Free Republic

The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin. Joseph Buttigieg, who died in January at the age of 71, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel's more doctrinaire theories, though...

A group of students from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City on April 28, 1882 and made an unambiguous decision: The United States was declaring its independence from British football. "A proposition to adopt the English rugby rules was unanimously rejected," the New York Daily Tribune reported on May 1, 1882. The basic concept at the foundation of American football originated in ancient Greece but came to the United States through Britain. As early as the 12th century, the English were playing "football" games -- particularly on Shrove Tuesday. William Fitz-Stephen...

A father serving a life sentence for beating his 2-day-old baby to death was found dead in his U.K. prison cell Sunday and another prisoner has been charged in his death, The Yorkshire Evening Post reported. Liam Deane, 22, who punched, shook and squeezed his 2-day-old daughter to death last July, was found dead in his prison cell at HMP Leeds on Sunday, the report said. Deane admitted to killing his 2-day-old daughter, Luna, in July after the baby would not stop crying. He was handed a life sentence last month and would serve a minimum 10 years.

WFOR-CBS 4 investigative reporter Michele Gillen is a defendant in a lawsuit. Plaintiff: Alexander Eugenio Moskovits, an ex-con from Miami Beach who says he lived with Gillen when he got out of prison, and donated sperm -- after their break-up -- so she could have a baby. Moskovits, 41, alleges fraud and emotional distress. Gillen, 50, "never intended to become pregnant" -- but used his sperm sample to "keep him in her life," he claims. Moskovits did eight years -- for cocaine trafficking while at the University of Pennsylvania. Released in January '97, he began dating Gillen that summer, and...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Horrified motorists sprang from their cars Friday to stop a woman who was repeatedly slamming her 7-month-old daughter onto a concrete sidewalk, police said. The baby later died of massive head trauma. Kirsten Vanderlinde, 36, who receives mental health care as an outpatient, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Melissa Vanderlinde-Berst. Police had checked on Vanderlinde twice shortly before the attack. A neighbor said she had called a crisis intervention center two days earlier, after Vanderlinde, fearing she was a bad mother, asked her to take custody of the child.