Free Republic

A 64-year-old Duluth woman whose heart almost stopped beating and whose body temperature dropped to a dangerous 60 degrees after she was stuck in the cold for hours has survived — and her recovery amazed doctors. Janice Goodger slipped in snow on the afternoon of Dec. 27 and wasn't found until hours later. Near death, she was taken to St. Luke's hospital. One emergency room doctor said her body was as cold as he's seen.

The wobbly video shows a group of adults mulling inside Chuck E. Cheese's restaurant in Susquehanna Twp. Suddenly it pans left and captures a fight breaking out. The 22-second clip, uploaded Sunday to YouTube, is the latest example of what police describe as a disturbing and bizarre crime trend: escalating violence among adults at a place designed for children's birthday parties. Susquehanna Township police have been called to the restaurant on Union Deposit Road 12 times in the past year for reports of disorderly conduct, assault and theft. Those calls have resulted in 13 arrests, including six women -- five...

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation... Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. -- Federalist Papers, #46 at 243-244. Congress shall never disarm any citizen unless such as are or have been in actual rebellion. Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant. Whenever there is an interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done and not less readily by a...

A federal grand jury in Seattle has charged two people in an alleged immigration fraud conspiracy, saying they advised straight immigrants to claim homosexuality in applying for political asylum. Steven Mahoney and his wife, Helena, were arrested today and scheduled to make initial appearances at U.S. District Court in Seattle in the afternoon. Prosecutors say Steve Mahoney ran Mahoney and Associates in Kent, and held himself out as an expert in immigration affairs. They say the point was to make money by advising immigrants on how to stay in the U.S. According to an indictment unsealed Tuesday, the Mahoneys in...

Teenaged births up of the first time in 14 years. The highest rate of of out-of-wedlock births ever recorded. Lots of older moms. See link for interesting stats: like, August is the month most babies are born.

Education professionals sometimes call them English Language Learners, and increased numbers of ELL students in Nebraska is among the highest in the nation, according to Education Week magazine’s latest edition.  The number of ELL students in the state grew by more than 200 percent between 2000-2005. Only 12 other states reached or exceeded that level. Those numbers compare with a nationwide increase of just 57 percent during the same period. With a total enrollment of 8,588 students, for example, the Grand Island school district includes 2,300 ELL, the Grand Island Independent reported. The Education Week nationwide study, reported in a...

Rayyan Trained His Kids to Die by Maayana Miskin (IsraelNN.com) When Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan was assassinated in an IAF strike last week, his four wives and 11 of his children died with him. According to his surviving children, the death of the Rayyan family children was not an accident: Rayyan had trained his wives and children to die with him as "martyrs." Surviving family members spoke to local Arab media and said that in the days before his death, Rayyan had repeatedly asked his children, "Who wants to die with me as a martyr?" The children would respond, "Yes,...

What a difference a year makes. President-elect Barack Obama hasn’t even taken office and we’re experiencing “climate change.” No, not the global warming variety that keeps bypassing the bone-chilling American winter, it’s the “climate change” in Washington. I’m talking about Obama, who promised a government of “change” and then unveiled a switcheroo in his January 2 radio address, also available on the Change.gov Web site. This isn’t a new controversy. There has been a blizzard of media coverage about the Obama economic plan. The only thing journalists agree on is that they don’t know what Obama has planned. The cost...

Gunmen threw a grenade and opened fire outside a television news station during its evening broadcast in Mexico on Tuesday and left a message warning journalists from reporting on drug war violence. Gunmen hurled the grenade at the regional studios of Mexico's top broadcaster Grupo Televisa in the northern city of Monterrey during the evening news show, the station's reporters said live on the air. No one was hurt in the attack, believed to be the first against a TV station in Mexico, and in which the gunmen sprayed one of the complex's outside doors with bullets. The grenade exploded...

An interesting line appears in a $27 million lawsuit recently filed against the New York Times. “Liberals may live to love the New York Times, and conservatives may live to hate it, but all must admit that it has historically been among a handful of American media outlets that occupy a unique niche of authority and respect within American and world culture.” This struck me as only partly true. Conservatives rightly hate this newspaper, which we view as being a fifth column for the forces that want to drag down American society. However, can even liberals trust what they’re getting?...

OAKLAND, Calif. — Protests over the fatal shooting of an unarmed man by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer turned violent Wednesday night with windows broken, fires set and train stations closed. A few hundred protesters took the streets of downtown Oakland to condemn the shooting and call for criminal charges against 27-year-old officer Johannes Mehserle. Oakland police reported at least 15 arrests.

Listening to the early universe just got harder. A team led by Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., today announced the discovery of cosmic radio noise that booms six times louder than expected. The finding comes from a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE, which stands for the Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission. In July 2006, the instrument launched from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and flew to an altitude of 120,000 feet, where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space. ARCADE's mission was to search the sky for heat...

Japanese scientists said Thursday they had successfully cloned the ancestral bull of a luxurious brand of beef, possibly opening the way to distribute cloned beef. At the start of the Year of the Ox, researchers announced they had kept frozen for 13 years the testicles of a bull named Yasufuku, the progenitor of the expensive Hida-gyu brand of beef in central Gifu prefecture. The researchers at Kinki University and Gifu's livestock research institute said they had cloned four Yasufuku calves between November 2007 and July 2008, although two of them died afterward. "Yasufuku's testicles were frozen for a decade without...

JUNEAU, Alaska – Ted Johnson planned on using a set of logs to a build a cabin in Alaska's interior. Instead he'll burn some of them to stay warm. Extreme temperatures — in Johnson's case about 60 below zero — call for extreme measures in a statewide cold snap so frigid that temperatures have grounded planes, disabled cars, frozen water pipes and even canceled several championship cross country ski races.

Major restaurant chains in Massachusetts would be required to prominently post the calorie counts for all their offerings - at the counter or on the menu - under a far-reaching anti-obesity campaign that Governor Deval Patrick's administration is expected to announce today. The administration's battle against bulging waistlines also calls for public schools to measure the height and weight of first-, fourth-, seventh-, and 10th-graders and calculate whether a child is overweight. The finding would be sent home with students along with detailed advice on eating better and exercising more, with the goal of reducing the incidence of health conditions...

Microsoft Corp.'s next version of the Windows operating system is almost ready for prime time. That's one message Chief Executive Steve Ballmer delivered on the eve of the official opening of the International Consumer Electronics Show. The world's largest software maker also disclosed deals to make its Live Search programs the default search engines on more personal computers and mobile phones. And it announced a new version of its Ford Sync in-car technology that folds in the voice-operated directory service TellMe, which Microsoft bought in 2007. For years, the opening keynote at CES belonged to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, whose...

Lara Logan was named chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News in June, and now this - the journalist just gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Logan and her husband, Joseph Burkett, welcomed Joseph Washington Burkett V to their family on December 29. The birth of their child is a pleasant chapter in a romance marked by scandal. Though both Logan and Burkett were separated from their respective spouses when they met, the relationship that began in Iraq in 2007 caused a flurry of tabloid commentary. The front page of the New York Post featured a story calling Logan...

How embarrassing is it when you produce a horror movie based on global warming and when the time comes to release it, the planet is experiencing some of the coldest weather in decades? Such is the case with The Thaw starring Val Kilmer. Filmed in Canada last summer, it should be ready for release by now but even though the trailer has been produced, no specific release date has been announced. Perhaps the producers realize how much of a laughingstock this movie would become if a movie based on the premise of global warming were released when their potential audience...

The U.S. is being infiltrated by illegals, sold to foreign powers, and abandoned by its government. But are Americans enabling the dissolution of our economy and country as well by continuing to buy foreign goods? America literally is being sold out from underneath Americans. According to the 2008 Economic Report of the President: "The United States is both the single leading recipient and leading source of foreign direct investment in the world. In 2006, total cumulative FDI in the United States was almost $1.8 trillion, 15 percent of the world total." In 2006, foreign-owned assets in the U.S. totaled roughly...

PORT ANGELES, Wash. – A 16-year-old girl suspected of drowning an infant boy in a toilet and throwing the body in the trash was charged with murder Wednesday...