Free Republic

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) _ A Gulf War veteran from Tennessee who murdered four children with an assault rifle has been executed. Death row inmate Daryl Holton was pronounced dead at 1:25 a.m. CDT Wednesday. He is the first Tennessee inmate put to death by electrocution since 1960. The 45-year-old Holton had confessed to shooting his three young sons and their half-sister in 1997 in the town of Shelbyville, about 50 miles south of Nashville. Holton told police he killed the children because his ex-wife had denied him from seeing them. He also said he intended to kill his ex-wife and...

The UCLA student stunned with a Taser by a campus police officer has hired a high-profile civil rights lawyer who plans to file a brutality lawsuit. The videotaped incident, which occurred after the student refused requests to show his ID card to campus officers, triggered widespread debate on and off campus Thursday about whether use of the Taser was warranted. It was the third in a recent series of local incidents captured on video that raise questions about arrest tactics. Attorney Stephen Yagman said he plans to file a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing the UCLA police of "brutal excessive...

These days, it seems, you need a college degree just to live in or around New York City. Almost 5 million people over the age of 25 in the New York metropolitan area — more than a third of the region’s population — had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2005, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau. In Manhattan, nearly three out of five residents were college graduates and one out of four had advanced degrees, forming one of the highest concentrations of highly educated people in any American city. The degree-holders are rapidly displacing the dropouts,...

(Wild bird escapes from empty home after face-off...) A wayward turkey created havoc after smashing through a window of a home on the city's southwest side, eventually prompting the police to resort to a Taser to get the bird to leave. Officers Chad Joswiak and Daniel Borth were called to the home at about 4:45 p.m. on April 7 after motion detectors set off an alarm. Steve Hird, the son of the couple who own the home, said the officers found a nearly 2-foot-wide hole in the 24-inch-by-50-inch window "smack dab in the middle." The bird flew at enough force...

On July 9th, Ayman al Zawahiri, the number 2 man in al Qaida, wrote a 6,000 word letter to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaida chieftain in Iraq. The letter was captured by U.S. forces, translated, and posted on government Web sites.

A Spanish mother has taken revenge on the man who raped her 13-year-old daughter at knifepoint by dousing him in petrol and setting him alight. He died of his injuries in hospital on Friday. Antonio Cosme Velasco Soriano, 69, had been sent to jail for nine years in 1998, but was let out on a three-day pass and returned to his home town of Benejúzar, 30 miles south of Alicante, on the Costa Blanca. While there, he passed his victim's mother in the street and allegedly taunted her about the attack. He is said to have called out "How's your...

BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) -- A trio of animal-rights protesters didn't find any welcome mat when they stopped at a KFC, but the restaurant manager did turn on the sprinkler system for them. Manager John Olivo turned the sprinklers on full blast to soak the protesters from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals who were standing by the curb. They were campaigning for more humane methods of killing. The protesters, including one in a chicken suit, were followed by a man with a microphone who said he eats beef. "You're not going to win, not in Brownsville," David Ingersoll shouted...

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. - A jury decided Monday that Scott Peterson (news - web sites) should be executed for murdering his pregnant wife, Laci, whose Christmas Eve disappearance two years ago was the opening act in a legal drama that captivated the nation. A cheer went up outside the courtroom as the jury announced its decision after 11 1/2 hours of deliberations over three days. The jury had two options in deciding the 32-year-old former fertilizer salesman's fate: life in prison without parole or death by injection. Peterson clenched his jaw when the verdict was read and leaned over to...

Fox News...

> > by Charley Reese > > If you step back a moment and think about it, you will realize that you are > constantly being propagandized to approve of war - not just the wars in > Afghanistan and Iraq, but war generically. > > We should resist. War is killing, maiming and disfiguring human beings. It > is so disgusting and horrible in reality that even the most "realistic" > Hollywood movie sanitizes it. The news media sanitize it. The government > sanitizes war because it doesn't want you to see the coffins. Most of all, > it...

Former Treasury Sec. Paints Bush as 'Blind Man' By REUTERS Filed at 10:40 a.m. ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill likened President Bush at Cabinet meetings to ``a blind man in a room full of deaf people,'' according to excerpts on Friday from a CBS interview. ``As I recall it was just a monologue,'' he told CBS' ``60 Minutes,'' which will broadcast the entire interview on Sunday. In making the blind man analogy, O'Neill told CBS his ex-boss did not encourage a free flow of ideas or open debate. ``There is no discernible connection,'' CBS quoted...

<p>We have the War Against Poverty, the War Against Drugs and the War Against Terrorism. Needless to say, we're losing all of them. I say let's make a war that we can win. My proposal? The War Against Stupidity.</p> <p>Now you might think this would be the most difficult of all wars to win, but as a schoolteacher, I have hope. I'm fortunate to work in a school where the teachers think—they read books, they write poems, essays, songs and stories, they discuss current affairs and even timeless questions. They think about how they think and they think about how to help children to think. And the results are impressive. The children do think and they show promise of growing into adults who will continue to think.</p>

<p>People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has a bone to pick with the KFC chain, which PETA is boycotting.</p> <p>KFC, PETA says, uses suppliers that don´t treat chickens very well. It demands that the company do something about it. KFC denies the chicken-abuser allegation.</p>

Microwaving Saddam: New weapons likely to see combat Prototypes could paralyze Iraqi militarySpace-age warfare may be used in attack against Baghdad regimeEd Blanche Special to The Daily StarSaddam Hussein may be in for a shock - literally - after telling US President George W. Bush to do his worst in the looming war against Iraq. It seems possible that his command network will become the first target of high-power microwave (HPM) weapons, probably carried by cruise missiles or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These squirt pulses of high-frequency energy that can knock out electronic and communications systems in milliseconds, scrambling computer...