Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — Starting in about a decade, Kingston, Jamaica, will probably be off-the-charts hot — permanently. Other places will soon follow. Singapore in 2028. Mexico City in 2031. Cairo in 2036. Phoenix and Honolulu in 2043. And eventually the whole world in 2047. A new study on global warming pinpoints the probable dates for when cities and ecosystems around the world will regularly experience hotter environments the likes of which they have never seen before. And for dozens of cities, mostly in the tropics, those dates are a generation or less away. "This paper is both innovative and sobering,"...

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has released its latest report on state funding for schools, and claims that Michigan is spending 9 percent less on schools than it was in 2008. The report, however, ignores billions of dollars, a major flaw that Mackinac Center for Public Policy experts identified last year. In its analysis of school spending for 2007-08, CBPP left out about $10 billion in education funding, including $6 billion in revenue from property taxes and $1.4 billion in special education money. CBPP's report is especially meaningless for Michigan because of the way the state foundation allowance...

Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy has just released a study of the relative effects of stringent gun laws. They found that a country like Luxenbourg, which bans all guns has a murder rate that is 9 times higher than Germany, where there are 30,000 guns per 100,000 people. They also cited a study by the U.S.National Academy of Sciences, which studied 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and it failed to find one gun control initiative that worked. In fact, in many cases it found that violence is very often lower, where guns are more readily...

Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy has just released a study of the relative effects of stringent gun laws. They found that a country like Luxenbourg, which bans all guns has a murder rate that is 9 times higher than Germany, where there are 30,000 guns per 100,000 people. They also cited a study by the U.S.National Academy of Sciences, which studied 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and it failed to find one gun control initiative that worked. In fact, in many cases it found that violence is very often lower, where guns are more readily...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new government study says that federal health care and retirement programs threaten to overwhelm the federal budget and harm the economy in coming decades unless Washington finds the political will to restrain their inexorable growth. The long-term pressures promise to quickly reverse recent improvements in the deficit. Tuesday's Congressional Budget Office report says that government spending on health care and Social Security would double relative to the size of the economy in 25 years and that spending on other programs like defense, transportation and education would decline to its smallest level by the same measure since...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Drilling and fracking for natural gas don't seem to spew immense amounts of the greenhouse gas methane into the air, as has been feared, a new study says. The findings bolster a big selling point for natural gas, that it's not as bad for global warming as coal. And they undercut a major environmental argument against fracking, a process that breaks apart deep rock to recover more gas. The study, mostly funded by energy interests, doesn't address other fracking concerns about potential air and water pollution. The results, which generally agree with earlier Environmental Protection Agency estimates,...

“The study of antisemitism,” admits Bruno Chaouat, a professor of French in Minnesota, “can be tedious.” This admirably candid confession appears relatively early in the pages of Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives, a collection of nineteen new essays edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, the distinguished director of Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and author of several major books about the Holocaust. Chaouat is right, of course: while a single anecdote about irrational hate can breed sorrow, anger, and/or shock, a thick book consisting entirely of such material is more likely to be, quite simply, numbing. It is...

Boys with sisters are more likely to be 'sexist and Republican because they are never made to cook or clean' research claims Having only female siblings makes boys more likely be Republicans as adults, new research claims. Professors from Loyola Marymount University and Stanford University analyzed surveys completed by more than 3,000 individuals when they were aged ten plus in 1987 and again a decade later. They concluded that men in their 20s and 30s who grew up with sisters and no brothers were 8.3per cent more likely to identify as Republican because they developed 'more traditional views of gender'.

A recent NASA report throws the space agency into conflict with its climatologists after new NASA measurements prove that carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in Earth's atmosphere. NASA's Langley Research Center has collated data proving that “greenhouse gases” actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun. The data was collected by Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry, (or SABER). SABER monitors infrared emissions from Earth’s upper atmosphere, in particular from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances thought to be playing...

Large swaths of the Arctic tundra will be warm enough to support lush vegetation and trees by 2050, suggests a new study. Higher temperatures will lessen snow cover, according to the study, which is detailed in the March 31 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change. That, in turn, will decrease the sunlight reflected back into the atmosphere and increase warming. About half the areas will see vegetation change, and areas currently populated by shrubs may find woody trees taking their place. "Substitute the snowy surface with the darker surface of a coniferous tree, and the darker surface stores more...

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - A national survey found 301,874 "zombie" properties dotting the U.S. landscape in which homeowners in foreclosure have moved out, leaving vacant property susceptible to vandalism and degradation. Florida tops the list of zombie properties with 90,556 vacant homes in foreclosure, according to a foreclosure inventory released on Thursday by RealtyTrac, a real estate information company in Irvine, California. Illinois and California ranked a distant second and third with 31,668 and 28,821 zombie properties respectively on the list. The number of homes overall in foreclosure or bank-owned rose by 9 percent to 1.5 million properties nationally in...

In its first three years, President Obama's healthcare law has imposed more than $30 billion in costs and 111 million hours of paperwork burdens, according to a new study from the American Action Forum. The forum, a conservative think tank led by former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said the law will raise premiums and hurt small businesses. "The macro figures, $30.8 billion in costs and 111 million hours, might give policymakers some concern, but the real impact is how these figures affect the healthcare market, consumers, and small businesses," the report said. Some provisions of the law are...

On the heels of a study linking sugary drinks to 25,000 U.S. deaths a year, new research suggests salty food is even more dangerous.The new study, by the same Harvard research team, linked excessive salt consumption to nearly 2.3 million cardiovascular deaths worldwide in 2010. One in 10 Americans dies from eating too much salt, the researchers found.“The burden of sodium is much higher than the burden of sugar-sweetened beverages,” said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and author of both the salt and sugary drink studies. “That’s because sugar-sweetened beverages are just one...

Harvard medical researchers just published a scholarly paper in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, claiming that more firearm laws in a state are associated with a lower rate of gun homicides and suicides. However, examination of their data and research methods shows the opposite. McMaster University researcher Caillin Langmann, MD, PhD noted that the Harvard authors’ own best analysis: * Does not show that states with more gun laws have fewer gun deaths * Demonstrates that “assault weapon” bans have no effect on homicide * Demonstrates that laws prohibiting guns in public places have no effect on homicide Even more...

The country’s largest trade group for drones on Tuesday released a study that says the unmanned vehicle industry could create 70,000 jobs in the United States over the next three years and add $14 billion to the economy. The Association of Unmanned Vehicles Systems International (AUVSI), which commissioned the study, went one further and predicted the industry could produce more than 100,000 jobs by 2025 with an estimated economic impact of $82 billion. “This is an incredibly exciting time for an industry developing technology that will benefit society, as well as the economy,” said Michael Toscano, president & CEO of...

Among the 23 “executive actions” President Obama announced yesterday amidst great fanfare (and shameless exploitation of children) is this: “Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.” Obama may want to put a hold on that one, until he comes to grips with what happened the last time a U.S. president tried it.

In a paper published in 2008, comparing highly regulated Californian gun shows with relatively unregulated Texas gun shows, there was no statistical difference in suicide rates, but the Texas shows, with far less regulation, showed a statistically significant drop in the homicide rate. From the study: "But our results provide little evidence of a gun show-induced increase in mortality in Texas. In fact, we find that in the two weeks following a gun show, the average number of gun homicides declines in the area surrounding the gun show. Aggregating across all gun shows in the state, we find that there...

One of the recommendations of Vatican II was that priests be formed in the arts: “During their philosophical and theological studies, clerics are to be taught about the history and development of sacred art, and about the sound principles governing the production of its works. In consequence they will be able to appreciate and preserve the Church’s venerable monuments, and be in a position to aid, by good advice, artists who are engaged in producing works of art” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 129). This is not a bad idea, considering that priests are the caretakers of the Church’s artistic patrimony. Each pastor...

A procedure that inserts fecal matter from a healthy person into the intestines of someone with diarrhea has been found to be a better treatment than antibiotics.

WASHINGTON - The Intercounty Connector, a highway that stretches between Gaithersburg and Laurel in Maryland, could see an increase in its speed limit this year. An engineering study found the speed limit of the highway could be raised from its current limit of 55 mph to 60 mph. The ICC, which opened in 2011, gives commuters a quick way to get from Interstate 270 to Interstate 95. "We wanted to have one year of actual operating experience before we looked at speed limits at all," Maryland Transportation Authority Executive Secretary Harold M. Bartlett tells WTOP. Bartlett says he thinks there...