Free Republic

The FBI released its final 2006 violent crimes report on Monday. Detroit remains No. 1 and Flint remain No. 3 in the nation for violent crimes among cities with a population of 100,000 or more.

...UC Berkeley has the world's premiere collection on Mark Twain — and Yale an unmatched trove of rare medieval manuscripts. But for research on Capt. Kirk, Frankenstein or Harry Potter, nothing tops the 110,000-volume Eaton collection at UC Riverside, the world's largest library of science fiction, fantasy and horror books...

Protesters corner Jeb Bush in Pa. 54 minutes ago Protesters greeted Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on his way to a campaign event for a Pennsylvania senator, and he briefly took refuge in a subway station supply closet to avoid the anti-Republican demonstrators. The president's brother encountered protesters on their way to join a demonstration outside the exclusive Duquesne Club, where Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record), a Republican, was holding a fundraiser Friday. Officers used stun guns to subdue two protesters, saying they disobeyed orders to disperse, said Bob Grove, a Port Authority spokesman. "It was a very tense...

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet a need for reliable, uniform crime statistics for the nation. In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those statistics. Today, several annual statistical publications, such as the comprehensive Crime in the United States, are produced from data provided by nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States. Other annual publications, such as Hate Crime Statistics and Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted address specialized facets of crime such as hate crime or the murder and...

Study suggests steps a planet must go through for complex animal life to arise. Clay made animal life possible on Earth, a UC Riverside-led study finds. A sudden increase in oxygen in the Earth’s recent geological history, widely considered necessary for the expansion of animal life, occurred just as the rate of clay formation on the Earth’s surface also increased, the researchers report. “Our study shows for the first time that the initial soils covering the terrestrial surface of Earth increased the production of clay minerals and provided the critical geochemical processes necessary to oxygenate the atmosphere and support multicellular...

Young Republicans buck conventional campus wisdom By Curtis Miller In the 1960s, pot-smoking, tie-dyed hippies made up the university alternative lifestyle of an era. Today, staunch young conservatives are looking to find a similar niche on the other side of the political spectrum. In a country run by Republicans, college conservatives are steadily becoming a counter-culture to be reckoned with and more than the footnote they formerly were presumed to be. According to one study from the Harvard Institute of Politics, before the 2004 election, as many as 31 percent of college students were identifying themselves as Republicans, in comparison...

Debate over the U.S. presence in Iraq stirred a clash of political opinions as student protesters gathered at the Belltower on March 20. The rally against the occupation of Iraq, hosted by the Student Coalition for Peace and Human Rights, was met by a group of 12 members of the College Republicans at UCR who offered their differing opinions. Chants of "USA" verses "Bush go away" and posters held up from both sides livened up the ears and eyes of students on what would otherwise be dead week. "I came out to set an example and encourage students to participate...