Free Republic

IT'S OFFICIAL: 2005 WILL BE the newspaper industry's worst year since the last ad industry recession. And things aren't looking much better for next year either, according to a top Wall Street firm's report on newspaper publishing. "Sadly, 2005 is shaping up as the industry's worst year from a revenue growth perspective since the recession impacted 2001-2002 period," says the report from Goldman Sachs, adding a warning that meaningful growth in 2006 is "very unlikely."

The sign out front said "Saddam Hussein's Nuclear Mastermind." Inside, Mahdi Obeidi, former head of Iraq's centrifuge program for uranium enrichment, told more than 200 people, including Department of Energy employees, that he wants to help stop one of humanity's greatest nightmares - global weapons of mass destruction. "We cannot afford one mistake," Obeidi said. "Everybody should be concerned." Obeidi, who emigrated to the United States in 2003, spoke on Wednesday morning at the Pollard Auditorium at Oak Ridge Associated Universities. His visit was sponsored by the Oak Ridge Office of Counterintelligence and funded by the U.S. State Department, according...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A drug dubbed CX717, made by Cortex Pharmaceuticals, Irvine, California, reverses the biological and behavioral effects of sleep deprivation, according to results of animal studies. In an article in the research journal PLoS Biology, Dr. Sam A. Deadwyler and his associates propose that CX717 would particularly benefit individuals affected by extended work hours or night shifts. To test this possibility, they taught monkeys to perform a "delayed-match-to-sample task," in which they were presented with a single image on a computer screen, then would use a cursor to identify that image in a group of several...

OAK RIDGE, TN, United States (UPI) -- U.S. grocery stores, schools, hotels and hospitals are likely candidates for a high-efficiency system that provides heating, cooling and electric power. The PureComfort system -- developed through a partnership between Oak Ridge National Laboratory and United Technologies Research Center -- features a combination of 60-kilowatt microturbines and a new direct exhaust-fired double-effect absorption chiller-heater that recycles exhaust streams. The system provides simultaneous electric power and cooling. Bob DeVault of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory`s Engineering Science and Technology Division said the system could be configured to provide emergency backup power to the customer...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A record amount of tax revenue flowed into federal coffers in July, helping to keep the government on track to significantly lower the budget deficit this year. The Treasury Department reported Wednesday that revenue collections jumped 5.7 percent last month from a year ago, pushing total receipts to $142.09 billion, the largest amount ever collected by the federal government in the month of July. The Bush administration last month significantly lowered its estimate for this year's budget deficit - to $332.65 billion, down 22 percent from its February estimate that the deficit this year would total $427...

OAK RIDGE, Tennessee (AP) -- The government is offering a rare glimpse of the massive machines used to enrich uranium for the "Little Boy" bomb -- the first atomic weapon used in war, dropped 60 years ago in August on Hiroshima, Japan. Inside the high-security Y-12 nuclear weapons plant remain the last of 1,152 calutrons that once filled nine buildings. The machinery was part of the top-secret bomb-building Manhattan Project, which turned this rural countryside about 30 miles west of Knoxville into a "secret city" of 75,000 people between 1942 and 1945. "Don't you know the people in Knoxville wondered...

TAARBAEK, Denmark - A Danish Lutheran minister who publicly denied the existence of God said Sunday he was glad to be back in the pulpit, but refused to speak about the case that led to his brief suspension last year. The country's Evangelical Lutheran Church suspended him in June 2004 because he said in an interview that "there is no heavenly God." Earlier this month, he was reinstated after renewing his vows, but will remain under the supervision of a bishop. In Denmark, where Lutheran ministers are employed by the state and only the government can fire them or take...

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan women are in constant risk of abduction, rape and forced marriage and the government is doing little to address their plight, the human rights group Amnesty International said in a report released Monday, 3 1/2 years after the ouster of the hardline Taliban regime. A spokeswoman for the Afghan Women's Affairs Ministry, Nooria Haqnagar, acknowledged that abuse was still rife and said, "In some remote areas, men deal with women like animals." In its report, Amnesty called on the government and the international community to do more to improve the lives of women. "Throughout the country,...

For much of Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron rule of another empire. V-E day marked the end of fascism, but it did not end the oppression. The agreement in Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. ... The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs in history. Bush told the awful truth about what really triumphed in World War II east of the Elbe. And it was not...

Suspected Islamic rebels detonated two bombs and opened fire on authorities riding in an armored railway car early Sunday in southern Thailand, wounding at least 19 people, police said

While there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, a UC Irvine study has found significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence. The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance. “These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior

Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine have shown that an antibody treatment administered to the brain surface in mice with Alzheimer disease is capable of rapidly reversing disease-related structural nerve damage. The study will appear online on January 20 in advance of print publication in the February 1 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.