Free Republic

Days before the fifth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting, U.S. Senators passed a bill designating the site of the former nightclub as a national memorial.

Doctors in the early 1900s dismissed Spanish flu as a 'minor infection' just years before it killed 50 million people, according to scientists. Countless lives could have been saved if medics had taken it seriously and worked out how to stop the virus before the disastrous outbreak in 1918, researchers say. A study has found there were investigations as early as 1915 into a mysterious illness which was killing World War I soldiers in France and England. ...

A judge sentenced a Rendon woman to five years in prison Wednesday for voting illegally in the 2016 presidential election while she was on supervised release from a 2011 fraud conviction. Crystal Mason, 43, waived her right to a jury trial and chose to have state District Judge Ruben Gonzalez assess her sentence. J. Warren St. John, her defense attorney, said after the verdict was rendered that an appeal had already been filed and he is hopeful his client will soon be released on bond. "I find it amazing that the government feels she made this up," St. John told...

JMO, David Bowies's greatest song, especiallsy where he sang "the queer got sick at the sight of that".

Excellent post off other forum --------- Have so much to be thankful for, no doubt. But how much longer do we have? I have always heard about this democracy countdown. About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier: 'A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government' 'A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover...

Our planet is just five years away from climate change catastrophe - but can still be saved, according to a new report. Planet is five years from disasterThe World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) warns governments have until 2012 to "plant the seeds of change" and make positive moves to limit carbon emissions. If they fail to do so, the WWF's Vision For 2050 warns "generations to come will have to live with the compromises and hardships caused by their inability to act". "We have a small window of time in which we can plant the seeds of change, and...

Our planet is just five years away from climate change catastrophe - but can still be saved, according to a new report. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) warns governments have until 2012 to "plant the seeds of change" and make positive moves to limit carbon emissions.

Representative Cynthia A. McKinney and her legal advisers blamed racial bias Friday for her run-in with a Capitol police officer as the incident ballooned into a political furor. At a news conference at Howard University, Ms. McKinney, a Georgia Democrat, said her physical altercation with the unidentified officer, who was screening visitors to a House office building on Wednesday, was the officer's fault. "Let me be clear," Ms. McKinney said, surrounded by supporters at the historically black university. "This whole incident was instigated by the inappropriate touching and stopping of me, a female black congresswoman. I deeply regret this incident...

INGLEWOOD, Calif. (AP) - A former school board president was sentenced Thursday to five years in state prison for welfare fraud, violating campaign finance laws and lying about her academic background. Cresia Green-Davis also was ordered to make about $200,000 in restitution and, unless her conviction is overturned she is barred from holding elected office in California. She could have been sentenced to as much as 16 years in prison. Green-Davis, 52, told Superior Court Judge Bob S. Bowers Jr. that she made bad choices out of a desire to help her family. "I thought I did what I had...

QUITO, Ecuador - Jorge Subia is nostalgic when he talks about this Andean nation's former currency, the sucre, and bridles with patriotic resentment when he recalls how it was replaced as the official legal tender by the U.S. dollar. "It's a national question of honor. The sucre was ours and now we have the dollar from the United States," said Subia, a truck driver. "The sucre was part of Ecuador, like the nation's flag or the national anthem." This week marks five years since former President Jamil Mahuad's Jan. 9, 2000, decision to phase out the sucre in favor of...