Free Republic

Alaska Dispatch Publishing LLC, the parent company of the online newspaper the Alaska Dispatch, will purchase the Anchorage Daily News from The McClatchy Co. for $34 million. The sale is expected to close in May. ... Billionaire Warren Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns 31 small- and medium-sized daily newspapers. It has bought most of those newspapers since 2011 at bargain prices. Including weekly papers and other publications, Berkshire owns 70 newspapers.

At The Hobby Center in Danbury, Karl LaLonde, the store's owner, holds the Proto X in the palm of his hand. It's the size of a fairly healthy tarantula. LaLonde has decorated it with an orange piece of plastic shaped like a bird's beak. Switched on, its four tiny propellers spin. Under LaLonde's control via a joystick, it lifts off the counter and scoots around the store's airspace. The Proto X costs $50. "You can get a camera to fit it," LaLonde said. It's the smallest of the many UAVs -- unmanned aerial vehicles -- LaLonde sells. Business is good....

The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times (FT) have recently reported frightening food-price inflation. Prices for staples like coffee, oats, milk, meat, vegetables and fruits have increased so far in 2014 by rates as high as 70%. The FT noted that a breakfast now costs at least 25% more than it did in 2013. As expected, media attributed the food-price inflation to droughts and to fast-growing demand in Southeast Asia. For fish, for which prices tripled in recent years, the drought factor does not apply, leaving us with high demand. This explanation fits best with what the US Federal...

Editor's note: Christopher S. Chivvis is a senior political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and expert in European and Eurasian security issues. You can follow him @cchivvis. Bonny Lin is an associate political scientist at RAND and an expert on Asia-Pacific security issues. The views expressed are their own. At Sunday night's emergency U.N. Security Council meeting, Western countries denounced Russian efforts to destabilize eastern Ukraine. Depending on your reading of its statement, China either refused to do the same, or refused to back Russia. Either way, the meeting was just the latest example of how the Ukraine...

Ukraine's controversial opposition leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, has formally joined the race to become the country's president, on the same day as the huge task facing the new leadership was underscored by a tough IMF aid package that will foist deep austerity on the country. ... Whoever wins the vote on 25 May will face a tough task. The International Monetary Fund on Thursday offered Ukraine a bailout of up to $18bn (£10.9bn) over two years, in return for harsh economic reforms that may well worsen living standards for the already impoverished population. Further IMF aid will be unlocked if austerity...

China's GDP grew 7.4% in the first quarter amid growing evidence that the powerhouse economy is easing offThe new railway station being built in Shenyang, Liaoning province. Investment in fixed assets dipped in the first quarter. China's annual economic growth slowed to its lowest for nearly a quarter of a century between January and March to 7.4% from 7.7% in the previous three months.

(CNN) – Hoping to help close the gap between workers' skills and the needs of businesses, President Barack Obama on Wednesday will announce he's putting hundreds of millions toward job training programs that produce highly skilled workers. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will head to a community college in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to make the announcement. The funding will come in two parts: $500 million toward a new job training competition that pairs community colleges with businesses, and $100 million for new apprenticeship programs to train workers. The White House says the new initiatives are meant to combat a...

A well-loved Maryland supermarket is being forced to limit the amount of full time workers they hire because of the harsh mandates imposed by Obamacare. Snider’s Superfoods, family owned and operated since 1946, says that they will not be hiring any new baggers or cashiers in order to avoid the 50 worker threshold, which under the new Obamacare stipulations, would require that they provide health insurance if they employ 50 or more full time workers. …

Federal systems remained vulnerable to hackers even after researchers identified the bug. Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security, but it didn't alert anyone in the government. Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed"—a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL—some time in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services—such as email, search, and YouTube—before the companies publicized the bug on April 7. The researchers also notified a handful of other companies about the bug before going...

In Congress, the vulnerability of the power grid has emerged as among the most pressing domestic security concerns. ... Crain, the owner of a small tech firm in Raleigh, N.C., along with a research partner, found penetrating transmission systems used by dozens of utilities to be startlingly easy. After they shared their discovery with beleaguered utility security officials, the Homeland Security Department began sending alerts to power grid operators, advising them to upgrade their software. The alerts haven't stopped because Crain keeps finding new security holes he can exploit. "There are a lot of people going through various stages of...

For the second time, producers of a planned pro-life film effort have had to switch from Kickstarter to IndieGoGo for their crowdfunding efforts. Filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McIlhenny took their Gosnell Movie project to IndieGoGo after Kickstarter insisted that they could shut down the effort at any time if they didn’t like the language used to promote it, and another pro-life project called Stolen Moments has gotten a rejection letter from Kickstarter as well. The rejection, nearly two weeks ago, was on the basis of the campaign being, er … “self help” (via Katie Pavlich): For the life of...

That honor now goes to New Jersey. Tax reforms passed in the latest budget represent big improvements for corporations, but not so much for individuals. ... Still, New York remains a burdensome place to earn a living. The reforms did not change the state's poor rankings for having high sales taxes (No. 38), individual income taxes (No. 49) and unemployment taxes (No. 45). Meanwhile, the governor announced Tuesday that the state tax department collected nearly $4 billion in evaded taxes in the past year, a 5% or $200 million increase compared to the year earlier.The state collects about $87 billion...

Sorry for the vanity post but I had a question and thought regarding the Bundy Ranch issues and really the core of the corruption... It boils down to the concept of land offset as part of ..The Rules you and I must follow and who gets exception to the rules because their powerful or friends of the powerful. . We have all seen this..take Obamacare. .push through a draconian law then give exceptions and waver to your friends and strict, to the letter, enforcement to your enemys..same with emigration. .selective enforcement to the letter vs selective non enforcement and out...

"said porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) is not a human health concern, but is deadly to newborn pigs."

link only: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-11/nsa-said-to-have-used-heartbleed-bug-exposing-consumers.html

Mayor Bill de Blasio is the first New York City mayor to release his tax returns in 12 years, according to the WSJ. de Blasio earned $165,000 as public advocate last year and brought in an additional $52,000 in rent on a second home he owns in Park Slope, according to his 2013 tax returns. Mr. de Blasio’s effective tax rate was 8.3%. As WSJ reports, Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who served as mayor from 2002 through 2013, released highly redacted copies of his return that gave scant information about his net worth. In 2001, during...

I realize this may be a thought crime by DC standards, but it sure would be nice to eliminate the high tax rates that undermine economic growth and reduce American competitiveness. At the risk of sharing too much information, I fantasize about a world without the internal revenue code. In addition to getting rid of high tax rates, I also want to abolish the pervasive double taxation of income that is saved and invested. Just as important, I want to wipe out the distorting loopholes that tilt the playing field in favor of politically connected interest groups. And I daydream...

Grant, that by this unsparing hurricane Green leaves with yellow mixed are torn away, And goodly fruitage with the mother spray;'Twere madness--wished we, therefore, to detain, With hands stretched forth in mollified disdain, The "trumpery" that ascends in bare display-- Bulls, pardons, relics, cowls black, white, and grey--Upwhirled, and flying o'er the ethereal plain Fast bound for Limbo Lake. And yet not choice But habit rules the unreflecting herd, And airy bonds are hardest to disown;Hence, with the spiritual sovereignty transferred Unto itself, the Crown assumes a voice Of reckless mastery, hitherto unknown.-Reflections by William Wordsworth The market was humming...

An Arizona mother will avoid jail time after she got high and drove nearly 12 miles with her 2-month-old baby on the roof of her car. Maricopa County Superior Judge Cynthia Bailey sentenced 21-year-old Catalina Mariah Clouser on Wednesday to 16 years of supervised probation. She will have to serve 3 months in jail only if she violates the order, a local CBS affiliate reported. Miss Clouser pleaded guilty in February to child abuse and driving under the influence of marijuana after her infant son was found miraculously unhurt in the middle of a Phoenix highway in June 2012, still...

Literally minutes after Gov. Scott Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch officially announced their re-election campaign Tuesday, a Hillary Clinton front group rolled out its attack machine against the Republican governor and potential 2016 presidential hopeful. American Bridge, backed by big-money liberal donor George Soros, “welcomed” Walker and his “failed job creation promise to the Wisconsin governor’s race.” The liberal “research and communications organization committed to holding Republicans accountable for their words” by employing liberal spin, made its first sortie an all-out assault on Walker’s jobs record, criticizing the governor’s failure to date to hit his ambitious pledge that the...