Free Republic

Columbia mayor-elect Steve Benjamin was in a car accident at 5:45 this morning at the intersection of Gervais and Pickens streets, according to his spokesman and EMS officials. Michael Wukela said Benjamin was on his way to early-morning media interviews when the accident happened. Wukela said Benjamin is OK, that he is "cooperating fully with police and his primary concern right now is that the woman in the other car is OK." The other driver Wukela identified was transported to the hospital in fair condition, according to Richland County EMS spokesman George Rice. Wukela could not confirm if Benjamin was...

KENSINGTON, Md. - Public parks are usually the places where children go to have fun. But the town of Kensington just passed a new rule that bans kids over five years old from playgrounds during the daytime...The girls at Kensington's Brookewood School are banned from using a public park right across the street for recess. "I don't think it's really fair because we're part of the community too and we want to play in the park," said Jill Collins, a fifth-grade student. The town council unanimously passed a resolution this week saying only caretakers with children five years old and...

The recent attack on the Marine Corps as "unwelcome intruders" is just the latest example of Berkeley politicians behaving badly. Showered with ridicule, confronted with the loss of federal and state money, the City Council was obliged to withdraw its misbegotten resolution, though it wasn't prepared to apologize for its blunder. "To err is human, but to really screw up it takes the Berkeley City Council," one councilmember ruefully acknowledged. But ask Standard & Poor's, the financial services company, what it thinks about Berkeley and you'll get a very different response. Last month, the firm upgraded the city's bonds to...

FORT WORTH, Texas, Jan 3. -- Just before New Year's Eve, a Fort Worth mother was kicked off the public bus for reading the Bible aloud to her children on the way to church. "What kind of person pulls over public transportation and kicks out a mother and her children for reading their Bible on the way to church?" said Kelly Shackelford, Chief Counsel for Liberty Legal Institute, the legal organization representing Christine Lutz. "Freedom of religion exists on public transportation just like anywhere else." Christine Lutz was reading the Bible to her children while on the way to church...

HOW OUR CITIES STACK UP Presumably, since municipal by-laws are approved by a vote of council, they all made sense to someone at some time. Nevertheless, in city halls across the country, regulatory insanity abounds. Herewith, the National Post's top ten wacky by-laws: 1. MONTREAL According to a 1996 by-law, it is explicitly forbidden to make or store a nuclear weapon, under pain of a $300 fine for a first offence, $500 for a second, and up to $1,000 for subsequent violations. This penalty scheme is identical to that for home owners who allow weeds to grow in their yards....