Free Republic

A 23-year-old man pleaded no contest Monday to assaulting a Los Angeles police officer during a May Day protest and was sentenced to a year in jail and five years' probation. Brian German Mendoza was accused of striking a female police officer on the back of the head with a snare drum on May 1 near Fourth and Hill streets downtown. The attack left a dent in the officer's helmet. The attack was caught on tape. The officer suffered a concussion. Mendoza had already served 122 days in jail since his arrest. The judge gave him credit for time served....

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- A former FBI employee who retired due to post-traumatic stress disorder linked to time spent as a liaison between law enforcement and families of United Airlines Flight 93 victims has written a book about seeing legions of angels guarding the site after the hijacked airliner crashed on Sept. 11, 2001. Lillie Leonardi was a Pittsburgh-area police officer before working for the FBI.

Commodore USA has announced the availability of a new beta release of Commodore OS Vision 1.0, a Linux Mint-based distribution designed to appear like a modernised version of previous Commodore computer systems: "Commodore OS Vision beta 9 online update. Release notes: added the ability to restore the GRUB boot menu from live mode after a Windows install; fixed Plymouth animated loading screen problems for most (but not all) graphics cards; added functionality to turn animated wallpaper on and off, enabled by selecting in the menu; tweaked Firefox CSS rendering to no longer follow the Commodore OS theme, resulting in...

NOTE: This is the second in a continuing series of exclusive, clandestine, interviews that I’ve been able to arrange with my mole over at the Department of Justice (“Deep Quote,” aka, “Molsterman,” aka “Little Mo” to the MOTUS community). (as always, h/t and apologies to the Ulsterman Report)... MOTUS: Have you dug up anything else for me over at Justice on Fast and Furious? MOLSTERMAN: I told you – it’s getting too hot over here for you to be snooping around... Why don’t you ask me about Obamacare?

No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. Mermaids — those half-human, half-fish sirens of the sea — are legendary sea creatures chronicled in maritime cultures since time immemorial. The ancient Greek epic poet Homer wrote of them in The Odyssey. In the ancient Far East, mermaids were the wives of powerful sea-dragons, and served as trusted messengers between their spouses and the emperors on land. The aboriginal people of Australia call mermaids yawkyawks – a name that may refer to their mesmerizing songs. The belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species. Magical...

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. -- What are the odds of sinking a hole-in-one in golf and bowling a 300 game, in a span of two days, at the age of 72? According to several published sources, the odds of an average golfer making an ace is about 12,000 to 1, while the odds of an adult male bowling a perfect game is about 11,500 to 1. What with doing both, the time constraint and age factor in the mix, those odds should be much, much higher. Astronomical? Whatever the odds, Terre Haute resident Sherm "Big Daddy" Wilkins, as he is affectionately...

One needn’t have had “gaydar” to know that Anderson Cooper was homosexual. That’s why the significance of the CNN anchor’s declaration yesterday – “I’m gay always have been, always will be” – is not that he made it, but that he felt so empowered to do so. In an email to Andrew Sullivan, a fellow homosexual who authors a blog for the Daily Beast, Cooper explained that he was reminded recently “that while as a society we are moving toward greater inclusion and equality for all people, the tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.” That’s...

A U.S. Navy oiler slipped away from a fuel depot on the Puget Sound in Washington state one recent day, headed toward the central Pacific and into the storm over the Pentagon's controversial green fuels initiative. In its tanks, the USNS Henry J. Kaiser carried nearly 900,000 gallons of biofuel blended with petroleum to power the cruisers, destroyers and fighter jets of what the Navy has taken to calling the "Great Green Fleet," the first carrier strike group to be powered largely by alternative fuels. Conventionally powered ships and aircraft in the strike group will burn the blend in an...

Featured Term (selected at random):STATE OF GRACE Condition of a person who is free from mortal sin and pleasing to God. It is the state of being in God's friendship and the necessary condition of the soul at death in order to attain heaven. See Also: SANCTIFYING GRACE All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

This video should be reminder to all of us that Independence Day is much more than fireworks, cookouts and a day off from work. It’s a commemoration of the things that make our nation great, and the values we hold in common. Thanks for helping us to tell that story, and have a wonderful holiday. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbWD0z8jkI0&feature=player_embedded

According to the Los Angeles Times, California lawmakers have passed legislation that would provide homeowners with some of the nation’s strongest protections from foreclosure. The cornerstone of the legislation mirrored provisions of the national settlement earlier this year between federal regulators and the five largest servicers, including Ally Financial (ALLY), Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (NYSE: C), JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Wells Fargo (WFC). The legislation, SB 900 and AB 278, also would simplify dealings between homeowners and their banks or loan servicers by requiring that clients be given a single representative to work with, helping to prevent bureaucratic runarounds....

RALEIGH, N.C. - The gas-drilling process known as "fracking" will be authorized in North Carolina now that the General Assembly has overridden Gov. Beverly Perdue's veto of a bill that sets rules and regulations for the form of shale gas production.

A local libertarian think tank’s recent email blast to 12,000 teachers encouraging them to drop their union membership has further inflamed tense relations between the Clark County School District and the local teachers union.

By next month, only 165,000 of more than 1 million jobless Greeks will receive unemployment benefits, according to the labor institute of the country’s two largest unions, ADEDY and GSEE. Speaking on Skai TV on Tuesday morning, the institutes research adviser Giorgos Romanias said that the one-year unemployment benefit will expire next month for thousands more workers who have lost their jobs, leaving just 165,000 people still eligible for benefits. Romanias also predicted that the actual number of unemployed Greeks, including the long-term jobless, will reach 1.6 million, or close to 30 percent by the end of the year, rather...

President Barack Obama's reelection campaign on Tuesday redoubled its attack on Mitt Romney as someone who shipped jobs overseas, defying findings from independentfact-checking outlets that have branded the accusation largely baseless.[snip] But recent polls in pivotal battleground states have found that the incumbent's approach may be working. And it's unclear whether the average voter will distinguish between Bain Capital under Romney's management and what happened after he left the company in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympic Games

U.S. states and localities have more than $2 trillion of unfunded pension liabilities, Moody's Investors Service said on Monday, citing data on plans offered by 8,500 local governments and over 14,000 individual entities. The total liabilities for fiscal 2010 were more than three times the amount reported by local governments. "Pension liabilities are widely acknowledged to be understated," Moody's Managing Director Timothy Blake said. Most state fiscal years end on June 30. The rising cost of public pensions has strained finances for cities around the country. Stockton, California, which last week became the biggest U.S. city to file for Chapter...

PARIS (AP) -- An official says French investigators have searched the home and offices of former President Nicolas Sarkozy as part of a probe into suspected illegal financing of his 2007 presidential campaign. The official says Judge Jean-Michel Gentil and other investigators from the Paris financial crimes unit conducted the search. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be publicly named discussing an ongoing investigation. The probe centers on the finances of France's richest woman, L'Oreal cosmetics heiress Lilliane Bettencourt.

Telly Hudgins has been stopped and frisked by the police too many times to count in the Brownsville, New York, public housing project where he lives. One occasion sticks in his memory. "I had my pajamas on and my slippers on and I'm emptying my garbage" at the trash chute. "They asked me for ID to prove I lived there. Who walks around in their pajamas with ID?" asked the black, 35-year-old counselor for the mentally handicapped. He says he complained about the search and was issued a summons for disorderly conduct. Deborah Richardson, 60, a black postal worker, has...

Drones, kill lists, computer viruses and administration leaks are all the rage in the current political debate. They indeed merit serious scrutiny at a time when the rules of war, and technologies available for war, are changing fast. That said, these issues are not the foreign policy centerpiece of the 2012 presidential race. Economic renewal and fiscal reform have become the preeminent issues, not only for domestic and economic policy but for foreign policy as well. As the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm.Michael G. Mullen, was fond of saying, national debt has become perhaps our top...

Welcome, America, to the British NHS. That may not be what you were promised when your president first dreamed up Obamacare. But the National Health Service is what you’re going to get all the same. I did warn you about this, four years ago in my (depressingly) prophetic book “Welcome to Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future and It Doesn’t Work.” I noted, for example, that your future president had grossly underestimated the costs of socialized health care. I warned that though he said at the time that it would cost between $50 billion and $65 billion, it undoubtedly would cost...