Free Republic

Early in the evening of July 4, Micaela Giles’s mobile phone started sounding alerts, and a series of messages straight out of a horror movie began scrolling down her screen. Her 19-year-old son told her that his Airbnb host in Madrid had locked him in the fourth-floor apartment where he was supposed to be staying and removed the key. The host was still there, he said, rattling knives around in the kitchen drawer and pressing him to submit to a sexual act. He begged his mother for help. When she called Airbnb, its employees would not give her the address...

BOSTON (Reuters) - Law enforcement created "dangerous crossfire situations" while trying to apprehend the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, according to a state report on the emergency response that was released on Friday. Police officers lacked "weapons discipline" during a gun battle with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed a short time later, in the early hours of April 19, 2013, the report found. [snip] While the first officers in the Watertown gun-battle used their weapons appropriately, others later improperly self-deployed to the scene without assignments, the report said. "Additional officers arriving on scene...

CHICAGO — Chicago police say a group of robbers have been using fake road blocks to attack drivers. This is happening in the Fuller Park neighborhood on the South Side. It’s happened twice in the last five days in the 300 and 400 blocks of west 51st Street, around 6 p.m. After drivers stop to move a construction barrel blocking the street, three or four suspects start attacking and robbing them. Police have only released vague descriptions of the suspects.

YUBA CITY (CBS13) — A Facebook page created to criticize people about their weight is generating controversy in the Yuba-Sutter region. 530 Fatties appears to be created by someone who lives within the local 530 area code, and featured photos of overweight or obese people in public without their permission. With those photos are words mocking the subjects’ weight. The page was taken down at some point on Monday after CBS13 began looking into it after several people reached out to us. Jessi Lynn Howell, 18, is still mortified after discovering a picture of herself posted on 530 Fatties.

Dallas Northington spent nearly eight years working for Target in loss prevention, roaming the stores and scanning the surveillance cameras. In an episode at the Leesburg Target store in May that he said was typical, a man was allegedly captured twice on video shoplifting, and Northington responded as he said he always did: He called the Leesburg police, made a report and provided them the videos of the two incidents. But the man in the video may have been a Fairfax County sheriff’s deputy, Northington said he soon learned. And within days, two things happened: The deputy retired from the...

Hidden cameras used to film men in bathroom stalls has led to the arrest of a Missouri police officer who's accused of taking and posting the videos on a pornographic website. The shocking bust of 33-year-old Chesterfield officer David Cerna caps the discovery of videos of numerous men — some with faces shown — using a bathroom stall without knowing that a camera was trained on them, Fox2Now reported. "When I saw myself pooping, I was just like, you've gotta be kidding me," alleged victim Rob Cheney told Fox reporter Chris Heyes, who was the first to crack the investigation....

Southwest Airlines was forced to apologize to a woman who was told she couldn't board her flight because her cleavage was "inappropriate." Jezebel reports that the woman, Avital — she only gave her first name — was boarding a 6 a.m. flight from Las Vegas to New York on June 5 when a ticket agent remarked that she couldn't fly unless she covered her breasts. Clad in a comfy cotton dress, a baggy flannel shirt and bright scarf, Avital ignored the warning and marched aboard anyway. ... Avital slammed the Southwest for "slut shaming," and said a man on her...

This spring, Les and Scott GrantSmith will mark their 25th wedding anniversary. The couple raised two daughters along the way. But 15 years ago, they hit a crisis that nearly shattered their family. Les was keeping a secret, and that became a problem. But they solved it as a family, in a way that kept them together and happy. In the weeks leading up to that day back in 1997, Les was certain of two things: She was a mother who loved her daughters — and she was also transgender, the term for someone born in a body of the...

WASHINGTON - D.C. Police say a teenage boy was stabbed inside the National Zoo in Northwest. Sources tell FOX 5's Wisdom Martin that a 14-year-old male was stabbed in the chest in the zoo after being jumped by another group of young people. ... In a statement, the National Zoo says they have a person in Zoo police custody and that individual will be turned over to D.C. Police. Easter Monday is traditionally African American Family Day at the National Zoo. Easter Monday has been a Washington-area multicultural tradition that spans more than 100 years. In 2000, there was a...

A famous former rugby player has been arrested in South Africa after allegedly butchering at least three people to death with an axe. A newspaper claimed the unnamed 34-year-old sportsman had launched a murderous rampage in revenge after his daughter was gang-raped and infected with HIV. Afrikaans daily Beeld reported that one of the star's alleged victims had been decapitated during a string of brutal attacks which happened last week near Durban in South Africa's eastern KwaZulu-Natal province. It is believed the man's head was found at least a mile away from his body in a separate suburb of the...

SANTA ANA Police arrested a man, a woman and a teenage boy on suspicion of killing a bystander following a fight between two groups over which Mexican state is best, authorities said Friday. Ivan Sanchez, 21, of Santa Ana was arrested Thursday evening on suspicion of killing 35-year-old Esteban Navarrete, and of attempting to kill Navarrete’s wife and friends, Santa Ana police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said. Police detectives got a call from an anonymous person who apparently recognized Sanchez from a surveillance video released by police Wednesday, Bertagna said. Homicide detectives learned Sanchez was possibly fleeing to Mexico to avoid...

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca said Friday his deputies’ marijuana enforcement would not change even if Proposition 19, which would legalize the drug in California, passes Nov. 2. “Proposition 19 is not going to pass, even if it passes,” Baca said in a news conference Friday at sheriff's headquarters in Monterey Park. Baca, whose department polices three-fourths of the county, was bolstered Friday by an announcement from the Obama administration that federal officials would continue to “vigorously enforce” marijuana laws in California, even if state voters pass the measure. Baca said the proposition was superseded by federal law and...

Yesterday, President Obama signed a presidential memorandum establishing a taskforce to work on first lady Michelle Obama's new issue: childhood obesity. The taskforce has 90 days to report back to the president on a suggested inter-agency strategy and action plan to help children be more active and eat better – because, of course, putting interior secretary Ken Salazar on the case will change children's eating habits. SNIP These days, though, it isn't just parents' budgets that are lean. President Obama himself called for an across-the-board spending freeze (outside of the military and entitlement programmes) in his state of the union...

A 34-YEAR-OLD woman, the mother of a 12-year-old girl, has been locked up in a Virginia jail for three weeks and could remain there for at least another month. Her crime? Blogging about the police. Elisha Strom, who appears unable to make the $750 bail, was arrested outside Charlottesville on July 16 when police raided her house, confiscating notebooks, computers and camera equipment. Although the Charlottesville police chief, Timothy J. Longo Sr., had previously written to Ms. Strom warning her that her blog posts were interfering with the work of a local drug enforcement task force, she was not charged...

A Quogue woman with two guns in her car was arrested after she was found taking pictures of the Air National Guard base in Westhampton Beach on Thursday night, according to the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office. Nancy Genovese, 49, who had an XM-15 assault rifle and a shot gun along with a cache of ammunition in her car, was took photos of the perimeter of the base at Gebreski Airport on a number of prior occasions as well, guardsman reportedly told deputy sheriffs. A Southampton Town Police officer spotted Genovese when she returned after she had been warned not to...

Craigslist chief executive Jim Buckmaster told a CNN cable TV news program this morning that the company feels terribly that an accused killer in Boston allegedly used the online service to target his victims. "We feel terribly, and it's quite sad that anyone would lose their life," Buckmaster told CNN. "And we're horrified that use of Craigslist could in any way be connected with a violent crime of this nature. It just causes us to redouble our efforts to try to get across to users to take a few common sense precautions that eliminate most of the risks.

Some executives are revoking the 24/7 rule and reinstating the eight-hour work day Susan Wilson Solovic likes her sleep and her time off. But it wasn't long ago that the hour between 2 and 3 a.m. was her prime e-mailing time, and vacations were little more than a different setting in which to work. "People thought I was crazy," says Solovic, the chief executive of Small Business Television Network, a Web-based news and information service for entrepreneurs. But, she says, "our company was growing rapidly, and my life became completely consumed by the business." Five years after the launch of...

A land conservancy from Oak Glen spent years amassing $45 million in private donations and negotiating the purchase of more than a half-million unspoiled acres in the California desert so it could be turned over to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for protection. Now, the BLM is considering applications for wind turbines and solar-energy arrays on thousands of those acres. The proposals on the donated Mojave Desert parcels have riled residents, visitors and members of The Wildlands Conservancy, which orchestrated the land deals involving a broad scattering of parcels in eastern San Bernardino County. “It’s a violation of trust,...

TUSTIN – A former athletic trainer at Tustin High School has been arrested on suspicion she had a sexual relationship with an athlete at the school for about a year, authorities said today. School officials became aware of the relationship Friday after they found images on the student's phone believed to be sent by the 23-year-old trainer, said Jim Amormino, spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff's Department. Hope Jacoby, of San Juan Capistrano, was taken into custody by deputies at the school Friday, the last day of classes before the winter break. Investigators believe Jacoby had sex with the male...

An inflatable gorilla beckoned from the roof of Don Brown Chevrolet in St. Louis, servers doled out free bowls of pasta and a salesman urged potential customers to "come on up under the canopy and put your hands on" a new set of wheels. But sitting across from a salesman in a quiet back room, Adrian Clark could see it would not be nearly that easy. This was the ninth or tenth dealership for Clark, a steamfitter looking for a car to commute to a new job. Every one offered a variation on the discouragement he was getting here: Without...