Free Republic

The man, named as Colonel Scherbakov, worked for Russia's SVR foreign intelligence service, a successor agency to the KGB, where he oversaw a top- secret programme to dispatch long-term sleeper agents or "illegals" to the United States. Russian intelligence sources told the Kommersant newspaper that he was the traitor who had given the FBI the names of the ten sleeper agents who made up the ring, including glamorous spy Anna Chapman. In at least one case, he is even said to have taken part in an interrogation. In an echo of the Cold War, a Kremlin source was quoted as...

A Gainesville man who beat and stabbed his mother when she refused to give him money for crack cocaine and beer was arrested late Friday night by Gainesville police after a struggle in which he tried to bite an officer, according to an arrest report. William Bernard Lee, 44, of 912 NW 6th Ave., was charged with attempted murder and resisting arrest with violence.

The original broke new ground with the risqué shot that made a star of Sharon Stone. Its long-awaited sequel, however, is likely to be remembered only for failing to deliver anything approaching so memorable a moment.Basic Instinct 2, the follow-up to the 1992 blockbuster starring Michael Douglas as a San Francisco policeman who falls for Stone's murderous femme fatale, opened at the weekend to paltry box office sales and a critical mauling. According to preliminary figures, it made only $1.15 million on its opening night and was expected to total just over $3 million by the end of the weekend....

Americans can thank the legacy of Leon Trotsky for some of the most influential research on the addictive qualities of food. It was Trotsky's great-granddaughter who helped make obesity a top priority of the federal government's National Institute on Drug Abuse. When Nora Volkow became director of the institute in 2003, it was far better known as the home of research on drug addicts, not junk food. But Volkow's restless interests expanded in recent years from cocaine abuse to include the puzzle of why people overeat. Intellectual upheaval is the birthright of Volkow, an intense, fast-talking scholar with weaknesses for...