Free Republic

COOS BAY, Ore. (AP) - A police survey says panhandlers outside a Wal-Mart here can make $300 a day. Inside, it takes a clerk a week to make that much. Police say people who have a problem with that needn't look to the law--asking for money is considered protected free speech. "We are not going to target panhandlers," said Coos Bay Police Capt. Rodger Craddock, who spoke a recent gathering of business owners about panhandling. "We can't do that. But if they aren't getting money from us, they aren't going to stand on that corner." He said most panhandlers are...

Roots of Care: Investigation of family tree, finds that ancestor lived in 'alms house'By Sherry Youngquist JOURNAL REPORTER Saturday, October 20, 2007 Kim Quintal stands inside a building in Yadkin County that was once known as "the crazy house." It was part of the poorhouse system in North Carolina. (Journal Photo by David Rolfe) YADKINVILLE - Off a dirt road, not far from the county seat, there is a small frame building in a field. Walk closer and you see the bars over the windows. Inside, handmade, crudely cut lattice separates stalls where people were once shut away. People in...

Soon after the tsunamis struck South and South-East Asia in December 2004, a Bengali newspaper published from New York prominently carried a report on how Bangladesh escaped the disaster. The report, by Bangladeshi geologists, concluded that the shallow continental shelf of the Bangladesh mainland acted as a kind of buffer. A few days later, an angry reader left this message on the editor's answering machine: "How, could you, a Muslim, publish such a report? It was Almighty Allah who saved Bangladesh." The proposition that God saved Bangladesh from the destructions of the tsunamis is of course a matter of faith,...