Free Republic

Video Linky Here

JACKSON COUNTY, Ohio (WSAZ) -- A man from Jackson County, Ohio who was arrested for A spanking that some family members say went to far is now out of jail. On Sept. 2, Charley Brown III was arrested in Jackson County, Ohio, for spanking his 6-year-old son with a belt. Click here to find out more! According to the incident report from the Jackson County Sheriff's Office, Brown was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence after his son admitted his father pulled his pants down and spanked him with a belt. Authorities say the spanking left bruising and welts on the...

Collisions between asteroids should be highly energetic affairs, with an average impact speed of close to 5 kilometers per second. We may be looking at the debris of a head-on collision between two asteroids in imagery provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. The object in question, originally thought to have been a comet, is P/2010 A2, discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) sky survey on January 6 of this year. The follow-up Hubble imagery dates from late January, and shows an unusual filamentary pattern near the nucleus.Image: HST picture of the comet-like object called P/2010 A2. The object...

First lady Michelle Obama speaks to children of executive office employees in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, April 23, 2009, during the White House's annual 'Take Your Child to Work Day.'

Tim Fofonoff, a 31-year-old grad student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stands at the base of a 50-foot-tall, graffiti-covered rock wall just south of Boston. He´s clipped into the Atlas Powered Rope Ascender, a toaster-size battery-driven device that he and his three co-inventors built themselves. With it, he´s about to do something no one outside of a Hollywood script has done before: rappel up a wall at an astonishing 10 feet per second. He stares hesitantly for a moment at the craggy rock face, presses a small button, and darts off the ground as if he were wearing a...

Medieval belt buckle discovered The medieval belt buckle Archaeologists unearthed a medieval belt buckle in Perth following work to repair a collapsed sewer. The group were allowed to examine the area in the Kirkgate as Scottish Water repaired the network. The copper alloy buckle is believed to date back to the 12th Century and was found along with animal bones, shells and pottery. A panel of experts will decide where the buckle should be housed, but it is hoped it will end up in Perth Museum. Catherine Smith from SUAT archaeological consultants told the BBC Scotland news website how they...

PARIS (AFP) - Astronomers have pieced together the remnants of a mighty collision that smashed apart a planet-sized rock in the Kuiper Belt, on the far-flung fringes of the Solar System. First identified in the 1950s by Dutch-US skygazer Gerard Kuiper, the disk-shaped belt is believed to be populated by tens of thousands of icy bodies, encircling the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune. A team led by Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) took a close look at the belt's third largest object, 2003 EL61. Nicknamed "Santa" because the team spotted it at Christmas-time, 2003 EL61...

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (news, bio, voting record) crashed his car near the Capitol early Thursday, and a police official said he appeared intoxicated. Kennedy said he had taken sleep medication and a prescription anti-nausea drug that can cause drowsiness. Kennedy, D-R.I., addressed the issue after a spate of news reports. His initial statement said: "I consumed no alcohol prior to the incident."'Later, however, he issued a longer statement saying the attending physician for Congress had prescribed Phenergan on Tuesday to treat Kennedy's gastroenteritis.Kennedy said he returned to his Capitol Hill home on Wednesday evening after a final series of votes...

Cook County lost more people between 2000 and 2005 than any county in the nation, according to Census Bureau estimates released Thursday that also show continued gains in suburban and exurban counties across the region and portions of the nation. The new figures--based on administrative records and estimates for births, deaths and net migration--show the county lost more than 73,000 people, or 1.4 percent, since the last official count in April 2000. The largest-loser designation can partly be attributed to Cook County's massive size, because raw numbers were used for the rankings. Still, among the nation's 10 largest counties, Cook,...

Scientists are over the moon at the W.M. Keck Observatory and the California Institute of Technology over a new discovery of a satellite orbiting the Solar System's 10th planet (2003 UB313). The newly discovered moon orbits the farthest object ever seen in the Solar System. The existence of the moon will help astronomers resolve the question of whether 2003 UB313, temporarily nicknamed "Xena," is more massive than Pluto and hence the 10th planet. A paper describing the discovery was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters on October 3, 2005. "We were surprised because this is a completely different type of...

August 25, 2005 The Times Stone axes highlight 10,000 years of commuting in stockbroker belt By Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent ARCHAEOLOGISTS have uncovered an important Stone Age site in the heart of Surrey. An excavation has turned up flint tools and cooking pots from about 10,000 years ago at the site on the North Downs. The area, which bears the remains of cooked meals, campfires and flints shaped into tools by people who visited the North Downs around 8,000BC, is believed to contain one of the most important Mesolithic excavations in Britain. Andrew Josephs, an archaeologist and the project’s consultant,...

Terrorists tie bomb belt to dog in Iraq (Filed: 27/05/2005) Insurgents in Iraq attached explosives to a dog and tried to blow up a military convoy near the northern oil centre of Kirkuk. The canine bomb went off but the only casualty was the unfortunate animal, said police. The militants wrapped an explosive belt around the dog and detonated it as the convoy passed through Dakuk, 25 miles south of Kirkuk, said the town's police chief, Col Mohammed Barzaji. "The dog was torn apart by the explosion which caused neither injury among the soldiers nor any damage." Col Barzaji said...

A Plymouth father facing a felony charge for using a belt to spank his 12-year-old son over forgotten homework says he's the victim of overzealous authorities with no business telling him how to discipline his child. ``My record is spotless and all of a sudden I have a felony charge?'' an exasperated Charles Enloe said following his arrest by Plymouth police. ``. . . How is a parent supposed to raise a child these days? You can't spank them, you can't yell at them in stores. I feel I was wrongly charged.'' Enloe, a 42-year-old divorced father, was charged with...

PLYMOUTH - A father who used a belt to spank his 12-year-old son over forgotten homework is facing a felony assault charge and an investigation by the state Department of Social Services. Charles S. Enloe, 42, of 4 Cortelli Court, Plymouth, hit his son on the buttocks three times with a belt after the boy forgot his homework assignment at school, police said. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Enloe said he was surprised at his arrest, but that he doesn't blame police for doing their job. ‘‘I never knew it would be considered assault with a...

With the recent toppling of CBS's Dan Rather and now CNN's top news executive, Eason Jordan, I think we can declare without fear of contradiction that rigor mortis is settling over the carcass of the Fourth Estate. At least as we once knew it. I make this pronouncement without pleasure, and in fact, suggest that we're really witnessing a double funeral. One is for traditional journalism as the omnipotent gatekeeper of information. As bloggers -- authors of Web logs -- have gleefully pointed out the past several days, everyone with access to the Internet is now a journalist. Given the...

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- A Senate committee advanced a bill Tuesday that would require drivers and all passengers to wear seat belts in trucks, SUVs and cars. After hearing emotional testimony from family members of those killed in crashes, the Senate's public policy committee voted 10-0 to endorse the bill. It now moves to the full Senate, which approved similar legislation last year before it was blocked in a House committee. The bill requires people in front and back seats to buckle up in all vehicles with seat belts, with exceptions for trucks used on farms. People who cannot wear seat...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Scientists Find Another Huge Mini-World in Outer Solar System The most distant object ever seen orbiting the Sun is nearly as large as Pluto, expanding astronomers notions of how the solar system formed and what resides in its outskirts. The round world is currently three times farther away than Pluto from the Sun, a distance that expands even further on its 10,000-year orbit. It sits in a part of the solar system that some astronomers had thought empty. It is redder and brighter than anything astronomers have seen in the outer solar system, and scientists don't know why. The object...

London-based Al Hayat newspaper: Saddam Hussein is wearing an explosive belt, for use if he is captured by U.S. forces.

SEATTLE - "It's all about safety." That's been the Washington State Patrol mantra around the "Click it or Ticket" law. Of course, now we come to find that writing 3 seatbelt tickets an hour means that troopers can "safely" pocket overtime pay. The devil, as they say, is in the details. And the details are in a contract with the State Traffic Safety Commission and law enforcement agencies, including the state patrol. The contract spells out how federal money is funneled into enforcement of the seat-belt law: write "x" number of tickets and the state gets federal grant money, which...

Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission Moves Ahead; NASA Approves Full-Scale Development for APL-Managed New Horizons The solar system's farthest known planetary outpost is closer to getting its first visitor. This week NASA gave The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Southwest Research Institute and their partners the go-ahead to start full development of the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The New Horizons spacecraft is scheduled to launch in January 2006, swing past Jupiter for a gravity boost and scientific studies in 2007, and reach Pluto and its moon, Charon, as early as summer 2015. The arrival date depends...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 March 2 In the Center of the Trapezium Credit: J. Bally, D. Devine, & R. Sutherland, D. Johnson (CITA), HST, NASA Explanation: Start with the constellation of Orion. Near Orion's belt is a fuzzy area known as the Great Nebula of Orion or M42. In this nebula is a bright star cluster known as the Trapezium, shown above. New stellar systems are forming there in gigantic globs...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 December 25 Orion Rising Credit & Copyright: Jimmy Westlake (Colorado Mountain College) Explanation: Orion always comes up sideways ... and was caught in the act earlier this month by astronomer Jimmy Westlake, stargazing eastward over the Rocky Mountains north of Leadville, Colorado, USA. To make this gorgeous image, Westlake placed his camera on a tripod for two exposures. The first lasted for 18 minutes allowing the stars...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 November 13 Asteroid Annefrank Credit: STARDUST Team, JPL, NASA Explanation: NASA's interplanetary probe STARDUST, on its way to Comet Wild 2 in January 2004, passed asteroid 5535 Annefrank earlier this month. Annefrank, named for a holocaust victim who kept a famous diary, is a member of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Just prior to closest approach at about 3300 km distant, the robot spacecraft...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 July 24 Our Busy Solar System Credit & Copyright: MPC, CBAT, Harvard CfA, IAU Explanation: Our Solar System is a busy place. Although the major planets get the most press, a swarm of rocks, comets, and asteroids also exist. The above plot shows the placement of known inner Solar System objects on 2002 July 20. The light blue lines indicate the orbits of planets. The green dots...

JULY 19, 2002 Bizarre study trick proves fatal BANGKOK - A university student here has been found dead after a bizarre study method which involved looping a belt around his neck and fixing it to a door handle went tragically wrong. Eak Chongsawatwattana's mother said the belt kept him awake while he was studying, a trick he had learnt from other university students. If he nodded off, the jerk of the belt would wake him up. 'I warned him many times not to do this, but he just didn't listen. Now he's dead,' she said. Eak, 21, was reportedly found...