Free Republic

(RNS) — The founder of one of the world’s largest megachurches has died, according to news reports from Korea. The English-language Korean Herald reported that the Rev. Cho Yong-gi died at a Seoul hospital on Tuesday morning (Sept. 14). He was 85. Cho, known in the United States as David Yonggi Cho, was the founder of the Yoido Full Gospel Church, a Pentecostal megachurch whose members number in the hundreds of thousands.

Rape is no laughing matter to Margaret Cho or to the audience that walked out of one of her performances on Saturday night. Cho, 47, performed at the Stress Factory comedy club in New Brunswick, NJ, on Saturday to a sold-out crowd, but not a happy one. Witnesses tell Page Six that Cho opened her set by talking about Garry Shandling’s death and her own rape instead of telling jokes. “She kept on talking about rape and how bad rape is, and it evidently pissed off a few people in the audience,” an audience member told us. “She really got...

Hoping to start a bloody "race war," a black, gay, in-your-face Obama-supporting former TV reporter horrified Southwest Virginia TV viewers yesterday when he stalked and coolly murdered two white former TV station colleagues and wounded a white interview subject during a live broadcast.

Comedian, actress, singer and San Francisco native Margaret Cho is tackling topics like police brutality and racism on her upcoming tour. Cho's "psyCHO Tour" is scheduled to stop at San Francisco's Castro Theatre on October 15. "This show is about insanity, and about the anger I feel about everything happening in the world right now, from police brutality to racism to the rising tide of violence against women," Cho said in a statement. "When men go off on something - they are 'passionate' and 'driven' and when women go off on something we are 'hysterical' and 'crazy.' I'm trying to...

President Obama plans to honor those who died in the Korean War with a surprising message for a foreign audience: a pitch for immigration reform back home. At a naturalization ceremony Friday for 13 U.S. service members and seven military spouses stationed in South Korea, he will offer a tribute to the contributions that naturalized American citizens have made through military service, according to an official familiar with the event.

Appearing as a panel member on Sunday's Melissa Harris-Perry show, comedienne Margaret Cho wondered why some women are Republicans as she asserted that the GOP is "a party that's so against our rights, our reproductive rights, so many rights in so many ways." Cho also complained that Sarah Palin tries to "beat feminism down," claiming that "Sarah Palin wouldn't exist without feminism." After host Melissa Harris-Perry recounted a GOP drive to appeal to women, Cho wondered: What are women getting out of the GOP? That's, I always question that. I always wonder. This is a party that's so against our...

Americans reach for a larger meaning in tragedy when possible. We hate the truth that the attempted murder of a congresswoman was likely a random act of madness. Because as frightening as some of the proposed explanations are, any explanation is better than no explanation; any explanation suggests a problem that could, potentially, be solved -- a future murder that we can avoid, rather than a problem that has no solution because it is rooted in insanity and evil, both of which test our capacity for explanation. If the devil made the shooter do it, it could (and will) happen...

WASHINGTON — Military officials say Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the suspected shooter at Fort Hood, was a psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for six years before being transferred to the Texas base in July. They said he received a poor performance evaluation while at Walter Reed. The Virginia-born soldier is single with no children. He is 39 years old. He is a graduate of Virginia Tech, where he was a member of the ROTC and earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1997. At Walter Reed, he did an internship, residency and a fellowship.

Missing mental health records of Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho have been discovered in the home of the university clinic's former director, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday. The memo said the records were removed from the Cook Counseling Center on the Virginia Tech campus more than a year before the shootings. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090722/ap_on_re_us/us_virginia_tech_shooting

RICHMOND, Va. – Missing mental health records of Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho have been discovered in the home of the university clinic's former director, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday. Cho killed 32 people on April 16, 2007, then committed suicide as police closed in. His mental health treatment has been a major issue in the investigation of the shootings. A memo from Gov. Tim Kaine's chief legal counsel to victims' family members says Cho's records and those of several other Virginia Tech students were found July 18 in the home of Dr. Robert...

A week after Miley Cyrus addressed her photo flap, the singer continues to draw criticism from some in the Asian community – including Korean comedian Margaret Cho. Cyrus denied she was mocking Asians when a photograph of her pulling at the corners of her eyes surfaced on the Internet. "There are some people upset about some pictures taken of me with friends making goofy faces," Cyrus wrote on her official Web site. "Well, I'm sorry if those people looked at those pics and took them wrong and out of context!" In turn, Cho took to her blog on Wednesday to...

The first convention of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC) featured at least one speaker who said college students bearing arms on campus would not make anyone safer. Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign, a gun control advocacy group, said studies show that college students are more likely to engage in risky behavior than the general population. “When I look back on my college days, maybe it was a different era in the late ‘60s, but most of my fraternity brothers didn’t have criminal records – not yet, most of them, even those who were in ROTC and...

A Virginia Tech employee shot himself in a room off the Cassell Coliseum arena on Saturday afternoon, officials said. Tech police responded to the incident at 2:15 p.m., and the man was flown to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, police Chief Wendell Flinchum said. Officials declined to identify the man, and his condition is unknown. Although officials said the shooting posed no threat to the campus community, Flinchum said police notified the public by e-mail using part of an alert system put in place after the April 16, 2007, shootings.

Barack Obama is embracing anti-gun policies in the run-up to a Democratic presidential debate scheduled on the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings. “I am not in favor of concealed weapons,” Obama told the Pittsburgh Tribune. “I think that creates a potential atmosphere where more innocent people could (get shot during) altercations.” These remarks break from Obama’s previous moderate rhetoric on gun control. While campaigning in Idaho in February, Obama promised, “I have no intention of taking away folks’ guns.” Obama elaborated later that month in a political forum sponsored by ABC News and the Politico. He said: “I...

The Virginia General Assembly voted Tuesday for the first major overhaul of the state's mental health system in three decades, largely in response to the mass shooting at Virginia Tech. The House and Senate passed a package of bills designed to give families and courts greater flexibility in having people who are mentally ill involuntarily committed, among other changes.

WASHINGTON -- Since the Virginia Tech shootings last spring, the FBI has more than doubled the number of people nationwide who are prohibited from buying guns because of mental health problems, the Justice Department said Thursday. Justice officials said the FBI's Mental Defective File has ballooned from 175,000 names in June to nearly 400,000, primarily additions from California. The names are listed in a subset of a database that gun dealers are supposed to check before completing their sales. The surge in names underscores the vastness of the gap in FBI records that allowed Seung-hui Cho to purchase the handguns...

Earlier this year, Virginia’s Roanoke Times newspaper came under intense scrutiny and near-universal condemnation after its editors made the irresponsible and dangerous choice to post a searchable database of Virginia’s Right-to-Carry permit holders on its website. In doing so, the paper provided anyone with access to the internet (including criminals) the name, home address, and permit issuance and expiration date of more than 135,000 Virginia permit holders. Thankfully, after hearing from outraged, law-abiding gun owners and non-gun owners alike, the paper prudently decided to remove the database from its website and not repost it, citing a “concern for public safety.”...

1. Roanoke Times will no longer allow any gun shows to advertise in their paper!!! 2. MMM has its protest at a church instead of the Richmond gun show 3. This is TOO FUNNY! The Daily Press accidentally gives VCDL yet ANOTHER great plug! ************************************************************* 1. Roanoke Times will no longer allow any gun shows to advertise in their paper!!! ************************************************************* Every time that I think the Roanoke Times has sunk as far as the toilet will let them go, they seem to find a new dent in the porcelain. Because of the Virginia Tech massacre, WHICH HAD NOTHING TO...

Public Safety: A governor's report on the Virginia Tech shootings says earlier warnings might have helped reduce the carnage. It says nothing about VT's complicity in denying the murdered their right to self-defense. After the release of Virginia Tech's internal review of the shooting spree in April that left 33 dead, it was hard to imagine a more clueless document on the tragedy being released. But the report released Wednesday by an eight-member panel headed by Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine takes the prize. VT's review called on police, counselors and other university personnel to monitor students whose behavior might indicate...

Could a member of the Bar elucidate on whether even if VaTech knew more of Cho, would FERPA (The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974) not have allowed them to act against him ahead of time. My head hurts just reading the legislation.