Free Republic

To the surprise of many students and parents, public colleges in every state except Louisiana use for-profit debt collection agencies to recover overdue tuition, library fees and even parking ticket fines. Many universities add late fees to students' bills, and when debt collectors add another 40 percent, students can end up owing thousands of dollars more than they did originally. In some states, the law requires public colleges to use collection agencies if debts go unpaid for too long. Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, sends overdue accounts to private debt collection companies after about six months, according to...

During a 2013 interview with Roland Martin, Congresswoman Maxine Waters propped up the Obama administration for “[putting] in place” a “database [that] will have information about everything on every individual.”*snip* “Well, I don’t know. The thing I think some people are missing here is the president has put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” Waters answered, unprompted. “That’s going to be very, very powerful.” Read more at DC

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is under fire for statements he made before Congress that suggested he had no knowledge about federal government programs that collected data on millions of Americans’ phone calls and Internet activities. In March, Clapper said at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that he was not aware that the National Security Agency was involved in such large-scale efforts. The questioning of Clapper’s statements follow blockbuster news last week that the federal government has since 9/11 been logging millions, perhaps billions, of calls and Internet activities and as the NSA’s top official goes before the same...

RICHMOND, Va. A humble 5-cent coin with a storied past is headed to auction and bidding is expected to top $2 million a century after it was mysteriously minted. The 1913 Liberty Head nickel is one of only five known to exist, but it's the coin's back story that adds to its cachet: It was surreptitiously and illegally cast, discovered in a car wreck that killed its owner, declared a fake, forgotten in a closet for decades and then found to be the real deal. It all adds up to an expected sale of $2.5 million or more when it...

WE ARE HONORED TO HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO SELL WHAT MAY BE THE "LOST 1870 S THREE DOLLAR GOLD COIN" FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO MINT. THE STORY GOES THAT THE ORIGINAL COIN WAS PLACED AS A CORNER STONE OF THE MINT IN 1870, NOT THERE NOW!!! THE SAME MOLD WAS USED TO MAKE A SECOND COIN HOWEVER THE MOLD WAS DAMAGED DURING THE FIRST STRIKE. THE INFOMATION WE HAVE IS THE SECOND COIN HAS A REPAIRED "S" DONE AT THE MINT. THIS IS POSSIBLY THE COIN WE HAVE FOR AUCTION. THE ONLY OTHER 1870 S THREE DOLLAR GOLD COIN KNOWN...

The Royal Canadian Mint just can't sit still. Like a hyperactive kid, it has revamped Canadian cash, first introducing plastic bills and then killing the penny. Now it wants people to play with glow-in-the-dark quarters. The mint's latest collectible coin features a dinosaur whose skeleton shines at night from beneath its scaly hide. It's actually two images on one face, which could be a world's first. The other side depicts Queen Elizabeth. Her Majesty does not glow in the dark. Made of cupronickel, the coin has a face value of 25 cents but is much larger than a regular Canuck...

If you stare at the Thomas Kinkade painting on your wall each day thinking "There's my retirement fund," prepare to pour skim lattes until you're 90. Collecting as a hobby can be a fun, worthwhile and potentially lucrative way to pass time. Amassing collectibles as investments, however, can be a disappointing endeavor yielding nothing but piles of devalued tchotchkes for the next of kin to sort through. The founder of comic book industry bible Wizard, Gareb Shamus, said a year ago that the best advice a collector could heed was to buy what they liked and do their homework. Then...

Attention, pack rats: science may have figured you out. Researchers say they've found an area of the brain that seems to govern the urge to collect. For most people, collecting is a perfectly healthy behavior. It's an outlet for expressing passion for just about anything, such as stamps, wine, art, shoes, or Elvis memorabilia. Collecting is also common among animals, and not just for food. It's been observed in creatures great and small, from mammals to insects. For instance, some birds can't resist aluminum and bright objects, while hamsters gather glass beads when given the chance. But in rare cases,...

Why Is Wikileaks Collecting Military Email Addresses?Helicopter video-leakers Wikileaks just asked for a "list of as many .mil email addresses as possible" via Twitter. That is weird. What are they up to?

One can measure the failures of the film American Beauty in so many ways, but perhaps the best is to realize that the screenwriter was so unsure of his audience’s ability to spot a creep that he had to make Kevin Spacey’s next-door neighbor not just a sadist and a closet case but also a collector of Nazi memorabilia. I bring this up because a fetish for the baubles of fascism is generally thought to be a good way of alienating civilized company. The auction house Christie’s refuses to sell the stuff. And whatever the interpretative fallacies of the late...

Alex Lutgendorf is gearing up for a memorial celebration of Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday and the first-day issuance of the Lincoln series postage stamps on Monday, three days before his Feb. 12 birthday. Lutgendorf is a volunteer at the Postal History Foundation and, as the curator of the Western State Postmarks for the museum, he requested that Arizona receive a special postmark for the occasion.

Thunder eggs are spherical objects which form in some types of silica-rich volcanic rocks (e.g. rhyolites). As the volcanic lava cooled, trapped steam and other gases formed an expanding bubble. Silica and feldspar minerals often crystallise around the bubble or grow crystal fibres which radiate outwards from the its centre. These mineral-filled bubbles with a radiating structure are called spherulites. Internal gas pressure forces the spherulite apart to form a central hollow, later filled with more minerals. Adjacent wedge-shaped segments of the cracked and expanding spherule move outwards and away from each other, helping form the typical star-shaped interior. Silica...

Ransacked West Bank antiquities turn into black-market gold On a small stone patio, surrounded by 2,000-year-old olive trees and piles of ancient pottery, Ahmed takes a deep breath as the smell of freshly slaughtered goat baked with okra and tomatoes wafts from his window. The ritual of sharing a homemade meal from an animal reared in his yard is nothing new for the herder-turned-grave-robber on days when his friends come to visit. To his left sits a once-affluent and significant Palestinian antiquities dealer in a pin-striped shirt, and to his right an Israeli antiquities hunter, who has ventured beyond the...

<p>San Francisco, California, USA -- For most people, tech gear is straightforward and utilitarian. You buy a modem or a computer or a piece of software to perform a task. Once you're done with it, it's obsolete and ready for the landfill if you can't find a charity or a friend to take it off your hands. I mean, what are you going to do with it -- start a collection?</p>