Free Republic

.S. District Judge Sim Lake ruled today that a Bible displayed in a monument outside the Harris County Civil Courts Building must be removed within 10 days and that the county must pay $41,000 in court costs and attorney fees. Real estate broker and attorney Kay Staley sued the county in federal court to have the monument removed, contending the display violates the First Amendment ban on an establishment of religion. The King James Bible rests under glass inside a 4-foot stone monument on the west side of the Civil Courthouse, 301 Fannin. The monument was constructed with private funds...

Engineers began dismantling a nuclear submarine scrapped from Russia's Pacific fleet on Sunday as part of a Japanese-funded project, a senior Japanese foreign ministry official said. With the recycling of the Viktor-3 class submarine at the Zvezda ("star" in Russian) plant near Vladivostok, "the implementation of the Russian-Japanese project 'Star of Hope' has begun," Sindo Esitaka told reporters in this Pacific port city. While Japan has been funding a nuclear submarine recycling programme for 10 years, too little has been done so far, Esitaka added. Over the past decade, "Japan has devoted 20 billion yen ($169 million, 144 million euros)...