Free Republic

When I was 9 or 10, I watched Raising Arizona on VHS and thought it was one of the weirdest and funniest things I had ever seen. A frequently jailed stickup artist with surprisingly florid diction (Nicolas Cage) and his barren police officer wife (Holly Hunter) kidnap a loudmouth furniture magnate's quintuplet and run into trouble with two escaped convicts and the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse. I didn't get it, really, but I didn't care: It was hilarious and strange, with amusingly quotable dialogue ("I'll be taking these Huggies and, uh, whatever cash ya got") and hummable music (the...

Police believe a 7-month-old baby was left alone on a porch while a man and woman broke into a home to possibly smoke crack cocaine, according to a Crestview Police Department report. Carlos Rodriquez Gantt, 34, of 1358 New Ebenezer Road in Laurel Hill, was arrested and charged with burglary and resisting arrest without violence. He is in custody at the Okaloosa County Jail on a $9,000 bond. Gantt was arrested in Crestview Sept. 22 for an incident that police said occurred on Aug. 27. According to his arrest report, Gantt broke into a home in the 1000 block of...

PHOENIX - A woman who agreed to be a surrogate mother for a childless couple is pregnant with quintuplets, all boys, and she's decided not to accept any money because of the expense the parents are facing.   Teresa Anderson, who has four children of her own, expected that being a surrogate for Luisa Gonzalez and her husband, Enrique Moreno, would be equally simple. "But it's really five times the swelling, five times the mood swings," she told The Arizona Republic. "It's very different. You're a lot weaker and more vulnerable to the symptoms (of pregnancy). My uterus is...

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German woman and a male friend face prosecution for human trafficking after they put the woman's daughter up for auction on the Internet at a starting price of one euro ($1.18), authorities said on Wednesday. A photograph of the 8-year-old child was posted by the man, from the Bavarian town of Traunstein, who later told police he had placed the offer to test the online auction system. The senior state prosecutor investigating the case said both the man, 35, and mother, 41, faced charges of attempted child trafficking. "Three people made offers for the child and...