Free Republic

What: A spacecraft that travels at faster-than-light speeds by distorting, or “warping,” the fabric of spacetime. Instead of trying to move through space, the warp drive moves space itself. The ship sits inside a bubble of spacetime bound by a negative energy field that races across the cosmos. Why: Chemical and nuclear propulsion, solar sails and ion thrusters all are too slow to reach the nearest star systems within a human life span. At faster-than-light speed (more than 186,000 miles per second), a warp-drive ship would travel 4.5 light-years to Alpha Centauri, the closest sun to our own, in about...

Black humour in Washington. A dying man is asked to choose between two donated hearts, a young athlete’s and that of Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy secretary of defence. “I’ll take Wolfowitz’s,” he decides. But the guy’s 61 years old, the doctors exclaim. “Yeah,” croaks the thrombo case, “but his heart’s never been used.” However, it seems the neoconservative architect of the Iraq war does have a beating heart — for a girlfriend who is causing ructions at the World Bank, Wolfowitz’s next posting if President George W Bush’s nomination prevails over European howls of distress. She is Shaha Ali...

PETER JENNINGS REPORTING: UFO's: LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE - THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24 (8:00-10:00 p.m., ET) -- Each year there are thousands of reports of unidentified flying objects, but the U.S. government doesn't investgate any of them. This special program will seriously examine the unexplained phenomena around the world that so many people believe is proof of the existence of UFOs.