Free Republic

Eskimos face hard times after Iraq call-up By MARY PEMBERTON, Associated Press Writer Mon Jun 19, 7:08 PM ET ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Military families across America often endure hardship when a loved one ships out. But there are not many places in the U.S. where those left behind have to chop ice out of the tundra for drinking water and make sure the freezer is well-stocked with walrus and seal meat. The first major call-up of National Guard reservists from rural Alaska since World War II could mean sacrifice and upheaval for Eskimo villages that practice subsistence hunting and gathering...

Only in Canada: The say the Mounties "Always get their man," but it's the widows who pay. This is a disgrace! WIDOWS OF Mounties killed recently on duty in Alberta, including one shot dead during a standoff, have been stuck with hefty funeral bills by the national police force. Lesley Massey said the RCMP insisted on a full regimental funeral for her husband Dennis, a 33-year member who died in a traffic accident when a trailer came loose from a gas tanker and landed on his car. Massey said the force told her it would handle all arrangements, which it...

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers are proposing that the first battle for survival-of-the-fittest might have played out as a simple physical duel between fatty bubbles stuffed with genetic material. The scientists suggest that genetic material that replicated quickly may have been all the bubbles needed to edge out their competitors and begin evolving into more sophisticated cells. This possibility, revealed by laboratory experiments with artificial fatty acid sacs, is in sharp contrast to a current theory of the earliest evolution of cells, which suggests that cellular evolution was driven by primordial genetic machinery that actively synthesized cell membranes or otherwise...