Free Republic

Knox report From the Firearms Coalition The Pen is Mightier...and More Dangerous by Jeff Knox (May 6, 2008) When Steven Barber turned in his midterm creative writing assignment at the University of Virginia's College at Wise (UVA-Wise), he was hoping for a good grade to complement his 3.9 grade point average. Instead, Barber was expelled from school, locked in a mental institution for three days, and had his concealed carry permit revoked. Barber's fictional story was a first person narrative of a troubled college student consumed by depression, paranoia, drug addiction, and alcoholism as he struggles with one of tragedy's...

HOUMA,Louisiana -- Shortly after 2 p.m. Monday, a Houma Police officer handed 32-year-old Clyde Scott a ticket. Scott was on Main Street, smack in the middle of downtown Houma, but he wasn’t in a speeding car, parked illegally or even jaywalking. Rather, Scott was inside his barbershop cutting hair, trimming up a few students readying for their Monday-night high-school graduation ceremony when officer Michael Toups walked in. "He said he’s giving me a citation for opening on a Monday," Scott said, who has owned Clippas barbershop for about two years. Little did Scott know, a decades-old city law forbids barbers...

When Steven Barber turned in a short story this semester for his creative-writing class at the University of Virginia's College at Wise, his instructor was alarmed. The 23-year-old student had produced an imagined account of someone on the edge of a violent breakdown, touching on suicide and murder. ...

The 21 Smithfield Packing Co. employees arrested by immigration officials while they worked Wednesday are in the process of being deported. The 20 men and one woman arrested were moved Thursday from the Mecklenburg County Jail to Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., nearly 700 miles from Tar Heel. Meanwhile, church officials within the region’s Hispanic community and spokespeople with the United Food & Commercial Workers union said the workers’ families didn’t know where they were and other immigrant workers were terrified of more arrests. Production at the plant was substantially diminished Thursday as workers stayed away. “There are hundreds...

Afghanistan to Ask NATO for Bigger Army Afghan officials will go to the NATO summit in Romania Thursday with a request: pay to increase our national Army by 40 percent. A bigger Army, Afghan officials argue, will allow the US and other coalition members to scale back in the coming years. This appeal comes amid pleas from the US and Canada for other NATO members to commit more to the Afghanistan mission, which many analysts say has floundered over the past year for lack of resources and a coherent strategy. France is expected to contribute another 1,000 forces and...

Steven Daniel Barber, 23, says a culture of fear has displaced rational thought. The Iraq War veteran's comments came Tuesday, shortly after learning his expulsion from the University of Virginia at Wise had been upheld. He has been prohibited from attending classes since Feb. 29 -- the day after sharing a story in which a character contemplates murdering his professor, then turns to thoughts of suicide. Barber wrote the piece for his creative writing class. "It's the nanny state ran amock; political correctness to the extreme," said Barber in a phone interview with timesnews.net. "Nobody goes after Stephen King, nobody...

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - An Amsterdam barber has been arrested for stabbing a client with scissors, the second such incident involving the barber, Dutch police said on Saturday. The client was stabbed and seriously wounded after a fight broke out earlier this week at the barber's shop, police said. The barber stabbed another client with scissors in 2000. The man later died of his wounds, although the barber was cleared of any charges after a court found he had acted in self-defense. Police said they were holding the man, 42, and investigating whether attempted manslaughter charges should be brought against him.

Giants fans may have been able to see Tiki Barber in Big Blue's huddle for another season, if not for the physical beating he received playing under head coach Tom Coughlin. Barber, speaking after yesterday's press conference that formally announced his three-year broadcasting contract with NBC, implied that Coughlin has problems relating to players on the team, and that it was an "act of God" that the physical demands the coach placed on him did not result in a serious injury. "Coach Coughlin is very hard-nosed, and I didn't get a lot of time off, couldn't sit down and rest...

A Muslim who allegedly used his Seattle barber shop to teach children "how to shoot and fight the Americans" has fled to Somalia to avoid prison after he was convicted on federal counterfeiting and weapons charges. Ruben Shumpert, a black American who converted to Islam, was among more than a dozen arrested by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force two years ago on charges including immigration fraud and bank fraud, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. Shumpert was able to leave the country because a judge allowed him to keep his passport when he was released from custody prior to sentencing. A...

Many Religion forum readers may be interested in hearing what is going on at the GobBlog conference 2006 which opened today in La Mirada, California. Some of the speakers include radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt (broadcasting live from there later today), bloggers La Shawn Barber, Mark D. Roberts among many others. The conference goes through this Sunday October 28th. You can follow it via the main website and at the blogs by many of the speakers. GodBlog Conference 2006 - http://www.godblogcon.com/ La Shawn Barber - (live blogging)http://lashawnbarber.com/ Hugh Hewitt -http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/ Mark D. Roberts -http://www.markdroberts.com/

Signature phrase of Marshfield candidate upsets Imam Talal EidMARSHFIELD - The slogan appears right below Steve Barber’s name every time he posts a message on the popular Marshfield Forum online discussion board: ‘‘Killem All Let Allah Sort Em Out.’’ Where other forum users punctuate their messages with quotations or song lyrics, Barber uses a contemporary riff on ‘‘Kill ’Em All, Let God Sort ’Em Out,’’ a war cry coined by U.S. special operations forces during the Vietnam War. ‘‘I figure we’re fighting Muslims. ‘Allah’ works,’’ Barber said. Barber, 49, is a retired Army staff sergeant who, for the third time,...

Where is the outrage that was manufactured to run Rush Limbaugh off the air? Is it absent because Gumbel is allegedly black? So just picture for a moment, if you will, that you're watching SportsCenter tonight and Dan Patrick says, "The lack of whites in the NBA makes it look like a welfare office." Think that would get buried like Gumbel's comments? For what it's worth, maybe Gumbel should do some research on the emerging face of the GOP.

Some cast aside traditional loyalties... Adam Hunter, an ambitious law student with bright eyes, an easy smile, and plenty of charisma, seems practically destined for politics... a first-year law student at Howard University, a historically black campus with a long record of liberal activism. He has political ambitions of his own -- but not with the Democrats. Instead, Hunter, who as an undergraduate headed Howard's chapter of College Republicans, sees himself as part of a younger generation of African-Americans. He is ready to cast aside traditional loyalties to the Democratic Party and forge his own political identity. ''There's a lot...

KAPOLEI, Hawaii -- Tiki Barber's young sons woke him around 5 a.m., understandable considering the five-hour time difference from the family's New York home. In essence, 3 1/2-year-old AJ and 23-month old Chason were serving as an alarm clock for their father, who was out the door shortly thereafter for a special workout that had nothing to do with football. Barber, in Hawaii for Sunday's Pro Bowl at Aloha Stadium, went through a physical training session Tuesday morning with more than 100 soldiers who will be deployed Wednesday to Japan before going to Iraq next summer. The New York Giants'...

Chesterfield County Supervisor Edward B. Barber is spending this weekend in jail after being charged with two sex crimes against a minor. Barber, who was arrested late Thursday night, faces one count each of aggravated sexual battery and object sexual penetration. He is being held without bond in Hopewell's Riverside Regional Jail until his Jan. 3 preliminary hearing in Chesterfield's Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court. "Of course, with allegations like this, people automatically assume guilt so it's devastating to the whole family," said Barber's wife, Theresa, during a phone interview from her Bon Air home today. "I absolutely don't believe...

HYDERABAD, India -- Indian police arrested 67 women yesterday after a mob killed a barber suspected of practising black magic, an official said. Dozens more women were being sought by authorities. The arrests came after the mob of about 150 women from the south Indian village of Muddireddypalli attacked the shop of a barber named Parvathalu on Tuesday, beating him and locking him inside before setting the building on fire, said C. Satyanarayana, a district official. The villagers suspected he was practising black magic and held him responsible for the large number of deaths in the village in the past...

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina crashed into the Gulf coast, there is little argument that the response was botched. But an extensive Knight Ridder review of official actions in the days just before and after Katrina's landfall Monday, Aug. 29, reveals a depth of government hesitancy and a not-my-job attitude that may have cost scores of people their lives. The Department of Homeland Security, facing its first major catastrophe since it was created, failed to issue a critical disaster declaration until more than a day after the storm. The White House never appointed a coordinator to monitor disaster developments.

oronto-- On the same day Canada’s historic same-sex marriage bill passed through the House of Commons, thousands of emails were pouring into Allstate Insurance Company over conservative columnist J. Matt Barber. Allstate may have unwittingly spawned an anti-same-sex-marriage martyr in the spunky J. Matt Barber. Barber, a former employee of the insurance giant was fired--allegedly terminated, all for writing a column posted on several websites that was critical of same sex marriage and espousing his signature Christian beliefs. As WorldNetDaily first reported, J. Matt Barber was a manager in Allstate’s Corporate Security Division, its investigative arm, at the Fortune 100...

Almost half U.S. women do not mind if a man is losing his hair, but 99 percent are against comb-overs, a new survey has found. Forty-eight percent of the women in the online poll for Cargo magazine say men shouldn't even worry about hair loss, while 32 recommend going with the flow and cutting all hair off. But only 1 percent suggest hiding a balding head under a cap or a comb-over. Fifty-eight percent of the women say men look sexiest in jeans and a t-shirt, but they hate men in anything too trendy: 92 percent hated leather pants, 91...

CINCINNATI (AP) -- Apollo moon mission astronaut Neil Armstrong has threatened to sue a barbershop owner who collected Armstrong's hair after a trim and sold it for $3,000. Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, used to go to Marx's Barber Shop in Lebanon about once a month for a cut. That stopped when he learned that owner Marx Sizemore had collected his hair clippings from the floor and sold them in May 2004 to a collector. "I didn't deny it or anything," Sizemore said. "I told him I did it." Sizemore said Armstrong asked him to try...

Ahmed Resain has his back to the door, so he does not see the gunman alight from a car outside his rudimentary Al Pasha hairdressing salon, in Baghdad's dusty Al-Salam quarter. The assailant strides deliberately into the shop and coldly turns to face Ahmed. He presses a pistol to the stunned barber's lower lip, carefully angling the weapon to ensure that the bullet exits through his left jaw. Ahmed, 37, is still standing - but three shots to his legs as the gunman makes his getaway drop him to the floor in a pool of his own blood. His survival...

<p>May 2, 2004 -- CURT Smith, author of "Voices of the Game" and chronicler of all that binds baseball to broadcasting, had a frightening thought. "What if the next Vin Scully is out there and no one will hire him? What if he can't find work because his audition tape isn't loaded with screaming and shtick and hyperbole? Look at it this way: When's the last time 'SportsCenter' chose to replay a classy, dignified call of a team announcer's call?"</p>

BRUTUS BEEFCAKE CAUSES ANTHRAX SCARE, LANDS IN REHAB by 1Wrestling.com Updated: 2/13/2004 8:34:41 AM Brutus Beefcake (Ed Leslie) caused an Anthrax scare at a Boston subway station when a white powdery substance was found that caused the evacuation of the station where he was working. The substance was found on the counter of a fare booth being manned by Leslie, who later admitted it wasn't Anthrax but was cocaine. Leslie has been suspended and has checked into rehab.

<p>SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. (AP) - Barbershops with traditional spinning poles violate a city law against revolving signs, city officials say, and code-enforcement officers are cracking down.</p> <p>They visited three barbershops last week and told them to get rid of the spinning poles.</p>

(Manning) Jan. 30, 2003 - There are some things you can count on in the town of Manning as sure as the sun rises, like a great cup of joe at George's Coffee House, bells tolling the hour at the First Baptist Church and the sound of voices reflecting on tales of old. Ninety-seven year-old Ollie Stukes' is a legend in town. He's been cutting hair, "Since nineteen-hundred and twenty-five." Parents bring their kids to Ollie for their first haircuts, "Because I had cut four generations, five generations in that family, see." He's received a number of awards. Strom Thurmond...