Free Republic

A 55-gallon drum of nuclear waste, buried in a salt shaft 2,150 feet under the New Mexico desert, violently erupted late on Feb. 14 and spewed mounds of radioactive white foam. The flowing mass, looking like whipped cream but laced with plutonium, went airborne, traveled up a ventilation duct to the surface and delivered low-level radiation doses to 21 workers. The accident contaminated the nation's only dump for nuclear weapons waste — previously a focus of pride for the Energy Department — and gave the nation's elite ranks of nuclear chemists a mystery they still cannot unravel. Six months after...

Sooner or later, we’re going to have to admit that the Russians aren't half the ally they pretend to be, or should have been. For a while after the fall of the USSR, it seemed that the long fight was over, but it’s beginning to look as though that was just wishful thinking. Oh, the happy-go-lucky nineties, when we thought we had no enemies. Russia has been moving backwards from democracy towards a more totalitarian government for years, a process that has accelerated under former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. Russia has tightened its grip on the former provinces of the...