Free Republic

Defence set to buy Super Hornets over cutting-edge fighter AUSTRALIA will almost certainly be forced to buy 24 new Super Hornet fighter planes at a cost of about $2 billion to plug a looming gap in its air defences amid delays in the purchase of the cutting-edge Joint Strike Fighter. According to a leaked draft of the 2013 defence white paper, just two Lockheed Martin JSFs will be delivered to Australia by 2020. This strongly indicates that the government will need to buy rival Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornets, which are cheaper but older and less stealthy than the JSF. ''By...

Three civilians were killed and several others wounded as a result of a series of artillery strikes by the Burmese military against targets in the town of Laiza in Burma’s northern Kachin province. These artillery strikes have come as part of a larger offensive by the central Burmese government against the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), an ethnic separatist group that wields significant influence in the province’s rural areas. The Burmese government has defended the strikes as an act of self-defense following the KIO’s refusal to allow supply convoys to reach a military base located in the province. The recent offensive...

SUMMARY The following summary is not prepared by the sponsors of the measure and is not a part of the body thereof subject to consideration by the Legislative Assembly. It is an editor’s brief statement of the essential features of the measure as introduced. Creates crime of unlawfully transferring large capacity magazine. Punishes by maximum of one year’s imprisonment, $6,250 fine, or both. Declares emergency, effective on passage. A BILL FOR AN ACT Relating to large capacity magazines; creating new provisions; amending ORS 161.005; and declaring an emergency. Be It Enacted by the People of the State of Oregon: SECTION...

Leading European Union officials have warned Germany it would be a grave mistake to let Cyprus default or to impose losses on private creditors, fearing a repeat of errors made when Greece first flew out of control. Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank’s chief, said a collapse of EU debt talks with Cyprus or a forced restructuring would “undo the positive mood” that has calmed European markets since July. Mr Draghi told Der Spiegel that Cypriot banks are big enough to pose a systemic risk to the eurozone. They conduct 40pc of their operations in Greece and are a key...

Enlarge Image Legal fuel. A federal court has struck down portions of a U.S. law mandating the use of cellulosic ethanol, made from woody plants such as this switchgrass grown in Texas. Credit: Warren Gretz/NREL A federal appeals court on Friday struck down a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandate requiring millions of gallons of cellulosic ethanol be blended into gasoline by petroleum refineries. The ruling is seen as a partial victory for the American Petroleum Institute (API), which challenged the mandate arguing that EPA was requiring refiners to use a fuel that was not commercially available or face...

Enlarge Image Hitching a ride. Hurricanes lift many kinds of microbes into the atmosphere, where they can survive for days or even weeks. Credit: iStockphoto/Thinkstock Each year, hundreds of millions of metric tons of dust, water, and humanmade pollutants make their way into the atmosphere, often traveling between continents on jet streams. Now a new study confirms that some microbes make the trip with them, seeding the skies with billions of bacteria and other organisms—and potentially affecting the weather. What's more, some of these high-flying organisms may actually be able to feed while traveling through the clouds, forming an...

Andy Stanley is pastor of a megachurch in Atlanta and is considered a leader in Evangelicalism, often speaking at Willow Creek Community Church functions and other interdenominational gatherings. His father is Charles Stanley, a famous Southern Baptist megapastor in the same city. Andy grew up in his daddy’s church but drifted away from his daddy’s Baptist roots. Baptists might humorously say that when his daddy baptized him, he did not hold him down long enough or deep enough! In 2010, a survey of U.S. pastors found Stanley to be the 10th most influential living preacher. In January of 2009, he...

While the Obama administration calls for a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to acquire 7,000 "personal defense weapons" -- also known as "assault weapons" when owned by civilians. ... Critics, such as Republican New York state Sen. Greg Ball, are already blasting the DHS request, arguing that the government deems these firearms as suitable for self-defense but want to ban civilians from owning them. "Now the Department of Homeland Security even agrees that these modern sporting firearms, made illegal by Governor Cuomo, are suitable for self-defense," Mr Ball said. -...

A quick experiment at the start of a PhD has resulted in a stable organic compound with four unpaired electrons. The researchers are now investigating this unusual structure for applications in batteries and data storage.When Jonathan Barnes joined Fraser Stoddart’s group at Northwestern University in Evanston, US, the group were working on radical enhanced molecular recognition and trapping pairs of molecules in close contact. The team were using molecules held within a macrocycle and then removing two electrons to create a radical pair. Barnes looked at some of the other projects going on in the lab and wondered if something...

The authorities in Yemen have seized a boat in their territorial waters filled with a large quantity of explosives, weapons and money, according to American officials briefed on the interdiction. The officials said Monday that there were indications that Iran was smuggling the military contraband to insurgents inside Yemen, although they declined to provide details. The captured weapons included surface-to-air missiles used to shoot down civilian and military aircraft, C4 military-grade explosives, 122-millimeter shells, rocket-propelled grenades and bomb-making equipment, including electronic circuits, remote triggers and other hand-held explosives, the statement said. If the weapons turn out to include the Iranian-made...

Playlist of some FANTASTIC videos submitted to a contest sponsored by Fresh Step. Some are funny - some will make you cry.

While the Japanese tsunami of March 2011 was devastating in its own right, the long term health consequences because of the damage to the nuclear reactor at Fukushima Daiichi are also of serious concern.There are a number of factors that have to be considered when assessing the health effects of radiation exposure: for example land decontamination efforts, size of evacuation area, shielding by buildings and terrain and consumption of contaminated food.Jan Beyea, from the US expert consulting service Consulting in the Public Interest, together with fellow colleagues has been analysing previous calculations of the subsequent nuclear accident in Japan, and...

... I can't get two Newtown numbers out of my head: 26, the number of people, mainly small children, who were murdered in the school; and 20, the number of minutes it took the police to arrive

President Barack Obama will fly over 9 hours tomorrow, round-trip from Washington, D.C. to Las Vegas, Nevada, just to deliver a speech on immigration, according to the president's White House schedule. With Air Force One estimated to cost $182,000 per hour in flight, Obama's trip--that is, only his travel to and from Vegas--will cost taxpayers over $1.6 million. Obama has no other public events scheduled in Las Vegas but his immigration speech. "In the morning, the President will depart the White House en route Las Vegas, Nevada. The departure from the South Lawn and the arrival at McCarran International Airport...

More than 1,000 citizens descended upon the state Capitol on Monday to voice their often-emotional views in the wake of the shooting massacre last month at a Newtown elementary school that brought out national calls for gun control. Some speakers called for a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-caliber magazines that allowed killer Adam Lanza of Newtown to shoot 20 children and six educators by firing at least 150 shots in a span of about six minutes. The public hearing, focusing on gun-control bills offered by legislators, lasted more than 12 hours and went past 11:30 p.m. Monday. Barbara...

HOUSTON (KTRK) -- The sight of Army helicopters and the sound of gunfire created a lot of concern Monday afternoon in one Houston neighborhood. We received a lot of phones calls, Tweets and Facebook posts from worried neighbors, wondering what was going on. SkyEye 13 HD was over the south side where at first look, it appeared there was a massive SWAT scene happening. With military helicopters flying above her southeast Houston neighborhood, Frances Jerrals didn't know what to think. "When you see this, you think the worst. When you hear this, you think the worst," Jerrals said. And so,...

A sinister airborne surveillance camera gives the U.S. military the ability to track movements in an entire city like a real-time Google Street View. The ARGUS-IS array can be mounted on unmanned drones to capture an area of 15 sq/miles in an incredible 1,800MP - that's 225 times more sensitive than an iPhone camera. From 17,500ft the remarkable surveillance system can capture objects as small as 6in on the ground and allows commanders to track movements across an entire battlefield in real time.

President Barack Obama will fly over 9 hours tomorrow, round-trip from Washington, D.C. to Las Vegas, Nevada, just to deliver a speech on immigration, according to the president's White House schedule. With Air Force One estimated to cost $182,000 per hour in flight, Obama's trip--that is, only his travel to and from Vegas--will cost taxpayers over $1.6 million. Obama has no other public events scheduled in Las Vegas but his immigration speech. "In the morning, the President will depart the White House en route Las Vegas, Nevada. The departure from the South Lawn and the arrival at McCarran International Airport...

A Texas woman convicted of the gruesome slaying and robbery of her neighbor, a retired 71-year-old college psychology professor, is set to be the first woman put to death in the United States since 2010. A Dallas County jury already found former nursing home therapist Kimberly McCarthy guilty of the 1997 killing when evidence at the punishment phase of her trial tied her to two similar murders a decade earlier.“Once the jury heard about those other two, we were certainly in a deep hole,” recalled McCarthy’s lead trial attorney, Doug Parks. Jurors decided McCarthy should die. Her execution, set for...

Florentino Fernandez, whose entertaining brawling style helped him become one of the top middleweight contenders and popular local fighters of the 1960s, died of a heart attack Monday morning in Miami, his son, Florentino Jr., said. Fernandez was 76.