Free Republic

Seventy years ago, when Arlene McCardle was a 19-year-old on the cusp of 20, she entered what later would be known as the Pillsbury Bake-Off, making the contest deadline just in time. She became Wisconsin's sole junior finalist on the strength of her recipe. McCardle baked her Venetian Cocoanut Cake at the competition in December 1952 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York — a four-layer sponge cake with alternating layers of pudding-like vanilla and chocolate fillings, topped with toasted coconut. (Cocoanut was an old variation on coconut still in use into the midcentury.) Pillsbury published the junior winner's recipe...

I would like to pay my respects to the elders both past and present of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation on whose land we gather tonight. Tonight I will be speaking about the need to change our cultural stories so that they cease to pit us against one another and the earth. And our greatest teachers in this process of transformation must be the Indigenous people who have kept their stories and practices of right relationship alive for tens of thousands of years. Thank you David Hirsch, for this tremendous honor, and thanks to the members of the...

OSLO (AFP) - Attack the causes of poverty and you remove the roots of conflict -- that is the message the Nobel Committee wanted to send out by awarding its Peace Prize to the creator of a micro-credit scheme which benefits millions, analysts said on Friday. Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, the so-called "Banker to the Poor", and the Grameen Bank he founded three decades ago were the surprise winners of the award for pioneering a system of small-scale loans that has helped 6.6 million people escape the grind of poverty. As the head of the Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes,...

Globalization guru Tom Friedman called Lou Dobbs, "a blithering idiot" in a lecture at Yale Law School last week... Friedman, three time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of bestsellers "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" and more recently "The World is Flat" (which sold a million and a half copies, far more than Dobbs' viewership), begins his answer. "One of the problems", he begins, explaining that we need leaders who can explain the complexity, not who will just stir the pot, "is we have politicians that are making us stupid, who are throwing sand in our eyes." But then he...