Free Republic

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A 4-year-old girl has grabbed her purple raincoat, slipped out of her house at 3 a.m. and hopped a Philadelphia bus in search of a snack. Bus driver Harlan Jenifer says the girl swung her legs in a seat as she chanted, “All I want is a slushie.”

FAIRCHILD, Wis. (WEAU) - An Amish family in Fairchild now has a sign on their home ordering them to leave. The court order for Amos and Vera Borntreger, along with their four young children, is for violating Eau Claire County building codes. The family claims those codes go against their religious beliefs. The county put up the sign, Thursday, around noon. The penalty for not obeying that sign by leaving their home could be $2,000 dollars for every day they stay or jail time. A group of about ten from the Amish community were gathered when the county delivered the...

An Amish family faces eviction from their home after being found in contempt of court for refusing to comply with building codes on the grounds that doing so would violate the religious community’s ban on modern technology. At a Monday hearing, a Circuit Court judge ordered the Eau Claire County sheriff’s office to evict Amos and Vera Borntreger, a farming couple with four children under the age of six, from their home in the Old Order Amish community of Fairchild, Wisconsin.

A complaint over a malfunctioning photo booth at an Ohio Chuck E. Cheese’s escalated into a terrifying attack involving a dozen birthday party-goers on Sunday — an incident that left two employees seriously injured, according to police. Police say a female patron complained to Chuck E. Cheese’s employees in Parma, Ohio, about the photo booth not working, and that a manager told her she had to wait. Then, police said, one of the male party attendees followed the manager into the kitchen, threatened to kill him and began to attack. “I’m characterizing this as an attack on the employees of...

Robinson’s mother, Andrea Irwin, said that, “My son has never been a violent person. And to die in such a violent, violent way, it baffles me.”Robinson, pictured above, was arrested last April following an armed home invasion at a Madison residence, according to police records. Cops were called to the scene around 6 AM by a neighbor who “spotted several men, one of them armed with a long gun, entering an apartment building,” according to a police report. Police arrived at the home “just as the armed robbery was ending” and a group of suspects was fleeing “with electronics and...

A dispute over a handicapped parking space at a Walmart in Greenfield, Wisconsin last month sent a seventy-one year old to the hospital for emergency hip and leg surgery after she was attacked by a younger, larger, heavy-set woman who accused her of stealing a parking space, WITI-TV reported. The February 3rd assault was captured on security camera footage that was released to the public. The video shows the attacker trying to maneuver her dark-colored car so that she can park in a handicapped spot, though it may not have been clear that the spot was her intended parking place...[Snip]...She...

A 5-year-old boy was “screaming his lungs out” Sunday as he came “flying out of the door” of an SUV during a botched theft of a flat-screen TV from a Falmouth Wal-Mart by his mom and her boyfriend, according to police reports released yesterday. Eyewitnesses said they ran to help as the crying boy fell “out of the car onto the ground” and then got up and started to chase the SUV.

Two men saved a little boy and his teen sister from a Brooklyn blaze on Monday, scaling scaffolding at a burning apartment building and catching the children as they were dropped from a window by their mother. Davon Flunory, 20, and his friend Kevin Ravenell, 27, leaped into action after spotting Cipriani Lundy and her kids, 4-year-old Julian and 15-year-old Imani, screaming for help in the window of their smoke-filled third-floor apartment in the Eleanor Roosevelt Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “My first instinct is to call the Fire Department,” recalled Flunory, who was visiting a relative in the building when the...

Already under fire from Iraq War veterans for making up events, NBC is taking new flak today from former military brass over a correspondent’s claim that sniper hero Chris Kyle was a “racist” on “killing sprees” while protecting troops in Iraq. Some 22 retired generals and admirals, including a former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, joined with dozens of other officers and the press watchdog Media Research Center in a letter to demand an apology from NBC parent Comcast after the network refused to acknowledge the comments. Kyle, the subject of the hit movie “American Sniper,” said a letter...

Will President Obama – the leader of the Democratic Party – formally apologize for his party’s role in slavery and Jim Crow? Will the Republicans now controlling both the House and Senate pass resolutions calling on the president to apologize for his party’s role in slavery and Jim Crow? The question arises in the wake of the president’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast in which Mr. Obama says: Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name...

From April of 1992 until December of 1995 the nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was wracked by a vicious war and brutality not witnessed on the European continent since the atrocities of Nazi Germany during World War II. The Bosnian War was primarily a war over territory between Serbian forces on one side and the ethnic Muslim Bosniaks on the other side. The Croats were also interested in gaining parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of a Greater Croatia. The battles between the Serbs, Croats and the Bosniaks resulted in brutality that reached a new level with bitter fighting...

Germany has been sacking Greece and other Mediterranean economies for years, and the Hellenic revolt against austerity is overdue. When the euro was established in 1999, prices were translated from the mark, franc and other currencies into euro at prevailing exchange rates. (Greece joined the Eurozone in 2001, giving up the drachma.) National prices reflected differences in labor costs and efficiency across countries, but owing to a variety of social and demographic conditions, productivity improved more rapidly in Germany and other northern countries. Making goods in the South became too expensive, and Greece and others could no longer export enough...

While innocent people are being slaughtered in the Middle East and Africa by Islamist radicals, not unlike when the Jews were being rounded up and killed by the Nazis, President Barack Obama is “barely” responding and is instead negotiating with Iran and “building the Iranian Islamo-nazi caliphate,” said best-selling author and nationally syndicated conservative talk radio host Mark Levin. Levin further said that the pressure is on to “destroy” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because he was invited to speak before Congress by Republican leader John Boehner and, in his remarks, “might offend the Islamo-nazi regime in Tehran” and “offend...

The United Nation’s climate chief says that reordering the global economy to fight climate change is the “most difficult” task the international body has ever undertaken. “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history,” Christiana Figueres, who heads up the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, told reporters. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that...

The United States is closing its embassy in Yemen amid political deadlock and deteriorating security conditions after the takeover of the country by Shiite rebels, two U.S. officials said. The officials said diplomats were being evacuated from the country on Tuesday and the embassy will suspend operations until conditions improve. Yemen has been in crisis for months with Iran-linked Shiite Houthi rebels besieging the capital and then taking control. The U.S. officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the closure publicly on the record.

The U.S. government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol in your diet The nation's top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption. [...] The current U.S. guidelines call for restricting cholesterol intake to 300 milligrams daily. American adult men on average ingest about 340 milligrams of cholesterol a day, according to federal figures. That recommended figure of 300 milligrams, Eckel said, is "just one of those things that gets carried forward and carried forward even though the evidence...

Today Show co-anchor and journalist Savannah Guthrie has emerged as the frontrunner to replace Brian Williams as anchor of NBC Nightly News, according to Drudge Report.

Newsweek’s Twitter account was hacked Tuesday morning by a group describing itself as “CyberCaliphate,” the latest in a series of high-profile hacks by apparent cyber jihadists. During the 14-minute hack, the group praised “cyber jihad” and threatened Michelle Obama and her family. “Bloody #Valentine’s Day Michelle Obama! We’re watching you, your girls, and your husband!” it tweeted, via the @Newsweek account. […] The hackers briefly changed the account’s profile picture and banner to an image of a masked man and the black standard that is the symbol of the terror organization. The profile also bore the message “Je suIS IS.”...

A record 3,415 individuals renounced their U.S. citizenship or long-term residency in 2014, according to a list released by the Treasury Department on Tuesday. The 2014 number was up 14% from 2,999 individuals in 2013, which was also a record. “Many Americans abroad are finding that retaining their ties is not worth the cost and hassle of complying with the U.S. tax laws,” says Andrew Mitchel, a lawyer in Centerbrook, Conn., who tallies the lists of names released quarterly by the Treasury Department. He links the growing number of renunciations by U.S. citizens and permanent residents to a five-year enforcement...

The situation on the ground in Ukraine has been described as a high-stakes chess game, and Garry Kasparov, world chess champion and chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, expressed little confidence in the players yesterday.