Free Republic

WASHINGTON — The Navy has published the final draft of its environmental impact statement assessing how it should go about dismantling the former aircraft carrier Enterprise (CVN-65), a process that will likely set decades-long precedents for future nuclear-powered ships. Environmental impact statements, as the name implies, are lengthy documents that outline the dangers to the ecosystem that disposing of decades-old nuclear reactors can pose, as well as identify one of several courses of action with which the Navy prefers to move forward. Due to the numerous state and federal agencies that must weigh in, as well as considering the general...

Appearing Wednesday on NBC’s Late Night with host Seth Meyers, former President Bill Clinton argued that suspending the Senate filibuster would be an act of “preserving democracy” in the United States.

The Federal Trade Commission confirmed a probe into how Facebook secures information shared by billions of users as CEO Mark Zuckerberg fights to regain customer confidence in the social media giant's privacy protections. The commission, which reached a settlement in 2011 with the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company on its handling of user data, "takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook," Tom Pahl, acting director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement on Monday. The commission "has an open non-public investigation into these practices,” he said. The FTC, which enforces...

House Speaker Paul Ryan on Friday gave a major boost to legislative efforts to preserve protections for young undocumented immigrants -- and urged President Donald Trump to not tear up the program. Responding to a question about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, on his hometown radio station WCLO in Janesville, Wisconsin, Ryan said Congress was working on a legislative fix to preserve the program. "I actually don't think he should do that," Ryan said of Trump's consideration of terminating the program. "I believe that this is something that Congress has to fix." Ryan's statement offers the most public...

NEW YORK - Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over. The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969. The Internet "works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions,"...

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libya made clear on Saturday it wanted to come in from the cold after decades as a pariah state, and the United States and Britain promised to reward its decision to abandon banned weapons programs. Almost 15 years to the day since its agents brought down a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Muammar Gaddafi's state opened the prospect of an end to sanctions and a return of U.S. oil firms with a pledge on Friday to stop seeking weapons of mass destruction. Britain said it had been close to an atomic bomb. Some U.S. officials cautioned that...

A plan to let a British company scrap 13 ships from the James River Reserve Fleet came under fire Tuesday amid revelations the pending deal is tied to a sale of two Navy oilers that had not been disclosed to domestic ship-scrappers. The disclosure, made by Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., raised new questions about the fairness of the bidding process used by the Maritime Administration in deciding who should dispose of the obsolete "ghost fleet," which has become a floating environmental hazard. Domestic scrappers expressed frustration that much-needed shipyard work would be sent overseas - under conditions they said made...