Free Republic

Five thousand Irish soldiers who swapped uniforms to fight for the British against Hitler went on to suffer years of persecution. One of them, 92-year-old Phil Farrington, took part in the D-Day landings and helped liberate the German death camp at Bergen-Belsen - but he wears his medals in secret. Even to this day, he has nightmares that he will be arrested by the authorities and imprisoned for his wartime service. "They would come and get me, yes they would," he said in a frail voice at his home in the docks area of Dublin. And his 25-year-old grandson, Patrick,...

View a video showing the bacteria BW-1 swimming in the direction of the magnetic field. Nevada, the "Silver State," is well-known for mining precious metals. But scientists Dennis Bazylinski and colleagues at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) do a different type of mining. They sluice through every water body they can find, looking for new forms of microbial magnetism. In a basin named Badwater on the edge of Death Valley National Park, Bazylinski and researcher Christopher Lefèvre hit pay dirt. Lefèvre is with the French National Center of Scientific Research and University of Aix-Marseille II. In this week's...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Both children and the elderly have slower response times when they have to make quick decisions in some settings. But recent research suggests that much of that slower response is a conscious choice to emphasize accuracy over speed. In fact, healthy older people can be trained to respond faster in some decision-making tasks without hurting their accuracy – meaning their cognitive skills in this area aren’t so different from younger adults. “Many people think that it is just natural for older people’s brains to slow down as they age, but we’re finding that isn’t always true,” said...

Ghent, Belgium 27 December 2011 - Researchers of VIB and UGent have discovered a new approach to preventing septic shock, an often fatal extreme inflammatory reaction of the body. It is the most frequent cause of death at intensive care departments in hospitals. In sepsis, acute inflammation is attended by low blood pressure and blood clots, causing the organs to stop working. Only recently, the Brazilian football legend Socrates, died of the consequences of this condition. In a new study in the top journal Immunity, Peter Vandenabeele and colleagues of VIB-UGent described how blocking a particular form of cell death...

The recent discovery of a pendant at the Irikaitz archaeological site in Zestoa (in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa) has given rise to intense debate: it may be as old as 25,000 years, which would make it the oldest found to date at open-air excavations throughout the whole of the Iberian Peninsula. This stone is nine centimetres long and has a hole for hanging it from the neck although it would seem that, apart from being adornment, it was used to sharpen tools. The discovery has had great repercussion, but it is not by any means the only one uncovered...

Cuba says it is expanding free-market reforms, opening more of the retail services sector to private business. From 1 January workers including carpenters, locksmiths, photographers and repairmen will be allowed to become self-employed. They will be able to set their own prices, while paying taxes and leasing their premises from the state. The measures are the latest reforms aimed at reviving Cuba's socialist economy by boosting private enterprise. President Raul Castro, who took over from his brother Fidel in 2008, has said the changes represent an effort to update rather than abandon the socialist model. His government plans to have...

Lean beef can contribute to a heart-healthy diet in the same way lean white meats can, according to nutritional scientists. The DASH diet -- Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension -- is currently recommended by the American Heart Association to lower cholesterol and reduce risk of heart disease. People following the DASH diet are encouraged to eat fish and poultry, but not much beef. According to the Centers for Disease Control about 26 percent of American deaths are caused by heart disease. "The DASH diet is currently the gold standard for contemporary diet recommendations," said Michael Roussell, nutrition consultant and recent...

Rise and fall of groups of fauna driven by temperaturePROVIDENCE, R.I. -- History often seems to happen in waves – fashion and musical tastes turn over every decade and empires give way to new ones over centuries. A similar pattern characterizes the last 65 million years of natural history in North America, where a novel quantitative analysis has identified six distinct, consecutive waves of mammal species diversity, or "evolutionary faunas." What force of history determined the destiny of these groupings? The numbers say it was typically climate change. "Although we've always known in a general way that mammals respond to...

Brazil has overtaken the UK as the world's sixth largest economy, an economic research group has said. The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said its latest World Economic League Table showed Asian countries moving up and European countries falling back. The CEBR also predicted that the UK economy would overtake France by 2016. It also said the eurozone economy would shrink 0.6% in 2012 "if the euro problem is solved", or 2% if it is not. CEBR chief executive Douglas McWilliams told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Brazil overtaking the UK was part of a growing trend....

On 26 December 1943 one of the great sea battles of World War II took place.Germany's most famous battleship - the Scharnhorst - was sunk by Allied forces during the Battle of the North Cape. Norman Scarth was an 18-year-old on board the British naval destroyer HMS Matchless, which was protecting a convoy taking vital supplies to the Russian ports of the Arctic Circle. In a BBC World Service interview he described how he witnessed the sinking of the Scharnhorst: > We could still hear voices calling from the black of that Arctic winter night, calling for help, and we...

Despite seemingly endless interest in decorating, landscaping, buying, staging and selling houses, actually building a house is a mysterious process that is mostly left to professionals. But for some homeowners, buying and in some cases assembling, a prefabricated home holds appeal. A kit home can streamline the process of custom-building a house. While the prices aren’t bargain-basement, kit homes can cost less. Keep in mind that these homes cost more to build than just the sticker price on the kit. Buyers might have to pony up for windows, cabinets, fixtures, contractors, subcontractors and other features and services, in addition to...

Ecuador has deployed some 10,000 security forces to its border with Colombia to deal with a "most grave" security problem, President Rafael Correa said Saturday. Correa said the troops and police forces were deployed to bolster security amid concerns about "organized crime, drug trafficking (and) irregular groups," including paramilitary groups and Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia known as FARC.

A team of Weizmann Institute scientists has turned the tables on an autoimmune disease. In such diseases, including Crohn's and rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system mistakenly attacks the body's tissues. But the scientists managed to trick the immune systems of mice into targeting one of the body's players in autoimmune processes, an enzyme known as MMP9. The results of their research appear today in Nature Medicine. Prof. Irit Sagi of the Biological Regulation Department and her research group have spent years looking for ways to home in on and block members of the matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) enzyme family. These proteins...

These neutrophils are there without there being any infection and play an immunoregulating roleBarcelona, 23rd of December 2011.- For the first time, it has been discovered that neutrophils exist in the spleen without there being an infection. This important finding made by the research group on the Biology of B Cells of IMIM (Hospital del Mar Research Institute) in collaboration with researchers from Mount Sinai in New York, has also made it possible to determine that these neutrophils have an immunoregulating role. Neutrophils are the so-called cleaning cells, since they are the first cells to migrate to a place with...

Twenty years ago this Christmas day, Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech announcing “I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” And with that, the totalitarian and murderous construct of the USSR, already uncoupled earlier that month by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, was no more. These were monumental events. Yet so tumultuous is the world right now that the 20th anniversary of the Soviet collapse is figuring as little more than a footnote in the news. In Russia itself, the events of the hour are...

A chance discovery has brought to light the little-known story of how a British Army officer risked a court martial in wartime Italy to save a painting the author Aldous Huxley once described as "the greatest picture in the world". I opened a dead man's suitcase in Cape Town and was transported from today's Africa, via World War II Italy, to Renaissance Tuscany. Inside I found a story of high art, bravery and love, all the more powerful because it is a story not widely known. I was on Long Street, a boisterous city-centre shopping artery, exploring the upper floors...

ROME -- A British lawyer says he invented accusations that Silvio Berlusconi paid him $600,000 to lie on the stand to protect the former Italian premier's business interests. David Mills' testimony Thursday at Berlusconi's corruption trial in Milan undercuts prosecutors' case against the politician.

Major speed bump in the path of a startling result announced in SeptemberWhen an international collaboration of physicists came up with a result that punched a hole in Einstein's theory of special relativity and couldn't find any mistakes in their work, they asked the world to take a second look at their experiment. Responding to the call was Ramanath Cowsik, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Online and in the December 24 issue of Physical Review Letters, Cowsik and his collaborators put...

I’d say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you’ve lost your mind. — John Edwards When does the legitimate “I oppose Obama” descend into the illegitimate “I hate Obama”? It is popular now to suggest that conservatives in general and congressional Republicans in particular suffer from an obsession characterized by an uncontrolled antipathy for Barack Obama — personal and visceral — that warps their entire political outlook. No doubt some do experience the same obsessions that infected the Left in their furor at George W. Bush. One can find unhinged posters...

Hamilton, ON (Dec. 22, 2011) - Drugs used to overcome cancer may also combat antibiotic resistance, finds a new study led by Gerry Wright, scientific director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University. "Our study found that certain proteins, called kinases, that confer antibiotic resistance are structurally related to proteins important in cancer," says Wright about the study published in Chemistry & Biology. "The pharmaceutical sector has made a big investment in targeting these proteins, so there are a lot of compounds and drugs out there that, although they were designed to overcome cancer,...