Free Republic

The news is breaking today that the person who walked into Lakewood Church in Houston on Sunday afternoon and opened fire was transgender. I have been waiting for more information about this shooting, as a Houstonian, and as a media observer. When the shooting was breaking news, one aspect of the story didn't sit well with me. It seemed as though local law enforcement and the media were not transparent with all they knew. It seemed like they were holding back. Frankly, I was waiting for the shooter to be identified as an illegal alien. It turns out it is...

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The closest most people will ever get to remote Papua, or the operations of Freeport-McMoRan, is a computer tour using Google Earth to swoop down over the rain forests and glacier-capped mountains where the American company mines the world's largest gold reserve. With a few taps on a keyboard, satellite images quickly reveal the deepening spiral that Freeport has bored out of its Grasberg mine as it pursues a virtually bottomless store of gold hidden inside. They also show a spreading soot-colored bruise of almost a billion tons of mine waste that the New Orleans-based company has...

Jaime Escalante, the brilliant public school teacher immortalized in the 1988 film, "Stand and Deliver," died this week at the age of 79. With the help of a few dedicated colleagues at Garfield High in East Los Angeles, he shattered the myth that poor inner-city kids couldn't handle advanced math. At the peak of its success, Garfield produced more students who passed Advanced Placement calculus than Beverly Hills High. In any other field, his methods would have been widely copied. Instead, Escalante's success was resented. And while the teachers union contract limited class sizes to 35, Escalante could not bring...

It is with great sadness, heavy heart, and moist eyes that I pass on the news to you that Jaime Escalante died today in Reno, Nevada while undergoing cancer treatment. Escalante has been one of my heroes since my days covering education in Los Angeles for the LA Daily News in the early 1990s. He was 79.

An off-duty Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy was gunned down outside his house at sunrise today in the gang-ridden Cypress Park area of Los Angeles, authorities said. Deputy Juan Escalante, 27, was a sheriff's deputy for two-and-a-half years, and was assigned to the county's Men's Central Jail, Los Angeles Police said. Escalante was found by his wife and his mother after a car passed by his house, and someone inside the vehicle fired about five shots, at 5:40 a.m., witnesses said. Police Chief William Bratton and Sheriff Lee Baca rushed to the scene, and Baca called this "a difficult day."...

A Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy gunned down Saturday outside his boyhood home in Cypress Park had been assigned to guard the most dangerous inmates in the county, including members of the notorious Mexican Mafia gang, authorities said Sunday. Los Angeles police and sheriff's officials said the prospect that Deputy Juan Abel Escalante was killed because of his work at the jail remained one of three possible motives. Investigators were also considering the possibility that neighborhood gang violence or a personal grudge were behind the killing. As of right now, all of those possibilities are on the table," said Los...

Authorities are investigating the shooting death of an off-duty sheriff's deputy at sunrise today in the gang-ridden Cypress Park area of Los Angeles, authorities said. Police chief William Bratton and sheriff Lee Baca rushed to the scene, and Baca called this "a difficult day." Baca said "we know that the public at large is grieving the loss of a deputy sheriff, a new deputy sheriff who was in the department for just two years, working at our central jail." The name of the slain deputy sheriff has not been released, although neighbors told Los Angeles station KNX that the victim's...

The legal tussle over President Clinton's 1996 designation of a vast national monument in southern Utah most likely ended Monday. Nearly a decade ago, Clinton stood on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona and announced the creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, covering 1.7 million acres including most of Garfield and Kane counties - much to the dismay of local elected officials who felt snubbed, and to those who wanted to develop a rich but remote coal preserve. Monday, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver threw out the claims of the last remaining plaintiff,...

<p>HARRISBURG -- The Clinton administration's creation of a 1.8 million acre national monument in southern Utah was marked by "deceit" and "chicanery" - even outright lies, according to U.S. Sen. Robert Bennett, a Utah Republican.</p> <p>Utah's largely GOP congressional delegation and its governor were kept in the dark until just before the announcement on Sept. 18, 1996. Members of Congress apparently were misled about the supposed lack of any maps of the project four days before the announcement.</p>

Link Post: Geology Picture of the Week, September 22-28, 2002

Coyote Point, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Some nice differential erosion artifacts in the foreground.

In light of the attention focused on coal and coalminers over the weekend, let's review one of the more sordid episodes of the late & unlamented Clinton Conspiracy of Criminals...Review the information in these links, and judge for yourself- was the public interest ripped off? The Utah Coal Lockup: A trillion dollar Lippo payoff? http://www.apfn.org/apfn/lippo.htm Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument: Conservation and ... Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument: Conservationand Controversy. Petrified Woody's ...Description: "This million-plus acre area needs protection from uncontrolled development, but at what cost?... -``Behind Closed Doors: The Abuse of Trust And Discretion In The Establishment Of The...