Free Republic

Every family's history holds its secrets, for good and for bad. For comedian Chelsea Handler, the biggest questions lay with the fact that her maternal grandfather fought for the Nazi regime in World War II. In a new episode of TLC's Who Do You Think You Are, Handler, 38, discovers exactly what role her grandfather, Karl Stoecker, played in one of history's most atrocious genocides. And growing up, Handler had no idea that her grandfather - a 'very, very strong man' she describes as having a 'sense of humour' - had a dark past.In the episode, she reveals that he...

President Obama seems to be relying heavily on the Fourth Estate to uncover internal government scandals. This video montage shows the Obama Administration claiming they knew nothing about scandals such as Fast and Furious and the Internal Revenue Service targeting until they were leaked by news outlets.

NASA / GSFC: Using the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), NASA has sampled the galactic wind that has traveled from outside our solar system. Four types of atoms were found to be different from what we have in our Solar System.

RUSH: The next story we have from CNN Money: "Tax Increase on the Rich Would Impact Just 3% of Taxpayers." What's happening here? It's small, but two stories in a row is some kind of a record. A breakout here of truth from the State-Controlled Media. "As the government looks for ways to climb out of its massive hole of debt, all eyes are on the rich." No, they're not! All eyes are on government. All eyes are not on the rich. But it's CNN. "President Obama and many of his fellow Democrats continue to call for higher taxes on...

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite – temporarily designated P4 -- popped up in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet. The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km). "I find it remarkable...

NASA scientists say they may have discovered a new force of nature, after research showed two of their deep space probes were being inexplicably pulled off course. Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, which have been in space for over 40 years, are being steadily pulled towards the sun by an unknown power, according to London’s Telegraph newspaper The scientists said it could not be gravity or solar radiation, as they decreased over distance.

NBC's Lee Cowan, on Thursday's NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, discovered a stunning result of Arizona's new immigration policies - illegal immigrants are now leaving the state. Cowan opened his piece noting a long line now "stretches around the Mexican Consulate in Phoenix every day" but noticed a twist, as the line was full of "immigrants trying to figure out not how to stay in Arizona, but how to flee it."

(IsraelNN.com) The Houston-based Noble Energy company, drilling for Israel’s Delek fuel company, announced that it has discovered a huge deposit of natural gas under the Mediterranean Sea near Haifa. Infrastructures Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer (Labor) said that the find was of “historic proportions,” and that it could change the face of Israel’s economy. Eighty-seven billion cubic meters, or nearly 3.1 trillion cubic feet, of high-quality gas are estimated to be in three deposits in the Tamar Drilling site, which is named for Delek owner Yitzchak Teshuva’s granddaughter. Teshuva said that the find marks a “historic milestone and a great holiday for...

8/7/2006 - FORWARD OPERATING BASE TARIN KOWT, Afghanistan (AFPN) -- When a suicide bomber slammed and ignited his missile-laden vehicle into the Humvee in front of Staff Sgt. Eric Mathiasen, the Air Force medic exploded into action. He did not think about his wife or two children, or that there was unexploded ordnance lying about. He just grabbed his medical bag and sprinted toward the blast area. "While I was running to the wounded guy, I just hoped I could help him," Sergeant Mathiasen said. "I just hoped I wouldn't screw anything up." He had questioned his abilities before this...

Walker discovers 5,000-year-old log path on moorFind to shed new light on Neolithic man Emma Dunlop FOR 5,000 years one of the world's oldest ever footpaths has remained a hidden secret, locked deep beneath the earth in South Yorkshire. That was until walker Mick Oliver quite literally stumbled across it while one day traipsing across Hatfield Moor, near Doncaster, shortly after it was re-opened to walkers in October last year. "I looked down and I could see a straight line. I thought, that's unusual, maybe it's a bog oak – a fossilised tree – so I'll go and have a...

MARIPI, Colombia - Colombian troops raided a sprawling clandestine drug laboratory run by a paramilitary group that was capable of producing 10 tons of cocaine a month, officials said Tuesday. "This is the biggest cocaine processing factory we've found this year, it contained a large quantity of chemicals used to process the drugs," Gen. Gustavo Matamoros, commander of the army's 5th Division, told The Associated Press. In a separate operation, the military announced Tuesday that it had seized six tons of marijuana allegedly belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country's main leftist rebel group. The...

Archaeologist discovers ancient ships in Egypt By Tim Stoddard Kathryn Bard had “the best Christmas ever” this past December when she discovered the well-preserved timbers and riggings of pharaonic seafaring ships inside two man-made caves on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. They are the first pieces ever recovered from Egyptian seagoing vessels, and along with hieroglyphic inscriptions found near one of the caves, they promise to shed light on an elaborate network of ancient Red Sea trade. Bard, a CAS associate professor of archaeology, and her former student Chen Sian Lim (CAS’01) had been shoveling sand for scarcely an hour on...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The Cassini spacecraft's mission to Saturn has revealed a new radiation belt around the ringed planet and found that lightning in its atmosphere is occurring in different patterns than it did when NASA's Voyagers flew by in the early 1980s, scientists said. The discoveries announced Thursday are part of an early wave of information about the Saturn system from Cassini, which arrived June 30 on a $3.3 billion exploration expected to last four years. "This is exactly the point of doing a mission like this," said Bill Kurth of the University of Iowa, the deputy principal...

UN discovers new Iranian nuclear evidence UN inspectors in Iran have uncovered evidence of nuclear experiments that Tehran did not previously disclose. The International Atomic Energy Agency is now warning the country to come clean. The dossier is a setback in Iran's efforts to persuade the world that its nuclear programme is peaceful and that it is fully co-operating with the UN. IAEA inspectors combing Iran for evidence of a weapons program found signs of polonium, a radioactive element that can help trigger a nuclear chain reaction, the report said. It was distributed to the agency's 35 nation board of...

VIENNA, Austria - U.N. inspectors sifting through Iran's nuclear files have discovered drawings of high-tech equipment that can be used to make weapons-grade uranium — a new link to the black market headed by the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, diplomats said Thursday. Beyond adding another piece to the puzzle of who provided what in the clandestine supply chain headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the revelations cast fresh doubt on Iran's commitment to dispelling suspicions it is trying to make atomic arms. But Iran insisted Thursday that it was cooperating. The diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the...

EAST LONGMEADOW, Mass. (AP) -- Verifying petition signatures probably doesn't keep municipal workers on the edges of their seats, but a name on a petition Laurie Raimer was checking against town resident lists stopped her in her tracks: her own. Raimer, who works in the East Longmeadow clerk's office, ran across her own signature last week as she was checking the names asking for a special town meeting to rescind a new law regarding closing times for restaurants. She says she was never asked to sign the petition, and she's positive that her brother James, whose name appeared next to...

Woman discovers she isn't her daughter's real mum A Brazilian woman who took a DNA test to prove the identity of her daughter's father was shocked to find out she wasn't her real mother. Tereza Menas and her former boyfriend took DNA tests because her nine-year-old daughter wanted her father's name on her birth certificate. But when the tests came back the results said neither were the girl's biological parents. Two further tests gave the same result. It's now believed staff at the Santa Casa Hospital, where she had her baby in 1994, may have swapped Mrs Menas' baby for...