Free Republic

Twice a year, Jaime Bremnes, 35, a fifth-generation resident of Garden City and the president of its Welcoming Club, arranges a cocktail party for new residents in this affluent village of around 22,600, part of the town of Hempstead in Nassau County. The organization has running and walking clubs, toddler play groups and gourmet and book clubs in addition to the parties for newcomers, which are held at members’ homes. “We aim to introduce neighbors to one another so they may become friends and part of the community,” said Dr. Bremnes, a dentist, who moved back from Manhattan four years...

After spending almost 60 years in Congress as a politician and a staffer, Rep. John Conyers II has to decide which of his many relatives to pass Michigan’s 13th congressional district to. It’s like King Lear, if Shakespeare’s fictional monarch had been forced to step down after groping a woman in church. The 13th is a very nice district to inherit. Conyers has won it by 77%, 79% and 82%. Fidel Castro couldn’t ask for better elections. Whichever Conyers clan member gets it will be staying in Congress for 60 years. And will inherit Rep. Conyers’ government Cadillac Escalade. The...

A major federal investigation stopped a domestic terrorism plot by a militia group to detonate a bomb at a Garden City apartment complex where a number of Somalis live, officials said Friday. Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/state/article108279072.html#storylink=cpy

Sitting on a salvaged sofa in the centre of her small tin shack, Nomfusi Panyaza looks increasingly worried, as heavy clouds gather in the sky outside. “When it rains, the public toilets overflow into my living room,” she says. “Water comes in through the ceiling and the electricity stops working.” Outside her makeshift home in the sprawling township of Khayelitsha, on the eastern edge of Cape Town, barefoot children play on the banks of an open sewer, while cows roam next to an overflowing rubbish heap. Panyaza shares this tiny cabin with her two daughters and four grandchildren, a family...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – A video has gone viral after a Long Island man recorded a police officer who threatened to ticket him if he washed his car in the driveway. As WCBS 880′s Sophia Hall reported Friday, the incident happened on Hawthorne Road in Garden City. The 24-year-old said he was washing his 1997 Volkswagen in his driveway when a police officer told him he wasn’t allowed to do that. The officer said although the car wasn’t going to be washed in the street, which is illegal, washing it in the driveway would still be in the public’s view,...

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil's border with Bolivia. The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story."It's never-ending," says Denise Schaan of the...

DODGE CITY - On Monday, John Martin, a meatpacker here, plans to skip work to attend a rally aimed at bolstering the call for immigration reform. "We want the work we do to be valued," he explained. "It's hard work in the plant." Fellow meatpacker David Gunion seconds that, wondering what would become of the plant without the workers, many of them immigrants. "Without us, the plant dies," he said. Fliers, e-mails and text messages are circulating like wildfire around southwest Kansas, calling on the zone's sizable Latino population to rally, skip work, skip school and boycott stores Monday to...

GARDEN CITY, Long Island The New York Rangers were forced to evacuate their Long Island hotel, just hours before their 5-4 loss to the rival New York Islanders, when a man wearing a surgical mask dumped a chemical on the lobby floor and then drove away. The man has been identified as former Garden City Hotel employee Scott Wallace, who's 23. Nassau County Police say Wallace entered the hotel about 3 p-m and deliberately spilled the chemical on the floor of the rotunda area and then fled. The chemical later was found to be harmless, and no one was injured....