Recently, the FDA has made rumblings about legitimizing the use of cloned animals in our food chain. Hopefully, these coming policy changes will start a conversation around the United States about the cost of our food. People from the Associated Press and our own BNN have thrown down very good articles covering the economic status [...]

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By Jefferson Flanders To echo that legendary newspaper columnist Jimmy Cannon, nobody asked me, but… SOCIALITE PARIS HILTON topped Google’s list of most-searched-for terms on the search engine’s news site in 2006. Perhaps that should be “newz” site. The late historian Daniel Boorstin would have recognized Paris Hilton as a modern master of the celebrity [...]

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Sometimes to understand what an identity theft victim is faced with you need to hear about it from a person, who has actually experienced it. We live in a world where our information is gathered, sold and not protected very well. Meanwhile, there seems to be an army of fraudsters compromising credit issuers, who issue [...]

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As expected, Saddam Hussein has been hanged in Iraq. The execution was slated to happen before the New Year and the former president’s late attempts to appeal the verdict were unsuccessful, with a US judge rejecting his appeal saying that Hussein was not in US custody. Hussein’s legal team had argued that he was a [...]

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by Ted Lipien FreeMediaOnline.org Free Media Online, Dublin, CA, December 29, 2006 — In an interview aired Friday by the Voice of America (VOA) Russian Service, exiled Russian businessman and President Putin’s critic Boris Berezovsky dismissed the latest accusations by Moscow in the Litvinenko poisoning case as moving beyond absurd into the realm of science [...]

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 by Ted Lipien FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online, Dec. 29, 2006 — Exiled Chechen emissary Akhmed Zakayev revealed that although dissident Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko had converted to Islam on his deathbed, he had been considering such a move for a long time. Mr. Zakayev said that Mr. Litvinenko grew up in the North Caucasus among [...]

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I’m ambivalent about this story from ABC News, coverage of a leaked NRA brochure that “drafts its Second Amendment mission in alarmist terms.” I’m not sure “alarmist” is accurate — the NRA’s fears are very real — but the statements are overdramatic and insulting. For the record, the brochure was stolen in production, so it [...]

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Everybody knows that the loss of huge portions of their home U.S. market to imports has decimated U.S.-owned automakers Ford and GM (as well as Chrysler, which is no longer U.S.-owned, but shares many of Detroit’s biggest problems). What everybody doesn’t know is that literally dozens of U.S.-based manufacturing industries have suffered the same kinds [...]

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The United States has tapped the Philippines for additional 50,000 metric tons of raw sugar to help stabilize supply following the onslaught of hurricane Katrina last year. Lawyer Ma. Victoria Magcase, a director of state-owned Philippine International Trading Corp., said the Philippines had already completed exporting 50,000 mt of raw sugar to the US in [...]

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The United States is likely to import a record 46 million tons in 2006, according to figures released Wednesday. The Census Bureau reported U.S. imports jumped 45 percent through October of this year, to 38.8 million tons, up from 26.8 million tons in the same period in 2005. Of that, 4.3 million tons came from [...]

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Yesterday, Hellenic Television proudly reported that “the Antikythera Mechanism Stuns Scientists”. This calls for a clarification. In 1900, a sponge diver discovered the wreck of an ancient cargo ship off the Greek island of Antikythera. The mysterious mechanism was discovered when an archaeologist noticed a gear wheel in the heavily encrusted and corroded mechanism. First [...]

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Proponents of the still fledgling livestock cloning industry insist there is a need for standardized product in an increasingly industrialized agricultural setting. Though this still represents less than a single percent of the animals used for meat or milk in the US, many consumers worry not only how the products from these animals will impact their health, but also what sort of agriculture depends on such experimental creatures.

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by Ted Lipien   FreeMediaOnline.org Free Media Online, Dublin, CA, December 29, 2006 — President Putin’s media chief Mikhail Seslavinsky told Ekho Moskvy radio station there is no censorship of media organizations in Russia. The Interfax news agency reported that the head of the Federal Press and Mass Media Agency (Rospechat) described many television and radio [...]

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Why I object to giving out *best of the year* awards before the year is actually over: this one is definitely a contender for Best Attempt at Elevating Truthiness and Spin to a Whole New Level It’s about halfway down the page in this CNN transcript from Dec. 28, in which some reporters are interviewing [...]

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From The Gathering Storm Blog I’ve written quite a bit on the non-violent tactics of the Islamists. That’s the major theme of my blog. And these non-violent tactics have yet to be addressed in this conflict between the Islamists and the free non-Muslim world. Though the war on terror as a name for this conflict [...]

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The ocean is polluted enough.  I hold my breath and scoop up my dog feces with a plastic bag.  At least that won’t find its way into the water. But I know it wouldn’t have made much difference to the ocean water off the Pacific Northwest.   Whatever goes into the drains eventually finds its way [...]

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News Item: Red Letter Day for Scarlet Knights The oldest college football team won the newest bowl game last night when Rutgers University ran all over Kansas State. Final score: 37 – 10. This is a team that thought it should have been in the Orange Bowl, at least, and even had dreams of a [...]

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As the AP reports (Strip-Searched Muslim Woman Gets Apology), the Dept. of Homeland Security sent an apology letter to a Muslim woman who was strip searched on April 11th, 2006. Naturally, the AP uses the report as an excuse to bash the US government. The Department of Homeland Security has sent a letter apologizing to [...]

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Internet abuse in the workplace has been a concern for a long time. Now the federal government is going to phish their own employees to determine if they will “click” on malicious links. Wade-Hahn Chan of FCW.com reports: Phishing is a technique of tricking or coercing users into giving up personal information, revealing log-in names [...]

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Not only do 82 percent of all Germans believe that their politicians aren’t concerned about the interests of the general population, 40 percent of all Germans believe in the existence of aliens (I know, sorry, numbers everywhere you look these days). No, not the ones that sneak across the border at night (they’re not that [...]

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Earlier today, the UN reported that the first installment of a joint UN-AU peacekeeping force arrived in Darfur. The force is 25 people strong, 12 police officers and 13 military staff officers, this group arrived to support the African Union mission (AMIS) which has been struggling to quell militia violence in the region. The group [...]

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“War is cruel. War is cruelty.” General Sherman of Civil War fame spoke those lines, but not as a denouncement of what war was. Rather, that was what Sherman said when the Mayor of Atlanta pleaded to keep his non-militarized city pillaged and burned. Sherman was a willing participant in doing the cruel to ensure [...]

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The FDA has finally concluded that food products from cloned animals like milk or meat are safe for human consumption after years of study. This opens up the possibility of commercial food products made from cloned animals being put into supermarkets. If this occurs, the U.S. will be the first country to allow it.  Many people, however, [...]

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Cindy Sheehan was arrested on Thursday for lying in the road leading to the Bush ranch, blocking it for about 20 minutes, according to Tela Mange of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Four other people were also arrested with her.  From the CNN article:  “[Sheehan] told us if you want us to get out [...]

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