Free Republic

It’s a little election with some potentially momentous consequences... Voters in the Hawkeye State’s Senate District 18 will head to the polls Nov. 8 for a special election that the Democrats must win to hang onto their last vestige of political power in state government. They hold just a slim 25-24 Senate majority and the District 18 seat is up for grabs after Republican Gov. Terry E. Branstad, in a move that he denies was politically motivated, nominated Democratic state Sen. Swati Dandekar from Marion earlier this month to a $137,000-a-year post on the Iowa Utilities Board.

William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies, the allegorical novel about childhood, admitted that he had once tried to rape a girl. He confessed to the incident in an unpublished memoir which he wrote for his wife in an effort to explain how his own “monstrous” character had developed. The attack is among the revelations about the Nobel prize-winning novelist in a new biography. It also turns out that when he was a school-teacher, Golding would pitch the boys in his care against each other in a real-life forerunner of his famous work. John Carey, the literary critic...

When William Golding, the author of the coming of age allegorical classic 'Lord of the Flies', died in 1993 little was known of his personal life. This has changed due to the resurfacing of an autobiography written by Golding for his wife in order to explain how his character developed. John Carey, the literary critic and an emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford has gained access to the reclusive author's previously unseen archive which includes two autobiographical works, three unpublished novels and a journal spanning twenty years. As released on the Times Online, amongst the revelations is an admittance...

From The Sunday Times August 16, 2009 Author William Golding attacked girl of 15 WILLIAM GOLDING, the author of Lord of the Flies, the allegorical novel about childhood, admitted that he had once tried to rape a girl. He confessed to the incident in an unpublished memoir which he wrote for his wife in an effort to explain how his own “monstrous” character had developed. The attack, on a 15-year-old named Dora, is among the revelations about the Nobel prize-winning novelist in a new biography. It also turns out that when he was a school-teacher, Golding would pitch the boys...

In his first political firestorm since taking office in January, Gov. Jon S. Corzine said Wednesday that he provided $5,000 in bail money to a lobbyist accused of stalking a state assemblyman. "I reacted as a human being responding to someone in need," the multimillionaire Democrat said. "However, in light of my position as governor, I realize this was a mistake." Karen Golding, a government relations manager for insurance giant Prudential Financial, is accused of breaking into the government-issued car of Assemblyman Joseph Cryan, a Democrat, and of writing threatening letters and making threatening calls to Cryan and others. Authorities...

The video resembled a scene out of Lord of the Flies. A group of 17-year-old-girls, all in monochromatic yellow jerseys, the faces of some smeared with war paint, hurl chunks of mud, paint, and excrement at a helpless, cowering group of younger girls in the middle, smeared with a repugnantly unrecognizable cement-colored muck, and screaming for their lives. A crowd of fifty students dressed in standard suburban gear, fleeces, baseball caps, blue jeans, stand by and urge on the predators, who shift to lunging and beating, some with their bats, others with bare hands clenched into structures resembling the claws...