Free Republic

There was a time, before the baby-boom generation took over, when we took pride in the achievements of our builders, producers, and innovators. There was always great celebration when settler families got a phone, a tractor, a bitumen road, or electric power. An oil strike or a gold discovery made headlines, and people welcomed new businesses, new railways, and new inventions. Science and engineering were revered, and the wealth delivered by these human achievements enabled the builders and their children to live more rewarding lives, with more leisure, more time for culture and crusades, and greater interest in taking better...

San Francisco must have taken a chapter out of Laer Pearce’s new book “Crazifornia.” The city’s new CleanPower SF plan garners subsidies from U.S. taxpayers for green-power purchases. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But you would have to be crazy not to shift your green power purchases onto U.S. taxpayers if laws provide for it. And what city wouldn’t want to do it if it could cover it up as part of their compliance with AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006? San Francisco is “gaming the system,” just as Enron supposedly did in the 2001 state energy...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Sierra Club says it will block an energy company's plan to export liquefied natural gas from the booming Marcellus Shale formation. Virginia-based Dominion Resources Inc. is seeking to export 1 billion cubic feet per day through a terminal it owns in Maryland. A previous legal settlement gives the Sierra Club the ability to reject any significant changes to the purpose or footprint of the existing natural gas terminal in Cove Point, Md.

AUSTRALIA can manage both a critically important economic relationship with China and growing military ties with the US, says Defence Minister Stephen Smith. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and US defence secretary Robert Gates were in Melbourne for the Australia United State Ministerial (AUSMIN) consultations with Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd. The talks focused on the US Force Posture Review, which will examine the US military presence in the Asia-Pacific, and the war in Afghanistan, among other issues. The posture review could see the US make more use of its military bases in Australia and give greater opportunity for joint...

The residents of Kibwezi, Kenya are fond of all kinds of fruits but they refuse to consume water melons for some reasons. Those who raise them have no market in their own place. They have to take them to the main highway linking the capital Nairobi to the seaport of Mombasa. ‘These fruits are not eaten by people around here’, says Mr Kyalo David with a stock of water melons along Nairobi Mombasa road. There, travelers by them. Veronica Ndiuku lives in Kibwezi and have planted water melons herself. Despite that, she is not ready to eat any: ‘You know...

For those of us in Central New Hampshire, Live Free or Die, for you in the slave states, I seem to have noticed a lot of water coming down. I need a refresher in building an Ark, I slept through that in my Bible class.

During the 2000 elections, I was enrolled at the University Of Georgia. A large university campus is a fascinating place to be during a presidential election; it is a microcosm of political views ranging from the mainstream to the absurd. I was involved with both Republican and Libertarian club events, but the colorful activities of other political ideologies did not escape my attention. The daily panorama of politics ranged from the banality one would expect to be a reflection of the Gore/Lieberman ticket, to the playfully politically incorrect witticisms that have come to be expected from College Republicans. But...

<p>Since Belinda Martineau stopped manipulating plant genes eight years ago and began pondering agricultural biotechnology's effects on society, nothing has riled her more than the assertion that biotechnology will cure world hunger.</p> <p>"They're making these claims, and they're just promises. At this point, they look like empty promises," said Martineau, a plant biologist who used to work for Calgene in Davis, where she helped invent the first commercial biotech crop, the "Flavr Savr" tomato.</p>