Free Republic

The Democratic Anchorage mayor widened his lead to 3,724 votes in today's counting of absentee and questioned ballots. The only votes left to count are approximately 2,500 special absentees from people living outside the U.S. or in remote parts of Alaska with no polling place.

As Ashley Barrett-Carter left Ryan Memolo's Army recruiting station after their first meeting more than a year ago, the staff sergeant thought, "I'll never see her again." Sgt. Memolo had encountered overweight applicants before, including some who dropped the pounds and returned to enlist. But those people exceeded the weight requirement by 20 or 30 pounds. Ms. Barrett-Carter needed to lose 100.

Now it seems variations in a section of the gene coding for a vasopressin receptor in people help to determine whether men are serial commitment-phobes or devoted husbands.

No extreme hazards found in basement workshop that alarmed authorities MARLBORO— Victor Deeb, the retired chemist who stored hundreds of chemicals in his house, was allowed to return home yesterday after authorities spent three days dismantling his basement laboratory. None of the materials found at 81 Fremont St. posed a radiological or biological risk, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection. No mercury or poison was found. Some of the compounds are potentially explosive, but no more dangerous than typical household cleaning products.

I hadn’t gotten beaten by my mom that day, and we hadn’t had any significant arguments over anything. I thought that if I died, I wanted to die without being mad at my mom. So I thought, I might as well take the opportunity to do so before I got back to the house—at which point who knows whether there would be another fight or a beating. I put a bullet in the chamber and raised the rifle up. The closer it got to my head, the faster my heart beat. I was taught that whoever committed suicide would go...

His experience reflects a challenge felt in classrooms nationwide. Six years after the No Child Left Behind law was enacted, the lowest-performing students continue to improve while children in the top tier have hit a plateau, according to a report due out Wednesday. The findings renew concerns about how schools challenge their brightest students at a time when federal law, backed by sanctions and financial consequences, forces many districts to focus time and money on students at the bottom rung of the academic ladder.

Vaune Dillmann grew up in South Milwaukee but long ago went off in search of weed. Make that Weed, as in the city in northern California. In 2004, Dillmann opened the Mt. Shasta Brewing Co. and started producing Weed ales and lagers from mountain spring water. He topped each beer bottle with a cap that reads: "Try legal Weed." "It's a play on words," he said, and a bit of innocent fun. Same with the brewery T-shirt that says: "100% pure Weed." The feds, not known for liking fun, recently ordered him to stop using the caps.

"They're just a couple of nice kids from Berkeley who wound up being the victims of their own success." That's how lawyer and longtime family friend Harold Rosenthal summed up the case against his clients Winslow and Abraham Norton, the brothers charged last week with moving an estimated $49 million worth of pot through their marijuana dispensary just outside Hayward over the past three years. And, believe it or not, the brothers paid state and federal taxes on all of it. What's more, their dispensary had a medical marijuana permit issued by Alameda County and was regularly visited by sheriff's...

Among our mayor’s greatest hits: • He once stopped a school bus on a busy interstate because he “needed a hug” from the kids inside. • He’s been known to strap weapons to his chest and leg that he has no authority to carry or conceal, then wear them in public. • He regularly suits up and leads SWAT-style “raids” on homes, businesses, and even roadblocks in busy traffic—without cause or a warrant. • He has tried to close down the city’s strip clubs for moral reasons, despite no authority to do so. • He once bulldozed an elderly woman’s...

A DEFENDANT accused of forcing a prostitute at gunpoint to have sex with him and three other men got lucky, so to speak, last week. A Philadelphia judge dropped all sex and assault charges at his preliminary hearing. Municipal Judge Teresa Carr Deni instead held the defendant on the bizarre charge of armed robbery for - get this - "theft of services."

The question I want to pose—perhaps as much to myself as to anyone else—is this: With well over a billion Muslims and extensive material resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge? To be definite, I am here using the 57 countries of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) as a proxy for the Islamic world.

Today, despite America’s three-decades-long national War on Drugs, we are still in the midst of what many have called a “drug epidemic.” If we abandon our policy of “containment”—the long-term effort to reduce the production and consumption of drugs—how far would this epidemic spread through the general population? If most people, or even a substantial minority, became drug addicts whose whole existence revolved around getting their next fix, the prospects for our society would look bleak indeed.

A southwest suburban Southern Baptist congregation allowed a convicted child sex offender to preach for the last few years -- despite his past, and a warning from his previous church that he might still be dangerous, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned. In 1996, Jeff Hannah was sentenced to nine years in prison for having sexual relations with four underage girls -- ages 15 to 17 -- while a married youth minister at Crossroads Church in Libertyville.

Prosecutors say child pornography found on the computer of a Salinas elementary school teacher contained the "morphed" faces of some of his students. Prosecutor Gary Thelander said accused child molester John Hawthorne, of Soquel, used Photoshop software to cut and paste digital photos of female students onto pornographic images he downloaded from the Internet.

You may have given money to an accused sexual predator to use for his legal defense — and not even know it. If you gave money to former congressman Mark Foley's re-election campaign, that's exactly what's happening. Even if you didn't contribute you should be disgusted this vestige of public trust is being used by Foley to help him worm out of the hole he could be in. And it's not just his legal defense he's using the money for.

California’s top election official on Friday decertified three voting systems widely used in the state but said she would let counties use the machines in February’s presidential primary if extra security precautions were taken. The official, Debra Bowen, the secretary of state, said she made the decision in response to studies showing that the machines could be hacked.

The model of economic development that we [China] are currently pursuing is unsustainable. Our energy consumption per unit of GDP is seven times that of Japan, six times that of America, and even 2.8 times that of India. China’s labour productivity is less than 10 per cent of the world total, and yet our emissions are over 10 times higher than the global average. China’s current supplies of energy and natural resources are unsustainable. Soil erosion and water loss mean that in the last 50 years, the area of habitable land has halved. We currently have 45 main sources of...

Broad changes are needed in the way the country cares for its veterans, including a boost in benefits for family members helping the wounded and an overhaul of the way disability pay is awarded, a presidential commission urged Wednesday. The nine-member panel, led by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kansas, and Donna Shalala, health and human services secretary during the Clinton administration, also recommended stronger partnerships between the Pentagon and the private sector.

IRAQ IS OVER. Iraq has not yet begun. These are two conclusions from the American debate about Iraq.

Two weeks ago, Brianna Morrison gave birth to six babies in Minneapolis. Less than a day later, Jenny Masche delivered six babies in a Phoenix hospital. Both of the women had been treated for infertility and had used fertility-enhancing drugs. The two families expressed joy, but many fertility doctors were dismayed. For years, doctors have been pushing to lower the rate of multiple births due to fertility treatment. Not only had two headline-grabbing births occurred in the same week, but several recent scientific papers also revealed mixed results in the eight-year effort to reduce the U.S. multiple-birth rate.