Free Republic

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court cited First Amendment rights to free speech in striking down a law that made it a federal crime to falsely claim to have been awarded military-honor medals. The 6-3 majority opinion upheld a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that had declared unconstitutional the Stolen Valor Act, a 2006 statute Congress passed "to protect the reputation and meaning" of military honors.

The $1 billion guided missile cruiser USS Port Royal, skippered by Capt. John Carroll, was returning to its homeport of Pearl Harbor when it ran aground just before 9 last night about one and one-half mile from the entrance to the Harbor.

The attack started in the early hours of January 31, 1968, during what had been a traditional cease-fire for Vietnam's lunar new year. The coordinated attacks shifted the fighting from jungles and rural villages and rice paddies to the streets of Saigon and other major South Vietnamese cities. And it caught the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces by surprise.

Here's today's quiz: What do Scottie Pippen, David Letterman and Ted Turner have in common? Answer: None of them are farmers, but all three have received thousands of dollars in federal farm subsidies this decade. We could add to that list of non-farmer farm-aid recipients David Rockefeller, Leonard Lauder of the cosmetics firm, Edgar Bronfman Sr. of the Seagram fortune, and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Our point is that you don't have to drive a tractor, plant seeds, or even live anywhere near rural America to qualify for Uncle Sam's farm largess. And you sure don't have to be poor.

The intelligence community failed to anticipate the Cuban Missile Crisis. "The USSR could derive considerable military advantage from the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, or from the establishment of a submarine base there. . . . Either development, however, would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it." --Special National Intelligence Estimate 85-3-62, Sept. 19, 1962 Twenty-five days after this NIE was published, a U-2 spy plane photographed a Soviet ballistic missile site in Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis began. It's possible the latest NIE on...

Ho Chi Minh Trail area safe for wildlife. By JERRY HARMER, Associated Press Writer Four decades after U.S. warplanes plastered it with bombs, a remote corner of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia is making a comeback as a treasure trove of endangered wildlife. Tigers prowl imperiously down tracks where weapons-laden North Vietnamese trucks once rolled. Elephants shepherd their young past giant bomb craters to drink at jungle water holes, and rare apes call from treetops that used to hide communist forces from American pilots. Much of the credit for this swords-into-plowshares story goes to the New York-based...

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