Free Republic

TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- The U.S. Air Force airman who was injured when he and two childhood friends tackled a heavily armed gunman on a Paris-bound train returned to his native California Thursday night. Airman 1st Class Spencer Stone arrived at about 8:30 p.m. at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, near Sacramento. .... Stone has been undergoing medical treatment in Germany since he, National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos and Sacramento college student Anthony Sadler, all childhood friends from the Sacramento area, subdued the gunman on a passenger train speeding through Belgium on Aug. 21. Skarlatos and Sadler...

Gotnews.com has obtained the disturbing d**k pics of #BrandonBostian, the engineer who killed at least 8 people in a horrific crash earlier this week. Bostian has lawyered up and implausibly claimed that he has no memory of the events leading up to the crash. ....

Is there a future for nude beaches on the Island? In a glorious late summer’s afternoon, the Gay Head Cliffs glow with color on one side; the sea gently laps at the warm sand on the other. Ah, nature! But on the strip of sand between cliff and sea there is what looks like a trade show for outdoor furnishings: umbrellas, coolers, chairs, tents, tote bags, volleyball nets, entire patio sets. Oh, naturists! What a dumb euphemism “naturist” is, for the hundreds of naked people on this section of beach are really in no more of a natural state than...

A day after Rolling Stone published an article describing a brutal gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house, a former Washington and Lee student claims he was expelled for having consensual sex with another student who eight months later regretted the encounter and claimed rape. The former W&L student has filed a federal lawsuit claiming the private Lexington university discriminated against him because he is a male, and because it wanted to avoid the negative public scrutiny that UVa was experiencing. Moreover, the student, identified as John Doe in the lawsuit, contends W&L’s Title IX officer advocates to...

Washington and Lee University's 2012 Mock Republican Convention just concluded minutes ago. A long-standing W&L tradition organized and executed entirely by the students, it was an exciting and impressive 3-day affair, featuring appearances from a variety of governors, congresspersons and other politicos, a debate, a parade of floats down Main Street in Lexington Virginia, and the usual parties and spirited behavior. Today the delegations voted. The winner -- Romney, on the first ballot, carrying about 70% of the votes cast. Romney himself could't seem to find a way to call in to make an acceptance speech, and so Ann Romney...

Did anyone just see the safe-auto commercial following the Bronco's game? It goes a little close to the edge in stereotyping an uninsured black father, with his family celebrating because he's finally "legal". All the other insurance commercials are about getting insured for "less" ---but not this one.

Here in Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, west of Charlottesville, we just had another earthquake, 2 minutes ago. Not as strong as the 5.9 quake earlier this week.

Breaking news from the Washington Post: Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) is expected to announce as early as Wednesday that he will not run for reelection in 2012, according to two Democratic sources who requested anonymity because the decision has not yet been made public. .......

An odd (to me) note in today's Washington Post story (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/28/AR2010062802134_pf.html) on the Supreme Court's decision today on gun rights, regarding Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose husband died yesterday: "And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 77, was with the court despite the death of her husband of 56 years, Martin D. Ginsburg, on Sunday." Comments? Am I alone in thinking this is unusual behavior?

NEW YORK (AP) | Two lawyers and Wall Street professionals were among 14 people charged Thursday in a widening $53 million insider trading case that has snared one of America's richest men and accused white-collar suspects of using the cover-up tactics of drug dealers. The actions raise to 20 the number of people who have been charged in the case first disclosed last month with the arrests of Galleon Group founder and hedge-fund operator Raj Rajaratnam and five others. .. Mr. Bharara said the defendants borrowed a "page from the drug dealer's playbook" by using anonymous hard-to-trace prepaid cell phones...

Diminutive humans whose remains were found on the remote Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 truly are a new species, and not pygmies whose brains had shrivelled with disease, researchers reported Wednesday. ... Many scientists have said H. floresiensis were prehistoric humans descended from homo erectus, stunted by natural selection over millennia through a process called insular dwarfing. Others countered that even this evolutionary shrinking, well known in island-bound animals, could not account for the hobbit's chimp-sized grey matter of barely more than 400 cubic centimetres, a third the size of a modern human brain. ... A team led by...

The Cleveland Browns' Donté Stallworth was questioned by Miami Beach police after his car struck and killed a crane operator on the MacArthur Causeway. Cleveland Browns wide receiver Donte' Stallworth was questioned and released by Miami Beach police Saturday after the car he was driving struck and killed a man on the MacArthur Causeway. Stallworth, 28, was headed eastbound in his black Bentley about 7:17 a.m. when he plowed into 59-year-old Mario Reyes near the stop light at Terminal Island, according to police. Stallworth cooperated with investigators and officers drew his blood at the scene, a routine procedure following a...

Two Bountiful Junior High School teachers are accused of sexually assaulting the same 13-year-old student, after their separate relationships with him spiraled from personal conversations to the exchange of sexual text messages and phone sex, authorities said. On Friday, the Davis County Attorney's Office filed first-degree felony charges of rape and sodomy on a child against Linda R. Nef, 46, and Valynne Bowers, 39. Nef, a Utah studies teacher and cheerleading adviser, and Bowers, who teaches math, each confessed to having sex with the student, said Bountiful Police Lt. Randy Pickett. Until recently, the two teachers did not know about...

A NASA satellite crashed back to Earth about three minutes after launch early Tuesday, officials said. ... NASA launches a rocket from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base on Tuesday. "We could not make orbit," NASA program manager John Brunschwyler said. "Initial indications are the vehicle did not have enough [force] to reach orbit and landed just short of Antarctica in the ocean." "Certainly for the science community, it's a huge disappointment." The satellite, which would have monitored greenhouse gases to study how they affect the Earth's climate, was launched on a rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at...

I tuned in to the last minute of Obama's speech, to hear his reference to George Washington and (I thought) the night before the crossing of the Delaware and the attack on Trenton. At least -- that's what I thought he was saying. It was, to my ears, incoherent. He mentioned that those huddled had "abandoned the capital". Huh? Is he referring to Philadelphia? Yes, it was the meeting place of the Continental Congress, but it wasn't referred to as the "capital". Was it a reference to Valley Forge? Then -- why the prominence of Obama referring to the people...

Winter truly arrived in Beijing yesterday with the highest temperature of the day down to minus 8.8 ℃. Media reports say it was "the coldest day in December in the last 57 years." Strong wind ripped off part of the metal roof of a university's gymnasium and the thermal insulation layer of a hotel in Beijing. It also blew away a man who was mending his own roof in Shijingshan District. The man landed on the top of a 15 meter-high tree and was rescued by firefighters (see front page image). According to Sun Jisong, a meteorologist from the Beijing...

Liposuctioning unwanted blubber out of pampered Los Angelenos may not seem like a dream job, but it has its perks. Free fuel is one of them. For a time, Beverly Hills doctor Craig Alan Bittner turned the fat he removed from patients into biodiesel that fueled his Ford SUV and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator. Love handles can power a car? Frighteningly, yes. Fat--whether animal or vegetable--contains triglycerides that can be extracted and turned into diesel. .... A gallon of grease will get you about a gallon of fuel, and drivers can get about the same amount of mileage from fat...

CANBERRA (Reuters) - An Australian holiday resort will hold a month-long, nude "anything goes" party to combat an expected economic downturn, media reports said on Thursday. "Tough economic times call for stiff measures," Tony Fox, the owner of the White Cockatoo resort in Mossman, in tropical Queensland state, told the Courier-Mail newspaper. ... "It will be a hedonism resort, where anything goes for a month. It doesn't take rocket science to work out what it means," Fox said, naming March as the risque party month. (Reporting by Rob Taylor, editing by Miral Fahmy)

One point I'd like to recommend to McCain, and I wish that he'd used it last night -- is that a distinction can and needs be made between higher tax revenue and higher tax rates. When John McCain says he wants to cut taxes, it rings hollow in the minds of undecided voters who realize that deficits are too high and that government has to do SOMETHING to reduce the delta. McCain's theory, implicitly, is that cutting tax rates strengthens the economy, and the economy in turn grows, which in turn creates a net INCREASE in tax revenue/income. But McCain...

UPDATE: John Edwards' secret meeting with his mistress at the Beverly Hilton hotel has now become part of a criminal complaint. NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporters Alan Butterfield and Alexander Hitchen filed a criminal complaint with the Beverly Hills Police Department on Thursday, July 24, charging that hotel security acted unlawfully while the reporters were trying to question the former senator. Edwards now could be contacted by police to give an eyewitness account of what occurred. Hotel security tried to stop the reporters from questioning Edwards in the basement of the hotel at approximately 2:40 a.m. Tuesday, July 22 after Edwards came...