Free Republic

UC President Janet Napolitano and the President’s Advisory Council on Undocumented Students will host a national summit on undocumented students from May 7-8. The invitation-only conference, which aims to discuss the needs and challenges that undocumented students face in higher education, will bring together undocumented youth leaders, immigration advocates, researchers, government officials, artists and funders from across the country. This is the first time the university is hosting a summit on undocumented students, according to UC Office of the President spokesperson Shelly Moron. Moron added that the summit expands upon Napolitano’s previous work, such as her distribution of $5 million...

The holiday is a symbol of the labor movement and used to speak out againt austerity, racism and other oppressive policies.  People around the world took to the streets Friday to mark May Day, the international rallying date for the labor movement. The day started in the United States in the late 1800s, when unions first called for an eight hour work day, but countries throughout the world soon followed suit in demands for better working conditions.   Although some countries can claim certain victories over the years in terms of labor rights, millions of people around the world are still underpaid,...

Hannes Hummel for Quanta MagazineTensor networks could connect space-time froth to quantum information. Next in the series Interactive: What Is Space? Chapter 2: Network Tapestry How Quantum Pairs Stitch Space-Time New tools may reveal how quantum information builds the structure of space. By: Jennifer OuelletteApril 28, 2015 Comments (8) Brian Swingle was a graduate student studying the physics of matter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he decided to take a few classes in string theory to round out his education — “because, why not?” he recalled — although he initially paid little heed to the concepts he...

Today is May Day. Since 2007, I have defended the idea of using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which is not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject: May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions...

I read through the New York Times this morning and since today is the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, they had several opinion pieces discussing the fallacy of America’s involvement in Vietnam, the terrible lessons of the misuse of American power, the atrocities “committed routinely” by us, etc.,etc.. May I throw the BS flag onto the field? We had an ally in trouble, we had the entire Communist Bloc supplying the Vietcong insurgents, we had the North Vietnamese Army in the south and whole world was watching to see what we’d do. If you peruse a map of...

The 1968 Democratic presidential primary is rightly remembered as a famous mess culminating in bloodshed. It seemed likely that the unpopular President Lyndon Johnson would suffer a great embarrassment or even a primary loss after Robert Kennedy entered the race, prompting him to declare that he would neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination for another term. The Kennedy surge was cut short when he was shot and killed in a California hotel. The stage appeared set for a victory by the anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy until George McGovern entered the race in late spring. The two fought a bitter...

HELSINKI – The Finnish military says it has dropped depth charges onto a suspected submarine in the sea outside Helsinki after twice detecting the presence of a foreign object in the area.

Over the past several months, Mediaite has produced a handful of posts asking the question: Where is Fox’s The Five co-host Bob Beckel? ... In our first report, we noted that Fox told us Beckel was out receiving and recovering from back surgery. However, our own sources at the network indicated there was more to the story, including possible addiction (as cable watchers know well, Beckel is open about his drug history). And now Fox confirms that there is, indeed, an addiction therapy element to the story after all.

President Obama spoke about his post-presidency during an event with school children today, saying he wants to go back to his life as a community organizer. “I’ll be done being president in a couple years, and I’ll still be a pretty young man,” Obama mused. “So I’ll go back to doing the kinds of work that I was doing before, just trying to find ways to help people.” Obama explained that he wanted to try to help people get jobs, and educations. He added that he also wanted to help bring businesses into “neighborhoods that don’t have enough businesses.” “That’s...

Although his narrative never slides into an ardent polemic, it is arguable that Reza Aslan's Jesus is a bold and tireless advocate for the poor. A close read of Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth makes this conclusion the Number One Take Away Point; a perspective not necessarily original, but nevertheless comforting and affirming if you're inclined to worry about white privilege and socio-economic inequality. Aslan is not alone. Many scholars have postulated that Pauline Christianity - the version that eventually became imperial Christianity - was an extreme sharp right turn from the path on which both...

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Scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Utrecht University have identified key mechanisms of the aging process of catalyst particles that are used to refine crude oil into gasoline. This advance could lead to more efficient gasoline production. Their recent experiments studied so-called fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) particles that are used to break long-chain hydrocarbons in crude oil into smaller, more valuable hydrocarbons like gasoline. "A major problem is that these catalysts quickly age and lose their activity, so tons of fresh catalysts have to be added to a reactor system every day," said lead researcher...

A Sacramento labor leader said Thursday he hopes the fate of a proposed $15 hourly minimum wage doesn't come down to a ballot-box battle. Fabrizio Sasso, executive director of the labor council, acknowledged that the ballot measure is a possibility. But he said the group is focusing for now on convincing the Sacramento City Council to adopt the minimum-wage proposal. An overwhelming majority of Sacramento residents favor the idea, he said. The labor group has set clear terms for the kind of council action it wants, however. Its leaders say a minimum-wage measure must: * Set a local minimum wage...

When a crystal lattice is excited by a laser pulse, waves of jostling atoms can travel through the material at close to one sixth the speed of light, or approximately 28,000 miles/second. Scientists now have a new tool to take movies of such superfast movement in a single shot. Researchers from Japan have developed a new high-speed camera that can record events at a rate of more than 1-trillion-frames-per-second. That speed is more than one thousand times faster than conventional high-speed cameras. Called STAMP, for Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography, the new camera technology "holds great promise for studying a...

Today, March 1, 2015, is May Day, which is also known as International Workers’ Day. May Day’s origins date back to May 1, 1886. It was on this day that 200,000 U.S. workers protested across the country. Their goal was an eight-hour workday and some of the protests turned violent. This became known as the Haymarket affair and it was declared a holiday by the International Socialist Conference three years later, reports Time. The holiday spread to the rest of the world, while never quite picking up steam in America. Instead, we have Labor Day, which takes place in September. This is likely due...

Many people who take a hard line on immigration will be quick to tell you that it's only illegal immigration they oppose. The rule of law must be upheld, they argue, and amnesty only rewards lawbreakers. Immigration boosters, including me, have always suspected that this professed concern for the law masks a deeper opposition to all immigration. Now Wisconsin Governor and potential presidential candidate Scott Walker has given ammo to the skeptics. In an interview with Glenn Beck, he strongly implied that he wants to limit legal immigration, in order to protect American jobs: In terms of legal immigration…the next...

Last Thursday, the day Loretta Lynch was ( lamentably) confirmed by the Senate as the new attorney general, the Los Angeles Times speculated on the relationships she might come to have with the various entities in American law enforcement, and whether she would inherit the “baggage” left by her predecessor, Eric Holder. The Times quoted James Cole, who until recently was a deputy attorney general under Holder. “She is in a good position,” he said, “because she has earned credibility with the law enforcement community to begin with.” This is the sort of thing one would expect to hear from...

New York, 1 May 1891 — "Then Mayer procured permission for me to see the vaults of the public treasury, where hundreds of millions in gold, silver, new banknotes and security bonds are stored. Exceptionally obliging yet important officials guided us to these vaults, opening the monumental doors to this mysterious castle, with an equally mysterious spinning of metal knobs. Bags of gold rested like sacks of flour in a barn, in beautiful, clean, electrically-illuminated chambers. I was given a stack of new banknotes worth 10 million dollars to hold. Finally I understood why gold and silver are not in...

Norway’s finance minister, who is also leader of the right wing Progress Party, stated in a press interview that she is skeptical that humans are causing climate change. According to ABC News; Norway’s finance minister says she doubts that global warming is man-made, seemingly contradicting the country’s official position in U.N. climate talks. In an on-camera interview posted on the Aftenposten newspaper’s website on Tuesday, Siv Jensen answered “no” to a question about whether she was convinced that climate change was caused by humans. Asked to clarify whether she was in doubt about man-made warming, she said “yes.” Jensen, who...