Free Republic

A North Carolina student has been found dead a day after she went missing while hiking a mountain in South Africa, authorities and her “devastated” family said Monday. Brook Cheuvront, 20, was reported missing Saturday from Table Mountain in Cape Town — where she was studying — after she stopped responding to friends and couldn’t be located on a tracking app, a rep for SANPark, which manages the mountain, told CBS News.

A Russian researcher with a cult following claims to have implanted a chip into his brain in the bold hopes of being able to control his dreams. Michael Raduga put his life on the line last month as he lost more than a 'litre of blood' while performing brain surgery on himself in his home in Kazakhstan. The 40-year-old, who has no neurosurgery qualifications, compared his extremely dangerous experiment to the film of Inception - claiming his 'electrode' one day has the potential to change the course of lucid dreams. Gruesome footage of the procedure shows him holding his skin...

He brought in a "Republican" sign to get in, but see above.

MOSCOW – Russia's lower house of parliament on Friday gave preliminary approval to a U.S.-Russian arms treaty, but decided to delay the final vote until next month. The Kremlin-controlled State Duma voted 350-58 to approve the New START treaty in the first of three required readings. The legislators said they would proceed further after returning from the New Year's vacation that lasts until Jan. 11. Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the State Duma's foreign affairs committee, said the full ratification could only happen next month "at the earliest." The New START treaty, which was ratified Wednesday by the U.S. Senate,...

I think I might be the only person who still has this opinion, but I need to get it out there. I think the inappropriate loving of dead people, commonly known as necrophilia, is just plain wrong and weird. There, I said it. The thing is, all the Republican presidential candidates, at least one of the Democratic candidates and a good 64 percent of Americans disagree with me. For those of you that think I'm overestimating this problem, I only have to mention one name: Ronald Wilson Reagan. Ever since the ex-president kicked the bucket in 2004, it seems that...

UMass hires Marxist Mwangi wa Githinji as a professor of economics (“Economist for the Proletariat,” page 8, Fall 2006). Didn’t anybody in the Department of Economics get the memo that Marxism as an economic principle has been discredited everywhere it has been used? The only places Marxism is relevant is in the rarefied air of academia and dictatorships where human rights don’t matter. Hiring a Marxist to be an economics professor is like hiring a gardener to work at a parking garage. What he knows won’t be of much use to anybody and it certainly wouldn’t appear to be money...

A congressman just back for Iraq says that the troops he spoke to overwhelmingly oppose a bill sponsored by Sen. John McCain that would restrict U.S. interrogators in the kind of techniques they can use while grilling terrorist suspects. While visiting with GIs on the frontline this week, Rep. Jack Kingston said he talked to the enlisted men who deal with prisoners of war. The Georgia Republican stressed that soldiers also told him that the U.S. guards who broke the law in the Abu Ghraib scandal last year should be punished. Kingston said that he will report his findings to...

While at a computer I have been listening to Rush as I always do on Tuesdays 11 am - 2:00pm. Now I don't have an exact quote. Rush just said and tried to justify that Roberts is saying what he must on the issue of abortion to make it through the process and if and when his rulings on abortion contridict his testimony, there's nothing anyone could do about it so fear not. Rush is correct in that the high court has supreme authority on deciding the constitutionality of of cases. My question, however, is how curious is it of...

Right-wing governments 'increase suicide rates' 23:01 18 September 02 NewScientist.com news service Right-wing governments may sap some people's will to live and result in more suicides, conclude studies in Britain and Australia. The researchers speculate that losers are more likely to kill themselves in the individualistic, "winner-takes-all" societies favoured by right wing governments, because they are left to fend for themselves. Wide disparities in wealth also sharpen any sense of hopelessness, the researchers argue. "If you fail under that ideology, it would accentuate your feelings of failure," says Mary Shaw, whose team at the University of Bristol analysed suicide trends...