Free Republic

Two Pennsylvania teens were acquitted of murder, aggravated assault and ethnic intimidation charges Friday in the beating death of a Mexican immigrant last summer. However, a Schuylkill County jury found Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak guilty of simple assault stemming from the death of Luis Ramirez, who died of blunt force injuries to the head after a fight with the defendants and their friends. Donchak, 19, was also found guilty of providing alcohol to the group of teens that encountered Ramirez the night of July 12 on a residential street in the rural mining town of Shenandoah. Prosecutors alleged the...

POTTSVILLE, Pa. -- Dick Yuengling Jr., fifth-generation owner of the brewery that bears his name, called his employees together a few weeks before their labor contract was set to expire to talk about the future of the business. "Read between the lines," he told them at one point, according to government documents on the management-union feud that followed. Depending upon whom you ask, Mr. Yuengling's speech was either a pep talk to urge employees to work harder or an ultimatum to dump the Teamsters union, which is what they did. The union has been trying to strike back, urging a...

POTTSVILLE, Pennsylvania (AP) -- Child welfare authorities seized a newborn from a hospital Friday and placed the baby in a foster home because his father is a convicted sex offender. A judge granted the mother supervised visitation rights but prohibited visits from the father. "There's no happy ending in these things. It's what we think is the best interest of the children," said Gerard Campbell, executive director of Schuylkill County Children and Youth Services. The agency took custody of the baby over the mother's objections....

POTTSVILLE, Pa. -- Melissa WolfHawk, due to give birth any day now, lives in fear that her baby will be taken from her - by the government. The county child-welfare agency believes her child won't be safe because her husband is a sex offender who spent more than a decade in prison for rape in a case involving two teenage girls. But WolfHawk says her husband of three years, DaiShin WolfHawk, is no "monster," and she won a federal court order Sept. 30 keeping child-welfare workers from asking about her pregnancy, at least until a hearing next week. The American...

An old wrong may be about to be rightedIN THE 1920s, decades before the emergence of the international sensation known as the Super Bowl, the National Football League (NFL) was a loose collection of franchises sited not just in big cities but in small towns, too. Rock Island, Illinois and Muncie, Indiana had their teams, as well as Chicago and Detroit. In 1925, the Pottsville Maroons, based in a coal-mining and textile-weaving town in east-central Pennsylvania, elbowed and tackled their way to the NFL championship—that is, until the league, to the eternal outrage of Pottsville, revoked the title on a...