Free Republic

Federal immigration officials are still pursuing the deportation of President Obama’s uncle, Onyango Obama, to Kenya, officials said today. The statement from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement came a week after Onyango Obama resolved drunken driving charges and a day after the state Registry of Motor Vehicles issued him a hardship driver’s license so he could get to his job as manager at two Metrowest liquor stores. “Now that Mr. Onyango’s criminal case has completed, ICE has communicated, in accordance with standard procedure, with his attorney regarding his removal pursuant to a previous final order by an immigration judge,’’ Brian...

Sexy Russian Spy Anna Chapman Arrested Because She Was Getting Too Close To Someone Inside "Obama's Inner Circle"? That's what a former FBI counterintelligence officer reveals. The Independent (UK) highlights the six hundredth revelation that Iraqi informant "Curveball" lied. They bury the actual new news -- that the FBI felt it had to move quickly to arrest and deport Anna Chapman, for fear that someone close to Obama was about to snork her, and get caught in a "honey trap" (sex, followed by extortion for secrets/influence). That someone "close" to Obama? A "sitting cabinet official," this FBI counterintelligence officer says....

ONE of the most interesting technological trends of the past few years has been the rise of additive manufacturing. This technique, which uses three-dimensional printing to make objects ranging from violins to pilotless aircraft, allows the construction of individual objects at the whim of the designer. Now, a small Californian company, the Gene Duplication Corporation, based in San Melito, proposes to push the technology to its limits. On Sunday it will announce plans to use 3D printing to make bespoke pets. GeneDupe, as the firm is known colloquially, has previously focused on the genetic engineering of animals. However Paolo Fril,...

Boston utility NStar has agreed to pay a starting price for power from the Cape Wind project that is substantially above the cost of conventional energy and will slightly increase the average customer’s monthly bill beginning the first year the offshore wind farm generates electricity, according to a 15-year contract filed with state regulators Friday. The price, 18.7 cents per kilowatt hour, is the same as what National Grid agreed to pay when it signed a contract in 2010 to purchase half the power generated by Cape Wind. NStar’s deal is to purchase 27.5 percent of the wind farm’s total...

As we discover more worlds orbiting distant stars, we are finding that "conventional thinking" doesn't seem to apply to the growing menagerie of exoplanets. And this most recent exoplanetary discovery is no different. In fact, the two exoplanets found to be orbiting a star 375 light-years away shouldn't exist at all. The two gas giant planets were spotted during a survey of "metal poor" stars. When focusing on a star called HIP 11952, researchers from the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, discovered a slight wobble in the star's position. The wobble is being caused by the gravitational tug...

Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga – who Barack Obama helped place in office in a power-sharing agreement to stop deadly rioting by Odinga’s followers – is now the target of a devastating book by a former top adviser that threatens his prospect for re-election. Miguna Miguna has handed over to WND senior staff reporter Jerome R. Corsi an 800-page manuscript of the book, which was scheduled to be published in Kenya this year. Miguna, however, was informed by his publisher that publication in Kenya had to be delayed until 2013, after the presidential and parliamentary elections at the end of...

President Obama and his West Wing aides ignored a subpoena of documents pertaining to the Solyndra loan guarantee even after congressional investigators met with White House officials to negotiate the scope of the subpoena, according to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "The White House's failure to comply with today's document deadline is a sad milestone on the path chosen by this administration to obstruct and delay our investigation rather than cooperate and help deliver answers for taxpayers," committee chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee chairman Cliff Stearns R-Fla., said in a statement this evening. House investigators...

Joe DeSantis, Newt Gingrich’s communications director, has come under fire for making significant changes to Gingrich’s Wikipedia page, CNN Political Ticker reported Monday. According to Wikipedia records, DeSantis has made or requested over 60 alterations to Wikipedia’s biographical entry on Gingrich. The communications director has also made changes to Gingrich’s wife Callista’s page on the online crowd-sourced encyclopedia, adjusting her entry at least 23 times since 2008, according to BuzzFeed. DeSantis has requested changes to the GOP presidential candidate’s page through a feature on the site called “Talk” since May 2011, most recently asking for adjustments in mid-December. DeSantis has...

Young couples have long signaled their devotion to each other by various means — the gift of a letterman jacket, or an exchange of class rings or ID bracelets. Best friends share locker combinations. The digital era has given rise to a more intimate custom. It has become fashionable for young people to express their affection for each other by sharing their passwords to e-mail, Facebook and other accounts. Boyfriends and girlfriends sometimes even create identical passwords, and let each other read their private e-mails and texts. They say they know such digital entanglements are risky, because a souring relationship...

Alcohol tastes sweeter when loud music is playing and the noise could make it difficult for drinkers to judge how much they are consuming, new research has claimed. Dr Lorenzo Stafford, a psychologist from the University of Portsmouth, conducted the first experimental study to find out how music can alter the taste of alcohol. Dr Stafford said: 'Since humans have an innate preference for sweetness, these findings offer a plausible explanation as to why people consume more alcohol in noisy environments.' New findings: Alcohol tastes sweeter when loud music is playing and the noise could make it difficult for drinkers...

This is remarkable. A just released Syracuse university study indicates that the government is overstating its enforcement of the immigration laws by a staggering amount. According to TRAC, Syracuse’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has overstated the number of immigration law violators apprehended by a 5:1 ratio. And that’s the good news. Deportations were overstated by 24:1 and detentions by 34:1. TRAC says that ICE has represented, not only in press releases but in congressional testimony, that in 2005 it apprehended 102,034. The records it produced, however, show only 21,339. It further claimed 166,075...

Sleepy time at Sibudu. Researchers have found microscopic evidence (inset) of 77,000-year-old bedding at this South African cave. "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise," wrote Benjamin Franklin in his Poor Richard's Almanack. That may have held true a couple of hundred years ago, but when it comes to our ancient human ancestors, researchers don't know much about how—or even where—they slept. Now a team working in South Africa claims to have found the earliest known sleeping mats, made of plant material and dated up to 77,000 years ago—50,000 years earlier than previous...

Within five years, a woolly mammoth will likely be cloned, according to scientists who have just recovered well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thigh bone. Japan's Kyodo News first reported the find. You can see photos of the thigh bone at this Kyodo page. Russian scientist Semyon Grigoriev, acting director of the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum, and colleagues are now analyzing the marrow, which they extracted from the mammoth's femur, found in Siberian permafrost soil. Grigoriev and his team, along with colleagues from Japan's Kinki University, have announced that they will launch a joint research project next year aimed at...

The American Bar Association secretly declared that 14 of President Barack Obama’s nominees to the federal bench are “not qualified.” The rejection rate is more than three times that of Obama’s predecessors, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, The New York Times reports. The Obama administration, which has nominated 185 judges, has questioned whether the bar association has placed too much value on courtroom experience. The association’s special role in judicial selection, in place since the Eisenhower days, has been contentious, with conservatives charging that the group has a liberal bias, the Times reported. Nearly all those found not...

Anadarko Petroleum Corp. said that land it has leased in the Wattenberg oil field in northern Colorado may hold more than a billion barrels of recoverable oil and natural gas, in the latest sign that energy production in the U.S. is set to surge. The disclosure could vault the Wattenberg onto a growing list of major new oil discoveries in the United States, joining the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford in South Texas. These new sources of oil are reversing four decades of declining domestic energy production. What is making them possible are new technologies, including...

Magnetic interference with the brain can make it impossible to lie, and polygraphs and "truth serums" will soon be obsolete, say Estonian researchers. Inga Karton and Talis Bachmann worked with 16 volunteers who submitted to transcranial magnetic stimulation, which can stimulate some parts of the brain and not others. The team discovered that when magnets were applied to either the right or left side of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the front of the brain, depending on which side was stimulated, the subjects would either lie or tell the truth. But while when magnetic interference was directed at the parietal...

Have you heard of a river flowing under a river? In an amazing discovery, scientists have found signs of an underground river flowing below the Amazon. Researchers at the department of geophysics of the Brazil National Observatory have showed evidence of the existence of an underground river that flows 13,000 feet beneath the Amazon. Get US Emails&Alerts The latest US business and financial news as well as issues and events Sample The underground river is now named after Valiya Hamza, the scientist of Indian origin,who has been studying the Amazon region for more than 40 years. The discovery is part...

A Boxford woman has filed a class action law suit claiming Google Inc. violated state privacy laws by scanning email messages between users of the search giant’s Gmail service and users of other providers, like AOL, and using the information to place online advertisements. The complaint was filed July 29 in Suffolk Superior Court, is intended to be a class action suit. Complainant Debra Marquis is seeking other people who don’t use Gmail accounts, but have dispatched emails to Gmail users, to join the action. Marquis claimed in the suit that non-Google email users did not authorize the company to...

After deliberating less than four hours, a federal jury acquitted former Boston firefighter Albert Arroyo yesterday of fraud charges, which were brought after he participated in bodybuilding competitions and other strenuous activity while on disability leave. The not guilty verdict on two counts of mail fraud shook Arroyo, who quivered with emotion, bowed his head, and burst into tears. “We’re extremely gratified that the jury was able to consider all of the evidence and put aside the public outcry,’’ said Timothy Watkins, Arroyo’s attorney, after the verdict was read in US District Court in Boston. “The public didn’t know the...

Fading US presidential candidate and conservative darling Newton "Newt" Leroy Gingrich denies that a high percentage of his 1.3 million Twitter followers are bought-and-paid-for fakes, despite reports – and alleged evidence – to the contrary. "We've never utilized firms, agencies, or outside organizations to inflate Newt's Twitter followers," his press secretary, R.C. Hammond, told ABC News. Newt Gingrich Hammond's statement came in response to accusations from an unnamed former Gingrich staffer, who told Gawker on Monday: "Newt employs a variety of agencies whose sole purpose is to procure Twitter followers for people who are shallow/insecure/unpopular enough to pay for them."...