Free Republic

Up until the time police put her in handcuffs and loaded her into a cruiser, Ann Musser was not expecting to be arrested. “I just wished that at least for my first time getting arrested, I had something interesting to say about what I had done wrong,” said Musser, a Holyoke resident. Musser was arrested at her home Friday night on an outstanding arrest warrant issued by Holyoke District Court for failing to appear in court. The court appearance was scheduled last September because Musser had failed to comply with repeated requests from the city of Holyoke in June for...

The Boston Fire Department is currently battling a 9-alarm fire in the 200 block of Beacon Street in the Back Bay. At least five firefighters have been injured, according to The Boston Globe: Nick Martin, a Boston EMS spokesman, said two firefighters had been transported to Brigham and Women's Hospital, while three others were being evaluated at the scene. It wasn?t clear whether other firefighters might also be injured. Channel 7 reports: Source tells me 2 firefighters suffered 3rd degree burns, 1 went into cardiac arrest, and 1 was reported missing

US officials knew about the potential danger of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, according to a soon-to-be-released Congressional report—but a spelling error led them to miss his frequent flights out to Dagestan for terror training. […] In March 2011, Russian intelligence agency FSB notified the FBI with concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the Tsarnaev family, which had emigrated to Massachusetts nearly ten years earlier. In the letter, FSB included contact information, with addresses and phone numbers, for many of the members of the Tsarnaev family, including Tamerlan and his mother, and warned that Tamerlan was gaining a reputation for associating...

Now it’s Patches Kennedy’s turn to write his memoir, and no, it’s not a coloring book. The working title is “A Common Struggle,” but surely Ted’s boy can do better than that. When he first ran for Congress in 1994, Patches admitted that he had never had “to worry about making mends meet.” That’s right, making mends meet. And I think that should be the title of his new tome: “Making Mends Meet.” Or “Drinkin’ Doubles Don’t Make a Party.” Or, “One Bad Ice Cube at a Time.” Or, “3 a.m. Roll Call.” The book is due out late next...

I have 17 million reasons for wanting to increase the minimum wage. Yes, 17 million—the number of children whose lives would be a little more secure if their moms and dads earned at least $10.10 an hour. When I was in junior high, my daddy had a heart attack. He was home for a while, the medical bills piled up, and we lost our family station wagon. So my mother did what she had to do: She went to work answering the phones at Sears. The job paid only minimum wage, but it was enough to make sure we could...

A long-running child custody case took a dramatic turn Tuesday, when a Massachusetts juvenile court judge awarded “permanent” custody of teen-ager Justina Pelletier to the state Department of Children and Families. The ruling by Judge Joseph Johnston leaves it up to the agency, not the court, to decide whether or when Pelletier should be returned to her West Hartford, Conn., home. “It’s a huge ruling,” said a person who had been briefed on the decision. “It’s a setback for the parents.” This person said the state, which has had temporary custody of Pelletier for more than a year, has no...

Massachusetts Judge Joseph Johnston delayed his promised Justina Pelletier ruling for the sixth time on Friday, stating that he will now issue the ruling on Tuesday March 25, 2014 in a facsimile message. The critically ill teenager’s family has been fighting a custody battle against the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) for more than a year. Meanwhile her older sister Jennifer is pleading with friends and campaigners to do all they can to support Justina. Devastated by the delays in getting medication for her sister, she tweeted Friday that armed guards sit in on visits while she is...

The F.B.I. agent who fatally shot a Chechen man in Orlando during an interrogation in May about the Boston Marathon bombing suspects has been cleared of wrongdoing by a prosecutor in Florida and by an F.B.I. internal review, according to law enforcement officials.Another review, by the Justice Department, which is almost complete, is expected to conclude that the agent followed proper guidelines on the use of force when he killed the Chechen, Ibragim Todashev, according to the officials. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize their access to classified information.None of the...

A Roman Catholic diocese in Massachusetts that refused to sell a historic mansion to a gay couple is facing mounting legal pressure. Massachusetts' Attorney General Martha Coakley recently filed a brief in support of the gay couple who are suing the Diocese of Worcester alleging discrimination. Filed before superior court earlier this month on behalf of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Coakley argued that the diocese's actions constituted "sexual orientation discrimination." "The commonwealth's compelling interest in protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination derives from their status as a politically vulnerable minority that has suffered a history of discrimination, which continues to...

(Original title: John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Ukraine Foreign Policy) In 1984, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a lifelong Democrat who Ronald Reagan appointed Ambassador to the United Nations, took to the stage at the Republican National Convention in Dallas. The Republicans and this Democrat roundly mocked the unseriousness of the Democrats who wanted to replace Ronald Reagan. Calling them “San Francisco Democrats” — the Democrats had held their convention in San Francisco — Kirkpatrick delivered many broadsides that ring true today. As she said of these San Francisco Democrats, “they always blame America first.” The San Francisco Democrats in 1984 included the...

A group of 28 state attorneys general are calling on Wal-Mart and other retailers to follow the lead of CVS Caremark and stop selling tobacco products in their stores with pharmacies — a move Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley backs but has not yet signed. The group’s letters to Wal-Mart, Rite Aid, Walgreens, Kroger and Safeway said there is a “contradiction in having these dangerous and devastating tobacco products on the shelves of a retail chain that services health care needs.” Woonsocket, R.I.-based CVS said in February that it would stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products at its 7,600-plus stores...

Massachusetts is dumping the contractor that created the state’s dysfunctional online health insurance marketplace and may hire a new company to fix the Health Connector website, a top state official said Monday. “We have made the decision we’re going to be parting ways with CGI,” said Sarah Iselin, who was hired recently by Governor Deval Patrick to oversee repairs to the website, which hasn’t worked properly since it was launched last October. The state has scrambled since then to sign up thousands of residents for health insurance that meets the requirements of the federal Affordable Care Act., resorting to using...

Following a change in the rules incorporated in the new federal farm bill, Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration announced on Tuesday that the state would be investing $3 million in additional home heating assistance for families to avoid the potential loss of up to $142 million in food stamp benefits for 163,000 families. Under the initiative, the Department of Transitional Assistance will be partnering with the Department of Housing and Community Development to provide at least $20 in heating assistance to eligible families through the H-EAT programs. The subsidy will qualify those families for an additional $80 in monthly Supplemental Nutritional...

Of all the things to be nostalgic for, infectious diseases probably don’t make it onto many lists. However, if you happen to pine for the good old days when measles was an active public health threat, I have good news for you. The anti-vaccine crowd is bringing it back. There is currently an outbreak of measles in New York City. Considered eliminated in the United States in 2000, last year saw a record number of outbreaks around the country. It’s only three months into 2014, and not only is the nation’s largest city seeing cases in several boroughs, but other...

More people are moving out of New Jersey than are moving in. The same is true for Illinois and New York. Those three states top the "outbound" list compiled by United Van Lines, the big St. Louis-based moving company that has put together an annual survey of where Americans are moving for the last 37 years. The company analyzed a total of 125,000 moves across the 48 continental states and the District of Columbia in 2013 and came up with a picture of migration patterns across the U.S. According to Professor Michael Stoll, chair of the Department of Public Policy...

MEDFORD, Mass. — Colleges are paying students to take a year off after high school to travel, volunteer or do internships so that students of all income brackets can benefit from “gap years.” A new program at Tufts University and existing ones at a handful of other schools aim to remove the financial barriers that can keep cash-strapped students from exploring different communities and challenge their comfort zones before jumping right into college. The gap year program starting this fall at Tufts will pay for housing, airfare and even visa fees, which can often add up to $30,000 or more....

The dank South Boston warehouse held a chill last weekend when the flatbed arrived, a 20-foot-long landscaping trailer with a wood plank floor stained by dirt. Around the flatbed gathered almost a dozen people — predominantly men from the surrounding blocks — wearing winter coats and work gloves. The job ahead was daunting: transforming the flatbed into a parade float with seven faux cannons. From each cannon would flow a different color of the rainbow — fabric draped over plastic piping — landing in a pot of gold. Randy Foster and Steve Martin had done this before. They built a...

The fight over Southie’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade got frosty yesterday, with Boston Beer Co. pulling its longtime sponsorship from the parade over the organizers’ refusal to let gay veterans march — and one Southie bar fighting back with a vow to boycott the brew. “Sam Adams doesn’t support South Boston. They don’t want to support veterans like my father and uncle, so they can go sell their beer elsewhere,” said Tommy Flaherty Jr., a lifelong Southie resident whose father and uncle own the landmark Cornerstone Pub & Restaurant on West Broadway. Flaherty Jr. said he and his father, Thomas...

<p>The maker of Sam Adams beer says it is withdrawing its sponsorship of Boston's St. Patrick's Day parade because organizers exclude gay groups.</p>

WORCESTER — Attorney General Martha Coakley is supporting a gay couple's legal battle against the Diocese of Worcester after the pair was allegedly denied the right to buy a church-owned mansion in Northbridge. Two Sutton men, James E. Fairbanks and Alain J. Beret, a married gay couple, filed a civil suit in Worcester Superior Court in 2012 against the diocese and its real estate agent after their offer to buy the Oakhurst Conference and Retreat Center, a 44-bedroom mansion in the Whitinsville section of Northbridge, was rejected by the Diocese of Worcester.