Free Republic

n the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate. To whom it may concern: I am writing this letter to inform you of my reasons for premeditating and attempting to murder citizens and residents of the United States of America on Friday, March 3, 2006 in the city of Chapel Hill, North Carolina by running them over with my automobile and stabbing them with a knife if the opportunities are presented to me by Allah. I did intend to use a handgun to murder the citizens and residents of Chapel Hill, North Carolina but the process of receiving a permit...

RALEIGH, N.C. -- The man who hit nine people with a sport utility vehicle on the University of North Carolina's Chapel Hill campus wrote a letter to a television reporter saying he read the Quran's 114 chapters 15 times and found that the Muslim holy book justified the attack. ''I did not act out of hatred for Americans, but out of love for Allah instead,'' Mohammed Taheri-azar, 22, wrote in a letter to Amber Rupinta dated March 10 posted on WTVD's Web site. Police say that just before lunchtime March 3, Taheri-azar drove a rented 2006 Jeep Cherokee through the...

RALEIGH -- In an odd political bedfellows moment, three North Carolina congressmen - two progressive Democrats and one religious-right Republican - joined forces Monday to urge the Obama administration to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. At an anti-war town hall meeting in the Legislative Building, Republican U.S. Rep. Walter Jones and Democratic U.S. Reps.David Price and Brad Miller sought to keep the pressure on the administration to end the American combat operations by the middle of 2013. "Our concern is that too many times, administrations will say that the date for coming home is a year from now, 18 months...

He roamed the University of Cincinnati campus with a loaded gun. When his rage overflowed, the brainy microbiology major would open fire inside empty buildings, visualizing a wall clock or other object as a person who had done him wrong. By the mid-1970s, Bruce Ivins had earned his doctorate and was a promising researcher at the University of North Carolina. By outward appearances, he was a charming eccentric, odd but disarming. Inside, he still smoldered with resentment, and he saw a new outlet for it. Several years earlier, a Cincinnati student had turned him down for a date. He had...

Chapel Hill, N.C. — The man behind a proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York spoke at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Wednesday night. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf delivered the 2011 Weil Lecture on American Citizenship. During the lecture, he talked about the importance of Americans engaging with the Muslim community. He said the mosque is one way to help do that. "I'm committed to bridging relations between the country that I love and the religion that I love," Abdul Rauf said in front of a packed auditorium. Abdul Rauf, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was...

Maybe there is some hope for civilization after all. At least, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seems a little more civilized this April than it did last April, when an out-of-control mob of protesters chased former U.S. Congressman Tom Tancredo from the dais and off the campus. A subsequent speech later that month by another former congressman, Virgil Goode, resulted in seven arrests. The very idea of free speech seemed under attack. Monday night (April 26), Rep. Tancredo returned amidst a great deal of anticipation, invited by the same official student group as before, Youth for Western...

Rashad Hussein, White House official and President Obama’s newly appointed Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference, has a history of participation in events connected with the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood as well as support for Brotherhood causes, once having called prosecution of the U.S. leader of a Palestinian terrorist organization one of many “politically motivated persecutions.” Mr. Hussain’s official biography states: Rashad Hussain is presently Deputy Associate Counsel to President Obama. His work at the White House focuses on national security, new media, and science and technology issues. Mr. Hussain has also worked with the National Security Staff in...

Last spring, some of our staff members noticed that large stacks of our April 2009 issue had gone missing overnight from newsstands in the Undergraduate Library and Hamilton Hall. Considering that this was during exams week, we at the Review doubted that they had all been taken legitimately. We had a long list of possible suspects with a motive to make our April 2009 issue disappear, as the issue had been highly critical of a number of individuals and campus groups. However, we had no evidence of anything. Until now. One of the groups criticized in the issue was Students...

Note: The following text is a quote: Federal Grand Jury Returns Indictment on Internet Bomb Threats Hammond, IN—The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Indiana announced that a three-count indictment was returned against Ashton Lundeby for his role in Internet bomb and related threats directed to Purdue University, Indiana University/Purdue University at Fort Wayne, Ind., and numerous other educational institutions throughout the country. Lundeby, 16, of Oxford, N.C., was arrested by the FBI at his home in Oxford on March 6, 2009. A federal search warrant was also executed at that time. Lundeby was arrested pursuant to a...

Lawyers dispute it can't be undoneHILLSBOROUGH -- More than 200 taxpayers packed the Central Orange Senior Center, and sheriff's deputies turned away dozens more who came to protest the recent countywide revaluation. Hillsborough lawyer Cynthia Shriner countered County Attorney Geoff Gledhill's claim that the county can't rescind the revaluation because Jan. 1 has come and gone. She said all the commissioners have to do is overturn a decades-old decision to revalue Orange County's properties every four years and take advantage of the state law that requires it only every eight years. At least three other counties scheduled to implement revaluations...

Investigators say they believe 64-year-old Paulette Locklear was beaten to death outside her home Tuesday afternoon after confronting a man who was trying to break in. Julio Cesar Ramos, 45, is charged with first-degree murder in Locklear’s death. Ramos, who is from Honduras, has been deported from the U.S. several times and is in the country illegally, said Debbie Tanna, spokeswoman for the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office. Ramos told investigators he is homeless and unemployed., Tanna said. Cumberland County sheriff’s deputies responded to Locklear’s home on the 1200 block of Wilmington Road after she called 911 Tuesday afternoon to report...

Christmas trees that have graced the two main libraries at the University of North Carolina won't be displayed this year, after numerous complaints, The Charlotte Observer reported. The trees have stood in the lobbies of Wilson and Davis libraries at the Chapel Hill campus during December. This year, they are being kept in storage. Sarah Michalak, the associate provost for university libraries, told the newspaper that she made the decision after several years of complaints from employees and others. “We strive in our collection to have a wide variety of ideas,” she said. “It doesn't seem right to celebrate one...

CHAPEL HILL - Police were not trying to rescue "Capitalism" on Friday night. They just didn't want a fiery funeral to happen in the middle of Franklin Street. Protesters clashed with police when two officers tried to move the group of more than 50 protesters out of the road and safely remove a mannequin labeled "Capitalism" from a coffin doused with fuel.

The police in our town used to be fairly hands off when it came to protests, a part of the general liberal façade of Chapel Hill. So we had hoped to occupy that intersection for as long as possible, as has usually been possible in the past. We still, after all, had to smash the money piñata, read out the public death sentence for capitalism, and draw and quarter the capitalist effigy. But the effigy was to remain intact, as the pig with no further warning stopped his car, got out, and charged those of us in the back pushing...

CHAPEL HILL — After Shawn Turschak saw two sets of McCain-Palin campaign signs disappear from his yard within hours of being planted, he took some unconventional steps to protect the latest pair.

RALEIGH, N.C. — A probation officer assigned to a teenager now charged with killing the University of North Carolina's student body president was handling 127 cases without training, state corrections officials said Wednesday. A state investigation also found that 17-year-old Laurence Lovette never met with probation officer Chalita Thomas. The probation cases of the other suspect in the killing, Demario Atwater, were handled by 10 different officers. "This is a dark cloud over our agency," said Robert Lee Guy, director of the state Division of Community Corrections. Guy said no one has been fired but three senior probation and parole...

Chapel Hill, N.C. — Chapel Hill police Monday evening released two new photographs of a man they want to talk to about the shooting death of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Student Body President Eve Carson. The photos show a black man attempting to use Carson’s debit card at an automated-teller machine in a local convenience store, Chapel Hill Police Chief Brian Curran said. He did not specify when or where the pictures were taken, in order to protect the investigation. "The photos depict a male going into an area convenience store," Curran said. That man was the...

CHAPEL HILL -- Police released photos of a person who may be a suspect in the murder of UNC student Eve Carson. Chapel Hill police have two surveillance photos of a possible suspect, someone Chief Brian Curran called "a person of interest" during a Saturday morning press conference about the Carson murder investigation. That person is wanted for questioning, after attempting to use Carson's ATM card. He is pictured wearing a baseball cap with a star on it.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — The murder of the popular student body president at the University of North Carolina may have been gang related, police told FOX News on Monday. Eve Carson, 22, was shot dead last week in an upscale residential neighborhood in Chapel Hill, N.C., where the elite school's main campus is located. Chapel Hill police believe Carson's killing may have a link to the Hoover Crips gang because of a retro Houston Astros baseball cap worn by a man caught on camera allegedly trying to use Carson's ATM card. The hats, which have an "H" emblem, are sometimes...

UNC Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is sponsering a protest march from "the pit" on campus to the local Chapel Hill Recruiting Center, downtown. They promise it will end in "creative action" at the recruiting center. SDS pagePrevious "creative action" has resulted in three paint vandalism attacks on military facilities in Chapel Hill in the last year, once at the ROTC office and twice on this very recruiting station. ROTC attack pics recruiting station attackFurthermore, the rally is organized by Kosta Harlan, notable for his article "The Iraqi Resistance is Just, and Should be Supported" in which he brags...