Free Republic

EL CENIZO — Much of 83-year-old José Zuniga's time is spent in his wheelchair gazing across a gravel yard that's nestled among shoddily constructed cinder block houses and deteriorating trailers in this border town that has the distinction of being one of the poorest places in the United States. He's homebound for the most part, but one of the few events that gets Zuniga out of the house is election day. But now Zuniga's ability to cast a ballot is in jeopardy.

Challenging more than a decade of scholarship, a study out of the University of Texas has found that adults raised by same-sex parents reported significant differences in the quality of their lives compared with children of married, heterosexual biological parents.

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A pack of hairless critters that has taken to a patch of woods just north of U.S. 183 and RM 1431 in Cedar Park has people in the area wondering if the creatures could be the legendary chupacabra. Authorities, however, are blaming the sightings on mangy coyotes.

According to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as NERC, the state is in for a struggle. New EPA pollution standards take effect Jan. 1, but NERC says many of the state's power stations won't meet those standards. That means they'll have to go offline for repairs. When that happens, according to the NERC report, "The generators' current compliance plans indicate that 1,200 to 1,400 MW of generation would be unavailable." It goes on to say, "The unavailability of this generation would increase capacity insufficiency and the need for emergency actions including rotating outages."

The media decided that Mitt Romney would be the inevitable Republican presidential nominee weeks before voters did, according to a report that analyzes race coverage.

It has been so warm in the United States this year, especially in March, that national records were not just broken, they were deep-fried. Temperatures in the lower 48 states were 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) above normal for March and 6 degrees (3.3 degrees Celsius) higher than average for the first three months of the year, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That far exceeds the old records.

A good friend of ours was diagnosed with colon cancer (that may have spread to his liver) and will have surgury this morning to remove at least one tumor. Chemo will be the next step. This will be truly life changing for this very active, outdoors man and his family. Your prayers for his recovery and healing would be most welcome.

A shocking report prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Prime Minister Putin on the just completed meeting between China’s Vice Premier Li Keqiang and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger states that the Chinese were told that former Florida Governor John Ellis “Jeb” Bush, brother to the former US President and son of another, will be elected as the next American leader despite his currently not even being on the ballot.

In a final twist to a five-year legal drama, the Peruvian government today appealed to the US Supreme Court to prevent the return to Spain of mountains of salvaged 19th-century lucre that are sitting in a US air base in Florida.

If Barack Hussein Obama II is Malcolm X's biological son and ideological heir, it would uniquely explain the mystery of why he was so generously helped by so many Arab and communist "friends in high places" long before he was a "somebody."

The folks who bring you the Bowl Championship Series have a few words of warning for college football fans craving a national playoff: Slow down. Take a breath. Before hardcore college football followers get ahead of themselves and start booking plane flights and hotel rooms for the first actual living, breathing playoff, some BCS powers caution against the expectation that a creation of a plus-one format or any other type of postseason model is a done deal. Not yet, anyway.

The “anti-fascist” wing of the “Anonymous” hacker group has broken into a website run by the white supremacist American Third Position (A3P), and released a document dump consisting of private forum messages, emails, organizational notes, and other personal information. The documents show numerous connections between Republican candidate Ron Paul and these racist Neanderthals; they’re heavily involved in campaigning for Paul, and according to the messages, have held regular meetings with Ron Paul himself:

Erin Brockovich is on the case! The environmental activist, made famous by the 2000 movie starring Julia Roberts as the crusading single mom, tells USA TODAY she is investigating the case of more than a dozen teens from one upstate New York school plagued by mysterious, Tourette's-like symptoms. One neurologist who has seen most of the affected girls has diagnosed their illness as psychological in origin; but that diagnosis has been difficult for some parents and community members to accept. Brockovich told USA TODAY that at the request of local residents, she is looking into a 1970 train accident that...

Scientists are confirming a recent and rare invasion from Mars: meteorite chunks from the red planet that fell in Morocco last July. This is only the fifth ...

The day after TODAY reported on the baffling case of 12 teenage girls at one school who mysteriously fell ill with Tourette's-like symptoms of tics and verbal outbursts, a doctor who is treating some of the girls has come forward to offer an explanation. Dr. Laszlo Mechtler, a neurologist in Amherst, N.Y., says the diagnosis is "conversion disorder," or mass hysteria. "It's happened before, all around the world, in different parts of the world. It's a rare phenomena. Physicians are intrigued by it," Mechtler told TODAY on Wednesday. "The bottom line is these teenagers will get better."

Newt Gingrich voiced enthusiasm for Mitt Romney's Massachusetts health care law when it was passed five years ago, the same plan he has been denouncing over the past few months as he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination. "The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system," said an April 2006 newsletter published by Gingrich's former consulting company, the Center for Health

The region's worst-case drought scenario might not be dire enough, researchers warn in a report released today. Over the past 500 years, Central Texas has seen droughts far worse than the 1950s drought of record, according to a report commissioned by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority and published Wednesday in the December issue of the Texas Water Journal. Researchers warn that makers of water policy should broaden their planning to factor in the possibility of droughts far worse than the spell that set the bar more than a half-century ago. "The drought of record was no aberration," researcher and authority Executive...

The Russian research vessel Academician Lavrentiev conducted a survey of 10,000 square miles of sea off the coast of eastern Siberia. They made a terrifying discovery - huge plumes of methane bubbles rising to the surface from the seabed. 'We found more than 100 fountains, some more than a kilometre across,' said Dr Igor Semiletov, 'These are methane fields on a scale not seen before. The emissions went directly into the atmosphere.'

After more than 30 years of traveling through the cosmos, a far-flung NASA spacecraft has entered an uncharted region between our solar system and interstellar space, scientists announced Monday.