Free Republic

Radioactive Wild Boars Increase in Number By Jennifer Viegas Radioactive wild boars are on the rise in Germany, where they have attacked and frightened residents, even snarling traffic when they gang up on roadways, according to Spiegel International Online and numerous other media reports over the past couple of weeks. Their radioactivity stems from Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, which happened way back in 1986, but contaminated much of Europe. Apparently the nuclear contamination is still detectable in some animals, including Germany's wild boars. The Spiegel report mentions that German government payments compensating hunters for lost income due to radioactive wild...

Desperate White House Sends Political Team To The Gulf, After Blowing It For The Past Three Months Joe Weisenthal | Jul. 25, 2010, 8:41 AM | 43 | comment 1 The Deepwater Horizon blew up on April 20. It's now almost August. Apparently it took nearly all this time for The White House to realize it was taking a beating over the politics of the situation, and that it ought to start getting head of the controversies. POLITICO: The White House has quietly launched an effort to confront the political backlash along the Gulf Coast over its handling of the...

Per Drudge...server too busy to get article

President Obama came back to work this week after leaving the Presidency for his Hawaiian holiday vacation. Hawaii proved to be a restful retreat for the President, his team and the White House press corps who all took time off from their regular duties to enjoy the Hawaiian sun and ignore their responsibilities. But after 10 days of tropical silence, this week there is a sudden flurry of security reviews, media statements, ass-covering and more misstatements coming out of Washington from the Obama Administration. But we still don’t know why the State Department didn’t revoke the visa of a man...

Celebrations at Bomber's Return to Libya Stir Angry Response; White House Calls the Reception 'Outrageous and Disgusting'LONDON -- The government of Scotland found itself scrambling Friday to control political fallout from a decision to flex its independence by releasing a Libyan man convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Television footage of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi welcoming home Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, and a crowd of Libyans waving Scottish flags has fanned anger about the release. He was allowed to travel to Libya on Thursday despite demands from victims' family members and a host of U.S....

Trying to defuse the U.S. bank test bomb Wed Apr 15, 2009 6:40pm EDT By Karey Wutkowski - Analysis WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration faces one of its most sensitive financial decisions yet -- how to release the results of stress tests on the 19 largest U.S. banks without sending the weaker ones into a tailspin. Intense investor interest and a desire among stronger banks to leak their results to differentiate themselves from rivals has caused regulators to abandon any hope of keeping the results under wraps. The latest government plan is to release some form of the results...

Congressional Democrats careened between the circular firing squad and the three-ring circus Tuesday as they struggled with their new reality: playing defense on the economy. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) blamed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for letting bailed-out insurance giant American International Group pay $165 million in bonuses to its employees, saying he wrote a letter to Geithner two weeks ago warning him of just such a possibility. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), tagged by Republican aides for sponsoring an amendment to the stimulus bill that allowed the bonuses, shifted the blame to the Treasury Department and “the bill conferees,” saying he...

Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) -- The euro had its biggest one-day drop against the yen since its debut in 1999 as the deepening credit crisis prompted European governments to pledge bailouts for troubled banks while stopping short of coordinated action. The 15-nation currency declined to a 14-month low against the dollar and the weakest in 2 1/2 years versus the yen after leaders meeting at the weekend avoided announcing any plan that would mirror the U.S.'s $700 billion bailout. Germany joined with banks and insurers to prevent the collapse of property lender Hypo Real Estate Holding AG and Belgium announced a...

This is my weekly article on the fallout from the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Heller v. District of Columbia. First, given that DC is ground central in the fallout from Heller, we should start there. Earlier this week, the DC City Council did adopt unanimously an emergency 90 day ordinance to create a process for DC residents to acquire handguns and to register handguns that they had and which they wished to legally possess within DC. This would include those DC residents who maintain residences in other areas primarily Members of Congress, judges, high executive officials, Congressional staffers,...

Duck and CoverAdmittedly, Hollywood is not a center of profound intellectual thought. It's been called the "dream capital of the world", and in a real sense this is true. Like dreams, many of Hollywood's movies consist of plots and dialogue that don't make much sense, and characters whose behavior defies the principles of psychology as frequently as it breaks the rules of physics. Some of them, like the dreary antiwar movies of the 1960s, are blatantly political and manipulative. But some of them can only be described as dangerous misinformation cynically disguised as entertainment. One of the worst examples of...

THE HAGUE (AFP) - The Dutch government is ready for any possible fallout of a planned film by far-right MP Geert Wilders that attacks Islam as an "inspiration for murder," Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said Friday. "We are ready to react quickly, it is our role to be prepared for calamities," Balkenende told journalists at his weekly press briefing. Earlier on Friday Dutch media had reported that the government had compiled a secret document on how best to deal with reactions to the film. Wilders, the head of the far-right Freedom Party, announced in November that he planned to...

Washington fears an offensive could destabilise Iraq's most peaceful area and potentially the wider region, but Erdogan has been under mounting pressure to act after Wednesday's vote on the highly sensitive issue of the killings in 1915 of Armenians. The U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee approved a resolution branding the killings genocide -- a charge Turkey hotly denies. The resolution was proposed by a politician with many Armenian-Americans in his district. The United States relies heavily on Turkish bases to supply its war effort in Iraq... The Turkish government cautioned that relations with its NATO ally would be...

Rules: link only http://www.coloradoan.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070922/CSUZONE01/709220352/1002

Ok folks here's the new thread for the new season. Jack, please don't teacup the guns.

Don't even THINK of opening this thread if you don't want to see what happened tonight!

For Senior Jonathan Goldstein, Monday nights from 9-10 p.m. are off limits for everything except FOX’s hit drama, “24.” “My friends know not to call me during that hour,” he said. “It’s not that I’m anti-social about it, I’ll watch it with other people. I just want to be fully focused on what’s happening.” As most people familiar with the show already know, Goldstein is hardly alone. Since its debut in 2001, “24” has become one of the most popular and compelling shows on television. Its debut this season garnered 33 million viewers and the DVD sales of its past...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzFbxsKA6uA&mode=related&search=

McCain starts to feel fallout from Iraq By Philip Sherwell in New York, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 1:28am GMT 17/12/2006 The popularity of John McCain, the decorated Vietnam veteran and strong contender for the Republican 2008 presidential nomination, is being undermined by his support for the Iraq war. As he took his undeclared White House campaign to Baghdad, among a congressional delegation to Iraq, the Arizona senator called for the deployment of up to 35,000 more US troops and made clear that he opposed a timetable for withdrawal. John McCain with other United States senators as they met Nouri al-Maliki...

U.S. Probe Roils Nigeria PoliticsBy DULUE MBACHU LAGOS, Nigeria - A corruption investigation in Washington has roiled Nigeria, leaving the top two leaders publicly trading allegations and nudging a politically volatile country closer to the brink. Nigeria's president claims his estranged vice president is implicated in the bribery case against a U.S. legislator, and the vice president has responded with damaging allegations of his own against the president. The very public feuding in a country where politics often erupts into violence is particularly disturbing for Nigerians because presidential elections in which the vice president is expected to run are just...

PALO ALTO, Calif. - Hewlett-Packard Co. shoved Chairwoman Patricia Dunn off its board Friday, severing its ties to a leader whose efforts to plug a media leak morphed into a spying scandal that has spawned criminal and congressional investigations. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company will turn the chairmanship over to its chief executive, Mark Hurd, who was supposed to take over that job in January as part of changes announced two weeks ago. But things have changed since then amid a wave of leaked documents revealing how deeply HP's investigators intruded into the personal lives of seven directors, nine journalists,...