Free Republic

Cruel and Unusual Punishment Cruel and unusual punishment is forbidden under the eighth amendment to the United States constitution. For a victim of murder, it would not be classified as punishment, but being murdered is certainly cruel and unusual. The sentence for such a crime should be no less. On Thursday, June 20th, the United States Supreme Court ruled that executions of mentally retarded criminals are cruel and unusual punishment violating the eighth amendment. So according to the standard, if a person found guilty of murder can show that they have an IQ under 70, then they will not have...

Vostok: The Lake of ShadowsCover Story FATE Magazine 2002-06-01 00:00:00 by Scott Corrales “Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left.” —H. P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness” The inspiration for this article began in the summer of 1996, when a series of email messages began to appear suggesting the possibility that “someone” or “something” was surreptitiously removing all recent maps of Antarctica. The notion was so outrageous that even die-hard conspiracy theorists found themselves having to clarify the...

<p>FULLERTON -- A mom and dad decided Sunday to stop their 21-year-old daughter from seeing her married boyfriend by tying her to a bed with 30-pound chains, police said.</p> <p>Guadalupe and David Mata admitted to locking their daughter with two "giant gate locks" to prevent her from going out, said Fullerton Police Lt. Danny Becerra.</p>

<p>This year's boating season opened with a mystery: the theft of almost a third of the new moorings placed around the islands of Boston Harbor.</p> <p>Harbor officials doing an inventory of the islands' moorings on Sunday found that 15 of the 50 buoys installed last August by the Boston Harbor Islands Partnership to provide safe anchorage and on-site waste removal services to private boaters had been stolen.</p>

Mystery shrouds IOP's floating orb Thursday, June 13, 2002 BY GLENN SMITHOf The Post and Courier Staff      <!summ!>ISLE OF PALMS-When a giant silver orb washed up in front of her rented beach house Monday night, Marie Segneri wondered for a moment if aliens had landed in the middle of her family reunion.<!end!>     The smooth, metallic ball was at least 3 feet in diameter and weighed a couple hundred pounds or more. Aside from a series of numbers stamped on its slightly dimpled surface, the sphere offered few clues as to its origin.     "It looked like it may have...

<p>OAK PARK, Mich. -- A man who police say castrated another man on his kitchen table faces possible charges.</p> <p>Police on Saturday found the apparently willing victim, a 48-year-old Birmingham man, sitting on a curb in bloodstained blue jeans, Oak Park Detective Lt. Bruce Smith told The Daily Tribune of Royal Oak.</p>

The two-foot long bird called a Kea that lives in New Zealand likes to eat the strips of rubber around car windows! Most lipstick contains fish scales! Skepticisms is the longest word that alternates hands when typing! One ragweed plant can release as many as one billion grains of pollen! It's illegal to drink beer out of a bucket while you're sitting on a curb in St. Louis! The first product to have a bar code was Wrigleys gum! No piece of square dry paper can be folded more than 7 times in half! A group of geese on the...

Early puberty linked to shampoos Unbeknown to many parents, a few hair products - especially some marketed to black people - contain small amounts of hormones that could cause premature sexual development in girls. The evidence that hair products containing oestrogens cause premature puberty is largely circumstantial, and the case is still unproven. But Ella Toombs, acting director for the Office of Cosmetics and Colors at the US Food and Drug Administration, told New Scientist : "No amount [of oestrogen] is considered safe and can be included in an over-the-counter product." Under FDA regulations, over-the-counter products containing hormones are drugs,...

    US non-lethal weapon reports suppressed   14:47 09 May 02 Debora MacKenzie   Bugs that eat roads and buildings. Biocatalysts that break down fuel and plastics. Devices that stealthily corrode aluminium and other metals. These are just a few of the non-lethal weapons that the US has tried to develop, or is trying to develop.   Titles of some of the non-lethal weapon reports But quite how close such weapons are to reality we may never know. The US National Academy of Sciences is refusing to release dozens of reports proposing or describing their development, even though the documents are...

Patrick McGovern "The site is very rich archeologically, has been excavated for the last 50 years by the University of Pennsylvania Museum. It has a large palace area with rooms, some of which are thought to have been kitchens for making the food for the palace, with jars of barley and other goods. Also, it has a whole series of tombs in which the burial was done in a special wooden chamber beneath a very large mound. It's almost as if you cut it yesterday and put the structure together. It is the earliest intact human building made of...

'Toilet paper capital of world' prepares for exhibition A museum in Wisconsin is preparing to open an exhibition charting the history of the toilet and toilet paper. Privy To The Past: Inside America's Most Private Room has a replica of a sponge ancient Romans used to share. Green Bay's Neville Museum spokeswoman Marilyn Stasiak says the area is: "The toilet paper capital of the world." The exhibition tells visitors about how corn cobs, leaves and newspaper came before modern-day toilet paper. It also shows how toilet paper used to have splinters in it. Ms Stasiak told Ananova: "That would've been...

Wanted: madmen to swim the Zambezi Once described as a "brave madman", an adventurer is looking for six "mentally deranged" fellow South Africans to follow him down 3 000km of churning Zambezi river water, dodging sharks, hippos and snapping crocodiles. Louie Greeff, 50, of Johannesburg, attracted international media attention last year when he paddled the mighty Zambezi from its source in Zambia to the ocean on the Mozambican coast. Now Greeff wants to introduce the challenge to six willing South Africans and a six-member British team - an ambitious project he hopes to sell to television stations. 'Preferably insane' "I'd...

 Old West vs. Big Retail as Horses Invade Wal-Mart April 11, 2002 8:55 am EST LITTLE ROCK (Reuters) - The Old West clashed with the world's largest retailer when two horsemen rode their mounts through a Wal-Mart in the southern Arkansas town of El Dorado, police say. The horses left a pile of droppings and a wake of startled shoppers but did no other damage despite getting well into the food section. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, is based in the northern Arkansas town of Bentonville. "We get some weird stuff down here," Lt. Terry Ward of...