Free Republic

It’s something she says she will hold on to forever. A victim of the April 27 Arkansas tornado had the moment to send one final text to his mother before the deadly storm claimed his life. “First he said mama, I’m so scared,” Regina Wood, Jeffrey Hunter’s mom, told KFTA-TV. ”He knew how bad it was, these say it’s going to be a direct hit.” All she could do was comfort him and tell him everything would be okay. It wouldn’t.

A man who was riding in the car with Mario Careaga testified in court Tuesday that his partner had two or three vodka and tonic drinks before getting behind the wheel of his Mercedes Benz. Careaga, 46, is charged with DUI manslaughter in the Sept. 10, 2010, crash

A great diva could sing the names in the phone book and it would come out like Puccini. A talented writer like Bill Bryson could take any year in American history and make it fascinating. Doing the usual round of interviews after his latest book came out, "One Summer: America, 1927," he was asked why he would choose to write about so ordinary a year, one without a great war or depression or discovery or… Ordinary? 1927? It was anything but. If any year was grand and glorious in modern American history, and yet a portent of the tragedies and...

The word came in an email even before another simmering hot August workday here in Arkansas had really begun. The message had been expected for some time, but that didn't make it any easier to take. Chris Battle had died. His long struggle with cancer was over, thank the Lord. But we didn't feel thankful. You never really do when the news first arrives. Maybe you know you should, but it's all abstract that first day, maybe that first year. Before the flood of healing memory has a chance to cover you, and wash away the immediate pain. His obituary...

Nineteen firefighters died fighting a forest fire in Arizona earlier this summer. Curiously, almost no one is talking about why it happened, only that it was a tragedy. Arizona Deputy State Forestry Director Jerry Payne has been the only one to speak out about the cause, and he backtracked immediately afterwards, apologizing for what he said. He claimed that the superintendent of the Granite Mountain Hotshots violated wildlife safety protocols while fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30th, 2013, 60 miles north of Phoenix. According to Payne, the superintendent’s violations allegedly included not knowing the location of the fire,...

As if more evidence were needed about the tragedy of black education, Rachel Jeantel, a witness for the prosecution in the George Zimmerman murder trial, put a face on it for the nation to see. Some of that evidence unfolded when Zimmerman's defense attorney asked 19-year-old Jeantel to read a letter that she allegedly had written to Trayvon Martin's mother. She responded that she doesn't read cursive, and that's in addition to her poor grammar, syntax and communication skills. Jeantel is a senior at Miami Norland Senior High School. How in the world did she manage to become a 12th-grader...

AFP - Botched circumcisions killed 30 young men and landed almost 300 more in hospital during traditional initiation rites in a South African province, the health department said Sunday. The 30 deaths in rural Eastern Cape province occurred during the annual season when young males undergo a rite of passage into manhood. Ten other youths were hospitalised after being rescued from a forest on Sunday, said provincial health department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo in a statement. "The ten initiates' private parts are rotten. They are badly damaged. Their condition is scary," he said. A further 293 young men were undergoing hospital...

Worries about post-traumatic stress have become a stock part of the media narrative surrounding tragedies like Boston and Newtown. And resilience is supposedly the best we can hope for in the face of adversity. But what if there’s a third option? The story of one mass shooting, and the surprising tug of post-traumatic growth.

Just Kidding. But it could happen... wait for it...

Last week, a federal judge ordered Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to allow 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, to be moved to the adult lung transplant list. That gives her a better chance of receiving a potentially lifesaving transplant. Sarah Murnaghan's fate should force us to examine our organ transplant policy. There are more than 88,000 Americans on the organ transplant waiting list. Roughly 10 percent of them will die before receiving an organ. These lost lives are not so much an act of God as they are an act of Congress because of...

It was a wreck so devastating that at first investigators thought two cars had been involved. The gray Infiniti G35 hit a tree in the center median at a speed that split the car in half. It landed in separate pieces on the road. The driver, Abdulrahman Alyahyan, did not have a California license, according to DMV spokesman Artemio Armenta. … Alyahyan visited the DMV twice – most recently in February – and both times was rejected for a learner's permit, the spokesman said…. Alyahyan came from Saudi Arabia four years ago, and was not able to prove he was...

Video from inside another school and updates.

Just wondering. It ought to be something. What did Rahm Emmanuel say?

The problem with much Christian worship in the contemporary world, Catholic and Protestant alike, is not that it is too entertaining but that it is not entertaining enough. Worship characterized by upbeat rock music, stand-up comedy, beautiful people taking center stage, and a certain amount of Hallmark Channel sentimentality neglects one classic form of entertainment, the one that tells us, to quote the Book of Common Prayer, that “in the midst of life we are in death.” It neglects tragedy. Tragedy as a form of art and of entertainment highlighted death, and death is central to true Christian worship. The...

President Obama will attend a memorial in West, Texas for those killed in the explosion there last week, the press secretary announced today. Obama will be in Texas anyway for a Democratic fundraiser...

Twenty years ago, on February 28th 1993, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) launched an assault on the Branch Davidian religious compound just outside Waco, Texas. The resulting siege ended more than seven weeks later, on April 19, but not before claiming the lives of 80 men, women and children -- many burned to death in the final inferno that destroyed the compound. Even today, videos of the burning buildings remain vivid reminders of an assault gone horribly wrong, from start to finish; and, lessons from what has become known as the “Waco Tragedy” should be borne...

It's being reported on KXAN.com noon news that multiple people shot at on Lone Star College in Houston, TX. It's a tech school.

Why do the innocent suffer? It's a question as old as the Book of Job and as current as today's headlines. Many criticized prominent evangelicals like James Dobson and Mike Huckabee for claiming last week's Connecticut school massacre was God’s punishment of a morally disobedient nation, but don't expect such views to change. Scholars say the belief in divine retribution for personal and national transgressions not only goes back as far as the Bible's Book of Job, it’s also a concept fused into the American worldview. “This is a recurring pattern in American history since the Puritans,” said Barry Hankins,...

Just cut away from 49ers vs. Patriots...

In the wake of the horrific tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, the burdens of Americans’ hearts have grown especially heavier upon learning of the events that unfolded yesterday at Sandy Hook Elementary School. A lone assailant entered the school and ended the lives of 26 people, including himself. Twenty of the victims were kindergarten children at the school. This attack apparently occurred after he had killed his own mother in her bed at home, which brought the death toll to 27. Some reports maintain that he had also earlier shot and killed a former roommate at a separate location, which would...