicide, according to the Burlington County Prosecutor's Office. Prosecutor Robert Bernardi said Evesham Township police went to the couple's home in the Marlton section of the township at around noon after a male caller asked them to check...

Volcano erupts in Chile, covering area in ash By Matthew Moore and agencies Last Updated: 1:50pm GMT  02/01/2008 A volcano has erupted in southern Chile, sending a column of smoke miles into the sky.Telegraph TV:Tourists and park workershave been forced to flee ^ Lava is spurting from the mouth of the active Llaima volcano, in the Conguillio National Park, and the surrounding area is covered in ash. More than 150 tourists and park workers have been evacuated and the emergency services have been placed on "early alert" should tectonic activity increase. There are no reports of any injuries. Before...

In the wake of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, Wolf Blitzer of CNN made much of an e-mail, exclusively provided to him by a close associate of Bhutto and a Hillary Clinton supporter, casting blame on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for her murder. We can now understand why Musharraf’s November 3 state-of-emergency decree took foreign news outlets like CNN off the air. Musharraf, who is one of the main targets of the Al Qaida international terrorist organization, recognizes that the so-called “CNN effect” in global affairs can destabilize foreign governments, including his own. It’s no wonder that he recently complained about being...

When President Bush described the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as cowardly, he chose precisely the wrong word. (He was not the only person to do so, but he was the most important one to do so.) In fact, it was a very courageous act: for it requires great courage to assassinate someone in the middle of a large and volatile crowd favourable to that person, and above all then to blow yourself up just to make sure that you have succeeded. Not many people have that degree of courage: I certainly don’t. The two Islamic militants whose telephone call was...

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Some of the coldest weather in years is expected to move into Central Florida to begin the New Year, according to Local 6 meteorologist Larry Mowry. "This could be one of the coldest stretches of weather we've seen in about four years by the first part of 2008," Mowry said. Mowry said a cold front will drop temperatures by Tuesday. "But, the coldest of the air arrives on Wednesday," Mowry said. "It is into Wednesday night into Thursday morning when a freeze is possible." Temperatures could drop into the mid 20s in northern Central Florida counties. There...

WASHINGTON - Fannie Mae's former chief executive says the Bush administration helped orchestrate an accounting scandal that cost him his job, and he wants to use White House documents to defend himself in a shareholder lawsuit.

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

An enormous underwater landslide 60,000 years ago produced the longest flow of sand and mud yet found on Earth. The landslide off the coast of north-west Africa dumped 225 billion metric tonnes of sediment into the ocean in a matter of hours or days. The flow travelled 1,500km (932 miles) - the distance from London to Rome - before depositing its sediment. The work, by a British team of researchers has been published in the academic journal Nature. The massive surge put down the same amount of sediment that comes out of all the world's rivers combined over a period...

....In the nearly six years that detainees have been held here, this 45-square-mile American base has seen more suicides than trials: Four detainees have killed themselves, while only one case has been completed, through a plea bargain. The military commissions system that President Bush set up from scratch after Sept. 11 has faced so many legal challenges that even basic questions, including whether constitutional protections extend to the detainees, remain unresolved. So judges, lawyers, and detainees are forced to do what people on this isolated island base do most often: They wait.

(2007-11-17) — As the release of the final report on climate change by a panel of Nobel Laureate scientists at the United Nations sent a tsunami of fear around the globe this week, U.S. President George Bush today for the first time revealed his retirement plans. “I’m going to put together a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and buy up a bunch of oceanfront property in resort areas both here and abroad,” said Mr. Bush. “Since the U.N. and Al Gore say it’s all going to be under 40 feet of water soon, me and my partners should be able...

A REPORT by Australian scientists has warned that the world is warming faster than predicted by the United Nations' top climate change body.

Maybe the finest example of Global Warming Derangement Syndrome to date is the claim by an Australian mammologist and paleontologist that climate change has reduced circumcision rates in Africa.

Didn't see one up, but Matthews has been giving me too many straight lines to pass up on!!!

Two days ago half-dozen illegal aliens suspected of stealing wildfire relief supplies from Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego. Now, this: Police have arrested a man in Los Angeles after witnesses say they saw him lighting a fire on a hillside. Authorities say 41-year-old Catalino Pineda was seen starting a fire in the San Fernando Valley Wednesday and then walking away. Witnesses alerted authorities and followed the man to a nearby restaurant where police arrested him. Pineda was booked for investigation of arson. Authorities say the Guatemala native is currently on probation for making excessive false emergency reports to law enforcement....

Thousands of walruses since late summer have congregated in haulouts on Alaska's northwest shore, a phenomenon likely connected to record low Arctic sea ice. Joel Garlich-Miller, a walrus expert with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services in Anchorage, said Wednesday animals began showing up on shore in late July, a month earlier than usual. By August, several thousand animals — far more than normal — were bunched up in haulouts in a stretch of coastline from Barrow, America's northernmost community, to Cape Lisburne, about 300 miles to the southwest on the Chukchi Sea. "It's raising a bunch of conservation issues...