Free Republic

Taylor Swift has drawn criticism over a cease-and-desist letter her lawyers sent a college student who uses publicly available flight data to track her private jet usage. As Breitbart News reported, the target of the threatened law suit runs social media accounts that follow her and other celebrities’ private jets to measure their carbon pollution levels — with Swift calling the issue a matter of “life or death.” Jack Sweeney, 21, received the missive in December which declared the 14-time Grammy award winner would “have no choice but to all legal remedies” if the accused did not stop his “stalking...

The Platteville police sergeant who left his patrol vehicle on railroad tracks last month with a handcuffed prisoner inside was hired by Platteville even though a commander at his previous department recommended he be demoted, his colleagues labeled him "incompetent" and another officer said Sgt. Pablo Vazquez "has a dangerous lack of radio awareness." As prosecutors weigh possible criminal charges, a CBS News Colorado investigation reveals a troubled past at previous departments Vazquez worked at, including how colleagues felt about him. But despite those concerns, the Platteville Police Department hired Vazquez directly from the Federal Heights Police Department, where he...

A handout image obtained on August 23, 2022 courtesy of the Dinosaur Valley State Park shows dinosaur tracks from around 113 million years ago. A drought in Texas dried up a river flowing through Dinosaur Valley State Park, exposing tracks from giant reptiles that lived some 113 million years ago, an official said Tuesday. Photos posted on Facebook show three-toed footprints leading down a dry tree-lined riverbed in the southern US state. It is "one of the longest dinosaur trackways in the world," a caption accompanying the images says. Stephanie Salinas Garcia of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department...

A 20-year-old Chicago man is being celebrated as a hero after he leaped into action to save the life of a man who fell on the subway's potentially deadly third electrified rail. Anthony Perry, 20, was honored in a ceremony on Wednesday by a local community leader who awarded him a new car for his heroism. Perry told WGN TV about the moment he saved the man's life: 'I don’t think I was thinking about what could happen to me at the moment. It was more of what do I have to do to make the situation peaceful. I felt...

Shocking footage shows a woman being pushed onto subway tracks in New York The victim, 52, was rescued by bystanders and suffered a broken collar bone The unknown suspect calmly walked away and the NYPD are still looking for him

Palaeontologists are claiming Utah officials have driven over a precious fossil site after dismantling a boardwalk nearby, possibly irreparably damaging preserved dinosaur footprints and animal tracks. These ancient remnants are extremely delicate and cannot be easily seen, according to sources speaking to Gizmodo, but contain more than 200 dinosaur tracks left by 10 distinct species. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) has since filed a cease-and-desist letter against the US Bureau of Land Management Utah office, calling for the immediate halt of the destruction of Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite near Moab. The alleged destruction comes as a result of the...

Early in the morning of April 20th we poured concrete on the train tracks that lead out of the Port of Olympia to block any trains from using the tracks. We took precautions to notify BNSF (the train company) – we called them and we used wires to send a signal that the tracks were blocked. We did this not to avoid damaging a train, nothing would bring bigger grins to our faces, but to avoid the risk of injuring railway workers. This action was done to disrupt the movement of trains carrying proppants used in natural gas fracturing. These...

RALEIGH The state Department of Transportation is warning people not to use railroad tracks as the setting for their prom or graduation photos this spring. NCDOT is working with the Department of Public Instruction to ask high school yearbook staff advisers to notify students and photographers of the dangers posed by taking photos on or near railroad tracks. The agencies urge yearbooks not to publish any. The warning comes after a college student and aspiring model was hit and killed by a train during a photo shoot in the small Texas town of Navasota last month. Fredzania Thompson, 19, heard...

ELIZABETH, N.J. (CBSNewYork) — A suspicious device was found on the Northeast Corridor train tracks in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Sunday night. The suspicious item was found in the area of North Broad and Westfield Avenue. Area businesses have reportedly been ordered to shut down and evacuate as bomb technicians have a robot checking the suspicious device. A hazmat team has also been requested to the scene. Police are evacuating and securing the area around the train line. Service has been temporarily suspended between Newark Airport and Elizabeth stations in both directions. ....

For over a century cranberries have been more than a Thanksgiving staple; they've also been heralded for their reported ability to prevent and even treat urinary tract infections.But clinical research attempting to link cranberry consumption to a reduction in urinary tract infections remains somewhat inconsistent. A 2012 study by a team from Taiwan and the U.S., published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that consuming cranberries did seem to prevent urinary tract infections in certain populations, but qualified the findings with a strong word of caution against using the "folk remedy" as a treatment. Most research on the cranberry's...

Daming evidence against Lois Lerner and other top IRS officials continues to mount. We learned Tuesday that Lerner used a personal e-mail account to conduct official business, an act that has the potential to frustrate both Congress’s requests for documents and the public’s freedom of information requests. That disclosure came on the heels of revelations that Lerner shared the tax information of at least one conservative group with an FEC investigator, perhaps in violation of federal law. Her misdeeds are likely more extensive. In June 2011, Lerner ordered a change in the “Be on the Lookout” listing for tea-party groups...

It has happened again. An apparently random, unprovoked subway attack, ending with a woman thrown to the tracks. You see it right there. Thankfully, she survived. And abc's john muller has the details.

  "German Islamists Target Youth on the Internet" By Christoph Sydow 11/01/2012 "Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan." PHOTO CAPTION: "A growing community of German-speaking Islamists has developed on the Internet. Aiming to find new recruits, they glorify jihad and call for attacks on Germany. A new study warns that such online propaganda might foster a new generation of terrorists." SNIPPET: "International terrorist groups like al-Qaida recognized the importance of the Internet for recruiting new supporters early on." SNIPPET: "Intelligence services can also take advantage of the anonymity of Internet forums to deliberately plant false information or obtain insider...

Link only - OnStar Tracks Your Car Even When You Cancel Service

As reported by the Blaze earlier today, CBS News's online store is selling seven different Obama-related items, but complementary Republican merchandise is suspiciously absent. The online store includes paperback and hardback copies of Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father," and five memorabilia books and DVDs of his campaign and election. When the Blaze looked into the matter, CBS News had even dedicated an entire tab of its store to the president. The category has since been removed, but searching "Obama" in the online store still returns all the merchandise. When the items are clicked on, though, shoppers are redirected to...

SNIPPET: "WASHINGTON – Some of the first information gleaned from Osama bin Laden's compound indicates al-Qaida considered attacking U.S. trains on the upcoming anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. But counterterrorism officials say they believe the planning never got beyond the initial phase and have no recent intelligence pointing to an active plot for such an attack. As of February 2010, the terror organization was considering plans to attack the U.S. on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. One idea outlined in handwritten notes was to tamper with an unspecified U.S. rail track so that a train would fall...

Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised. The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program. For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with...

Americans for Peace now releases app which provides a "comprehensive settlements database, integrated with high-tech mapping technologies." Americans for Peace Now has released a new interactive mapping application for Apple iPhone and iPad devices which will provide a real-time view of events on the ground in the West Bank, according to a press release by the organization. The free application called "Facts on the Ground: The APN Map Project" is available through iTunes or the internet. The application "provides detail and context for the debate on Israeli settlements in the West Bank," APN said in the press release. Any user...

March 3, 2010 (MMD Newswire) -- Americans for Legal Immigration PAC is requesting that Federal authorities charge the illegal aliens caught stealing over 500 railroad spikes in North Carolina with terrorism charges, since they entered America illegally and worked to sabotage train tracks in a way that could have resulted in mass casualties. "We are at war with terrorists and stealing train spikes, which is likely to cause a train to derail is an act of terrorism," said William Gheen of ALIPAC. "The Obama administration must admit that their failure to adequately enforce our border and immigration laws is putting...

The driver of a Boston subway train that stopped just inches short of a woman who had fallen onto the tracks says she expected the worst. Charice (shuh-REES') Lewis told CBS's "The Early Show" on Wednesday that she said to herself, "Please God, let this woman be OK" before getting out of her cab to check. Lewis said the woman just smiled at her.