Free Republic

With increasing rates of infertility and higher average rates of maternal age, people are turning to assisted reproductive technologies (ART) like in vitro fertilization (IVF) more than ever. More than 8 million babies have been born since the first IVF pregnancy in 1978. Recognizing the emotional agony of dealing with trouble conceiving, it makes sense why IVF is becoming so widely used. IVF provides a glimmer of hope for couples who have faced numerous cycles of negative pregnancy tests. But recently, some light has been shed on less positive aspects of the ART industry, revealing inflated success rates, maternal and...

Correct information about possible aftershocks was being conveyed inaccurately, or someone at Homeland Security was getting truly bad information and relaying it. Either way, it was a problem. An earthquake conspiracy theory forum was—or perhaps several of them were—clearly pushing out false and misleading information about what was going to happen next. Earthquake conspiracy theorists aren’t a huge group, but they do exist and have an immense amount of sway over their dedicated fans. They would say they are rogue scientists, unfairly reviled by their more mainstream colleagues for having mastered prediction, the ultimate goal of seismology. They say they’re...

In a decade, high speed travel via outer space will represent an annual market of at least $20 billion and compete with long-distance airline flights, UBS says. UBS expects the broader space industry, which is worth about $400 billion today, will double to $805 billion by 2030. Long haul airplane flights that are more than 10 hours in duration would "be cannibalized" by point-to-point flights on rockets, UBS said. UBS believes there will be very lucrative ramifications from the space flight efforts currently led by Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and Blue Origin. A lengthy UBS report published on Sunday found...

Bill Nye, the climate activist and renowned television host of “Bill Nye The Science Guy,” came out in support of the Green New Deal, a plan to combat climate change by investing in eco-friendly jobs. “AOC gets it. She sees that fear is dividing us. We can address income inequality. We can address climate change, if we get together and get to work. #SXSW @AOC,” Nye tweeted with a photo of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), one of the plans most vocal advocates.Nye has long discussed the dangers of failing to address climate change and has advocated for bold proposals to...

I appreciate honest marketing. Don’t lie to me what hotel I stay at will make me smarter or that my body spray is going to make me irresistible to women.... These are uncomfortable topics but we may as well air them out right now. This is a ballsy move on Lulu’s part but things have gotten hairy on the women’s side of the business with stiff competition from Nike (NKE - Analyst Report) and Under Armour (UA - Analyst Report) leading to shrinking sales. However, on the Men’s side, revenues were up 21% last quarter. The Men’s business accounts for...

Procter & Gamble is raising the creative bar on advertising because too frequently such marketing efforts are full of stuff that stinks, said Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer for the Cincinnati-based company. “When we’re at our best, we paint a brand masterpiece, clearing the highest bar of creative brilliance,” Pritchard said during a recent meeting of some of the world’s top advertisers and agency representatives. “But too often we produce crap.”

...The crowd was so large that when Cruz spoke the Wilkses had to open the pool patio doors to accommodate about 100 guests who stood in 28 degree weather to listen to the senator.Cruz allies said the two-day gathering, capping off with a rally where Cruz delivered his standard stump speech, followed by a performance from the Christian rock band The Newsboys, was an overwhelming success. By the end of the six-hour meeting Monday, dozens of the visitors lined up outside a closed room to tape video endorsements of the Cruz presidential bid. Some attended Super PAC and campaign fundraisers...

The quality of mercy is always strained, but snake oil comes raw and unfiltered, harvested from ever more lethal snakes. You might think the accounts of the suffering of those stricken with the Ebola virus would soften the hearts of snake-oil salesmen. But the more horrific the suffering, the more inspired the sales pitches. The con men are flooding the Internet and some homeopathic health stores with tonics and elixirs that boast of miraculous powers to prevent or cure sickness from the Ebola virus. The grim fact is that there is neither a preventative nor a cure. Josephine P. Briggs,...

Democrat and Republican members of Congress admittedly did not write or read law they approved impacting both the financial and personal behavior of every citizen of every age.Now this gang of fraudulent, deceitful, scurrilous hucksters pretend egregious shock at the fact that their free fall defense of our Constitution gave over to the administrative branch the ability to create regulations having the enforcement of law whereby religious liberty is no longer a fundamental right of Americans. Rather, it is a conditional concept susceptible to the capacious whim of a federal civil employee.Now come the ‘leaders’ of Congressional thieves of money,...

One consequence of Utah being a mostly Mormon state is that the potential for affinity fraud can be higher than in other states. A fraudster can use his activity or status within the Mormon Church to fool church members into trusting him. An example of this in Ogden was Val Southwick, who cheated investors out of millions. Fortunately, Southwick sits in prison now. Of course, affinity fraud is not confined to the LDS Church. Probably the best-known case of massive affinity fraud is that committed by Bernie Madoff, who is alleged to have defrauded investors of up to $50 billion....

According to NBER.orgthe National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession officially ended June, 2009. Yet unemployment just went UP to 9.8%. So we are not in recession folks; we have been out of it since mid-2009. What is keeping unemployment so HIGH?

De Beers says it will reduce its production to extend the life of its mines. Taking into account the moderated output diamond prices could rise by at least 5 per cent a year for the next five years, according to Des Kilalea, a diamond analyst at RBC Capital Markets. In 2008 De Beers produced 48m carats and the company will cut production to 40m in 2011. In the last two decades the industry has found no new diamond deposit to match the two biggest mines in Africa, owned by De Beers, or the best Russian mines of Alrosa, the other...

Conservative bloggers are calling for a boycott of the company. Executives say the series, in which Santa is warned the North Pole could melt before Christmas, was intended to inspire children.St. Louis - First, Chicken Little warned children that the sky was falling. And now Build-a-Bear Workshop has warned children that the North Pole could disappear before Christmas. The Missouri-based company has found itself in hot water, defending an animated series on its website featuring polar bears, penguins and Mrs. Claus, as Santa is warned that global warming is "a serious situation." Conservative bloggers reposted the videos online and called...

If we're going to spend $150 billion, I'd like to suggest that maybe we add two lanes of highway from Bangor all the way to Miami on I-95. A third of the United States population lives within 100 miles of that. This nation's infrastructure is falling apart. And if we built those lanes of highways -- with American labor, American steel, American concrete - I believe it would do more to stimulate the economy. And the reason I say that is because when we were going through a recession in my state, we were in the middle of a billion-dollar...

Is Huckabee's highway plan the nuttiest thing to come out of this presidential election? I don't want to speak too authoritatively, because I certainly haven't tried to catalogue every nutty thing everyone has said. But it certainly seems like a good candidate. I say that as the daughter of an avid transportation infrastructure advocate--indeed, my dad just co-authored a report on transportation finance for the next 50 years, which I hope he'll be joining me for a podcast on next week. Transportation spending takes years, even decades, to complete, which makes it less than ideal for stimulus spending. In a...

LITTLE ROCK — Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign, like Huckabee himself, is a lot thinner than it used to be. In a sense, the campaign has come full circle, according to Huckabee’s press secretary, Alice Stewart. “We’re getting back to where we started,” Stewart said Thursday in an interview with the Arkansas News Bureau at Huckabee’s national campaign headquarters in downtown Little Rock. “We got through Iowa being lean and a small campaign with a very focused message, and we’re now to the point where we are a lean staff but very committed, very dedicated and very loyal to the governor...

SYDNEY (AFP) — Global warming is occurring at a faster rate than the worst-case scenario envisaged by experts just six years ago, Australia's top climate change scientist said Thursday. Tim Flannery, named the 2007 Australian of the Year for his work in alerting the public to the dangers of global warming, said the issue was the greatest challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Flannery said predictions in a 2001 UN report, warning the atmosphere was likely to warm by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius (2.5-10.4 Fahrenheit) from 1990 to 2100 now appeared conservative. "In the six years since then,...

On Saturday, March 8, 2003, CNN’s Renay San Miguel interviewed Joe Wilson.   CNN SATURDAYInterview With Joseph WilsonAired March 8, 2003 - 15:00 ETSAN MIGUEL: How could this happen? It is the perception that documents like these are vetted to within an inch of their life by intelligence agencies. How do you think this managed to slip by?WILSON: Well, this particular case is outrageous. I actually started my foreign service career in Niger and ended my foreign service career doing -- in charge of Africa in the Clinton White House. We know a lot about the uranium business in Niger,...

The IRS gives April 15 special meaning, but a bill pending in Congress could make it just another beautiful spring day. The Fair Tax Act would repeal all federal income taxes, payroll taxes and estate/gift taxes, replacing them with a sales tax effective January 1, 2007. The Fair Tax would be paid on all purchases within the United States of any new goods or services for final consumption. The tax would be 23 cents of each dollar spent. That rate is calculated to be "revenue neutral" on a static basis to assure it will raise the same amount of funds...

More From The Mississippi Press OPINION Fair Tax offers more freedom, more wealth Tuesday, August 02, 2005 Please do this experiment with me. Take a look at your last week's pay stub. See that nice big figure on top? O.K. I know it's customary to complain about salaries. See that relatively nice big figure on top? Now look at all the figures below that start eating away at your pay, leaving you with the hungry little number at the bottom. Draw a line through all those pay-stealing numbers and circle your gross pay in red. That's the amount you would...