Free Republic

A prostitution sting resulted in eight arrests Thursday night in Grand Forks. The Grand Forks Police Department conducted the operation by putting advertisements on Backpage.com, a classified advertising website. The arrests were made at a local hotel, according to Lt. Dwight Love of the Grand Forks Police Department. Love said the ad netted 30 to 40 responses. "Quite honestly, we could probably do it once a week for a while and get that many," he said. "We were pretty shocked by the level of responses we got."

FARGO – A 27-year-old man accused of driving a Zamboni while drunk at a high school hockey game had a blood-alcohol level of over three times the legal limit, police said. A preliminary breath test showed that Steven James Anderson had a blood-alcohol level of 0.30 percent on Friday night, said Lt. Joel Vettel, a Fargo police spokesman. The limit in North Dakota is 0.08 percent.

A moose caught in an avalanche in Hatcher Pass may have three passing snowmachiners to thank for making it into the new year. The men dug the moose -- a young cow, they think -- out of the snow, apparently unharmed, after it was caught in an avalanche Dec. 28. One of the men, Marty Mobley, 44, said the moose probably caused the slide that swallowed it and that without the group's help, it would not have survived. "There was just enough of its snout sticking above the snow that it could breathe," Mobley said. Mobley said he and friends...

What is a dog handler? It is someone who is delusional enough to think that taking instructions from a professional (or amateur) dog musher might seem like good fun. Reality typically intervenes quickly and jarringly. Handling dogs actually has less to do with the dog than the various things the dog leaves behind. The first thing a new handler is handed is the poop scooper. Summer or winter it is the same. There is less volume during the summer months, but it’s messier.

This is a funny 911 call involving a lottery ticket.

The daughter of Houston Mayor Annise Parker was briefly denied the chance to take a driving test this week because her birth certificate and other documentation indicated she has two mothers, the mayor said.. Parker, who married her longtime partner, Kathy Hubbard, in California this year and remains a rarity as an openly gay mayor of a major U.S. city, complained on her Twitter account on Friday.

“Far too often, what passes for history is nothing more than rehashed, undocumented folklore and myth, and this is especially true with ‘cocktail history.’ Not so with this fine book, Mint Juleps with Teddy Roosevelt. It is well-researched and documented, while also immensely enjoyable to read.” —Philip Greene, vice president, co-founder, and legal counsel of the Museum of the American Cocktail and author of To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion “This charming and erudite book is full of surprises. I never dreamed that the presidents were such boozers! Pour yourself a toddy and ponder a vexing question:...

Prosecutors won't proceed with charges in a brawl that involved several members of the Palin family, Anchorage police said Thursday. The news comes as Anchorage police released reports Thursday morning outlining witness statements in the fight. Police were called to South Anchorage regarding a brawl involving about 20 people that had broken out at Korey Klingenmeyer's house on the evening of Sept. 6. The event was a birthday party for brothers Marc and Matthew McKenna and Klingenmeyer’s son. Five police officers wrote up police reports on the scene. More than 15 witnesses were interviewed, and the statements offer conflicting information...

Bernadette Adams became the first known woman in Barrow history to harpoon a whale, when she struck the bowhead pictured here 20 miles offshore from the Arctic community. Bernadette Adams remembers pitching fits as a young girl out on the sea ice wanting desperately to go out whaling with her father. With no brothers, her hunting career started at a young age. And last week, she made local history as the first woman in the community to harpoon a bowhead. Usually women don’t go out in boats with the whaling crews. And while community members in Barrow are touting her...

George W Bush has declared his younger brother Jeb "wants to be president", fuelling speculation that the Bush dynasty may soon launch a fresh bid to retake the White House. Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, is seen as one of the Republican Party's best hopes of defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016 and many party power brokers are eager for him to run. Jeb Bush has said he's still weighing his options but his elder brother is among those urging him to run.

Swedish Radio Science News asked about a dozen researchers, and many say the 200-550 kg animals are simply too large to get drunk on the amount of fermented apples they are reported to eat. Professor Petter Kjellander, expert on wild animals at the agricultural university SLU, says that neither he nor the colleagues he asked has ever come across a test confirming high blood alcohol in an elk. Despite thousands of people all over the world reading about the aggressive "drunk" Swedish elks Petter Kjellander speculates the animals might simply be protecting their stashes of tasty fallen fruit. One elk...

THE PRESIDENT: Hello, everybody. Please have a seat. Bobby Kennedy once said, “On this generation of Americans falls the full burden of proving to the world that we really mean it when we say all men are created free and equal before the law.” As one of the longest-serving Attorney Generals in American history, Eric Holder has borne that burden. And over the summer, he came to me and he said he thought six years was a pretty good run -- I imagine his family agrees. Like me, Eric married up. He and his wife, Dr. Sharon Malone, a nationally-renowned...

The Republican candidate for Minnesota House District 6A on the Iron Range faces a civil trial in Itasca County this week after sawing his neighbor’s garage in half. Roger Weber of rural Nashwauk is being sued by Mark Besemann of Iron after Weber used a power saw to bisect the building. Weber then removed half of the garage he insists was built, decades ago, on property that he now owns. Besemann is suing Weber for $20,000 in damage to the garage and $20,000 in punitive damages. Besemann also is seeking a small portion of Weber’s land adjacent to the garage...

Minnesota drivers will face a 1-in-88 chance of hitting a deer on the state’s highways this year, according to a report released Monday by the nation’s largest auto insurance company. State Farm’s annual report estimates that Minnesota drivers will collide with 37,549 deer in 2014. Minnesota drivers have the 8th highest odds of hitting a deer among the 50 states, according to the report, down from 6th highest in last year’s report.

PALMER -- A 25-year-old Florida man who showed up in Bristol Palin’s Wasilla driveway Sunday evening after climbing off a third-floor balcony was arrested on felony stalking charges, court documents show. Peter P.W. Ferrero remained jailed at Mat-Su Pretrial Facility on Tuesday on $25,000 bail. Palin recognized Ferrero’s name right away because he has sent her “approximately 1,000 Facebook messages,” according to a sworn affidavit accompanying the charges from Wasilla police officer Brandon Gray. Ferrero also communicated with Palin’s younger sister, 20-year-old Willow Palin, and apparently thought he was romantically involved with her, according to Facebook posts he wrote.

What do you do with a huge hot dog that is washed up on a Cook Inlet beach in Alaska? Light it on fire! That's what trekkers Graham Kraft, Andy Fischer, Eben Sargent, and Luc Mehl attempted. The giant foam hot dog in a bun that Luc Mehl and friends stumbled across this spring on the edge of Alaska nowhere left him haunted.

Sea lion goes flying in video: Guests aboard an Anglers Adventures charter out of Ketchikan got to see more than just scenery Friday morning when their vessel, the F/V Sierra Dawn, attracted a sea lion being stalked by an orca.

Are hybrids -- such as polar/grizzly bear offspring -- a bad thing? Conventional wisdom suggests that when an endangered species -- such as a polar bear -- mates with a close relative -- such as a grizzly, or brown, bear -- the resulting hybrid speeds the endangered party to the affair along the path to extinction more quickly. In fact, creatures like the one described -- called “pizzly” or “grolar” bears -- already exist. But perhaps hybridization isn’t as bad as biologists feared, a possibility the New York Times explores in a lengthy Sunday magazine piece titled “Should You Fear...

The story is about the high school principle who was fired for telling student(s) 'It would be best to speak English in classrooms'.(p) The paper requires a subscription for the whole story. I didn't find it here searching the title. Can anyone fill me in on the rest (besides the excerpt at the source)?

A 48-second YouTube video catching the swift reactions of a Sitka float plane pilot went viral this past week. KCAW tracked down the pilot and the man who took the video to bring us the full story of how a routine flight in Southeast Alaska made waves on news programs and websites around the world.