Free Republic

Virginia Military Institute will make changes to its student-run honor court to make the system fairer to cadets accused of lying, cheating, stealing or other transgressions that can lead to expulsion. VMI detailed the reforms in a progress report Friday in response to a state-ordered investigation into racism and sexism at the nation’s oldest state-supported military college. The 70-page report, which the college gave to General Assembly members and the Virginia secretary of education, describes initiatives approved, enacted or begun last year, including mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training for administrators and members of VMI’s Board of Visitors, and changes...

A South Sudan immigrant and standout basketball player at a Catholic high school in Canada has been arrested after it was revealed that his true age is not 17, but closer to 29, the authorities said.

Kyle Kester loved the local people and the rugged landscape north of Guadalajara, where he had built a sprawling stucco home.Kyle Kester’s parents admit they weren’t thrilled when he built his dream home tucked in a rocky, secluded valley 18 miles north of Guadalajara. They worried for his safety in the isolated Mexican countryside where the nearest neighbor was a half-hour ride down a rutted dirt road, passable at times only by motorcycle, or whether the state-of-the-art 6,000-square-foot stucco house in a poverty-stricken land could make him a target for thieves, or worse. The 38-year-old Apple Valley native reassured his...

NEW YORK — A vast network of Armenian gangsters and their associates used phantom health care clinics and other means to try to cheat Medicare out of $163 million, the largest fraud by one criminal enterprise in the program's history, U.S. authorities said Wednesday. Federal prosecutors in New York and elsewhere charged 73 people. Most of the defendants were captured during raids Wednesday morning in New York City and Los Angeles, but there also were arrests in New Mexico, Georgia and Ohio. The scheme's scope and sophistication "puts the traditional Mafia to shame," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said at a...

Meghan McCain, daughter of 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain, has a tell-all book out entitled Dirty Sexy Politics. In it she describes her experiences campaigning with and blogging about her dad. The book is one third chronicle of the lives of campaign children, one part a picture inside the campaign and one third angst: clothes, make up, hair, appearance, mean blog comments, unflattering media coverage. There's a lot of crying involved. Oh, and “crazy sex,” which McCain describes as, “sex with somebody who is extremely bad for you. Somebody you probably don't even like that much. But on the...

TUCSON (KGUN9-TV) - Senator John McCain's camp is apologizing to Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada for an ad running featuring Estrada's name. Sheriff Estrada has come out saying he does not support the senator. McCain's ad features several Arizona sheriff's taking his side. Towards the middle of the ad you see Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada's name scroll along the bottom. "I thought it was a mistake. They shouldn't have had that name in there and I did talk to some of the aids for senator McCain and I set the record straight on that I am not...

"An apparently hungry Chalmette man has been arrested for stealing a duck from a public park with the intent of cooking it up for a meal, the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff`s Office said. The Sheriff`s Office said Ashmeer Tahir, 38, 3713 Juno Drive, was booked with theft of an animal Monday after someone saw him remove a muscovie duck from Sidney Torres Park in Chalmette. A sheriff`s deputy found Tahir at his home with a duck inside a bucket in his van, the Sheriff`s Office said in a news release." duck http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/06/chalmette_man_stole_duck_from.html If this dude can afford to live in...

In a mind-boggling ripoff that went undetected for years, thousands of city cabbies overcharged nearly 2 million passengers by at least $8.3 million, according to a shocking disclosure yesterday by the Taxi & Limousine Commission. Officials said 35,558 of the city's 48,300 taxi drivers -- or three-quarters of all the licensees -- were caught overcharging at least once by secretly changing the meter's rate setting. A staggering 3,000 drivers swindled passengers more than 100 times each. A total of 1.9 million trips were overpriced. The scale of the thievery over the last 26 months was flabbergasting even to hardened veterans...