Free Republic

The Boston City Council wants to make sure everyone who needs menstrual products has access to them, regardless of income. During the regular city council meeting, Councilors Matt O’Malley and Lydia Edwards called for a hearing about menstrual equity. “It’s important to have conversations about public health that impact women, girls, and low-income families,” said O’Malley during Wednesday’s meeting.

A Broward County circuit judge delivered a blistering, arm-waving, face-palming, tongue-lashing to a frail, out-of-breath woman — pushed into court in a wheelchair — who was facing misdemeanor charges following a family feud. Three days later, the defendant died. ... Twiggs suffered from asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, also called COPD. She ended up under arrest after squabbling with her 19-year-old daughter. ... Porter told the Miami Herald that once Twiggs was released from jail and taken back home, she was starving, dizzy and borderline breathless. She had trouble getting her medications in the jail, Porter said. ... Twiggs...

<p>KINSHASA, Congo -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's temper flared on Monday when a Congolese university student asked her for her husband's thinking on an international financial matter.</p> <p>A week after former President Bill Clinton traveled to North Korea to secure the release of two detained American journalists and stole the limelight from the start of his wife's first trip to Africa, Clinton was clearly displeased by the question at town hall forum in Kinshasa.</p>

The Dixie Chicks and their camp will continue their struggle this week to figure out where their own Mason-Dixon Line lies on a map of America's arenas. The reason is that ticket sales for their upcoming road run, the Accidents & Accusations Tour, have not as gone as they expected; basically, in many Southern states and Midwest markets, the Chicks have not been forgiven for perceived political sins of the past. Concert industry watchers say some radio station chiefs are extending their boycott of the group's recordings to include advertising bans for the group's concerts. "Obviously there are political overtones...

When all the fanatical Christians disappear, will traffic finally improve? Wait, did I miss it? Did it happen three days ago, on 6-6-06, a.k.a. Tea Time with the Beast, a.k.a. the Great Day of Reckoning, a.k.a. the National Day of Slayer, all the world crashing down in a heap of hissing steam and belching smoke and balmy gusty breezes sometime around noon just after lunch but not before rush hour and hitting right around siesta? I might have been napping. Did the Apocalypse finally hit? Did the deep wish of roughly a half-billion zealous believers come to pass and were...

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV...

Think sex and drugs destroy America? Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls" There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country. Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys,...

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over? Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe. Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime. Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known...

President Bush is continuing the homeland security dog-and-pony charade in his quest to deliver a massive "guest worker"/amnesty plan to the open-borders lobby. A few weeks ago, Bush's Department of Homeland Security put on a bogus performance of Get Tough Theater with a series of politically timed immigration raids...which, as I predicted, simply resulted in more catch and release of illegal aliens nationwide. This new last-minute stunt to sprinkle National Guard troops on the border--temporarily, of course, to appease Mexican President Vicente Fox--is more transparent than the Scotch tape used to hold together our dilapidated border fences. (That's only a...

How to address a bitter, war-torn but still somehow giddy and deeply horny nation. My fellow Americans, we're not as royally screwed as everything Bush has done during his miserable term in office would have you believe.

Yes, I know you were drunk. Must've been. Either drunk or on serious meds and/or you just didn't give much of a damn about anything anyway because you're just one of those people, one of those types who comes lurching around the city like a chunk of numbed pain in your big-ass mid-'80s burgundy car with the white top and chrome bumpers -- an old Cadillac? Monte Carlo? -- early last Sunday morning to wreak casual havoc. Is that about right? Do you remember any of it? Here is what I'm guessing: probably not. Let me tell you what happened,...

Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply should you cringe? Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost? And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob...

Apparently, it wasn't just "invade Iraq and Afghanistan in my name." A special report: Scene: White House private residence, night, not long ago. President Bush present in his most favoritest guns 'n' bunnies PJs. Laura asleep, knocked out by a combination of too much Good Housekeeping and excessive hair-spray fumes. Suddenly, a burst of black smoke. A deep, resonant voice speaks: "Psst! George! God here, taking a break from supervising the well-being of eight billion troubled souls along with infinite galaxies of unimaginable vastness to speak with you directly one more time because, well, you're special, aren't you, George? Yes...

Leather, techno, sex & war: more only-in-SF juice to make you proud. Take that, uptight neocons. It was the moment when we walked by a jam-packed S.F. City Hall and realized it was open to host a VIP techno dance party, while immediately outside its gilded doors upward of 50,000 revelers wandered and shimmied and flaunted their costumes and drank nasty Red Bull cocktails in the huge Civic Center plaza for the third annual Love Parade, everyone baring flesh and shaking their groove thangs to any one of 200 world-class (well, some of them) DJs spinning their wares on over...

At last, one scientist BushCo will definitely -- albeit resentfully -- listen to. Sometimes. So now we know. This is what it takes. This is how far the nation has to crumble and this is how many people have to die and this is how many tens of billions it has to cost and this is how far his dirt-low poll numbers have to fall before Bush will finally come out and say he agrees with one of those godforsaken gul-dang book-learned scientist types. You know the ones. Those informed and well-educated data-crunchers he normally despises like a kid hates...

Can you hear that? That low scraping moan, that painful scream, that compressed hissing wail like the sound of an angry alligator caught in a vise? Why, it's the GOP, and they're screaming, "No, no it can't be, oh my God, please no, this damnable Katrina thing is just an unstoppable PR disaster for us!" After all (they wail), who woulda thought dissing all those poor black people and letting so many of them die in filth and misery in the Superdome while our pampered CEO president enjoyed yet another vacation would cause such an ugly backlash, such harsh criticism...

Hormonal changes may actually alter the chemical balance in the brain and trigger some of the mood swings associated with a woman's monthly menstrual cycle, according to a new study. The study suggests that cells in a brain region called the hippocampus generate different types of receptors for the brain chemical GABA during various phases of the menstrual cycle. These changes may affect a woman's susceptibility to anxiety, depression, and seizures. Both estrogen and progesterone have effects on nerve cell activation, but the mechanism behind changes in seizure activity and increased anxiety are unknown, write the researchers. They say their...

NEW IRAQ PRISON SHOCK: MALE DETAINEES FORCED TO WEAR WOMEN'S 'MAXI-PADS'