Free Republic

MARINE CORPS RECRUIT DEPOT SAN DIEGO, Calif. (August 19, 2005) -- Marines swapped nurses and hospital food for Hooters girls and hot wings Saturday during a trip that got 29 recovering warriors out of their hospital rooms and back to sampling normal life. Patients from Navy hospitals in San Diego and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif., caravanned to Pasadena, Calif., where they were the guests of honor at a Hooters restaurant and the nearby Ice House Comedy Club. America's Heroes of Freedom, a private veterans support organization, bought the comedy tickets and the pre-show feast for the Marines and...

The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica will disappear by 2040, Japanese scientists forceasted yesterday, offering a far more hopeful timeline than previous reasearch predictions.Using a supercomputer to model future global atmospheric conditions, scientists Tatsuya Nagashima and Masaaki Takahashi from Toyko University predicted that the next 15 years will see little or no change in the size of the ozone hole before a slow improvement begins in the late 2030's. From that point on there will be a sudden increase in the amount of ozone into the stratosphere, leading to a full recovery by about 2040.