Free Republic

As LifeNews reported today, the judge in the Kermit Gosnell murder trial dropped three murder charges related to babies he killed in his horrific abortion-infanticide process. One of the three charges the judge dropped includes a 28-week unborn baby who was killed in an abortion-infanticide and eventually discovered in a freezer at Gosnell’s clinic. LifeNews has identified that another charge involved “Baby B,” about whom a Gosnell staffer testified was a newborn child who survived a failed abortion and was still breathing into a shoe box. Kareema Cross told the jury she saw at least 10 children who were breathing...

Summary: According to a new, comprehensive report by Lex Machina, more than half of all patent lawsuits in the US now come from patent trolls.Patent lawsuits are used as weapons in business wars between companies such as Oracle vs. Google and Apple vs. Samsung. Behind the intellectual property (IP) headlines, however, Lex Machina, a Silicon Valley startup, has found that patent troll lawsuits have increased from 24 percent of cases filed in 2007 to 56% in 2012. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a "patent troll uses patents as legal weapons, instead of actually creating any new products or coming...

A federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, has ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to make the morning-after birth control pill available to people of any age without a prescription. The order overturned a 2011 decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to require a prescription for girls under 17. The FDA said it couldn't comment because it is an ongoing legal mater. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended last year that oral contraceptives be sold over the counter in an effort to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies in the United States. Opponents of...

Dear readers, The present gay "marriage" debate is an important one, but I am more worried about the broader, encompassing matter at hand, namely the dark forces trying to redefine social institutions essential to a free society. The family is traditionally the private institution commanding the most intense loyalty from its members, along with churches (at least in happier times). Leftist theorists are now working to drill down past the family, extending their hands into the crib to rob us of our God-given individual identities as males and females and the important roles and responsibilities which have always accompanied these...

So I just noticed today that a few of my "Facebook friends" more like 2 people I haven't spoken to in twenty years, had those stupid gay marriage red equality signs up. I defriended them all, anyone else have the same thing happen?

The list of amici contains several names that will be familiar to anyone whose has had the bad habit of following American politics. Beyond their political coloration, which in many instances seems quite changeable, they do present a typical Washington motley: underemployed lobbyists, society hostesses, TV gasbags, defenestrated politicians, and political hangers-on, most of them draping themselves in the phony-baloney job titles that only our preposterous political culture can pretend to endow with authority (“adviser,” “consultant,” “commentator,” “advocate”). In other cases there are references to real jobs—former special assistants, speechwriters, undersecretaries—that the amici once held and abandoned several administrations ago,...

AFP - With Thermos bottles, sleeping bags and a few good books, about a dozen people lined up Friday to be among the first to attend oral arguments at the US Supreme Court on gay marriage. Never mind that the hearings don't begin until next Tuesday. They said they were determined to have front-row seats at one of the year's most anticipated sessions of the highest court in the nation.

President Obama is for the fifth time trying to ram through the Senate confirmation of a radical pro-abortion, anti-gun rights activist to become a judge on the nation’s most important federal appellate court. Previously, the candidate, a renowned leftist attorney who advocates for the rights of terrorists, has been blocked by Senate Republicans, but Obama refuses to give up. For the firth time, Caitlin J. Halligan’s nomination is up for Senate approval to fill a vacancy on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Halligan is currently general counsel for the Manhattan District Aattorney’s office in New York. It’s hardly...

Title and link only.

MORRISTOWN (WATE) - A same-sex couple applied for a marriage license in Morristown Wednesday, despite a state law that won't recognize their union. It's part of an effort by a group called the Campaign for Southern Equality. In a procession surrounded by friends and family, Matt Griffin and Raymie Wolfe made their way to the county clerk's desk in a ceremonial request for a marriage license. "Based on Tennessee law, I will not be able to issue a marriage license," the clerk told the couple. It was the answer they expected, but it was still an important step for the...

In a landmark settlement, the Pentagon has agreed to give full back pay to U.S. service members who were discharged due to their sexual orientation under the military's “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The payouts will be granted to service members dismissed from the military under the now-repealed policy on or after November 2004. “This means so much to those of us who dedicated ourselves to the military, only to be forced out against our will for being who we are,” former Air Force Staff Sgt. Richard Collins said in a statement from the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought...

A judge described a graffiti gang who caused £150,000 ($242,000) worth of damage in planned attacks on trains as “talented artists”, as he locked them up for a combined total of almost four years. Keiron Cummings, 21, Alex Rowe, 22, and Billy McColl, 17, targeted train and tube carriages across London in a three-year campaign described as vandalism on “an industrial scale”. The trio, who called themselves “SMT”, caused huge disruption to train services by spraying their tag onto carriages under cover of darkness. But Judge Henry Blacksell said the defendants had “got talent”, and that he would pass the...

A federal judge has sided with the ACLU against the state of North Carolina and blocked the state from offering residents “choose life” license plates without providing plates with the opposing view. In his decision on Friday, U.S. District Court Judge James Fox, who last year issued an order temporarily blocking the state from producing the “choose life” plates, found the plates to be unconstitutional in the absence of other license plates that promoted a pro-choice position. …

A San Francisco couple is waiting to find out if the U.S. Supreme Court will take their case challenging the 1996 law that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. Karen Golinski and Amy Cunninghis got married during the brief window in 2008 when gay and lesbian couples could tie the knot in California. Golinski immediately tried to add her wife to her employer-sponsored health care plan. But because she is married to another woman and works for the U.S. government, her otherwise routine request was denied...

Despite all the investigation, public outrage and scrutiny over the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, at least one major piece of evidence has not yet been thoroughly analyzed: his cellphone. Police found it at the scene the night Trayvon was shot, its battery dead. Authorities tried but failed to download data from the phone, then asked his father, Tracy Martin, for the security code so they could unlock it. They didn't get the code and turned the phone over to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. A crime-lab specialist there had only limited success accessing the messages, photos and other...

Original title: Romney's 'October surprise' WILL be released: Judge allows Mitt's secret evidence in bitter divorce of ex-Staples CEO to be made public --------------------------- Celebrity attorney Gloria Allred has won her battle to have Mitt Romney's sworn testimony in the bitter divorce of the ex-Staples CEO released to the public - in what is claimed could provide a damaging blow to his campaign. The Boston Globe filed the application to unseal the records and lift a gagging order on all parties involved after receiving a tip-off that there was 'juicy information about Romney' in the documents. On Wednesday, there were...

If Elena Kagan was not a woman, she may not be sitting on the country's highest judicial bench, the Supreme Court justice told an audience at the University of Tennessee on Friday. The candid statement came early in an hourlong conversation-style presentation Kagan held Friday in the Cox Auditorium in the Alumni Memorial Building, where she also discussed the strategy of deciding the country's top cases and her affinity for hunting with fellow Justice Antonin Scalia. While seated in padded armchairs on stage, Kagan told UT Law Dean Doug Blaze that being a woman in the courtroom comes with some...

A Massachusetts man who pleaded guilty to raping a 14-year-old in 2009 is now seeking visitation rights for the child he fathered — a sensitive case that could force the victim to maintain contact with her rapist. That possibility has left the teen mother in an emotional tailspin, according to Fox 25 Boston, and she doesn’t want to interact with the man — a then-20-year-old she had met through the same church. “She got raped at 14,” the victim’s mother told Fox 25. “She decided to keep her baby. And now she has to hand her baby over for a...

Europe’s highest court on human rights will decide if a lesbian can adopt her partner’s child, in this case stripping the father of his parental rights to his son. The case is very simple according to Gregor Puppinck of the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ). “The two female partners want to oust the father and, since the law does not allow them to do so, they claim it is discriminatory,” Gregor reported in Turtle Bay and Beyond, C-FAM’s blog. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights will hear the case X and others v. Austria...

Judge Vaughn Walker, the now-retired federal judge in San Francisco who nullified California’s Proposition 8 in 2010, said if judges really are umpires, they must sometimes “move the strike zone” in order to champion social issues like same-sex marriage. “Case by case, what judges do and must do is take account of the pitcher and the batter in the legal arena, watch the windup, the throw, the curve, and the delivery and then, where they believe appropriate, move the strike zone,” Walker wrote on Aug. 28 in the University of Illinois Law Review. But Walker, flouting Justice Antonin Scalia and...