Free Republic

Plans to build the tallest skyscraper in the United States are shaping up in an unlikely metropolis: Oklahoma City. Developers at a real estate company are adjusting the already ambitious plans to construct the Boardwalk at Bricktown Tower by a few hundred feet to make the building reach 1,907 feet high — which would make it the tallest in the country, the Oklahoma City Free Press reported. “The symbolic height honors the year that Oklahoma was admitted as the 46th state of the United States,” Matteson Capital said in a statement.

How to Simulate Being A Sailor 1. Buy a dumpster, paint it gray inside and out, and live in it for six months. 2. Run all the pipes and wires in your house exposed on the walls. 3. Repaint your entire house every month. 4. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of the bathtub and move the shower head to chest level. When you take showers, make sure you turn off the water while you soap down. 5. Put lube oil in your humidifier and set it on high. 6. Once a week, blow air up your...

Renovation work is underway at the main synagogue in central Beirut, after approval from the Lebanese government, planning authorities and even Hezbollah. The work, which is being funded by private donors and a Lebanese construction firm, began two weeks ago, according to various media reports. Built in the 1920s, the synagogue is located in the neighborhood of Wadi Abu Jamil, close to Lebanese parliament and other government buildings in downtown Beirut.

Federal agents are on the hunt for a former California Water Services Company employee who quit his job a few weeks ago, broke into the firm's computers to wire $9 million into overseas bank accounts and then fled the region when confronted with criminal charges in Santa Clara County. In court documents filed today in federal court in San Jose, law enforcement officials have charged Abdirahman Ismail Abdi with unlawful flight from prosecution after he disappeared from the area earlier this month. Local prosecutors and police determined that Abdi has been trying to flee the country since at least May...

(IsraelNN.com) A near-lynch by an Arab mob in Jerusalem ended without casualties on Monday, as rioters confronted soldiers in several locales. Arab students at Israeli universities held pro-Palestinian Authority demonstrations, as well. Rioting, rock-throwing and firebomb attacks by Arab mobs were reported in several locations in municipal Had they been able to, the Arab attackers "would have lynched us, not just the car." Jerusalem during the day. In one instance, two municipal workers escaped a lynch mob on Salah A-Din Street, a main road in the eastern part of the capital. On Monday night, they described the event to Mayor...

BAGHDAD — Coalition officials are taking advantage of a decline in insurgent violence to jumpstart a transition into long-term stability operations, a U.S. commander said Nov. 11 in Baghdad. Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of Multinational Division Center, told reporters in the International Zone that with the effects of the U.S. troop surge bearing positive fruit in the form of reduced attack numbers, reduced casualties, and an increase in weapons cache finds, U.S. forces can pay more attention to capacity building in Iraq’s towns and provinces. “(Iraqi) civilian casualties since the first of July are down by 42 percent,...

Pelosi: Global Warming Already Underway Global warming is already underway, but it is not too late to slow it down and reduce its harmful effects, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Global warming is already underway, but it is not too late to slow it down and reduce its harmful effects, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi following the release of a report by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II on the effects of climate change. "The new scientific report on global warming warns that global warming is already affecting the earth and that the effects are likely to...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 11, 2006 -- The media spotlight shone on the Pentagon today, five years after the terrorist attack killed 184 people here. NBC Today Show correspondent Lester Holt reports from the courtyard of the Pentagon Sept. 11, 2006, as part of a broadcast remembering the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Photo by Jim Garamone  '(Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. The signs of chaos have been erased, and NBC’s “Today” show broadcast from the courtyard of the Pentagon this morning. On the other side of the courtyard, radio hosts from around America interviewed government officials as part...

FORT HUACHUCA — This year and next will be the toughest for the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, the service’s top enlisted soldier said Friday. Equating too many things coming together at once to the movie “The Perfect Storm,” Sgt. Maj. of the Army Kenneth O. Preston said the Army is in the midst of a major transformation of creating more brigade combat teams, movement of forces from overseas locations, base closures and realignments, recruiting more soldiers and continuing to fight terrorism. What cannot be lost is protecting the nation, he told nearly 700 noncommissioned soldiers and officers during a...

CAMP TAQADDUM, Iraq (Feb. 14, 2006) -- Deployed Marines often depend on their ability to freely travel the skies to accomplish their missions. If that ability is endangered, so are those missions. At Camp Taqaddum, the condition of the flight line here is in need of improvement, which is where the Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133, 30th Naval Construction Regiment, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force is coming into action. The unit is helping ensure that airborne assets and transportation remains a dependable facet the overall military force here. Petty Officer 1st Class Timothy A. Gridley, in charge of the runway project...

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Palestinian prosecutors froze bank accounts and seized assets of dozens of suspects in a widening corruption probe of senior government officials believed to have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds, the Palestinian attorney general said. The suspects have been barred from leaving the Palestinian areas and their names have been forwarded to officials at the Gaza-Egypt and West Bank-Jordan crossings, Attorney General Ahmed al-Meghani told The Associated Press late Wednesday in a telephone interview. Earlier this week, al-Meghani said his investigation concluded that Palestinian Authority officials may have stolen billions of dollars from...

PERSIAN GULF (NNS) -- Air and surface forces of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group are conducting Search and Rescue (SAR) operations in the Persian Gulf after a Sailor from the guided-missile cruiser USS Princeton (CG 59) was discovered missing Sept. 13. An immediate and thorough search aboard Princeton began after the Sailor failed to report for watch that morning. After the search of every space aboard the ship did not locate the Sailor, SAR operations began from the point of the ship’s position when the Sailor was last seen, combing the area for any sign of the Sailor. The Sailor...

CAMP SYKES, Iraq (Army News Service, Sept. 13, 2005) – Scores of insurgents were reportedly killed, detained or fled from the town of Tal Afar Sept. 11 as Coalition forces launched an offensive into the city, located about 30 miles west of Mosul in northern Iraq. Now reconstruction and re-establishment of infrastructure in the city has been turned over to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment’s 401st Civil Affairs Battalion. The civil affairs Soldiers have already been working on short-term projects in Tal Afar, including school refurbishments, supplying food, road repair, fixing electrical problems, digging wells for drinking water and starting...

Watching the Signs The race for 2008 is already underway on the Republican side, you just have to know what to look for.NOT SINCE 1952 has a presidential election lacked a sitting president or vice president as a contestant, and Ike was about as close as one could get to non-official incumbent. Before that, it was the 1928 race, and there, too, Herbert Hoover was, like Ike, a figure of towering popularity. In other words, there has never not been a front-runner in at least one party in the modern scrambles for the presidency. Here is a bit of evidence...