Free Republic

Workers at C.F Martin & Co. are putting finishing touches on the solid-wood 1 Series model, so named for its simplicity. It lacks inlay, as did the company's stripped-down 1930s model, and is expected to sell for less than $1,000, breaking a key price point and far less than its $100,000 limited-edition guitars made of Brazilian rosewood. More popular Martins generally sell for $2,000 to $3,000. Initial reaction is promising. The company, which had sales of $93 million last year, introduced the 1 Series in April and promptly sold out its first year's output of 8,000 guitars. "We needed something...

Posted on Mon, Jul. 17 Matera: A southern Italian town revives its ancient cave dwellings By Carol Pucci The Seattle Times (MCT) MATERA, Italy - Nicola Rizzi stands in front of his boyhood home where chickens and ducks used to wander, closes his eyes and smells bean soup and tomato sauce boiling on pots heated by wood fires. He was 11, a survivor in a neighborhood of windowless caves and damp walls, where animals and humans slept side-by-side and half the children born there died, among them three of his brothers and sisters. Mostly though, Rizzi remembers the smell of...

Battleship film revives Japan's pride in wartime generation (Filed: 28/11/2005) Sixty years after the colossal battleship Yamato was sunk, the pride of Japan's wartime navy is once again an object of fascination. Almost 400,000 visitors have flocked to see a full-scale replica of the deck of the Yamato in Onomichi, western Japan. The ship was reconstructed for the shooting of a film, Men of the Yamato, which will be released next month. The £3million replica deck, made for the film Men of the Yamato, has attracted 400,000 Japanese visitors The Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, was considered indestructible by...

DENVER - The mad cow scare has widened a division between some ranchers and meatpackers over a law set to take effect this fall that will require labels identifying U.S.-produced beef sold in grocery stores.   Ranchers say it's more important than ever for their products to be labeled to bolster consumer confidence. Meatpackers, however, want a two-year delay in the law's implementation, contending it will require an expensive tracking system and may limit free trade without making meat any safer. Right now, consumers don't know the history of beef products in the grocery store freezer; beef produced in the...

Hollywood revives McCarthyist climate by silencing and sacking war critics By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles 21 April 2003 Hollywood is often depicted in the US media as a hotbed of anti-government dissent and left-wing politics but that is not how it feels to Ed Gernon. Mr Gernon was, until recently, a television producer at CBS responsible for a four-part miniseries on Hitler's rise to power, which will be shown next month. He thought the timing was apt, and said so in an interview with TV Guide magazine. "It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who...

<p>WASHINGTON - The House is moving swiftly to enact energy legislation, hoping to revive a proposal for oil drilling in an Alaska wildlife refuge and, in a boon to farmers, expand the use of ethanol as a gasoline additive.</p> <p>Both provisions were included Wednesday as separate committees crafted key parts of the energy legislation. Lawmakers said they expected an energy bill to be voted on by the full House, possibly as early as next week.</p>