Free Republic

New York firefighter Jason Stokes, 41, has pleaded not guilty to the felony arson charge. A firefighter in upstate New York is facing a felony arson charge after authorities say he set his family’s house on fire and wrote an anti-police message outside as a potential cover-up. Jason Stokes, 41, pleaded not guilty Tuesday to felony second-degree arson following the mysterious Aug. 10 summer blaze in Endicott, just west of Binghamton, local station TV WBNG reported. Stokes, his wife and two teenaged children escaped the home safely, state police said. Broome County District Attorney Steve Cornwell described an “obstacle course”...

In the aftermath of the attacks on Pearl Harbour during World War Two stories emerged of sailors who were trapped in the sunken battleships, some even survived for weeks. Those who were trapped underwater banged continuously on the side of the ship so that anyone would hear them and come to their rescue. When the noises were first heard many thought it was just loose wreckage or part of the clean-up operation for the destroyed harbour. However the day after the attack, crewmen realised that there was an eerie banging noise coming from the foward hull of the USS West...

An electrical engineer from upstate New York has been fined $5,000 and sentenced to 180 hours of community service for accusing his boss of spying for another country. […] Prosecutors say the 39-year-old (Ryan Lechter of Endicott) wrote an anonymous letter to the Defense Security Service in March 2012 accusing his boss at BAE Systems, a defense contractor, of being “foreign intelligence,” which they say means spying. …

A Massachusetts college sophomore is under arrest for a string of vicious, totally random, “knockout game”-style attacks against three fellow students. Dillon Destefano walked up to three people he didn’t know and sucker-punched them in the face, reports CBS Boston. Police say the incidents occurred in the wee hours of Sunday, Feb. 2 at or near Endicott College, a small private school in a small New England town about 25 miles north of Boston. The victims were walking home. Two of Destefano’s alleged victims suffered major injuries. One student, a freshman baseball player, was hospitalized with a broken jaw and...