Free Republic

The Left’s working motto consistently turns out to be “do as I say, not as I do.�  How else could they possibly make bold pronouncements to the media but live the exact opposite? The day before his declaration of war on the Tea Party movement, Teamsters President James Hoffa appeared on CNN and deemed American companies as “unpatriotic,� according to the Political Ticker. “I think the president should challenge the patriotism of these American corporations that are sitting on the sidelines,� Hoffa said. “The problem in America isn’t that we don’t have enough money. We’ve got more money than any...

Either way, with unemployment at 9.1 percent, the top corporations are not using it to hire workers or expand benefits. American corporations are in a sweet spot, according to some. They have a motivated work force , and with muted demand, no need to expand and hire more workers. The sums at stake have triggered alarms. "Companies should be using the cash to either invest in new products to allow them to grow, or to make acquisitions if they are not good at research and development," said Peter Cohan, a management consultant and venture capitalist. "Alternatively, they should use the...

Tokyo supermarkets stripped bare as hoarding breaks out across region Supermarkets in the Tokyo region have been stripped bare of food and other daily necessities in the wake of the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake, producing shortages across the national capital region. Hoarding was apparently sparked by the quake and tsunami damage done to factories, as well as difficulty in obtaining raw materials caused by chaos in the distribution network, and the prioritization of the devastated northeast in the provision of basic supplies.

The body didn't appear to have injuries or trauma. There was an orange juice container found inside the plastic wrap that the body was in. The container was marked with a 2003 date but authorities aren't sure if the woman had the container with her when she died or if it fell into the wrap because of the hoarding conditions of the house.

03-09-2011 16:56 'Food shortage in N. Korea overblown' By Na Jeong-ju North Korea appears to be cutting food rations for its people and soldiers to make the world believe that the food shortage there is becoming serious and deceptively receive more aid from South Korea and other nations, diplomatic sources said Wednesday. “The food shortage in North Korea could be overblown,” a senior Cheong Wa Dae official said on condition of anonymity. “In recent weeks, the Stalinist country has begged for food from many countries, even some poor African nations, saying that it’s becoming difficult to feed its people due...

TAIPEI -- The Taiwan High Prosecutors Office vowed yesterday to harshly crack down on anyone caught hoarding food staples as part of the government's efforts to stabilize food prices amid a string of price hikes following the Lunar New Year. The office said it has started collecting evidence by monitoring prices of major consumer products. Anyone found to have engaged in hoarding will be severely punished to the fullest extent of the law, it said. Those guilty of illegal activities such as hoarding daily necessities, manipulating food supplies or product prices could be sentenced to jail terms of up to...

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A four-month search for a missing Las Vegas woman came to a ghastly end this week when her husband found her corpse in their home amid a labyrinth of squalor that had been impassable even to search dogs.

Mostly pictures.

Emergency crews were called to a Sandy Springs home Tuesday. When they arrived, they found a home filled with garbage and a woman nearly buried alive inside. Investigators said it took emergency personnel nearly 45 minutes to extricate the woman. Emergency crews were called to a home on Kitty Hawk Drive, near Roswell Road for a medical call. When crews arrived they found a home covered in chest high garbage and investigators said the home smelled like a garbage dump. Outside the home, cars were sitting in the front yard covered in mildew and boxes of food were piled high...

Neighbors had complained before about Mary Minter's unkempt yard, littered with weeds and debris. But that was nothing compared to the interior of the 38-year-old's Sandy Springs bungalow, as firefighters discovered earlier Tuesday. Minter had to be extricated from her home by four rescue personnel following a 911 call from an unidentified source. It took the firefighters 40 minutes to wade through "chest-high" debris that clogged the hallways of the modest residence, located in the Cherokee Park neighborhood just off Roswell Road. Sandy Springs Deputy Fire Chief Jeff Scarbrough described the smell as "intolerable," though he didn't have to navigate...

Over 40 dogs were seized from within the residence.Investigators tell NEWSCHANNEL 3 that the homeowner would cover her back yard in newspapers, then shovel them into piles once the dog feces was a half foot deep.We spoke with Sheldon's niece and she said, "[Helen] doesn't realize how bad it is. All this stuff you see around here, this has been this way for a long time." Sheldon's niece added that her aunt suffers from a mental illness.

Does someone have a right to live in squalor? Under New Hampshire law, the answer is yes — but only to a point. Two recent cases, in which town officials took action against homeowners in Warner and Andover, have garnered front-page headlines, and led some to ask why someone didn't step in earlier. But the reality is that New Hampshire's laws allow folks to pretty much live as they choose, so long as their lifestyle doesn't threaten their own health or that of others. Elliott Berry is a housing expert at New Hampshire Legal Assistance, which has represented homeowners in...

Attention, pack rats: science may have figured you out. Researchers say they've found an area of the brain that seems to govern the urge to collect. For most people, collecting is a perfectly healthy behavior. It's an outlet for expressing passion for just about anything, such as stamps, wine, art, shoes, or Elvis memorabilia. Collecting is also common among animals, and not just for food. It's been observed in creatures great and small, from mammals to insects. For instance, some birds can't resist aluminum and bright objects, while hamsters gather glass beads when given the chance. But in rare cases,...

Second sad story about abused dogs in the state.

52 cats and one dog were removed from the home of a 76 year old Elkhart woman Tuesday by Elkhart Police Department's animal control officer and Humane Society workers. Elkhart Humane Society Assistant Director Rachel Dennis says the cats and dog are all in poor health, suffering from respiratory problems, matted eyes and infested with insects. Adult Protective Services was called to assist the 76 year old woman who was living in the feces covered trailer. The woman is now living with a family member. Elkhart Police say a maintenance worker at Four Season Trailer Park flagged down an animal...

SPCA Officials Stunned After 2 Feet Of Feces Found In Room Of House Located In Million-Dollar Community Officers Say It's One Of The Worst Cases Ever Reported Reporting Sean Hennessey CHESTER TOWNSHIP, N.J. (CBS) ― One New Jersey SPCA official said it was probably the worst case he's ever seen.

VALRICO — It took 15 minutes to get through the front door of a $300,000 house. Investigators used broomsticks and mop handles to push away debris. From inside a gated Valrico community, they removed a frail older woman and some of her cats — eight dead and 15 alive. Hillsborough County Animal Services said both the woman and the cats appeared neglected. The Department of Children and Families was summoned, to see whether 74-year-old Alice Santy, a woman who showed signs of hoarding, needed help. Now, the Sheriff's Office is investigating to see how Mrs. Santy, who is married, came...

An eccentric loner in Britain hoarded so much trash he had to burrow through it to get around his home — then got lost in the maze of tunnels Friday and died of thirst. Human mole Gordon Stewart, 74, had filled his rooms up to the ceiling with 10 years’ worth of garbage and clutter, making it impossible to walk around. -snip-

AMSTERDAM, Ohio -- Deputies found garbage wall to wall inside the Amsterdam home and now one parent is facing charges. The 10-year-old girl and 6-year-old boy are in the care of a foster parent tonight and the father is facing a charge of child endangerment. Sheriff Fred Abdalla said me he did not arrest the mother because she is pregnant with the couples third child.

y father never had much use for fairy tales. The fifth of five brothers raised in a one-bedroom tenement on the Lower East Side, he preferred real-life grotesqueries. And so at bedtime, I would listen raptly to his urban horror stories, tales that filled the dark with chimera, bogeymen, golems.The most macabre was the tale of the Collyer Brothers, the hermit hoarders of Harlem. In lugubrious tones not unlike Boris Karloff's, my father described the vague aura of evil that had endowed the four-story brownstone on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street for much of the 1930's...

BATON ROUGE -- Nearly five months after Hurricane Gustav, the public relations battle between Gov. Bobby Jindal and FEMA continues over who was to blame for the exasperating depletion of emergency food and water supplies soon after the storm. At stake is a clear understanding of how to prepare for disasters. FEMA's argument, contained in a retort to comments made by Jindal last week, is that basically the responsibility for the problem lies with the storm victims of Louisiana, who gobbled up food and water at an "extraordinary" rate after Gustav swept through. The federal agency said it worked closely...

A spinster who obsessively hoarded clothes died in her home after a mountain of suitcases fell on her, burying her alive. Joan Cunnane, 77, owned 300 scarves as well as thousands of trinkets and valuables. They took up so much space in her bungalow that she had only a 2ft-wide path to get around them, and her car and garage were packed with other goods. After she was reported missing earlier this week, it took police searching her home two days to sift through her possessions. Miss Cunnane was eventually found buried under a 3ft pile of cases in a...

Farmers and food executives appealed fruitlessly to federal officials yesterday for regulatory steps to limit speculative buying that is helping to drive food prices higher. Meanwhile, some Americans are stocking up on staples such as rice, flour and oil in anticipation of high prices and shortages spreading from overseas. Their pleas did not find a sympathetic audience at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), where regulators said high prices are mostly the result of soaring world demand for grains combined with high fuel prices and drought-induced shortages in many countries. The regulatory clash came amid evidence that a rash of...

, New Jersey (Aug. 16) - A rotten odor seeping from a home in an upscale neighborhood led to the discovery of dozens of dogs and cats, many of them dead, inside the feces-ridden mansion, authorities said. "Behind a mansion door there's a horror house," said James Lagrosa, head of the Bergen County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. At least 80 live cats and six dogs were removed Wednesday from the Saddle River house, although one kitten died later, he said. In the garage, authorities found 23 separate plastic bags that contained the remains of dead animals,...

US President George W. Bush said today that he hoped China would transform from a country where people "hoard the money they have" into one where people buy large amounts of US products. In an interview with conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, Mr Bush said China should become "a society in which there's consumers. Because now they're a society of too many savers". "If we can encourage China to become a country of consumers, you can imagine what it would mean for US producers and manufacturers to have access to that market," he said.

A woman in Shelton, Wash., who was reported missing by her husband, was found dead under piles of clutter in their home, where she suffocated to death, according to police. Shelton Police Chief Terry Davenport said the home was so cluttered that police officers' heads touched the ceiling as they climbed over the clutter. Authorities found the body of 62-year-old Marie Rose buried under clothes after 10 hours of searching. She reportedly suffered from a condition known as hoarding. Rose's husband believes she fell while looking for the phone in the house this week and suffocated. There were so many...

Like people all over the country, Gary Patronek, a veterinarian who teaches at Tufts University, heard the bizarre story of Ruth Knueven and her 488 cats -- 222 of them dead, and most of the others so wild and sick that they had to be euthanized. Knueven, 82, charged with five misdemeanors, including animal cruelty, became a public curiosity last week after Fairfax County officials hauled the cats and carcasses out of her home in Mount Vernon and her daughter's townhouse in Burke. Both residences, filthy and damaged, were declared unfit for habitation until repairs are made. In the Mount...

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Shoppers in Finland raided shelves for toilet paper Wednesday in fear of it running out as a lockout of workers kept the Nordic country's paper mills shut. "As soon as we get a delivery, the packages vanish off the shelves. The big bags go first," said Hille Laine, manager of a central Helsinki shop which had no tissue paper products left. Paper makers enforced a four-week lockout on May 18 following a two-day strike by workers. The dispute in the key export sector is mainly over industry's plans to scrap mill shutdowns during some holidays and on...

<p>For 25 years, a difficult-neighbor problem plagued Curtis and Elaine Colvin of Seattle. The neighbor's home and lawn resembled a junkyard. Finally, last spring, the elderly man was taken out of state by relatives.</p> <p>Konstantinos Apostolou bought the house — and sent in five men to clear the floor-to-ceiling junk. "It was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life," says his son, George Apostolou. There was nowhere to walk, except for a narrow "goat path" connecting the rooms. The men hauled out seven Dumpsters' worth of clothes, books, magazines, spoiled food, firewood, car parts, tires, bank statements and 50-year-old tax records. "I feel bad for the guy," says Apostolou. "I'm sure he was ill."</p>

The cases never cease to fascinate: reclusive people trapped by their own accumulations, in rooms made unlivable by floor-to-ceiling heaps of newspapers, books and saved objects — from twist ties to grand pianos.Some pass into legend, like the Collyer brothers, "the hermit hoarders of Harlem," who in 1947 were buried by the piles of urban junk that filled their four-story Harlem brownstone. But even less extreme examples, like that of the Bronx man rescued on Monday after being trapped for two days under an avalanche of magazines and catalogs, haunt the public imagination.Such compulsive hoarding is being recognized as a...

Afghan warlords hoarding income Jonathan Steele Tuesday May 20, 2003 The Guardian President Hamid Karzai has threatened to resign if Afghanistan regional governors go on hoarding customs revenues rather than handing them to the central government in Kabul. His angry remark shows how much power still remains in the hands of rebellious warlords and religious fundamentalists 18 months after US forces toppled the Taliban regime and promised to create a properly functioning society. In a speech broadcast on state television Mr Karzai said the provincial authorities had sent no money to Kabul since mid-March, the beginning of the Afghan fiscal...