Free Republic

ed Cruz will grab an upset win over Donald Trump in Arizona's presidential primary election on Tuesday, as he's the "only candidate with any kind of organization out here," a close confidant of Sen. John McCain predicts. "They have him positioned to spring the upset," Kurt Davis, a GOP operative in Arizona, told The Hill. "They just have to deliver."

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department failed to provide the names of some terrorists in the witness protection program to the center that maintains the government's watch list used to keep dangerous people off airline flights, the department's inspector general said in a report Thursday. As a result of the department's failure to properly share information, some in the witness protection program who were on the "no-fly" list were allowed to travel on commercial flights, the federal watchdog said. "It was possible for known or suspected terrorists to fly on commercial airplanes in or over the United States and evade...

PHILADELPHIA - For the second year in a row, city officials are being asked how police officers responding to celebratory New Year's Eve gunfire ended up shooting innocent bystanders. This year, police chasing an armed reveler shot into a house filled with partygoers, leaving one man in a coma, a second wounded and a 9-year-old boy with a graze wound to the chest. A year ago, police fatally shot a man in the back of the head as he tried to flee when neighbors started shooting guns into the air. The latest shootings came as Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson ends...

NEW YORK - Four of the five officers who together fired 50 gunshots at the car of an unarmed man on his wedding day hadn't completed mandatory firearms training, a group of black officers alleged Thursday. New York Police Department brass "failed to ensure these officers were properly trained," said Marquez Claxton, a founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. At a news conference outside police headquarters, Claxton alleged that four plainclothes officers involved in the Nov. 25 killing of 23-year-old Sean Bell and the wounding of two companions attended only one of two annual "training cycles" at...

Bush faulted on postwar planning REUTERS WASHINGTON - An independent assessment of the tumult in Iraq led by two top former presidential advisers found that the Bush administration was unprepared for postwar Iraq and underestimated the number of troops needed in a miscalculation that helped fuel the insurgency. The report by a Council on Foreign Relations task force, released Wednesday, concluded that the failure to prepare properly for the period after the war had given "early impetus for the insurgency" now gripping the country. The task force was headed by two former national security advisers, Democrat Samuel "Sandy" Berger and...

FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) - The sheriff's office was partly to blame for the death of a psychiatrist who was strangled by a jail inmate during a mental evaluation conducted in a soundproof room, a jury found. A federal jury found Monday that the Collier County Sheriff's Office was liable in the 2001 death of Dr. David Hoyer. But it found that the doctor himself was equally to blame, reducing the potential liability claim by half. Rodrigus Patten was not handcuffed or shackled while Hoyer interviewed him in an unmonitored, soundproof room at the Naples jail. Patten was awaiting a...

In April 2004, followers of Iraqi Shi‘ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr launched a well-coordinated uprising across southern Iraq. While Western media focused on events in Sadr City, Najaf, and Karbala, violence occurred elsewhere as well. A Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) source forwarded the following after-action report regarding violence in the town of Al-Kut, the capital of the Wassit governorate and home to the Ukrainian contingent.The unclassified report, written by a coalition security contractor, highlights dysfunction between regional coalition offices and the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters in Baghdad, as well as tension between diplomats and security officers. The summary faulted a British...

<p>WASHINGTON – NASA may be aiming for the moon and even Mars, but it has not yet laid the groundwork for modernizing the aging space- shuttle fleet, a government report said Friday.</p> <p>A year after the shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas, killing all seven astronauts aboard, NASA has not figured out how to upgrade the three remaining shuttles to make them safe and usable for at least the next 15 years, the General Accounting Office said.</p>