Free Republic

This past weekend’s Wall Street Journal carried an article entitled “Our Most Peculiar President” which reviews two new books on former President Richard M. Nixon. The reviewer concludes that Mr. Nixon was an extreme introvert in an extreme extrovert job. The lengths to which Mr. Nixon would go to avoid engagement in social discourse – focused primarily on conversations with others – were extraordinary. Virtually everyone in Washington was aware of Mr. Nixon’s peculiarities – meaning that the press had to also know – and yet it was left to the historians to compile and comment on those peculiarities decades...

Americans believe that there are six times as many gays and lesbians in the population as there actually are, according to new data released by Gallup. According to Gallup’s tracking surveys in the first four of 2015, 3.8 percent of the U.S. adult population says they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. However, in a survey conducted May 6-10, Gallup asked: “Just your best guess, what percent of Americans today would you say are gay or lesbian?” On average, Americans said it was 23.2 percent. …

(CBS) If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed" 2009 H1N1 or "swine flu" in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu. In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all. That's according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation. The ramifications of this finding are important. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Britain's National Health Service, once you have H1N1 flu, you're immune from future outbreaks of the same virus. Those who think they've had H1N1 flu -- but haven't -- might...

In late July, the CDC abruptly advised states to stop testing for H1N1 flu, and stopped counting individual cases. The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was: why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there's an epidemic? Some public health officials privately disagreed with the decision to stop testing and counting, telling CBS News that continued tracking of this new and possibly changing virus was important because H1N1 has a different epidemiology, affects younger people more than seasonal flu and has been shown to have a higher...

(CBS) If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed" 2009 H1N1 or "swine flu" in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu. In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all. That's according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation. The ramifications of this finding are important. According to the Center for Disease Control, CDC, and Britain's National Health Service, once you have H1N1 flu, you're immune from future outbreaks of the same virus. Those who think they've had H1N1 flu -- but haven't -- might mistakenly presume...

PRINCETON, New Jersey (CNN) -- During the past few months, two events have revealed a side of President Obama that we knew little about. First came his remark in July when he said at a press conference that the police who arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates had acted "stupidly." The unrehearsed remark triggered controversy right at a time when Democrats needed to focus public attention on health care. And last week, at a climactic moment for the health care debate in the Senate, Obama suddenly went to make a personal pitch for holding the 2016 Summer Olympics in Chicago,...

CHICAGO (AFP) – While a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet will have devastating impacts on global sea levels, a study published Thursday found the anticipated impact has been seriously overestimated. Using new measures of the ice sheet's geometry, British and Dutch researchers predict its collapse would cause sea levels to rise by 3.2 meters (11 feet) rather than previous estimates of five to seven meters. However, the study published in the journal Science found that even a one meter rise in sea levels would be significant enough to weaken the Earth's gravity field in the southern hemisphere and...

Aids in Africa 'overestimated' By Adrian Blomfield in Nairobi (Filed: 09/01/2004) Millions of Africans believed to have HIV/Aids are free of the disease, according to research published yesterday. The survey will dismay those who claim the West is ignoring a pandemic so acute it could wipe out the populations of entire African states. Scientists said the new report would force a rethink in the way the United Nations measures Aids prevalence on the continent. The preliminary report of the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey suggested that HIV has infected about one million adults in the country. Previous estimates put the...