Free Republic

A team of archaeologists have unearthed evidence of the world’s first cash machine dating back to the Roman empire, buried for centuries in an unassuming field in Hatfield, England...The discovery, located in what appears to be the wall of an ancient bakery at the heart of the commercial Roman town, sheds light on how cash was the cornerstone on which the ancient community was founded and clearly shows the Romans were indeed keen on their ‘dough’.The mysterious fragments and collection of Roman coins, dated to the year AD 289, are traces of one of the world’s first automated monetary distribution...

<p>A mother is refusing to back down from calls demanding she remove a tiny flag hanging in her window in honor of her military son on tour in the Middle East.</p>

Not all campaign books are treated equally. Just look at Edward Klein and J.H. Hatfield. Klein, of course, is the author of the new book "The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House." Hatfield, now dead and forgotten, wrote a book about George W. Bush, "Fortunate Son," during the 2000 presidential contest. Klein's book, which debuted in early May, has been mostly ignored by large media organizations (although not by the book-buying public, which has put it at the top of next week's best-seller list). Hatfield's book, on the other hand, rocked a presidential campaign -- before crashing and burning...

C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc. has agreed to pay a $126,700 penalty for claims it violated the federal Clean Air Act when a gas leak sickened workers at its North Hatfield Road warehouse, the Daily Hampshire Gazette reports. "We appreciate the opportunity to finalize this agreement and close the door on this event that occurred five years ago," Bryan T. Granger, a vice president in C&S's legal department, said, referring to the May 2007 incident. C&S is a major supplier to supermarket chains in the northeast. The Keene, N.H.-based company did not admit to any liability, but did agree to audit...

Attorney Mark Hatfield on behalf of Plaintiffs Kevin Powell and Carl Swensson has filed appeals to the Georgia ballot access challenge with the Fulton County Superior Court of the State of Georgia. Attorney Hatfield also sent notices to Judge Malihi and Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp. The first case is styled Kevin Richard Powell v. Barack Obama and the case number assigned is 2012CV211528. “This action is an appeal of a Final Decision of Georgia Secretary of State Brian P. Kemp denying Petitioner Kevin Richard Powell's challenge to the qualifications of Respondent Barack Obama, a presidential candidate, to seek...

Michael Savage, already the author of 25 nonfiction books, penned a debut novel “Abuse of Power,” which was released in mid-September. It reached as high as No. 4 on the New York Times best-seller list for hardcover fiction. And the inevitable question: Will a film script follow? The concept of primary character Jack Hatfield — a former war correspondent “smeared as a bigot and extremist by a radical leftist media-watchdog group” — could either intrigue or ultimately terrify Hollywood.

<p>WASHINGTON - Army scientist Bruce Ivins had custody of highly purified anthrax spores with "certain genetic mutations identical" to the poison that killed five and rattled the nation in 2001, according to documents unsealed Wednesday in the government's investigation.</p> <p>Also, Ivins was unable to give investigators "an adequate explanation for his late laboratory work hours around the time of" the attacks, and he apparently sought to mislead investigators on the case, according to an affidavit filed by one government investigator.</p>

By SUSAN SHARP sharp@lafollettepress.com Elk Valley resident Scotty Hatfield isn’t sorry for trying to kill a man. Hatfield’s only regret is he didn’t succeed that December 2005 night when he felt a moral obligation to take the law into his own hands. H atfield recently was tried by a jury of his peers and found guilty of reckless aggravated assault and reckless endangerment. The original indictment charged him with three counts of aggravated assault and one count of felony reckless endangerment. Jurors ultimately chose to convict him on the lesser charges. Scotty Hatfield never denied the charges. Sitting in court...

The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts. Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline and other "fight or flight" stress hormones.No one blames the whole feud on this, but doctors say it could help explain some of the clan's notorious behavior."This condition can certainly make anybody short-tempered, and if they are prone because of their personality, it can add fuel...

A federal judge gave the New York Times a brief reprieve from an order forcing it to identify confidential sources for columns about the 2001 anthrax attacks, but the paper could still face the possibility of being held in contempt of court as soon as tomorrow. Judge Claude Hilton of Alexandria, Va., issued a two-day stay of a magistrate's order that would have required the Times to name the sources by yesterday. The order came in a libel suit filed by a former Army scientist, Steven Hatfill, who claims he was defamed by five columns written by Nicholas Kristof in...

TALLMANSVILLE, West Virginia (CNN) -- Rescuers found the sole survivor of an explosion that trapped 13 miners in a West Virginia coal mine "by the sound of moans," mining officials said Wednesday, about 12 hours after family members learned the initial report that their loved ones were alive was erroneous. Without giving a reason for the miscommunication -- and without assigning blame -- mining executive Ben Hatfield said he deeply regrets "allowing the jubilation to go on longer than it should have." Hatfield and Gene Kitts, senior vice president of International Coal Group, gave several possible reasons for how the...

RICHMOND, Va. - A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed a former Army scientist to proceed with a libel lawsuit against The New York Times that claims one of the paper's columnists unfairly linked him to the 2001 anthrax killings. Steven Hatfill sued the Times for a series of columns written in 2002 by Nicholas Kristof that faulted the FBI for failing to thoroughly investigate Hatfill for anthrax mailings that left five people dead. The initial columns identified Hatfill only as "Mr. Z," but subsequent columns named him after Hatfill stepped forward to deny any role in the killings. Federal...

Yesterday's headlines: "No Free Ride in Crawford" (New York Times), "Local Paper Snubs Favorite Son" (Los Angeles Times), "Not Very Neighborly" (Chicago Tribune). The big news: The Lone Star Iconoclast, a weekly newspaper in Crawford, Texas, where President Bush has his ranch, endorsed John Kerry.  Woop-de-do. The four-year-old newspaper with a circulation of 425 (most sources) or 1,000 (says The New York Times) has as its editor and publisher W. Leon Smith, a Democrat who is the mayor of a nearby Texas town, Clifton. So Smith went to press with the snub heard round the world (Agence France Press delighted...

Anti-war, anti-military appropriations, and yet, this man supports Bush. Even this die-hard pacifist realizes that our country changed after 9/11. Perhaps some Democrats need to read this.... ======================================================== "As a young Navy officer in World War II, I was one of the first Americans to see Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. That experience lives with me today, and it helped to shape the view I held during my public service career: a view that war is wrong in nearly every circumstance. "As Oregon's governor, I was the only governor in the nation who refused to sign...

A collaborative effort of Coleman C. Hatfield and Robert Y. Spence, The Tale of The Devil purports to be a biography of Anderson Hatfield, more commonly known as Devil Anse Hatfield, of Hatfield and McCoy fame, but it's more than that. Assisted by original manuscripts from Coleman A. Hatfield, a grandson of Devil Anse, the authors describe several significant members of the Hatfield family in their changing mileaus. Not intended as an account of the infamous Appalachian feud, The Tale of The Devil nevertheless describes the issues surrounding the feud from an insider's perspective, admittedly from the vantage point of...

PIKEVILLE, Ky. - A pen and ink sealed the end of Appalachia's most infamous bloody feud instead of a shotgun and bullets. Descendants of the Hatfield and McCoy families gathered Saturday morning in Pikeville to sign the truce, making a largely symbolic and official end to the feud that claimed at least a dozen lives. Signed by more than 60 descendants during the fourth Hatfield-McCoy Festival, the truce was touted as a proclamation of peace, saying "We ask by God's grace and love that we be forever remembered as those that bound together the hearts of two families to form...

PIKEVILLE, Ky. - Descendants of one of the nation's most famous pairs of feuding families, the Hatfields and McCoys, will face off in court to settle a dispute over access to a cemetery where three slain boys were buried. ``I really hate that we have to go to the court system to settle this,'' said Bo McCoy of Waycross, Ga., a plaintiff in the lawsuit against a Hatfield descendant who blocked access to the family cemetery. ``We wanted to be gentlemen about it,'' McCoy said. ``We felt like we had no other choice.'' The cemetery, which holds remains of three...

An anthrax outbreak in the U.S., just what the Federation of American Scientists has been waiting for. Having spent a lot of time on the arms-control wars over the past 30 years, I'm well acquainted with the Federation of American Scientists. Its mission is promoting arms control with a scientific twist, nicely illustrated with the huge anthrax outbreak near a suspected Soviet biological weapons facility at Sverdlovsk in 1979. "Because the world scientific-medical fraternity is a close one," a statement by the FAS council said, nations can't expect to conceal secret large weapons accidents or arms-control violations. "We have not...