Free Republic

An infectious pathogen inside California’s pot farms is attacking cannabis plants and growing invisibly for months only to spoil a crop just as a farmer is ready to harvest. Scientists believe that it’s in nearly every pot farm in the state and could be causing billions of dollars in damages to the national weed economy. Hop-latent viroid, or HLVd, shrivels pot plants and reduce how much weight they produce by as much as 30%. It also destroys the amount of THC, pot’s most common active compound, that a plant produces, greatly reducing the value of affected plants. Advertisement HLVd was...

Beit Nattif lamps. Photo: Yoli Schwartz, Israel Antiquities Authority. One of the largest ceramic oil-lamp workshops in Israel has been discovered by Israel Antiquities Authority excavations in Beit Shemesh. Hundreds of ceramic oil lamps, two bearing symbols of the menorah and stone lamp molds for their production were found along with terracotta figurines which were made about 1600–1700 years ago. In the past few months, the Israel Antiquities Authority excavations aided by dozens of pre-military program students. The large-scale archaeological excavations are being carried out prior to the establishment of a new neighborhood by the Ministry of Construction and Housing....

PITTSBURGH — Republicans will not be conceding anytime soon in a tightly contested special election in Pennsylvania, where Democrat Conor Lamb holds a slim lead over Republican state Rep. Rick Saccone in Tuesday's election. Lamb's campaign and Democratic groups have declared him the winner, as he sits with less than a 700-vote lead. NBC News also projected him the "apparent winner" early Wednesday morning as more absentee ballots trickled in. There are still about 203 absentee ballots and then additional provisional and military ballots left to be counted, but Saccone would have to capture an overwhelming majority of those outstanding...

Just as Hillary Rodham Clinton is preparing to launch her presidential campaign, a new behind-the-scenes book about life at the White House is providing a fresh look at her bitter fights with husband-President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, including a bloody clash in the first couple’s bedroom. “There was blood all over the president and first lady’s bed,” writes former White House reporter Kate Anderson Brower. “A member of the residence staff got a frantic call from the maid who found the mess. Someone needed to come quickly and inspect the damage. The blood was Bill Clinton‘s. The...

A 24-year-old Nigerian who used a steel bar to smash a big lamp at the Grand Mosque in Makkah said he had done so after smelling a good scent. The man told police that he had gone to the Mosque to pray after having a heated argument with his family. “I was at the Mosque when an old man and a woman passed by and pushed me…I got mad because of this…moments later, I smelt a good scent which made me more mad and pushed me to attack the lamps,” he said, quoted by Makkah newspaper. It quoted police sources...

The Obama administration’s Benghazi response continued to unravel at the House Oversight Committee hearing today, as State Department officials struggled unsuccessfully to get their stories straight. Ambassador Patrick Kennedy defended UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s claim on September 16 that the attack was part of a spontaneous protest that erupted over an anti-Islam video, saying that anyone at the State Department would have said the same thing as Rice based on the intelligence available at the time. “If any administration official, including any career official, were on television on Sunday, September 16, they would have said what Ambassador Rice said. The...

Gravity Powered Lamp, Designed By Student, Provides As Much Light As 40 Watt BulbThe Gravia LED lamp will be powered by gravity. It will be about 4 feet high and the entire column will glow. (Credit: Clay Moulton) ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2008) — A Virginia Tech student has created a floor lamp powered by gravity. Clay Moulton of Springfield, Va., who received his Master of Science in Architecture with a concentration in industrial design from the College of Architecture and Urban Studies in 2007, created the lamp as a part of this master’s thesis. The LED lamp, named Gravia, has...

When you go through the streets you see buildings which are quite different from warehouses or cinemas or living-houses or shops or public-houses. Sometimes they have towers or pointed windows instead of square ones, but there is always something about them which makes you say, "That is a church" or possibly a "chapel." There is also usually a board outside them with a name upon it and hours of "services." Sometimes these churches are open; if they are Catholic ones, they nearly always are. But a man might well feel too shy to go in, at any rate without being...

Key open-source code passes muster 12:37PM Analysis of the source code for key open-source projects has shown fewer than 29 'defects' in every 100,000 lines of code. Analysis of the LAMP stack - the Linux platform, Apache web server, MySQL database and Perl, PHP or Python scripting languages - showed that the commonly used open-source building blocks were well below the average for some 32 open-source projects scrutinised by Coverity. These included the likes of Samba, gcc, Gnome and FreeBSD. The average score for the projects analysed was 43.4 defects per 100,000 lines of code. Coverity undertook the task as...

The authors of a US government-sponsored report claim to have delivered the first reliable guide into judging the safety and reliability of open source software. The report, backed by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has evaluated 31 popular open source packages searching for defects that will cause "hard crashes" - problems that leave users open to hackers or cause downtime. And fortunately for many a young Silicon Valley start-up and entrepreneur, the report, conducted by fault tracking specialist Coverity, has effectively given the Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) stack a healthy rating. LAMP "showed significantly better software...

ATHENS — "I know the son of a gun's poisonous, and he's not from around here," Sheriff Mike Blakely said Wednesday about his latest prisoner. Athens animal control officer Lt. Ron Ultz grabs hold of a cobra that Limestone and state wildlife officials confiscated from an Athens home. Possession of non-indigenous poisonous snakes is illegal because of anti-venom unavailability. Blakely's officers and wildlife officials confiscated a 4- to 5-foot-long water cobra from an Athens man's home. Possessing a poisonous snake that is not native to Alabama is a misdemeanor. Blakely said someone called the sheriff's office about a resident on...

How many freepers does it take to change a light bulb? 1 to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been changed 14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently 7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs 27 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs 53 to flame the spell checkers 41 to correct spelling/grammar flames 6 to argue over whether it's "lightbulb" or "light bulb" ... another 6 to condemn those 6 as anal-retentive 2 industry...

The following link will take you to episode #20 and links to 1-19: #20 - Childish Behavior at the President's Historic Speech #21 - Why Cops and Firemen Hate Hillary NOTE: the survival of our Republic is threatened by two things -- fundamentalist Islamic terrorists and Hillary Rodham Clinton. President Bush is leading the fight against the terrorists. It is up to those of us who know the real Hillary Clinton to lead the fight against her. We must shine the light of truth on this dangerous woman so that all Americans may know the real Hillary. #22 in the...

MIDI - P.S. I LOVE YOU Mariela did it…she confessed, it's true So, Hillary, we are sending…this toaster to you To brown bread we know that you can use it You could also abuse it This toaster's for you…you…you…you With young girls your Bill was copulative It's time to get creative This toaster's for you…you…you…you It is bright and shiny…look at that sharp edge So when he comes to visit…hide behind the hedge There's a lesson taught by Mariela Learn how to greet your fella This toaster's for you…you…you…you It is bright and shiny…(ha ha ha)…look at that sharp...