Free Republic

Changing planet revealed in atlasAn atlas of environmental change compiled by the United Nations reveals some of the dramatic transformations that are occurring to our planet. It compares and contrasts satellite images taken over the past few decades with contemporary ones. These highlight in vivid detail the striking make-over wrought in some corners of the Earth by deforestation, urbanisation and climate change. The atlas has been released to mark World Environment Day. The United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) produced One Planet Many People: Atlas of Our Changing Environment in collaboration with other agencies such as the US Geological Survey and...

The US network of satellites monitoring the environmental health of the Earth is on the verge of collapse, according to a highly critical report released on Wednesday by the country’s National Research Council. Six recent NASA Earth-observing missions have been delayed, scaled back or completely cut. Several of the cancelled missions were follow-ups to successful satellite projects. The US is probably responsible for about half of the Earth-science satellites currently in orbit, says Richard Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and co-chair of the committee that produced the report. Most of the document focuses on research satellites,...

 Please pardon any grammatical errors. This is after all just a vanity post. Observations of a Troop currently stationed in Iraq.Baghdad Dominated by Protest    It struck me as humorous when Carter told this story at dinner the other night.  ‘My interpreter came up to me the other day and said “my family and I pray every night that you will stay here for a long long time.” Carter’s response was of course....”That’s funny, because my family is home every night praying for the exact opposite ...praying that I come home tomorrow. I guess we’ll have to see whose god...

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ Having just driven from Northern Wisconsin down to Kansas City spending weeks there and driving back home, I noticed several very interesting things. Living in KC and drawing in the atmosphere, I was touched by the kindness and goodness of the people I met along the way.An over the road truck driver told me that 80% of truckers are followers of Christ. This he reports is a recent change. Additionally, I was quite impressed by the radio stations I heard along the way. Pushing the seek button to look for music or talk radio...

In April 2004, followers of Iraqi Shi‘ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr launched a well-coordinated uprising across southern Iraq. While Western media focused on events in Sadr City, Najaf, and Karbala, violence occurred elsewhere as well. A Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) source forwarded the following after-action report regarding violence in the town of Al-Kut, the capital of the Wassit governorate and home to the Ukrainian contingent.The unclassified report, written by a coalition security contractor, highlights dysfunction between regional coalition offices and the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters in Baghdad, as well as tension between diplomats and security officers. The summary faulted a British...

Japan Plans To Develop Advanced Spy Satellite (Caption) Japan's spy satellites build on a legacy of increasingly sophisticated earth observation satellites. The Japanese government plans to develop an advanced spy satellite for launch in 2010. Government sources say the satellite will be able to distinguish objects on Earth as small as 50 centimeters. The satellite in fast polar orbit will pass over each target site once a day, compared with once every two days with Japan's current satellite system. Kyodo News reports that the project is aimed at watching missile and nuclear facilities of North Korea. Japan deployed two spy...

a popular local talk show host observed and stated something we had both observed at the MN State fair. The DFL party (MN dims) had a wall of post-it notes that people could state why they were voting against Bush. He noted they included things like because ..."I'm poor", "I want to be happy,"I want the world to like me" ,etc,etc. He also risked going into their booth to take a computer "test" about who to vote for. A option of most important issuses included healthcare,education,"war in Iraq" ,but nothing about "terrorism". Odd, is it not?

I found this web site that has the latest weather data for the 10 closest buoys to Hurricane Francis:   National Data Buoy Center http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/radial_search.php?lat1=24.1N&lon1=74.8W&dist=450&time=3       Hurricane Special! For observations closest to Hurricane Frances, see our customized Observations Search page.    

Before I begin my short remarks let me say that I was watching I guess the european coverage in Armenian here in Armenia. First and foremost were the opening cermonies before the parade of nations. You might remember the guy running around the stadium through all the different olympics. When he reached the time when WWI happened, he stopped. When he reached the Munich olympics with Hitler before WWII he also stopped. These stops symbolized that there was something wrong etc. Anyways, when he was reaching the 1972 Munich olympics, he didn't stop. Even though something bad did happen, the...

PIA03896: NASA'S Newest SeaWinds Instrument Breezes Into Operation One of NASA's newest Earth-observing instruments, the SeaWinds scatterometer aboard Japan's Advanced Earth Observing Satellite (Adeos) 2--now renamed Midori 2--has successfully transmitted its first radar data to our home planet, generating its first high-quality images. From its orbiting perch high above Earth, SeaWinds on Midori 2 ('midori' is Japanese for the color green, symbolizing the environment) will provide the world's most accurate, highest resolution and broadest geographic coverage of ocean wind speed and direction, sea ice extent and properties of Earth's land surfaces. It will complement and eventually replace an identical...