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TWO men who allegedly tried to hijack a plane in China were beaten to death by passengers and crew. The Global Times newspaper reported that two of the suspects died in hospital from injuries they suffered during the ensuing fight with passengers and crew on board. The men were part of a six-strong gang involved in the foiled hijack of a Tianjin Airlines flight bound for the regional capital of Urumqi last Friday. Just minutes after the flight took off from Hetian, southwest Xinjiang, the men, all aged between 20 and 36, stood up and announced their plans to terrified...

Shriners ask city for permission to hold a 5 and 1/2 HOUR parade. City grants 3 Hours so they are parading double file. See practice video. http://www.charlotteobserver.com/420/index.html?media_id=147656471

Mayor Villaraigosa, KTLA's Lu Parker end relationship TV reporter's publicist confirms that the couple have broken up after three years. Villaraigosa declines to answer questions about Parker, who had been living at mayor's mansion. By Kate Linthicum and David Zahniser, Los Angeles Times July 2, 2012, 10:26 p.m. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and television news reporter Lu Parker, arm-in-arm regulars on the red carpet and at glitzy charity events in recent years, have broken up, a publicist for Parker said Monday. "I can confirm that Lu Parker ended her three-year committed relationship with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa as of May...

There were extended moments of muted silence during performances by Kanye West's G.O.O.D. group, Nicki Minaj, Samuel L. Jackson and Spike Lee. But the bleepers couldn't catch all the vulgarities. The BET Awards became the Bleep Awards on Sunday, as entire segments of performances were muted out due to foul language. Still, censors failed to catch many vulgarities that were uttered onstage, from performances by Nicki Minaj to even a parody by Samuel L. Jackson and Spike Lee. It started during the opening number by Kanye West's G.O.O.D. music group, which included Big Sean, Pusha T and 2 Chainz. There...

I spent the last few days down on the Texas/Mexico Border. One of my brothers got married to a Hispanic woman down here so we all came down for the wedding. We had a great time down here and I got to talk to a bunch of new family members. Some of the small talk we had of course wandered into the topic of border violence and life on the border. I have written many articles about this topic because I am very worried about the situation down there. I always love hearing stories from people who actually live...

After blasting the Senate last week for passing a 600-page bill no one had time to read, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced legislation that would force the Senate to give its members one day to read bills for every 20 pages they contain. "For goodness sakes, this is a 600-page bill. I got it this morning," Paul said Friday, just before the Senate approved a massive bill extending highway funding, federal flood insurance and low student loans rates. "Not one member of the Senate will read this bill before we vote on it," he added.

Pierre Desrochers gleefully introduces himself as the bête noir of Canadian local-food activists. An economic geographer at the University of Toronto Mississauga, he has written a book (co-authored with his wife, Hiroko Shimizu), that attempts to eviscerate the movement’s main arguments, from its economic rationale to its environmental one. Even the book's title is an upper cut aimed at local food’s leading "agri-intellectual," the prolific Michael Pollan. The Locavore’s Dilemma, Desrochers has styled his counterargument, with this baiting subtitle: In Praise of the 10,000-mile diet. A libertarian-leaning academic with a thick French-Canadian accent, Desrochers was in Washington, D.C., last week...

Not if your aim is to change hearts and minds rather than draw battle lines. Last weekend, members of a Downstate pro-gun group made that point pretty well when they drove up to Chicago and turned in about 60 rusted-out and broken guns in exchange for $6,200 in gift cards. This was their supposedly amusing way of ridiculing a gun trade-in program run by the Chicago Police to get dangerous firearms off the city’s streets. The group, Guns Save Life, based in Champaign County, said they’d use the gift cards to buy ammunition and firearms for a youth program that...

So which movement is deader? OWS or GOOOH? In case you never heard of GOOOH, the best way to describe is is that what vanity publishing is to publishing, GOOOH is to politics. Just shell out a few bucks and you too can pretend that you are a real life politico. We did have a Freeper who is no longer active who jumped into GOOOH whole hog because he thought it would make him a political player. I sure hope he lost only his shirt and not his home.

Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt said he wished that countries still supporting the Syrian regime would draw lessons from the "civilized event" in Egypt and allow their own people to practice democracy. "Egypt and the Arab world have lived extraordinary historic moments in the past two days with President Mohammad Mursi taking the presidency, ushering in a new era and a new stage," Jumblatt said in his weekly article to be published by the PSP's weekly newspaper Al-Anbaa. "If a lesson is to be drawn from this it is that injustice cannot last indefinitely. I wish that some states...

I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet on the Right just how awful the John Roberts Obamacare decision really is, or what nasty consequences will now flow from it. Of course, it’s a betrayal on the part of the chief justice, not only of the conservative constituency that put him into his lifetime, very well paid sinecure, but of all Americans foolish enough to believe that we actually are a government of laws, not men. At one stroke, Roberts has damaged his own reputation (ruined it, really) and that of the court. If Roberts was reacting to the unconscionable...

In his first Kentucky comments since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that even if "Obamacare" is repealed, the health care law will not easily go away.

The way Attorney General Eric Holder sees it, all this mounting criticism of his inept leadership as the nation's top law enforcement officer is simply predictable politics of the worst kind in an election year. And last month's congressional contempt citation against him, the first ever of a sitting member of a presidential cabinet, isn't really about his Justice Department pouring thousands of weapons into the already pretty well-armed Mexican drug wars and causing the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent (Brian Terry, see photo above). And then denying the House Oversight Committee access to relevant documents. No. The...

What do you make of an attorney who gets 98.6 percent of everything he wants in a lawsuit — and then sues again to get that last 1.4 percent? What if I tell you that, months after filing the appeal, the attorney drops the lawsuit — and sticks his client with the bill? “Wasted effort” comes to mind. “Wasted taxpayer dollars” does as well. That is exactly what Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen did after he made a big deal about appealing a decision, in which a panel of federal judges for the U.S. District Court for Wisconsin’s Eastern...

WASHINGTON (AP) - If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks. Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho. These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change, although it's far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

Thousands of dementia sufferers are being abandoned by the NHS, with shocking variations in the time it takes to get a diagnosis and support. Waiting periods for vital memory services average at least three months--but they can vary from a few weeks to more than a year, reveals a damning report by a group of MPs. And some patients are not informed for at least five years that they have the disease, meaning treatments that are available are not as effective. Early diagnosis is key to staving off the ravages of the killer brain disease--yet almost 60 percent with dementia...

This is an article that you're going to want to spread far and wide! Copy the browser address, paste it in an email and send it out to everyone you know. Post it at Facebook and in every newspaper that will allow it. It's our only hope, America! According to Cha-Cha, the information website on (supposedly) everything, the great novel Moby Dick is 864 pages long. Wikipedia claims that War & Peace is 1440 pages in hardcover form. Each of these great classic novels were written long before radio, television, I-Pads, I-Phones or the Internet. The point here being if someone...

In an interview with the Washington Post, Attorney General Eric Holder said the House vote last week to hold him in criminal and civil contempt was hardly about documents, but about Republicans not liking his boss President Obama and the decisions his Justice Department has made when it comes to certain issues like DOMA, terrorism and voting rights. Holder is the only sitting attorney general to every be held in criminal contempt of Congress. Holder failed to mention it was both Republicans and Democrats who voted to hold him in contempt. “I’ve become a symbol of what they don’t like...

A lifelong liberal sees the light

Scandal: A campaign contributor who was an architect of the 1994 assault weapons ban was the mastermind behind the Fast and Furious operation that let guns walk into Mexico, including those that killed two U.S. agents. Shortly after the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on Dec. 15, 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder's deputy chief of staff, Monty Wilkinson, received an email from U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke telling him just that: "The guns found in the desert near the murder(ed) BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s...