Free Republic

But groundbreaking in spring The founding president of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate yesterday said he is giving up on seeking federal funds for the legacy project, $30 million short of the total the institute has requested from Congress. “We had this request in and we felt that either we get it this year or we don’t, and we’re not going to go back,” said Peter Meade, president of the institute. “I doubt we’re going back to ask for any more. The institute, a $150 million project to honor the liberal lion, already has nabbed $38...

The Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate today unveiled renderings for its approximately $60 million site, which is expected to break ground in Dorchester this fall. The institute will be located next to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum on the University of Massachusetts-Boston campus. [Snip] Sen. Kennedy envisioned the institute as a living, breathing, constantly evolving bipartisan center that would reflect his passion for education, history and civic engagement. The institute hopes to raise $125 million to cover the building expenses and start an endowment, Meade said. Federal earmarks worth $38.6 million have already been...

Lloyd Grove at the DB writing from the Aspen Ideas thingamajig where Obama's economic policies are apparently being lambasted by Niall Ferguson and Mort Zuckerman: “We are, without question, in a period of decline, particularly in the business world,” Zuckerman said. “The real problem we have…are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.” Zuckerman added that he detects in the Obama White House “hostility to the very kinds of [business] culture that have made this the great country that it is and was. I think...

U.S. President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo last week robbed Judaism of its legacy and threatens the existence of the Jewish state, according to Temple Institute Rabbi Chaim Richman. The rabbi also said the president’s comments were in essence perverse and obscene. He responded point by point to President Obama’s speech in which he said that “settlements are illegitimate,” that the re-establishment of the State of Israel is rooted in the Holocaust, and that denying the Holocaust is a sin but that Iran, whose leader denies the Holocaust, has a right to nuclear power

Creation institute sues coordinating board By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz April 21, 2009 The Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research Graduate School has sued the state’s higher education agency for denying permission to offer a master’s degree in science education. The Bible-oriented group contends in a lawsuit filed last week in federal court that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board violated its civil rights. The suit, first reported by the Dallas Morning News, argues that the coordinating board discriminated against the institute because it doesn’t support evolution. Members of the coordinating board, who are gubernatorial appointees, voted 8-0 a year ago to...

Gainesville, Florida - A nuclear space power institute at the University of Florida has been raided by the FBI. Supervisory Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen Rhew in Tallahassee says search warrants were served at the university's Innovative Nuclear Space Power and Propulsion Institute. University of Florida spokesman Steve Orlando says the FBI was in the office of professor Samim Anghaie, the Iranian-born director of the institute. Rhew would not comment on the investigation but did say no arrest warrants have been issued. Orlando says the university is cooperating with the investigation and Anghaie's employment status is being reviewed.

Eugenics … death of the defenceless The legacy of Darwin’s cousin Galton By Russell Grigg Few ideas have done more harm to the human race in the last 120 years than those of Sir Francis Galton. He founded the evolutionary pseudo-science of eugenics. Today, ethnic cleansing, the use of abortion to eliminate ‘defective’ unborn babies, infanticide, euthanasia, and the harvesting of unborn babies for research purposes all have a common foundation in the survival-of-the-fittest theory of eugenics. So who was Galton, what is eugenics, and how has it harmed humanity?...

George Soros finally gets it February 21, 2009 – 1:56 pm Three weeks ago, the positively schizophrenic Op-Ed page for the WSJ published yet another piece by a big financial brain proposing a “solution” to the financial crisis. While the editorial page itself is so rigidly ideological as to be useless, the op-ed page publishes stuff all over the map. The only common attribute seems to be a big-name byline. Once in a while you’ll get a thoughtful, nuanced and hard-hitting piece by Shelby Steele or Judy Shelton, for instance; occasionally, one of the big names will actually say something...

The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax we citizens for our carbon footprints. Only two details stand in the way, the faltering economic times and a dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have lead to a rise in public awareness that CO2 is not a pollutant and is not a significant greenhouse gas that is triggering runaway global warming. How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving big...

A public policy organization has issued an urgent alert stating affirmative votes are needed from only two more states before a Constitutional Convention could be assembled in which "today's corrupt politicians and judges" could formally change the U.S. Constitution's "'problematic' provisions to reflect the philosophical and social mores of our contemporary society." "Don't for one second doubt that delegates to a Con Con wouldn't revise the First Amendment into a government-controlled privilege, replace the 2nd Amendment with a 'collective' right to self-defense, and abolish the 4th, 5th, and 10th Amendments, and the rest of the Bill of Rights," said the...

<p>NSTITUTE, W.Va. -- Witnesses reported seeing a red fireball and feeling a blast as far away as Charleston, after an explosion was reported at the Bayer Crop Science Plant in Institute at 10:35 p.m. Thursday. The explosion was heard at least as far away as Mink Shoals.</p>

A publicly funded, world-class research institute that would develop answers to the threat posed by climate-changing greenhouse gases is being crafted in the Legislature, and is among the last-minute proposals expected to come before the Legislature in the closing days of this year's legislative session. The plan differs sharply from the original blueprint proposed by California's top utilities regulator, state Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey. Legislation encompassing the new, estimated $87 million-a-year plan is likely to be completed within a few days. At time when public attention is focused on California's $15.2 billion budget shortage, the proposed California Institute...

A plan pushed by California’s top utilities regulator to set up a ratepayer-financed, $60 million-a-year institute at the University of California is running into opposition in the Capitol, where the legislators’ lawyer says the scheme is illegal and angry lawmakers sense a ploy to circumvent their authority. Michael Peevey, the president of the Public Utilities Commission, described the California Institute for Climate Solutions as a “groundbreaking path to find solutions to the most pressing problem of our time.” Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, following the PUC’s unanimous vote in April to approve the institute, agreed, saying the new facility would “bring...

California's stem cell institute has granted nearly $271 million to 12 universities and research centers to build new research laboratories. In 2004, Californians approved Proposition 71, a measure that created the California Institute for Regernerative Medicine, a $3 billion stem cell research agency. The institute says the new labs are needed to house the glut of researchers who flocked to the state to study stem cells. The largest grant announced Wednesday for a single campus will be $43.6 million for Stanford University. Nearly $137 million in funding will be divided between eight University of California campuses, with UC San Francisco...

On Jan. 10, just one day after my article on UFO secrecy appeared in this newspaper and on this Web site (“Intelligent Extraterrestrial life: The Other Inconvenient truth?” Jan. 9), I was unceremoniously dropped as a Cato Institute adjunct scholar, a position I’d held for more than 20 years. First some background. I’m a Ph.D. economist with a national reputation in the antitrust area. I’ve written books, journal articles, and many dozens of op-ed articles over the years on a variety of public-policy issues. My association with the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D. C. goes back many decades. Yet...

Teachers' Institute Opens in Rasheed By Pfc. Nathaniel Smith 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division Public Affairs BAGHDAD, March 14, 2007 -- The Iraqi National Police and Multi-National Division-Baghdad Forces opened the Mutanabi Teachers' Institute in the Rasheed district of the Iraqi capital, March 13. The institute was opened at the Netaaken School, a school for girls, ages 12 through 19, in the southern district. "The Iraqi government and the coalition forces work hard because they have one goal, to build a new Iraq." Sabeeh Al Ka'abi, the head of the Al Rasheed District Action Council Sabeeh Al...

To the dismay of some advocates for the disabled and sick, a draft report issued today by California's $3 billion stem-cell institute says the agency is unlikely to develop cures for diseases or other ailments any time soon. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine's proposed strategic plan, written by a group that included two Nobel scientists, methodically sets out a detailed blueprint for eventually turning stem cells into treatments for a variety of health problems. But the plan -- which must be approved by the institute's board -- cautions that stem cell science remains in its infancy and that much...

Biotech company executives in the Bay Area met Tuesday to begin working with California's sputtering stem-cell research institute, which was jump-started last week by the $150 million boost it got from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. ``I feel we are at a very important point in history here,'' said Michael West, chairman and chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology of Alameda. He added that it was essential ``do do everything we possibly can to see that money is well spent.'' Still, the executives who met in San Francisco with officials at the stem-cell institute, created in 2004 when California voters passed...

London - Iran could be able to produce between 20 and 25 kilos of highly-enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon by 2010, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London said Wednesday. 'The IISS estimate of 2010 remains valid,' the institute said in its report The Military Balance 2006 published Wednesday. Other estimates of an Iranian nuclear weapons capacity by 2009, or even 2008, were 'within the margin of error, given the number of unknowns', the report said. It stressed that the limited access of the IAEA nuclear watchdog to Iran's facilities required policymakers 'to rely on worst-case assumptions...

Msgr. R. Michael Schmitz, Vicar General of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, will be interviewed on Relevant Radio's "Morning Air" on Monday, 22 May, at 8:00 am CET. On that same day, Monsignor Schmitz will also be celebrating the Mass which is broadcast by the Catholic radio network at 8:30 pm CET, in the Traditional Latin Rite. For frequencies go to www.relevantradio.com. For streaming audio go to http://www.relevantradio.com/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?&pid=287&srcid=217.