Free Republic

AUSTIN, Texas -- The battle over Houston's non-discrimination ordinance has moved from the ballot box to the church pulpit, as a group of pastors fights efforts by the city to subpoena their sermons and private communications with church members. The law, passed last June, was criticized because it could be used to allow men to use women's bathrooms, among other objections. Opponents to the law had collected more than 50,000 signatures to place a repeal measure on the ballot this November, far more than the 17,269 required. However, the City of Houston moved to invalidate the majority of the signatures,...

This story is disturbing on multiple levels. It has been revealed that stockpiles of expired or degraded chemical munitions were discovered in Iraq during the initial years of the war and both American and Iraqi forces were exposed to them in more than twenty instances. This information was never revealed to the public. American troops were exposed to chemical weapons multiple times in the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while the Pentagon kept their discoveries of the expired or degraded weapons secret from investigators, fellow soldiers, and military doctors, according to a published report. The New York...

Ryan Kelly Chamberlain II, the subject of a nationwide manhunt after explosive materials were allegedly found in his San Francisco apartment, was taken into custody by the San Francisco Police Department and the FBI, an FBI spokesman said today. A law enforcement source briefed on the case told ABC News that Chamberlain was taken into custody "right under the Golden Gate Bridge," but he was not certain if he was in a car or on foot at the time. The capture came after a day of dramatic and cinematic cat-and-mouse with the hunted man. "We had been close to him...

The FBI is looking for a man who lives in the San Francisco apartment where agents found a large stash of what appears to be the deadly poison ricin. On Saturday, FBI agents searched the apartment, which belongs to Ryan Chamberlain, according to KGO, an ABC affiliate. The FBI said Chamberlain could be armed and dangerous. The apartment search was expected to resume Sunday. Chamberlain owns a Nissan that reportedly could be rigged with explosives. The FBI did not evacuate apartments during the search, and FBI spokeswoman Alice Heller said there was “no threat to public safety.” She said agents...

The National Institutes of Health announced today that vials of the virus that causes smallpox were found in a laboratory on its Bethesda, Maryland, campus, which was unequipped and unapproved to handle the deadly pathogen. Because it’s so infectious, the smallpox virus is considered a bioterrorism threat and is only permitted in two labs in the world: One at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Atlanta headquarters and another at the VECTOR Institute in Russia. The newly discovered vials violate an international agreement reached in 1979 aimed at keeping the virus eradicated while allowing some scientists to continue...

Militants from the Islamic State Organisation have in the past two weeks executed 700 members of a tribe in eastern Syria, the majority of them civilians, a human rights monitoring group said on Saturday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has tracked violence on all sides of the three-year-old conflict, said that reliable sources reported beheadings were used to execute many of the al-Sheitaat tribe, which is from Deir al-Zor province. The conflict between the group of fighters calling itself Islamic State (formerly known as Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or ISIS) and the al-Sheitaat tribe, who...