Free Republic

Taylor Swift surprised the police department where Sgt. Delbert Pickney used to work by sending a heart-shaped wreath of roses in memory of the late police officer on Thursday.

There may be a significant shift in police interrogation methods over the next several years. The Marshall Project reports one of the nation's largest police consulting firms is abandoning a technique that has been used by a majority of law enforcement agencies over the last six decades. It's called the Reid Technique, and it's been linked to a large number of false confessions.

Author, art professor, feminist, and cultural commentator Camille Paglia speaks on the current transgender mania, the wisdom of early medical & surgical intervention (calling it "child abuse"), and how the explosion of gender identities is a recurring sign of cultural collapse throughout the history of civilization.

Officials in College Park are weighing a plan that would make their city the largest in Maryland to give undocumented immigrants a right to vote in local elections, a long-standing practice elsewhere in the state that has drawn new scrutiny amid the simmering national debate over immigration...

The body text of every post in the forum is now a VERY LARGE font. Anyone else seeing this?

CASTLE GATE, Carbon County — One of Utah's most prominent industrial landmarks may be on the verge of a permanent shutdown, done in by its own scenic setting. Rocky Mountain Power has warned employees and public officials to expect the likely closure of the company's Carbon Power Plant in the next two to three years. "It's probable," company spokesman Dave Eskelsen said Monday. "I think people need to be prepared for that." ... A cleanup deadline is looming in the year 2015 for reductions in emissions of mercury, nitrogen-oxides, sulfur-dioxide and particles of ash. "There's simply not enough room in...

One of the main advantages of OLED is that it can be flexible—so flexible, in fact, that it can be wrapped around a pencil. Taking 2007's .3mm prototype Sony's made a new one just 80μm-thick. That's about ten times the size of a red blood cell, or just a tiny bit thinner than a single hair. The whole OLED measures 4.1-inches in size, and has a 432 x 240 resolution and a contrast ratio of under 1,000:1.

A number of 12-year-old girls were beginning to use lipstick and would put it on in the girl's washroom. That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick, they would press their lips to the mirror, leaving dozens of little lip prints. Every night the maintenance man would remove them and the next day the girls would put them back. Finally the Headmistress decided that something had to be done. She called all the girls to the washroom and met them there with the maintenance man. She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for...

Just received this letter to the editor in my email:Party-crashers or undocumented guests? To the editor: I don't understand why the White House is so upset about the two party crashers at Barack Obama's steak dinner the other night. Is it really appropriate and politically correct to call them party crashers just because they trespassed on Mr. Obama? Does that make them criminals? Isn't that discrimination? Shouldn't they be rewarded for such bold and brave behavior? Maybe they were just trying to feed their family? I would suggest that it's more appropriate to call them "undocumented guests." Just because they...

SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- Somerset Police arrested a 16-year-old girl on charges of online harassment. She was arrested under a new law that took effect September 1. The new Texas law criminalizes online harassment on social networking sites and through e-mail or text messaging. H.B. 2003 states a person commits a third degree felony if the person posts one or more messages on a social networking site with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten another person. (Emphasis added)

Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America's Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture. Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize...

Please use "a lot", since those words are actually in the dictionary. </grammar rant>

This year, Acer appears poised to overtake Dell as the world’s second-largest seller of personal computers, which would put a real dent into one of America’s favorite dorm-to-empire business stories. And if this comes to pass, Acer would trail only Hewlett-Packard; no computer company based outside the United States has ever climbed so high.

I'm having a polite (so far) discussion on the old "More people have been killed in the name of Christianity than any other religion" meme with an old liberal college acquaintance. Any good history reference material documenting the levels of Christian vs Muslim violence? (More particularly the Muslims...)

BLINK and you would have missed it. The expression of disgust on former US president Bill Clinton's face during his speech to the Democratic National Convention as he says "Obama" lasts for just a fraction of a second. But to Paul Ekman it was glaringly obvious. "Given that he probably feels jilted that his wife Hillary didn't get the nomination, I would have to say that the entire speech was actually given very gracefully," says Ekman, who has studied people's facial expressions and how they relate to what they are thinking for over 40 years. It seems that Clinton's micro-expression...

One of the more dangerous phenomena in aviation is an F-16 pilot whose marksmanship is better than his situational awareness. Two soldiers discovered this on the Utah Test and Training Range one night in April 2007. An F-16 pilot lost sight of his target while rolling into a strafing run using night-vision goggles, acquired their rented GMC Suburban instead, and converted it to Swiss cheese.

Colorado officials say man, woman, 3-year-old dead; 2 survive ordeal BENNETT, Colo. - A convicted spammer and his wife, who were being sought after she helped him escape prison, were found slain along with their young daughter Thursday in an apparent murder-suicide, authorities said. A teenage girl was shot in the neck and a baby was found unhurt in a car seat inside the vehicle where the three bodies were found, Arapahoe County undersheriff Mark Campbell said. The relationship between the girl, baby and the escaped convict wasn't immediately clear.

A Long Beach congresswoman who fell behind lin her payments on a $535,000 mortgage in Sacramento said in a written statement that she owns the home, but financial documents show the house was sold at public auction and has been in the possession of the buyer for weeks. The auction for Rep. Laura Richardson's house, in Sacramento's Curtis Park neighborhood, took place on May 7. The transaction was detailed in public records filed with the county. Richardson, a Democrat, a former Assembly member who was elected to the House last year, bought the 1,600-square-foot, three-bedroom house in January 2007, but...

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning. Last week I watched, open-mouthed, a Newsnight piece on the spread of "Brain Gym" in British schools. I'd read about Brain Gym before - a few years back, in Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Science column for this newspaper - but seeing it in action really twisted my rage dial. Brain Gym, y'see, is an "educational kinesiology" programme designed to improve kiddywink performance. It's essentially a series of simple exercises lumbered with names that make you want to steer a barbed wire bus into its creator's face. One manoeuvre, in which you massage the...

I haven't been FReeping much lately, so I didn't notice when Search vanished. Has anyone seen it wandering aimlessly, without a home, in the bad part of town? I miss it...