Free Republic

Disturbing bodycam video captured the moment a towering 6-foot-tall woman was fatally shot by a veteran Virginia cop just seconds after she charged at him with a knife and repeatedly slashed him. Sydney Wilson, 33, was fatally shot by Fairfax County officer Peter Liu in the hall of her apartment building in Reston, just outside Washington D.C., on Sept. 16 after cops were called to carry out a welfare check on her, police said. The graphic footage, released by police on Monday, showed an “agitated” Wilson opening and then abruptly slamming her door in the officer’s face after he knocked...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - With little else to attract tourists, promoters of two Swedish counties are pinning their hopes on a truly gargantuan wooden moose. When completed, the 148-foot tall, 155-foot-long moose will have a restaurant in its belly, as well as a concert hall, conference rooms and a shop, according to Thorbjorn Holmlund, project coordinator and local tourism promoter. The monument to the moose will be so big that its massive wooden hooves will be firmly planted in two different counties, Vasterbotten and Norrbotten, about 540 miles north of Stockholm. "The reason we decided to build a moose is because...

Towering Mysteries Who built them and why? An amateur archaeologist tries to get to the bottom of some astonishing structures in Tibet and Sichuan Province, China Martine "Frederique" Darragon set out from New York City for the hinterlands of western China and Tibet in 1998 to pursue an interest in the endangered snow leopard when she fell under the spell of another elusive phenomenon: old stone towers, some vaguely star-shaped and some more than 100 feet tall, scattered across the foothills of the Himalayas. Yet when she asked local residents about the towers—Who built them? When? Why?—nobody seemed to have...