Free Republic

A Red Sox fan on his way home from Yankee Stadium died Wednesday when he tried to climb on top of a Metro-North train and was electrocuted by overhead wires, creating a chaotic situation where riders were trapped for more than two hours, MTA officials and riders said. The Metro-North train from Yankee Stadium to New Haven, Conn., left the ball field just before 11 p.m. on Wednesday. As the train was running from Larchmont to Mamaroneck about half an hour later, a pair of brothers tried to climb from inside a car onto the roof. Train personnel got one...

The Communist Party USA is amping up its rhetoric as it prepares to confront the “Tea Party” and the GOP in the coming months. Ohio Communist Party leader Rick Nagin sets the tone in today’s Peoples World: The best thing that can be said about the distasteful debt ceiling deal is that it is behind us and hopefully the real challenges and issues facing the American people can now be frankly addressed. The AFL-CIO leadership, which met with President Obama the day after the agreement was reached, correctly said the deal ignores and undermines the nation’s ability to confront the...

When university police officers were called to Powell Library on Tuesday night to escort a student off the premises, they used weapons which are unregulated and have largely unknown effects on the body. Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a 23-year-old UCLA student, was hit with a Taser at least four times after he was unable to produce his BruinCard during a random check of all people in the CLICC Lab and did not leave the building promptly upon request. UCPD said in a statement that the officers resorted to the use of the Taser because Tabatabainejad refused to comply with officers' requests that...

40 Thousand volts, four thousand amperes, and over one hundred million watts squeezed into a cubic centimeter. YouÂ’d think that would be enough to vaporize just about anything, and it certainly doesnÂ’t seem like the kind of electricity youÂ’d want to apply to your body. But if our research continues to succeed as it has, years from now weÂ’ll be asking some cancer patients to do just that. And it might just save their lives. The trick is to apply that gargantuan jolt for only a few billionths of a second. ThatÂ’s so brief a time that the energy delivered...