Free Republic

A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled. Witnesses from Trøndelag to Finnmark compared the amazing sight to anything from a Russian rocket to a meteor or a shock wave - although no one appears to have mentioned UFOs yet. The phenomenon began when what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate.

Next Monday, the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Free Enterprise Fund and Beckstead and Watts v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and United States of America. If the plaintiffs are successful, they could unravel one of the most used and persuasive tools in security technology sales: the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The particulars of the case aren’t really that important, but I’ll recount them quickly. Beckstead was a small accounting firm in Henderson, Nev. (just outside Las Vegas). It was audited by PCOAB in 2004 for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and several deficiencies were...

NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life. Pyrimidine is a ring-shaped molecule made up of carbon and nitrogen and is the basic structure for uracil, part of a genetic code found in ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA is central to protein synthesis, but has many other roles. "We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory...

In Utah, the National Security Agency is building a $2 billion storage facility that will house and analyze all forms of electronic communication...a potential yottabyte of everyone's (formerly) personal data. So how big is a yottabyte? CrunchGear puts it well: There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. In terms of data on current human scales, a yottabyte is nearly infinite (though I'm sure the NSA will manage...

The exceptionally well-preserved fossil primate known as "Ida" is not a missing link as some have claimed, according to an analysis in the journal Nature. The research is the first independent assessment of the claims made in a scientific paper and a television documentary earlier this year. Dr Erik Seiffert says that Ida belonged to a group more closely linked to lemurs than to monkeys, apes or us. His team's conclusions come from an analysis of another fossil primate. The newly described animal - known as Afradapis longicristatus - lived some 37 million years ago in northern Egypt, during the...

Just a little while ago, a friend of mine posted a new blog entry on his Geeky Political Musings site that threw out some free-market solutions for reforming our health care system in this country. Currently, as you know, the President and Congress have their own idea(s) about how this should be done and have crafted nearly 2000 pages of legislation in order to handle the reform. I'm with most Americans in that I want reform, but not that kind of reform.

A Houston-area congressman has rocketed to fame in cyberspace today. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, has been toting around a giant, colorful chart describing the House Democrats' health-care reform plan in Rube Goldbergian complexity. Brady, the top Republican on Congress' Joint Economic Committee, has appeared today on Fox TV, ABC News and even made the granddaddy of political aggregators, the Drudge Report. Brady's chart -- already available on T-shirt (you can buy one by clicking here) -- identifies at least 31 new federal programs, agencies, commissions and mandates that he says would accompany the House Democrats' plan, which he dismisses...

Three striking sisters, women in their 20s from the Mexican metropolis of Monterrey, were riding in the back of a late-model minivan with friends toward the shopping malls of Houston, when a Laredo customs agent noticed something out of place. The driver of the white 2005 Chrysler Voyager with Nuevo Leon plates, a 42-year-old hairdresser, seemed a bit too nervous for a northbound shopper at the No. 2 International bridge. And inspectors noticed that the women appeared overly voluptuous, particularly in the bust, thighs and bottom. All five were ordered out and patted down, where — under layers of fashionable...

In an astonishing admission, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she was under the impression that legalizing abortion with the 1973 Roe. v. Wade case would eliminate undesirable members of the populace, or as she put it "populations that we don't want to have too many of." Question: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women? Ginsburg: Yes, the ruling about that surprised...

Don't Do This!

I recently asked my friend's little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, If you were President what would be the first thing you would do? She replied, I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people. Her parents beamed. Wow...what a worthy goal, I told her, but you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep...

LOS ANGELES — The rowdy Bratz dolls have been evicted. Barbie has regained control of the dollhouse. Toy giant Mattel Inc., after a four-year legal dispute with MGA Entertainment Inc., touted its win in the case Wednesday after a federal judge banned MGA from making and selling its pouty-lipped and hugely popular Bratz dolls.

This is what we're up against. On Sunday morning, amidst worshiping congregants and following unifying prayers that our President-elect be granted wisdom as he prepares to lead our nation through difficult global, social and economic challenges, the Michigan left declared open war on peaceful church goers. They did it with banners, chants, blasphemy, by storming the pulpit, by vandalizing the church facility, by potentially defiling the building with lude, public, sex acts and by intentionally forcing physical confrontations with worshipers. This didn't take place in some dystopian, post modern work of fiction and it didn't take place in San Francisco...

Most prevalent theme during Tuesday night's coverage of the Democratic National Convention, after speculation over healing the Clinton-Obama fued: TV journalists worrying about how the Democrats are not adequately aggressive in their attacks against John McCain as reporters, especially on CBS, repeatedly pressed for more “red meat” and wondered if the speakers are being “hard enough” or “tough enough” on McCain? CBS's Bob Schieffer rued to keynoter Mark Warner that “normally keynote speeches” deliver “a lot of red meat,” but “I didn't hear a lot of that.” Over on NBC, Brian Williams pushed Warner: “You know there's some in the...

ST. PAUL, Minn. - In an effort to help Sen. Larry Craig, the American Civil Liberties Union is arguing that people who have sex in public bathrooms have an expectation of privacy. Craig, of Idaho, is asking the Minnesota Court of Appeals to let him withdraw his guilty plea to disorderly conduct stemming from a bathroom sex sting at the Minneapolis airport. The ACLU filed a brief Tuesday supporting Craig. It cited a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling 38 years ago that found that people who have sex in closed stalls in public restrooms "have a reasonable expectation of privacy." That...

DES MOINES, Iowa — A Des Moines man was charged with domestic assault Sunday after throwing a bag of Cheetos at his father. Twenty-two-year-old Patrick Hamman was arrested after the bag of cheesy chips hit his father, Michael Hamman, in the face. Police said the bag hit his father's glasses, causing a cut to the bridge of his nose. The police report said — quote— "Michael's T-shirt was also covered in Cheeto dust." Police said Patrick, who lives with his father, admitted that he was on methamphetamine at the time of the argument.

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - A group of campers tied a peeping Tom suspect to a tree, keeping him bound until police arrived. Richard H. Berkey, 63, was charged with private indecency, a misdemeanor, by sheriff's deputies who were called to the Big Fan Campground near Bagby Hot Springs last weekend, according to Clackamas County Detective Jim Strovink. Campers told deputies they recognized Berkey from a similar incident at the campground last year and wanted to make sure he didn't get away. The 2006 incident was reported to police but did not result in charges. "Last year, we took down his...

ST. PAUL, Minn. — A security video from an apartment hallway shows at least 10 witnesses ignored a woman's cries for help for more than an hour as a man beat and sexually assaulted her, prosecutors in Minnesota said. The surveillance video clearly showed men and women looking out their apartment doors or starting to walk down the hallway before retreating as the woman was assaulted for nearly 90 minutes, police spokesman Tom Walsh said.

WORTHINGTON, Ohio — It has come to be known as the Spooky House Incident: A group of teenagers in this quaint older suburb who tried to scare themselves on a "ghost hunt" and a recluse who responded with gunfire, leaving two lives wrecked. A pretty blonde high school cheerleader, Rachel Barezinsky, is crippled for life. Allen S. Davis, roused from an eccentric but otherwise unoffending existence, was sentenced last month to 19 years in prison for what he describes as defending his home.

Counter-terrorism experts have drawn up plans to develop an array of advanced technologies capable of spotting would-be terrorists in a crowd before they have time to strike. Scientists and engineers have been asked to devise ways of analysing people's behaviour and physiology from afar, in the hope they may reveal clues about their mental state and even their future intentions.