Free Republic

Washington, D.C.--The acts of war by Hamas against Israel are precisely what people should expect from Bush’s so-called democracy strategy in the Middle East. The administration campaigned for elections in the strongholds of various Islamist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that it should have worked to destroy. In the Palestinian territories, Bush insisted that Hamas be allowed to participate in the 2006 elections--and the jihadist group won a landslide. Thanks to that political victory, Hamas gained an unearned legitimacy for its vicious war to exterminate Israelis and Westerners. Winning power with the aid of their enemy confirmed for...

150 years after Darwin proposed it, evolution by natural selection continues to be both a battleground and a hotbed of ideas.Scientists continue to respond to the latest attacks from creationists, and at the same time propose profound new ideas about evolution. This year has seen perceptions of the virus change from disease-causing villain to evolutionary hero, and the emergence of a new force of evolution - the absence of natural selection.Since its redesign in November, NewScientist.com is making the last 12 months' of articles free for everyone to read. Here, in case you missed them, are our top 10 in-depth...

The U.S. government spends more than $200 million annually on abstinence-promotion programs, including virginity pledges.The latter approach does not work too well.A new study of a federal survey taken in the 1990s finds that teens who took virginity pledges are just as likely as other teens to have sex before marriage. Importantly, when the pledgers broke their vows they were less likely to use birth control, including condoms.

Cheers To You bar owner Robert Brown wants his customers to smoke if they want to. And Brown said he found a way to keep his private club in Salt Lake City smoker-friendly despite, or maybe because of, the Jan. 1 smoking ban. But Utah Department of Health officials, in a formal declaration issued Tuesday, said that loophole doesn't exist, and the smoking ban stays.

OCALA, Fla. -- A woman in Ocala was jailed for hitting herself in the face with a frying pan and then blaming her estranged husband.

If you are frying a steak and mindful of your health, then marinate it in either beer or red wine. So say food scientists who measured amounts of a family of carcinogens found in fried steaks after steeping them in booze.

She sews, cooks, knits, gardens and raises chooks. The housewife is back – with younger women embracing traditional domestic crafts in droves, new figures show.

A few days ago, Maria Murray was counting the pennies and deciding that Christmas had to be cancelled. She warned her four children that she could not afford to buy them presents. They would probably not have been impressed to learn, therefore, that she had spent her last £5 on a lottery scratchcard at the local newsagent's. But she was firmly back in favour with her family yesterday after the card turned out to be worth a £1million jackpot. 'It was my last £5,' she said. 'It hasn't really sunk in that I've won - I don't know what I'll...

New Brandeis University research reports that academic medicine is in critical condition Waltham, Mass.—Everybody is familiar with the stereotypes of medical education from the student perspective: grueling hours, little recognition, and even less glory. Now a novel Brandeis study published in Academic Medicine this month pulls back the curtain on the dominant environment of academic medicine from the perspective of faculty, the providers of medical education in medical schools.

Making self-improvement New Year's resolutions often leaves people feeling worse, the British mental health charity Mind warned Thursday.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 1, 2009) — New interpretations of fossils have revealed an ancient missing link between today’s spiders and their long-extinct ancestors. The research by scientists at the University of Kansas and Virginia’s Hampden-Sydney College may help explain how spiders came to weave webs.

A team of Johns Hopkins neuroscientists has worked out how some newly discovered light sensors in the eye detect light and communicate with the brain. The report appears online this week in Nature. These light sensors are a small number of nerve cells in the retina that contain melanopsin molecules. Unlike conventional light-sensing cells in the retina—rods and cones—melanopsin-containing cells are not used for seeing images; instead, they monitor light levels to adjust the body's clock and control constriction of the pupils in the eye, among other functions.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2008) — Scientists at the University of St Andrews have created exotic biological compounds in a test tube by uncovering some of Nature's chemical secrets. The development for preparing fluorinated chemicals, an important group of compounds which comprise commercial entities such as Teflon and Prozac, could help the multibillion dollar industry which currently makes the materials by hazardous methods. The discovery by the researchers in the School of Chemistry demonstrates, for the first time, that fluorinated molecules can be made in the laboratory but under mild biological conditions.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2008) — University of Utah researchers have developed an automobile ignition key that prevents teenagers from talking on cell phones or sending text messages while driving.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2008) — Peering at structures only atoms across, researchers have identified the clockwork that drives a powerful virus nanomotor.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 1, 2009) — New evidence uncovered by oceanographers challenges one of the most long-standing theories about how species evolve in the oceans.

Giving antibiotics to patients in hospital intensive care units (ICUs) to prevent – rather than fight – bacterial infections may reduce the number of patient deaths, Dutch scientists report today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Despite the findings, some researchers remain skeptical whether the possible risks (most notably spurring new antibiotic resistant germs) outweigh the benefits of plying patients with antibiotics instead of using other more benign strategies such as hand-washing, isolating contagious patients and scrubbing hospitals with antiseptic cleansers.

There was a big development in science this year, yet most people missed it. It wasn't induced pluripotent stem cells or global warming or Barack Obama securing 99% of the scientist vote despite his belief that vaccines cause autism, which caused even heterosexual scientists to disregard Jenny McCarthy. No, it was an alarming decrease in available clichés to describe what scientists think about new discoveries.

Whatever you resolve to do differently in 2009, vow also to develop a strategy to make it happen. Otherwise, expect failure. So says John O'Neill, director of Addiction Services for The Menninger Clinic in Houston.

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] Happy New Year! And don’t feel bad about taking today off. After all, you’ve traveled far. And I’m not talking about the trip home from the party last night. According to NASA, just by being on the planet Earth in the last year, you’ve zipped about 584 million miles around the sun to get back where you were. At an average speed of about 67,000 miles per hour. Again, not talking about the drive home last night. Of course, the trip was not a perfect circle. As Kepler showed, the Earth’s...