Free Republic

Electronic banking can have its down side. A Winnipeg, Manitoba, man died nearly two years ago, but thanks to automatic bill payments, no one noticed. "How can that happen, for God's sake? Two years!" exclaimed Sam Shuster, a neighbor of Jim Sulkers, to the Canadian Press wire service. "I used to ask the president of the [condominium] board of directors 'Where in the hell is he?'" Shuster added. "She said all she knew was the bank gets the monthly money, so we don't worry about it." Sulkers, said to be in his 50s, suffered from multiple sclerosis (search). The province's...

Aug. 27 — NASA released a pair of highly anticipated Mars portraits from the Hubble Space Telescope on Wednesday as the observatory’s operators took advantage of a proximity to the Red Planet not equaled in 59,619 years. THE FIRST color photograph, released early in the morning, includes Mars’ Hellas Basin, a huge impact crater, and the southern polar ice cap is unmistakable. The second image shows Mars’ version of the Grand Canyon, called Valles Marineris, a vast system of gorges and side canyons that stretches across 2,485 miles (4,000 kilometers) of the Martian surface. If you dropped Valles Marineris on...

A British arms dealer and two other men were arrested Tuesday in an FBI sting after they tried to sell a shoulder-mounted missile to an undercover agent. Several congressmen used the news to promote their efforts to put missile defense systems on all commercial aircraft. What kind of missile defense can you put on a civilian jet? There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missiles available on international arms markets, including many Stinger missiles the United States provided to Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s. The arms dealer caught on Tuesday had planned to sell 50 such...

What Happens to Recalled Meat? By Brendan I. Koerner Posted Monday, October 14, 2002, at 2:50 PM PT Wampler Foods, a division of poultry titan Pilgrim's Pride, is recalling 27.4 million pounds worth of cooked deli products, which may be contaminated with the potentially lethal bacteria Listeria monocytogenes. What's going to happen to all that recalled meat? Once consumers have returned their suspect victuals to the supermarket, the processed turkey and chicken products will likely be shipped back to Wampler's Franconia, Penn., factory, which produced the shady meat between May 1 and Oct. 11. The packages will be sprayed with...