Free Republic

Joy Tiz ©2010 Get these Russian spies out of here before they start talking. The spies, who lived in the U.S. for ten years on Putin’s dime, will be swapped out for ten prisoners currently held in Russian jails. There’s no question that the powers that be don’t want these people talking. But who has the bigger investment in keeping them quiet—the Kremlin or Washington, DC? While the bird cage liner media would like us to believe that these were a bunch of bumbling incompetents, in reality, they got quite a lot done. Certainly a trial of the spies could...

A prisoner swap is being planned to bring 10 suspected Russian spies back from the US, according to reports from Russia.

They were strangers living in different parts of the world till about three months ago, when terminal liver failure brought them together in Delhi. Now, 18-month-old Nigerian boy Dike and 44-year-old Mumbai resident Priya have become India's first patients to successfully undergo a swap liver transplant surgery. Unable to find suitable donors with a matching blood group for either Dike or Priya, doctors from Sir Ganga Ram Hospital decided to try out a liver swap, much on the lines of a swap kidney transplant, which has now become common. Five months after his birth, doctors diagnosed Dike with Billiary Atresia...

Central banks around the world on Sunday night announced they would restore currency swap agreements that were introduced during the financial crisis, in an attempt to ease the strain on banks caused by the European sovereign debt crisis. The move by the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, and the Swiss National Bank was part of an audacious coordinated package by global authorities to combat escalating financial market tensions, including an emergency funding facility worth as much as €720bn in loan guarantees and credits. The Bank of Japan was meeting on Monday...

"...Sorry to be the “fly in the ointment” but..."

SAN FRANCISCO – It's safe to say Stephen Fowler probably wishes he never appeared on "Wife Swap." Fowler's stint on the ABC reality show last month, in which he called a rural Missouri woman spending two weeks in his San Francisco home stupid and simple, has made him famous in the worst way. His performance has inspired a Web site, StephenFowlerSucks.com, a Facebook group, "I Can not Stand Stephen Fowler from `Wife Swap,'" and public condemnation by his own wife, who on her blog urged him to get professional help. What has generated such wrath is Fowler's condescending treatment...

Press Release Release Date: February 3, 2009 For release at 10:00 a.m. EST The Federal Reserve on Tuesday announced the extension through October 30, 2009, of its existing liquidity programs that were scheduled to expire on April 30, 2009. The Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) took these actions in light of continuing substantial strains in many financial markets. The Board of Governors approved the extension through October 30 of the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (AMLF), the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF), the Money Market Investor Funding Facility (MMIFF), the Primary...

... "These Credit Default Swaps have been written (as insurance is written) as private contracts. There is nil government regulation of them. Who writes these policies? Banks. Investment banks. Insurance companies. They now owe the buyers of these Credit Default Swaps on junk mortgage debt trillions of dollars. It is this liability that is the bottomless pit of liability for the financial institutions of America." ...

Palestinian sources reported that a prisoner swap deal between Israel and the Palestinian organizations will start to be carried out secretly in Amman, Jordan within the next day. This was reported by Saudi newspaper, Okaz. As of now, there is no authorization of this report from any other body. According to the report, Israel will release the Hamas minister and parliament members detained in Israel within the next day. Simultaneously, the release of kidnapped soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit will be announced Sunday. In the next stage, according to the report, Israel is expected to release 740 Palestinian prisoners in two...

DUBAI (Reuters) - Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in remarks aired on Tuesday his group would only release the two Israeli soldiers it kidnapped if Israel freed Samir al-Qantar, the Lebanese prisoner held for the longest time by the Jewish state. "After all that happened and this ends without Samir?" Nasrallah told Al Jazeera television in an interview. Nasrallah stopped short of saying the group would not set the release of other prisoners as part of its conditions. "There are other prisoners," the interviewer said. "You ask me, will there be a deal without Samir, I say no ......

Israel, Palestinians to swap prisoners within 48 hours: report Israel will release 1,400 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for its soldier taken hostage in Gaza since late June, the Qatar-based al-Sharq daily reported on Monday. According to a deal, which will take effect within 48 hours, Israel will release Hamas ministers and lawmakers and reopen crossing points into Gaza, the report said. Israel will also stop assassinations and return tax revenues owned to the Palestinian National Authority, it added. In addition to the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit, who was seized by Palestinian militant groups on June 25, the Palestinians are...

Did the Ancient Greeks and Native Americans Swap Starcharts? Author Ker Than I had a story on SPACE.com yesterday about a very cool discovery: a one-thousand year old petroglyph, or rock carving, that was found in Arizona and which might depict the supernova of 1006, or SN 1006. The carving is presumed to have been made an ancient group of Native Americans called the Hohokam. The researcher who made the discovery argues that symbols of a scorpion and stars on the petroglyph match the relative positions of SN 1006 to the constellation Scorpius when the star first exploded. Well, after...

ThePirateBay is back from the dead again Reports of its demise greatly exaggerated By Nick Farrell: Sunday 04 June 2006, 23:09 THE P2P site ThePirateBay is back from the dead, despite claims from various anti-piracy groups that it had been sunk. The site went back online on Saturday at 6:07PM Eastern Standard Time, and already seems to be a bit busy, probably because it is not running at full capacity again. It is not clear if any of the smaller businesses that were also using the same ISP are back online. The last email we received from GameSwitch, that outfit...

Almost swapped a lower end Dell Inspiron 1200 for a 1984 300ZX the other day. Despite the fact that it was full of rust, if the motor had been running, I would have taken it. But there's something about a slipped timing belt and valve slap that made me say no. So I'm discussing it with a friend here at work, and he mentions that he has a 1987 Alfa Romeo Milano Platinum that he would be interested in swapping for the laptop. Only problems is that it needs a new headlight cluster switch inside the steering column, and there's...

A former school official in San Antonio wants to change the name of an elementary school from one with Confederate connotations to one with socialist ones because the former is racist, reports the San Antonio Express-News.

"A more vital piece of U.S. history would be hard to find," gushed the Boston Globe last week about a new item in the Kennedy Library and Museum, a map of Cuba. The Library obtained it from the estate of Robert L. White, a collector who had earlier received it from JFK's late secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. "This map bears the marks of history," continues the Globe story, "a series of X marks in black ink, crosshatched east and west of Havana by President John F. Kennedy, and two foreboding words scrawled above them: 'missile sites.' This map was used by...

"We didn't swap wives — we swapped lives." — Mike Kekich "Don't make anything sordid out of this." — Fritz Peterson Yeah, right. It was only the strangest trade in baseball history. On March 5, 1973, at the New York Yankees' spring training camp in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson announced they had swapped wives, two children apiece and even family dogs. (For the record, the Kekiches had a terrier, the Petersons a poodle.)

More than 9 million people across the country are expected to watch Minneapolis resident Mina Leierwood make her television debut tonight on ABC's reality hit "Wife Swap." It's a strange move for a 39-year-old Quaker art teacher who doesn't watch TV. "I just figured that somebody had to step up and say how they felt," said Leierwood during an interview Tuesday morning at the MayDay Cafe in South Minneapolis. "I wanted to see a pacifist on TV." The producers of "Wife Swap," a show where two women from different mindsets trade families for two weeks, sought out Leierwood two days...

Saudi Arabia has denied swapping Saudi inmates with Western prisoners in an effort to secure release of its nationals from the Guantanamo Bay US naval base. "We would never swap our nationals ... but we use all possible means to bring them back from Guantanamo or any other prison," Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told a news conference aired on the Al-Ekhbaria news channel. He was responding to a question about press reports claiming that Riyadh swapped Western prisoners with Saudi inmates in the US prison in Cuba. Two Canadian newspapers said on Friday they had evidence that seven Western...

A professor at Tokyo University in Japan has been arrested and charged with copyright offences after developing a computer program that promises to let users share files with anonymity. Isamu Kaneko, a 33-year-old academic, wrote a file-sharing program called "Winny". This promises users the ability to share audio and video files through a network built on top of ordinary internet traffic, but without revealing network address of their computer to other users. Kaneko was arrested on suspicion of offering copyrighted material for download through the program himself. In Japan, violating copyright law can be punished with a maximum sentence of...