Free Republic

Jerry Doyle, the actor best known for his role on 'Babylon 5', has died at the age of 60. Sources tell TMZ that police were called to actor and political talk show host's Las Vegas home Wednesday afternoon after he was found unresponsive. It's still unclear how the actor died. A post on his Twitter page stated that 'the cause of death is unknown at this time'. However sources who spoke with TMZ said no foul play is suspected. An autopsy is pending. Doyle was born in Brooklyn, New York and spent the first six months of his life in...

Even while the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba could be heard singing, “Avanza, Lincoln, avanza! Tu eres nuestra esperanza!” (Onward, Lincoln, Onward! You are our hope!) – as if they knew, even before the soldiers fighting the war far to the North and long before most politicians understood, that the war in America would change their lives, and the world. The secession crisis of 1860-1861 threatened to be a major setback to the world antislavery movement, and it imperiled the whole experiment in democracy. If slavery was allowed to exist, and if the world’s leading democracy could fall apart...

The tiny Mediterranean island of Caprera, near Sardinia, was not the sort of place to find an American diplomat in the late summer of 1861, but that’s precisely where Henry Shelton Sanford landed late in the afternoon of Sept. 9. It had been a long, involved trip: he came from Brussels to Genoa by train, secretly chartered a ship to avoid public notice and, on the night of Sept. 8, sailed through the Ligurian Sea to Sardinia. Landing late the next day, he hired a small boat to take him to Caprera, then walked more than a mile on a...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Her voice wavered, the emotion coming through loud and clear, as a California woman spoke of her son who committed suicide after using steroids. "There is no doubt in our minds that steroids killed our son," Denise Garibaldi told a House committee during Thursday's hearing on steroids in baseball. An hour or so later, Garibaldi and her husband were seated in the gallery directly behind Mark McGwire, one of Rob Garibaldi's baseball heroes. The young Garibaldi would tape McGwire on television and break down McGwire's swing "frame by frame," said father Raymond Garibaldi. The Garibaldis, of Petaluma,...