Free Republic

As someone whose father was in the aeronautics business — and who got passed on plenty of his wisdom from a young age — there are two things that I know, even as an unskilled observer, about airplane crashes. The first is that there’s never one single thing to blame for disasters, especially when it involves airliners; so much redundancy is built into the system that numerous things have to go wrong, either simultaneously or over a period of time, for a crash to happen. The second is that nobody — nobody — knows what caused the disaster in the...

Hundreds of immigrants with mental disabilities who were deported from the U.S. after representing themselves in court may be allowed to return to the country under a settlement approved by a judge Friday. [Snip] Under the agreement, the federal government said it will help those with reopened cases return to the U.S. and pay for some transportation costs. The settlement comes after an April 2013 injunction that found immigrants with serious mental disabilities have a right to an attorney if they're found mentally incompetent to represent themselves.

EXCLUSIVE: Minnesota resident Jim Stene voted last November -- and thought he was casting his ballot for President Gerald Ford. "He was exploited, plain and simple. He was exploited," his father, Alan Stene, charges. "This is a moral and ethical issue." Jim Stene, 35, suffers from anoxic encephalopathy, severe brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain. He has lived with the condition since 1987, when, as a 12-year-old boy, he jumped into a river to save the life of his drowning sister, Heather. Stene had spent the last 15 years living in a group home in...