Free Republic

NEW JERSEY (WPIX) — A freshman at Rutgers University is believed to have committed suicide after he was secretly taped by two other students during a sexual encounter, police said. The video was allegedly broadcast on the internet.

Harvard Pilgrim Health Care has notified customers that it will drop its Medicare Advantage health insurance program at the end of the year, forcing 22,000 senior citizens in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine to seek alternative supplemental coverage. The decision by Wellesley-based Harvard Pilgrim, the state’s second-largest health insurer, was prompted by a freeze in federal reimbursements and a new requirement that insurers offering the kind of product sold by Harvard Pilgrim — a Medicare Advantage private fee for service plan — form a contracted network of doctors who agree to participate for a negotiated amount of money. Under current...

If you were going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a higher education, would you want the end result to be known as a "D+" education?

Some major health insurance companies have stopped issuing certain types of policies for children, an unintended consequence of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law, state officials said Friday. Florida Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty said in his state UnitedHealthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield have stopped issuing new policies that cover children individually. Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland said a couple of local insurers in her state have done likewise.

It's believed up to 77 million people have been exposed to toxic levels of arsenic from contaminated drinking water in Bangladesh. The Lancet medical journal reports the high arsenic exposure is the tragic result of a community development project in the 1970's that went terribly wrong. The UN's World Health Organisation is describing Bangladesh's arsenic crisis as "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history." Presenter: Matt Abud Speakers: Dr Dipankar Chakraborti, head of School of Environmental Studies, Calcutta's Jadaypur University; Arif Ahamed, project team leader, World Bank . ABUD: Over twenty percent of all deaths in the study...

Twin nine-month-old girls were being treated at a London hospital on Monday after being mauled in their sleep by a fox. The animal apparently entered the house and climbed stairs before attacking Lola and Isabella Koupparis in their beds while their parents watched television, according to reports. (snip) In urban areas of England there are an estimated 27 foxes per square mile, living in close proximity to humans.

Sometimes you have a headline that makes the rest of the story superfluous, but here's the background. Actor Lance Baxter, otherwise known as "D.C. Douglas," currently known as the man who informs you how much GEICO can save you on car insurance, left a message last month with FreedomWorks in which he asked the group how many "mentally retarded" people it had on staff and what it would do when a tea partyer "killed someone." On April 14, FreedomWorks put his voicemail online. Today, Douglas reports he's been dropped from GEICO's campaign. His dramatic news release is here; he claims...

In 2007, outside Bangalore, India, an explosion decapitated an industrial worker, hurling his body through a brick wall. In 2005 a routine procedure at a manufacturing plant in Taiwan caused a spontaneous explosion that killed a worker and ignited a blaze that ripped through the factory, shutting down production for three months. Both incidents shared a common cause—silane, a gas made up of silicon and hydrogen that explodes on contact with air. And both incidents occurred in the same industry—solar power. Among other environmental black marks, the process of manufacturing photovoltaic (PV) cells from silicon relies on this dangerous pyrophoric...

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Progressives can't get past the Knowledge Problem By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds Contributor April 4, 2010 "If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?" -- President Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981. Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew. In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Your next credit card statement is going to contain an ugly truth: how much that card really costs to use. Now, thanks to a long-awaited law that goes into effect Monday, you'll know that if you pay the minimum on a $3,000 balance with a 14 percent interest rate, it could take you 10 years to pay off. "Jaws will drop," said David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report, a newsletter that tracks the industry. "I don't doubt for a nanosecond that it's going to give a lot of people a sinking feeling in their stomachs."...

Despite the wrongheadedness behind the SEC's decision, some unintended good may come of it.

downloadable .pdf file of possible results if New Madrid fault lets go.

Why God Hates Haiti The frustrating theology of suffering. By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK Published Jan 15, 2010 From the magazine issue dated Jan 25, 2010 Haiti is surely a Job among nations. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere: half its population lives on less than a dollar a day. With 98 percent of its forests felled and burned for firewood, Haiti is uniquely vulnerable to flooding from hurricanes. In 2008 four storms in as many weeks left a million homeless. Haiti has an infant-mortality rate worse than that of many African nations, and its people are...

<p>GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — Some Wisconsin communities that have installed high efficiency traffic lights are discovering the energy-saving bulbs are a hazard in a snow storm.</p> <p>City officials say the LED lights use less electricity and don't give off enough heat to melt ice or snow. So when the snow falls and the wind blows, the traffic lights are obscured.</p>

A series of events over the past few months have made me consider the logic of third world politics. I am not talking about killing people or imprisoning detractors. That is what happens in places like Cuba, China and Iran. What I am thinking about is the prosecution of the prior ruling party by the new ruling party.

Keith Olbermann calls Rush Limbaugh an "asshole" after the talk show host called Jimmy Carter the nation's hemorrhoid.

Michigan's unemployment rate for June of 2009 jumped to 15.2%. That's a 1.1% increase over the prior month. Rates usually climb or fall by a few tenths of a percent. It's rare to see such a substantial increase or decrease. But experts say the struggling economy combined with the ailing auto market means Michigan has been hit harder than other states. We'll have much more on the numbers and what it means for Michigan tonight on 6 News at 5 and 6.

No matter how you slice it, this is a case of bad governing. Earnest, hard-working teenagers who thought they had steady employment for the summer now have none; camps that have traditionally been positive outlets for youngsters and life-savers for working families during summer months have been closed or cut back; the city's recreation director, an able man with plenty of experience, faces perhaps the most challenging two months of his career. All this because Paterson Mayor Jose "Joey" Torres and his administration used dollars targeted for use under the federal stimulus program not to create jobs but to create...

Every year the Shia Muslims make pilgrimage to one of their main religious sites in Iraq. And it is quite a sad spectacle to behold indeed. A goulish / gastly site of folks beating themselves, whipping themselves, and cutting themselves till blood flows. Many have inflicted themselves with serious injury as a result. While Islam has not been around since ancient times, [ 7th century], horrible and dispicable practices similar to what was just described were engaged in by heathen cultures. A notable account of this is the confrontation between Elijah, the prophet of the Lord, and the false prophets...

The Acceptable Conditions? The present conditions produce unacceptable problems which are finding greater acceptance. We are living in an ever-expanding mental, moral and social swamp. We are working from a faulty foundation consisting of evolution (man is a meaningless accident of nature, evolved from what?), communism (man is matter in motion and nothing more) and psycho-babble (man is told over and over again that he is not to be blamed for his actions; that he is not responsible). The ever-expanding swamp is further encouraged by needles for drugs, condoms for sex, counseling for irresponsibility, abortion for eliminating the unwanted, euthanasia...