Free Republic

After a police-assault conviction made her a rallying point for activists, an Occupy Wall Street protester was cleared Friday of charges stemming from another confrontation with police. Cecily McMillan was acquitted Friday of obstructing government administration, after her second trial this year. […] In the latest case, prosecutors said McMillan interfered with officers who’d stopped two accused fare-beaters in a Manhattan subway station in December 2013. McMillan claimed to be a lawyer, urged the two not to cooperate with police, hectored the officers and got in the way while shooting video when the officers took the two to a transit...

SAN DIEGO - A chemistry graduate student allegedly used a research lab at San Diego State University to manufacture methamphetamine, Ecstasy and an anesthetic 80 times more potent than morphine, authorities said. Matthew Finley, 26, was arrested at his home in Ocean Beach on Wednesday on drug charges and the Chemical Sciences Laboratory was shut down as investigators removed the drugs, said Misha Piastro, spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration. "He felt he could get away with it. To his disappointment today, he did not," Piastro said. "His disregard for the safety of the rest of the student body is...

I think that it has been well established that "conservatives" or whatever it is they call themselves these days (e.g., storm troopers) in matters concerning politics value little more than the state's power in which they imagine themselves to participate and the supposed glory that war and domestic national securitism brings to them. Now strictly speaking this is a delusion, because their only access to power lies in the accidental agreement of their opinions with those of the managers of the state. This access will evaporate as soon as the state does something that displeases our conservatives. It is always...

Prime Minister Tony Blair's communications chief admitted Wednesday that a mistake was made when a government dossier on Iraqi weapons included material lifted from a graduate thesis on the Internet. Controversy over the dossier, a key part of the government's argument for military action in Iraq, intensified as Blair was under fresh pressure to get troops out of the region following the deaths of six military policemen. Campbell told a parliamentary committee said the inclusion of work from a graduate thesis in the dossier, which outlined the weapons of mass destruction threat posed by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, published by...