Free Republic

Illusionist David Copperfield's assistant was rushed to hospital on Wednesday night after suffering horrific injuries during a live show. A technician named Brandon was accidentally pulled into the vortex of an oversized fan on stage of Copperfield's An Intimate Evening of Grand Illusion at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. Audience members watched in horror as the assistant was sucked into the fan, before another staff member rushed to switch it off. Brandon, who is in his twenties, suffered puncture wounds in his face and broke his arm in several places. He was rushed to University Medical...

Inaugural No-Nos: Strollers, Coolers, Backpacks and More... The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies has posted on its Web site a number of tips to keep in mind for those planning on attending the Jan. 20 swearing-in ceremony and parade. Among the list of items banned from the festivities are baby strollers, coolers, backpacks, thermoses, umbrellas and signs. Go here for the full list and other tips about what to wear and what to expect.

A samurai sword wielding vigilante has come to the rescue of two Police officers when they were attacked by an armed gang in South Shields, England. A group of men had forced their way into a house and were ransacking the place when passing plain-clothes officers were alerted by a woman inside screaming. The criminals outnumbered them and were armed with a hammer, knives and chains and attacked the Police officers. As one of them stabbed at a Policeman with his knife, a mysterious do-gooder appeared from nowhere and attacked him with a samurai sword. One of the burglars began...

Knife amnesties have no real impact on reducing knife crime, according to a Metropolitan Police report. An eight-week Met Police amnesty over the summer showed that, after a slight dip in knife-related crime, levels were back to normal within weeks, it said.

KNIVES are no different than guns -- they both are "tools of death," says the mother of stabbing murder victim Andrew Moffitt. Paulette Moffitt has not failed to notice that knives have been used in two major crimes making headlines this week -- the brutal attempted murder of Karen Parker who was found in Britannia Park and the slaying of Sami El-Ghazal in a parking lot. "A knife and a gun, the only difference is that the gun makes noise. They both take lives," she said, yesterday during a dedication ceremony of a plaque to honour her son. The Moffitt...

SIERRA VISTA — Certain knives tell stories. But, unfortunately, many of these stories remain mysteries. “Trapper Jon” Carpenter has a number of special knives made by World War II GIs, each with some kind of story behind its making. He once had a knife that was tailored for or by some soldier. It was different, Carpenter said. The handle was personal. On the butt of the handle, underneath Plexiglas, was the photo of a GI’s family, he said. “I wanted to know about that family and the person who carried it (the knife),” Carpenter said. Today, there is an increase...

(Windsor Locks-WTNH, Aug. 25, 2006 Updated 2:56 PM) _ State police tell News Channel 8 that this morning a passenger reported a prohibited item on an inbound U.S. Airways flight from Philadelphia to Bradley International Airport. The crew was alerted to the item just as it was scheduled to land; the plane landed safely around 9:00 a.m. on Friday. There were 50 passengers and five crew members onboard. All remained onboard for about 20 minutes as officials searched the airplane. A utility knife was found on one of the seats of the plane. Transportation Safety Administration and state police are...

One of the region's top cops has called for a ban on pointed blades so that they cannot be used as lethal weapons. The Chief Constable of Northumbria police Mike Craik said he would like to see implements like kitchen knives only being sold with rounded ends to make them safer. He explained: "You rarely get victims who are sliced to death . . . they are usually stabbed. "So, the problem is pointed knives. If you ask chefs how many times they need to use pointed knives they'll tell you they don't need them at all." Mr Craik spoke...

Knife amnesty nets 17,700 weapons Over 17,700 weapons were handed in during the first week of the national knives amnesty, the Home Office said. Machetes, meat cleavers and axes as well as knives were among the haul of 17,715 surrendered to the 43 police forces across England and Wales. Home office minister Vernon Coaker said the results were "encouraging". The five-week amnesty, running until 30 June, allows people to surrender knives at police stations without fear of punishment. Mr Coaker urged those who had not yet handed in their weapons to do so. "The initial figures for the first week...

In 1997, Great Britain outlawed private ownership of handguns, and by 2003, gun crimes had doubled and violent crime had increased markedly. Those numbers continue to rise. Now knife crimes are increasing in Britain. For the most recent one-year period for which government records are available, 29 percent of homicides -- twice the rate of the United States -- were committed with "sharp instruments": knives, switchblades, etc. London had 12,589 knife-related crimes, most involving teenage boys. Knives are becoming the weapon of choice for young people, criminologists say, because they're easier to get and "less illegal" than guns. It's not...

Neandertals take out their small blades Bruce Bower From San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the Paleoanthropology Society and Society for American Archaeology meeting Excavations of Neandertal artifacts at two caves in northern Spain have yielded an unexpected discovery—a trove of thin, double-edged stone blades that researchers usually regard as the work of Stone Age people who lived much later. In 2005, Federico Bernaldo de Quiros of the University of Léon in Spain and his coworkers unearthed small stone blades, which they called bladelets, lying amid larger, characteristic Neandertal stone implements in a cave called El Castillo. All the finds came...

DETROIT -- A Detroit judge said Wayne State University police should not have arrested a student for carrying a knife. The knives are part of his Sikh religious beliefs. Sukhpreet Singh Garcha was arrested in August for carrying a 10-inch knife, known as a kirpan, on his hip. Police said the knife violated the city's weapons laws. Carrying a kirpan at all times is a basic tenet of Sikhism, an Indian-based faith with an estimated 25 million followers worldwide. The judge ruled last month that the knife ordinance is intended to apply to people carrying a weapon for some unlawful...

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Sikh students can carry ceremonial daggers to class and that doing so does not pose an undue danger to others in the schools. The top court overturned Thursday morning a Quebec Court of Appeals ruling that had barred the kirpan from schools in the province. The Quebec court had said a limit on religious freedom was reasonable, given the safety concerns from carrying the daggers to school. "Religious tolerance is a very important value of Canadian society," the top court judges wrote in their decision. "A total prohibition against wearing a kirpan...

Sikhs in B.C. are cheering the Supreme Court of Canada's decision that upholds the right of Sikh children to wear a ceremonial dagger to school. The case involved a Montreal student who wasn't allowed to wear his kirpan to school. Schools in B.C. have long permitted orthodox Sikh students to wear the ceremonial dagger. In its 8-0 judgment, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that a total ban infringed on Gurbaj Singh's guarantees of religious freedom under the Charter of Rights.

DEADLY WEAPONS DISCOVERED DEADLY weapons and thousands of pounds worth of suspected drugs were seized from two Thurnscoe homes during police raids on Monday morning. Officers used battering rams to smash into suspects homes during simultaneous raids on two suspected drug dens. At the first raid a man and a woman were led away in handcuffs for questioning after officers found a suspected large quantity of class A and class C drugs from the house. They recovered what are believed to be nine blocks of cannabis resin each with a street value of £1,000 and several thousand ecstasy tablets. Cops...

NATIONWIDE knife amnesty to end the carnage on our streets was launched yesterday. The five-week initiative, running throughout the UK, is aimed at repeating the success of Operation Blade, which took thousands of weapons off the streets of Strathclyde in 1993. Justice Minister Cathy Jamieson yesterday vowed it would be just one of many measures to battle knife crime in Scotland. Victims of the scourge have included policeman Lewis Fulton, knifed through the heart in Glasgow in 1994 as he tried to arrest a teenage schizophrenic. Knives are becoming an increasing menace in the hands of young girls, too. Kirsty...

WASHINGTON - Airline passengers will be allowed to carry small scissors and tools onto planes, reversing a rule that led to confiscation of many thousands of sharp objects at airports since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, a Homeland Security Department official said Wednesday. Transportation Security Administration chief Kip Hawley on Friday will announce changes to the list of items prohibited in carry-on luggage and to the airport screening process, according to the official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because the plan has yet to be announced. With federal air marshals on planes, bulletproof cockpit doors, armed pilots and...

As some of you know, The group of friends here at Free Republic known as the Hobbit Hole thread, have been contributing to a small project to buy pocketknives and other needed tools for our deployed soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It started out as care and comfort packages, and grew into pocketknives because we learned that while sweets and snacks were good, there were very practical tools, such as a good pocket knife, that our troops didn’t have unless they purchased them themselves. Handy items that would actually help them do their job. Since we started we have...

The Shadow Party: Part I By David Horowitz and Richard Poe FrontPageMagazine.com | October 6, 2004 Part 1: Origins "My family is more important to me than my party," declared Senator Zell Miller, a Georgia Democrat, as he spoke from the podium of the Republican National Convention on September 1. "There is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust their future and that man's name is George Bush." [1] Many Democrats howled in outrage at Miller's "betrayal" - former President Jimmy Carter in particular. In an angry personal letter to the Georgia senator, Carter accused Miller of...