Free Republic

A fourth day of violence in Los Angeles prompted the mayor to impose a rare citywide curfew and call in the National Guard after demonstrators clashed repeatedly with officers, torched police vehicles and pillaged businesses in a popular shopping district. Mayor Eric Garcetti said Saturday he asked Gov. Gavin Newsom for 500 to 700 members of the Guard to assist the 10,000 Los Angeles Police Department officers. The Guard members were expected to arrive early Sunday.

The small Virginia restaurant whose owner asked White House press pecretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave has now become the site of heated political demonstrations. Police in Lexington had to cordon off the portion of the road in front of the Red Hen restaurant, where an estimated 75 protesters brought signs, waved flags, and chanted slogans on Tuesday. One unidentified individual even hurled chicken feces toward the restaurant, which landed on the sidewalk.

The Italian mother at the centre of an care scandal involving the removal of her baby by Essex social services was far too unwell to care for her child, Essex Council has said. A statement from the council, shedding light on the case which generated a media-storm, explains that the woman in question has two children already in the care system in Italy. The Telegraph's Christopher Booker had originally described the woman as having had "something of a panic attack" on a two-week training course at Stansted. However, in the newly released judgment from Judge Newton, he says the woman...

An animal rights group and six members were convicted Thursday of inciting violence against a company that tests drugs and household products on animals. The group, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, maintained its actions were protected under the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. The government charged that SHAC waged a five-year campaign of threats, harassment and vandalism against Huntingdon Life Sciences and posted information on the SHAC Web site about the lab's employees and those who do business with Huntingdon. Many of those targeted saw their homes vandalized, and they and their families received threatening e-mails, faxes and phone...

Click here to find out more! When asked about the significance of her daughter, Chelsea, marrying Marc Mezvinsky, who is Jewish, and thus being married in an interfaith union, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responded, “Over the years, so many of the barriers that prevented people from getting married, crossing lines of faith or color or ethnicity have just disappeared.” True, the barriers have disappeared, but serious difficulties remain. While some scholars argue that mixed-faith unions “serve as a refiner’s fire” that make the relationships stronger, the statistical evidence indicates this is all too frequently not the outcome. The American...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – House Republican leader John Boehner has used a vulgar expression to refer to Democrat Barack Obama and his voting record in the Illinois legislature. While campaigning for Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Wednesday, Boehner told a small crowd at a bar in the college town of Oxford that failing to vote "yes" or "no" on an issue meant a lawmaker was a "chickens---." The Ohio congressman said the last thing the country needs is to have a "chicken" in the White House. Boehner spokesman Jessica Towhey confirmed the remarks on Saturday but said the congressman wasn't...

Mysterious tear gas canister sickens 43 in city By KIRK SWAUGER and PETE BOSAK, the tribune-democrat November 20, 2002 In violence called domestic terrorism by authorities, a canister of highly potent riot gas was detonated in a busy Johnstown neighborhood yesterday, sending 43 passers-by to hospitals. None of the patients was seriously injured by the gas, which is only available to the military or large police departments. An unnamed victim was admitted to nearby Memorial Medical Center for observation. All others were treated and later released from local hospitals. Symptoms ranged from tightness in the chest and tearing and burning...

Cows also 'have regional accents' Cows moo with a regional twang Cow moo recordings(Click on site to hear) Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have suggested. They decided to examine the issue after dairy farmers noticed their cows had slightly different moos, depending on which herd they came from. John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at the University of London, said regional twangs had been seen before in birds. The farmers in Somerset who noticed the phenomenon said it may have been the result of the close bond between them and their animals. Farmer Lloyd Green, from Glastonbury, said:...

Surprise! Computer Scientists Model the Exclamation Point Two Southern California engineers have created a mathematical theory of surprise, working from first principles of probability theory applied to a digital environment -- and the results of experiments recording eye movements of volunteers watching video seem to confirm it. Laurent Itti of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering and Pierre Baldi of the University of California Irvine's Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, will present their results December 7, at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference in Vancouver, B.C. Itti and Baldi went back to first principles in...

IBM and North Carolina's Research Park Triangle are whining and moaning about the paucity of students entering computer science: "With a critical shortage of [IT] workers projected in the coming years, it's crucial that [universities] attract top students to the field, a local IBM official said..." Irony, thy name is IBM. Allow me to quote from another article, dated May 19th: "IBM's headcount in India is inching closer to the 25,000 mark..." Gee, I wonder if IBM's Everest-sized outsourcing effort has dampened the enthusiasm of any would-be computer science majors? ...

Laurie Mylroie sent out an email about Paul O'Neill's appearance on 60 Minutes last night; she notes what appears to be a major error in Ron Suskind's book, which casts doubt on the credibility of both Suskind and O'Neill. Here is the key portion of Mylroie's email: "In his appearance this evening on '60 Minutes,' Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty, based to a large extent on information from former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, made an astonishing, very serious misstatement. "Suskind claimed he has documents showing that preparations for the Iraq war were well underway before...

A colleague had a chance to hear the new Chief of Staff of the Army (GEN Schoomaker, Shinseki's replacement) speak (I'm not sure of the forum). He summarized the talk into a memo, which was distributed to the chain. Sorry about some of the jargon. I don't know it all myself. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the review, other than to say the source is credible. So inaccuracies, if any, are mistranscriptions, and not fabrications. Here is what it said: Subject: New CSA's Comments Some of the highlights of what the CSA said: 1. He had no idea...

CHURCH SOCIETY ON PRIMATES STATEMENT Thursday 16th October 2003 Initial Response from Church Society to the Statement by the Anglican Primates We welcome the recognition by the Primates of the Anglican Communionthat the actions of liberal revisionists have destroyed the unity of the Communion. The authorisation of same-sex blessings in New Westminster and appointment of an actively homosexual man as Bishop of New Hampshire are contrary to biblical teaching. Revisionists have put their own narrow self-interests above the unity of the greater Anglican family. We are profoundly disappointed that the Primates as a body have not yet taken decisive action....

<p>BAIJI, Iraq — Initial tests on a pile of 50-gallon drums found by U.S. troops near this small industrial town north of Baghdad came up positive for chemicals used to make weapons of mass destruction, military officials said.</p> <p>"We've confirmed that we have a cyclo-sarin agent also known as CF," said Lt. Valerie Phipps, a chemical and biological weapons specialist with a reconnaissance element of the Army's 4th Infantry Division.</p>