Free Republic

Navy's $100m chopper can't fly in bad light By Tom Allard March 19, 2005 Serious flaws have been uncovered in Australia's $1.1 billion squadron of Seasprite naval helicopters, rendering them unable to fly crucial missions. Costing $100 million each - more than the latest stealth fighter - and arriving more than three years late, the helicopters cannot be used in murky weather when the pilots' external vision is impaired, the Herald has learnt. They have been restricted to simple tasks, such as delivering stores and transporting passengers, and only when the weather is good. Military missions such as search and...

Navy planning for two new aircraft carriers March 14, 2005 SECRET discussions have been held with ship builders about equipping two large new Australian warships with fighter aircraft. The Royal Australian Navy plans to buy two $800 million, 25,000 tonne amphibious ships by 2010. A push is under way to give the vessels the capacity to carry eight or more so-called short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) fighters. The aircraft would cost about $6 million more than the $70 million price tag for the conventional joint strike fighters (JSF) being purchased for the RAAF. The Government wants to buy up...

Rainforests are disappearing at a frightening rate, the students were taught, so they raised $523 for an activist group’s "protect an acre" program. At the behest of their teacher and the group, they trekked into Manhattan to ask a major bank to "stop lending money to projects that destroy endangered forests and cause global warming." Indoctrination and manipulation are deplorable enough when high school or college students are involved. But these were second graders, and the close cooperation between their teacher and radical environmentalists underscores a widening problem. People want to live in a clean, civil and safe world, activists...

It's not easy to explain the anti-globalization movement's attraction or its successes. Much of the writing on the movement's growth, ideology, and influence veers into impenetrable thickets of post-modern theory (e.g., Naomi Klein's indigestible No Logo), so non-stoned readers often find it tough sledding, and give up. But that may be an altogether unfortunate response. One reason for the anti-globalizers' effectiveness is that corporations often simply roll over in the face of activists' onslaught. For example, this past January, Citigroup, the global financial powerhouse, surrendered to a four-year campaign by the anti-globalization Rainforest Action Network (RAN). This long-running protest included...

LONDON, Jan. 21 - After several years of lobbying by the Rainforest Action Network, Citigroup plans to announce on Thursday that it will no longer accept financing deals involving certain projects and corporations criticized by the group on environmental grounds. In future deals, Citigroup will not finance commercial logging in rain forests or projects that harm indigenous populations and will report the greenhouse gas emissions of the energy projects it does finance, the bank and the environmental group will announce. The changes will not apply to current Citigroup deals. The announcement comes after a campaign by the Rainforest Action Network,...

Shevaun Pennington seemed to be the same as any normal 12-year-old experiencing growing pains. She listened to loud punk rock, surfed the Net for hours and talked endlessly of "her boyfriends" despite never having been on a proper date. No one could have guessed that the person she referred to as her "American boyfriend" was something other than the figment of an excitable school-girl's imagination. The "boy" in question was in reality Toby Studabaker, a 31-year-old American Marine who, two weeks ago, discharged himself from the US military to meet the child he had befriended in his e-mails. Together, they...

A CARGO vessel thought to be the mother ship of an international drugs-smuggling operation was escorted in to Sydney last night after being boarded by the Royal Australian Navy in a high-seas raid. Police, navy personnel and customs officials went on board the North Korean- registered Pong Su about 70 miles off the central New South Wales coast after a chase through stormy seas to international waters. Surveillance teams were alerted last Wednesday, when 50 kilograms (110lb) of high-grade heroin believed to have come from Golden Triangle in South-East Asia was found on a beach at Lorne, on the coast...

Washington, DC, Apr 17 (OneWorld) - A major environmental group has declared a ceasefire in its three-year campaign against Citigroup, the world's largest private financial institution, after new commitments by the giant lender to adopt more responsible social and environmental policies in deciding what projects to finance. Citigroup's decision to more seriously engage one of its main critics, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), came one week after the San Francisco-based group launched a major ad campaign to persuade Citigroup credit card holders to destroy their cards to protest the company's support for projects and industries that environmentalists consider particularly harmful. The...

Eco - LogicOn - Line 7/15/2002 The smoking gun... How Environmentalists Intend to Rule the World By Ron Arnold Critics have long believed environmentalists were planning global domination. The problem with making a credible case against such an ambitious plan was simple: no environmental leader had published one. Yet conflicts over global warming, world trade, multinational corporations, population control, sustainable futures, and transnational government left little doubt that environmentalists in fact shared the unspoken aim of wielding supreme power over a green future. But there was no proof. For years, critics, lacking hard evidence, were reduced to piecing together a...

A California man is out to expose what he calls the hypocrisy of a prominent environmental group. John Campbell, a Los Angeles-based Republican fundraiser, says the Rainforest Action Network sent out letters asking for financial help to "compensate for the extra costs of using tree-free paper," but actually used regular wood-pulp paper to print the letters. Campbell says he had the paper independently tested, and that the results may prompt him to sue the Rainforest Action Network (RAN). "Here's an organization that is purporting to want to save forests all over the planet, then they put out this letter basically...