Free Republic

The “Duke 88″ (or Group of 88) are a group of faculty members who effectively joined ex-District Attorney Mike Nifong in prejudging lacrosse players who were falsely accused of raping Crystal Gail Mangum. There has been considerable discussion of the consequences these faculty members should suffer, both professionally and civilly, for their actions. Unluckily for them, “88″ is white supremacist shorthand for “Heil Hitler” (H being the eighth letter of the alphabet). As an example, if a white supremacist writes “14/88″ he means “The Fourteen Words” (a white supremacist slogan) followed by “Heil Hitler.” This can be verified from the...

A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military's new frontier outpost. The word came down suddenly in early January to the fifty or so U.S. troops stationed inside Camp Simba, a Kenyan naval base located on that country's sandy coast: Drop everything and pull everyone back inside the compound wire. Then they were instructed to immediately clear a couple acres of dense forest. Task Force...

88 cuneiform inscriptions discovered at Chogha Zanbil Ziggurat Tehran Times Culture Desk TEHRAN -- Eighty-eight brick inscriptions were recently discovered at the 3250-year-old Chogha Zanbil Ziggurat in southwestern Iran’s Khuzestan Province, the Persian service of CHN reported on Wednesday. A team of experts restoring the middle section of the ziggurat discovered the cuneiform inscriptions on the northeastern and southeastern walls. “Only a few of the inscriptions are intact. The inscriptions were discovered when the workers were removing rubble from the bases of the walls,” team director Bijan Heidarizadeh said. French archaeologist Roman Ghirshman had said nothing about the inscriptions in...

Barbara Novak remembers her big brother as an easygoing, good-humored guy who pushed her on a swing set and hoisted her on his shoulders when he came home on military leave. "He was like a lot of young men at the time -- he wanted to serve his country," said Novak, 64, who lives in Livermore. "He had a lot of pride, and we were all very proud of him." But on July 12, 1950, Pvt. Nicholas John Hansinger, a medic in the Korean War, was captured and marched to a prison camp in North Korea, where he apparently died...

MANILA, Philippines A stampede broke out early Saturday outside a stadium near Manila, killing at least 88 people, and injuring 280, the Philippine Red Cross reported. About 30,000 people were waiting to get inside the stadium for the program "Wowowee" when the mayhem erupted, said Vicente Eusebio, the mayor of Pasig, the Manila suburb where the stampede occurred. The mayor said the melee erupted as the crowd pushed and surged toward the gates, thinking they were open, pinning and trampling those in front. One survivor said some people in the crowd became rowdy when they could not enter. "The gates...

Could all problems cause move by US to take aggressive action. Could problems justify such moves? Maybe.

Robert George Schulze showed up in Dakota County District Court on Tuesday to explain why, two years after he was cited by the city of South St. Paul, piles of wood still litter his back yard. Instead, Schulze, 88, was booked and placed in the county jail, where he is being held without bail for 30 days — or until he cleans up the clutter. "He's never been in prison before," said his wife, Mary, 84, standing in the offending back yard. "It will either kill him, or he's going to make a big story out of it later. I...

<p>It was a sweet and sour day on the campaign trail: Republican Bill Simon, with four days left to narrow the gap with Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, gobbled jelly beans at a candy factory to invoke memories of Ronald Reagan.</p>