Free Republic

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Surveillance video of a bank robbery surprised detectives when it showed the bandit holding a gun in a strange manner, even backward during the holdup. "(The robber) is holding it in a manner that he's probably not familiar with handguns and was afraid it was going to go off," Orange County sheriff's Detective Jason Sams said. "If that was a fake gun, he would be holding it normally because he wouldn't care." Investigators said the bandit was wearing a new Cleveland Indians baseball cap when he walked into the Fifth-Third bank on the corner of University Boulevard...

Mayan leaders announced that priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after US President George W. Bush visits next week. "That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a national association of indigenous people and peasant farmers, said Thursday. Bush's seven-day tour of Latin America includes a stopover beginning late Sunday in Guatemala. On Monday morning he is scheduled...

ATLANTA - Timothy "Bud" Badyna has broken world records. He ran a marathon in under four hours. He finished a 10K race in 45 minutes. Wait a minute, you say, that's not so fast. Right. But Badyna set those records running backward. Badyna, dubbed "Backwards Bud" by fellow runners, holds the Guinness World Record for fastest backward run in a 200-meter race (32.78 seconds), set in 2001. In the early 1990s, he held the record for backward marathon (3 hours, 53 minutes) and 10K (45 minutes, 37 seconds). Those records have since been broken. So the 39-year-old hospital nurse from...

WASHINGTON - Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco asked Congress on Wednesday for help in rebuilding her devastated state, saying Hurricanes Katrina and Rita "knocked us down but they did not knock us out." Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Blanco in her opening statement did not mention former FEMA director Michael Brown, who on Tuesday had blamed state and local officials in Louisiana for not responding appropriately to the storm. "We are looking forward, not backward, " Blanco said. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Alabama Gov. Bob Riley also were testifying before the committee via teleconference hookup from their state capitols....

The defining moment of my visit to New Orleans a year ago occurred in a gift shop. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit this, but at least it wasn't the kind that sells feather boas and t-shirts with jazz-playing lobsters. I wasn't a sorority girl nursing my hangover at Café Du Monde during Mardi Gras; I was a tourist visiting what used to be a sprawling, stately slave plantation. I was busy mulling over that subtly troubling experience, browsing through the gift shop's bookshelves, when I came to a curious array of volumes. The title The South Was Right! jumped out...

Putin: Ally or Terrorist? by William F. Jasper Counting Vladimir Putin as an ally against terrorism ignores his career in the murderous KGB/FSB and his ongoing support for terrorist regimes and organizations. ‘‘Lena Goncharuk, aged 38, said that she was the only one to survive out of a group of six who were ordered out of the cellar where they had been hiding and shot at point blank range. Resting in her hospital bed, her voice barely rising above a whisper, she said she had survived only by pretending to be dead." So reported Paul Wood from the Chechen border...

The state budget deal contains some devastating compromises, including one that will hit California's kids hard: Republicans agreed to drop their demand to revise a 2002 law that largely prohibits schools from hiring private firms for food, transportation, and janitorial and landscaping services. The failure to repeal this law and give districts more control over funding puts California at odds with national trends in utilizing public- private partnerships to improve public education and condemns many districts to financial straits. Schools across the country have saved millions through outsourcing, thus directing more resources to classrooms. When the St. Louis school district...

It appears that "no compromising" can get you in trouble. Perhaps positive results should be the goal.