Free Republic

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — Jim Willett remembers the night of Dec. 6, 1982, when he was assigned to guard a mortuary van that had arrived at the death house at the Huntsville prison. "I remember thinking: We're really going to do this. This is really going to happen," says Willett, who was a captain for the Texas Department of Corrections. When the van pulled away early the next morning, it carried to a nearby funeral home the body of convicted killer Charlie Brooks, who had just become the first Texas prisoner executed since a Supreme Court ruling six years earlier...

Yesterday I wrote a vignette in jest suggesting what New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie might be yelling at his TV during the GOP debate. Unlike his alter-ego in my vignette, the real Bill Kristol did not call Christie to plead nor drive over to his house to urge him to get into the race. Instead he used his Web site , figuratively speaking, to run over Texas Gov. Rick Perry with an 18-wheeler and drive through Christie’s living room window: With nine candidates on the stage, and answers restricted to one minute, it’s hard to really show your stuff. And...

A Melbourne man who fantasised about contracting HIV before actually being infected by the virus has spoken of a gay subculture in which infection is seen as "desirable". The 20-year-old man, who does not want to be named, told Fairfax newspapers both complacency about the virus and the wish to have unprotected sex with an HIV-positive man he was in love with led him to become infected. "I wasn't actively seeking it, but maybe there were parts of me, dark corners, that wanted it, that were thinking, 'Let's just do it and get it over and done with and then...