Free Republic

TEL AVIV/FRANKFURT, March 12 (Reuters) - Two years after scientists cooked up the first test tube beef hamburger, researchers in Israel are working on an even trickier recipe: the world's first lab-grown chicken. Professor Amit Gefen, a bioengineer at Tel Aviv University, has begun a year-long feasibility study into manufacturing chicken in a lab, funded by a non-profit group called the Modern Agriculture Foundation which hopes "cultured meat" will one day replace the raising of animals for slaughter. The foundation's co-founder Shir Friedman hopes to have produced "a recipe for how to culture chicken cells" by the end of the...

Many people are living longer, but not to age 112 or beyond -- except in the records of the Social Security Administration. The SSA's inspector general has identified 6.5 million number-holders age 112 -- or older -- for whom no death date has been entered in the main electronic file, called Numident. The audit, dated March 4, 2015, concluded that SSA lacks the controls necessary to annote death information on the records of number-holders who exceed "maximum reasonable life expectancies." "We obtained Numident data that identified approximately 6.5 million numberholders born before June 16, 1901 who did not have a...

The American Civil Liberties Union is siding with the Washington Redskins in a court battle over the team’s name. The ACLU filed papers last week supporting the team’s position that canceling the Redskins trademark violates the team’s free-speech rights. […] On Monday, lawyers for the Native Americans who challenged the trademark said the ACLU should not be allowed to intervene in the case. …

Addressing the nation from Selma, Ala., on Saturday, President Obama said that while racism may be “no longer endemic,” as it was 50 years ago, his Justice Department’s report on Ferguson shows that the “nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.” Sorry: The Justice report doesn’t prove disparate treatment, let alone discrimination. In fact, it looks more like something ginned up to distract from the embarrassing fact that Justice (in another report released the same day) wound up fully validating the findings of the Ferguson grand jury. Racism is serious, and those engaging in it should be...

According to Glenn Beck, possible GOP candidate Dr. Ben Carson‘s comments about homosexuality being a choice is one of the dumbest things the radio host has ever heard ... “Goodbye to his presidential career,” Beck said Friday on his radio show. “It’s over. It’s over. There is no way to recover from that. That just sounds like a lunatic… That is just a ridiculous statement on a million fronts. A ridiculous statement.” ...

Melvin Konner, a Professor of Anthropology and Behavioral Biology at Emory University, believes that women will lead the world to “a better place.” More specifically, he argues, “male biology has brought the world war, corruption, and scandal.” He wrote his opinions down in an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal titled, “A Better World, Run by Women.” Women, he believes, do not become corrupt, they are not scandalous, and shall not ever plunge nations or the world into war. Females, he explains bluntly, are “superior to men in most ways that will count in the future… because of...

General Motors agreed to buy back $5 billion in stock by the end of next year as part of a plan to return more cash to shareholders. In return, an activist shareholder decided to drop a potentially divisive bid for a seat on the company’s board. The move, announced Monday, is part of a deal with Harry Wilson, a former member of the government task force that restructured GM coming out of its 2009 bankruptcy.Wilson, who represents four hedge funds which own about 2 percent of the company, had previously accused GM of hoarding cash to the detriment of shareholders...

CORAL GABLES, Fla. (AP) — Former President Bill Clinton defended his foundation's acceptance of donations from foreign governments on Saturday, pointing to the track record of his global philanthropy as Hillary Rodham Clinton nears an announcement on 2016 presidential campaign. In an interview at the Clinton Global Initiative University, the ex-president sought to address critics who have questioned the receipt of donations from foreign governments while the former first lady served in the State Department and after she departed in early 2013. "My theory about all of this is disclose everything and then let people make their judgments," Clinton told...

Kentucky is one place in America where a tea-party firebrand and a Republican from the governance wing amicably meet.For two Republican senators from the same state, Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell could not be more mismatched. Senator Paul is a man in a hurry, with presidential stars in his eyes after a mere four years of serving Kentucky in Washington. The loquacious libertarian is a darling of young conservatives – a relaxed jeans-and-boots kind of guy. Senator McConnell, after three patient decades in office, has finally reached his dream job of Senate majority leader. A man of few words, he’s...

Director John Brennan has ordered a sweeping reorganization of the CIA, an overhaul designed to make its leaders more accountable and close espionage gaps amid widespread concerns about the spy agency’s limited insights into a series of major global developments. Brennan announced the restructuring to the CIA workforce on Friday, including a new directorate devoted to boosting the CIA’s computer hacking skills. He said the move comes after nine agency officers spent three months analyzing its management structure, including what deputy CIA director David Cohen called “pain points,” organizational areas where the CIA’s bureaucracy does not work efficiently. […] The...

Unemployment in the U.S. has dropped to a seven-year low of 5.5 percent—a level normally considered the mark of a healthy job market. Yet that number isn’t as encouraging as it might sound. While U.S. employers added a solid 295,000 jobs in February, and the jobless rate fell from 5.7 percent, it went down mostly because many people gave up looking for work and were no longer officially counted as unemployed, the government reported Friday. What’s more, wage gains remained sluggish. Those trends suggest that the job market, while improving rapidly, isn’t quite as healthy as it looks. That complicates...

<p>Students at the University of California, Irvine have voted to make their school a more “culturally inclusive” place by banning the American flag.</p> <p>The Associated Students of University of California (ASUCI) passed a resolution March 3 that would remove the Stars & Stripes along with every other flag from the lobby of a complex housing the offices of the student government.</p>

U.S. worker productivity was even weaker than first thought from October through December while labor costs rose at a faster rate. Productivity declined at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the fourth quarter, weaker than the 1.8 percent drop that was estimated a month ago, the Labor Department said Thursday. Labor costs rose at a 4.1 percent rate, faster than the 2.7 percent increase first estimated. Weaker productivity and higher labor costs could spell inflation troubles for the economy. But analysts say that the changes in the fourth quarter are temporary and not an indication that inflation is about...

Gov. Tom Wolf is expected to call today for the Republican-controlled General Assembly to send him a budget that boosts state education funding and provides relief for school district property taxes while raising the rates of the sales and personal income taxes. His plan for doing so includes a proposal to raise the personal income tax rate in July 2015 from 3.07 percent to 3.7 percent, while increasing the eligibility for a poverty exemption, according to a briefing document prepared by the administration. He will propose increasing the state sales tax in July 2016 from 6 to 6.6 percent while...

President Barack Obama took a stab at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview with Reuters on Monday, on the eve of Netanyahu’s controversial speech to a special joint session of Congress on Tuesday morning. Obama said that Netanyahu “made all sorts of claims” about the interim nuclear deal with Iran that turned out to be untrue. Yet Obama mischaracterized Netanyahu’s remarks, and misrepresented Iranian compliance with the terms of the interim deal. Obama’s full comment on Monday was: “Netanyahu made all sorts of claims. This was going to be a terrible deal. This was going to result in...

In June 2008, candidate Barack Obama spoke before thousands of delegates to the pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to assuage concerns that he harbored animosity toward the Jewish state. In a paragraph of his speech that began with the phrase "Let me be clear," Obama declared that under his vision for peace, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." The next day, after the statement triggered fierce criticism from Palestinian leaders, Obama backtracked. The reversal was an early signal of what has become a pattern during his presidency — professing profound...

When Alison Norris couldn’t find work in Detroit, she searched past the city limits, ending up with a part-time restaurant job that’s 20 miles away but takes at least two hours to get to via separate city and suburban bus systems. For many city residents with limited skills and education, Detroit is an employment desert, having lost tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs in manufacturing cutbacks and service jobs as the population dwindled. What’s available to those without cars—about 40 percent of Detroit’s population, according to federal figures—often are low-paying retail or sales positions far outside the city. […] The...

Maryland Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski will announce later Monday that she won’t seek reelection in 2016, two sources familiar with her plans confirmed to POLITICO, opening up a seat long coveted by Free State Democrats looking to move up. The 78-year-old Mikulski is the longest-serving woman in congressional history. She was first elected to the Senate in 1986, after serving five terms in the House. Mikulski’s campaign called an 11 a.m. press conference in Baltimore on only a few hours’ notice, saying only that she’d make an “important announcement about her future plans.” Her retirement will create an open seat...

Hardy souls who shivered and shoveled their way through February in the Northeast now have evidence of just how brutal the weather was, with record cold in at least eight cities and record snowfall in Boston. “We’re the standout globally,” said Art DeGaetano, director of the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University. “It’s colder in Siberia, but we’re the farthest below normal.” The climate center shows the New York cities of Buffalo, Syracuse, Binghamton and Ithaca had their coldest months ever. The average temperature was 10.9 degrees in Buffalo, beating the 1934 record of 11.4°. The normal average temperature...

In his address to the Italian Confederation of Cooperatives Saturday, Pope Francis employed muscular language in speaking about money — while acknowledging its importance to business. “Money,” he said, “is the devil’s dung.” “It is not easy to talk about money,” Francis said. Quoting Saint Basil the Great, the Pope said: “Money is the dung of the devil! When money becomes an idol, it rules over a person’s choices. And then it ruins a person and condemns him, turning him into a slave.” The Pope called for “creative imagination” to find new methods, attitudes and tools to combat the “culture...