Free Republic

HIGHGATE CEMETERY, LONDON—On a summer visit to the grave of Karl Marx, Ben Gliniecki found that he would have to pay £4, or about $6, to pay respects to the man who sounded the death knell for private property. Mr. Gliniecki, a Marxist, said no. “Personally, I think it is disgusting,” the 24-year-old political activist said. “There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which capitalists won’t sink if they think they can make money out of it.” The charity that looks after this cemetery has long taken swipe at a different irony: Karl Marx’s decision to buy...

Less than 24 hours after a veteran police officer was buried, vandals struck, damaging the eternal flame honoring the fallen officer at a cemetery in New Orleans. The Times-Picayune reports vandals desecrated the grave of New Orleans Police Officer Vernell Brown, Jr. by prying off and destroying the metal vessel housing the gas-powered flame-- the centerpiece of the Louisiana Law Enforcement Officer Memorial. Brown, who was injured in a July 12 traffic incident and died five days later was buried on Saturday at Lake Lawn cemetery. The 17-year veteran of the force was training two recruits when they stopped to...

Group takes a shovel to Confederate General’s grave Posted 10:18 pm, July 22, 2015, by Eryn Taylor MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A group was fed up with waiting, so they got a shovel and dug up a patch of grass next to Nathan Bedford Forrest’s grave and statue in a public park in the Medical District. The group says they wanted the statue and remains removed for a long time, because he was a Confederate soldier, a KKK leader and a slave trader. “If he’s gone, some of this racism and race-hate might be gone,” said Isaac Richmond with Commission on...

A prominent attorney admits to taking flags from the graves of soldiers, a move that's sparked both positive reaction and calls for him to be arrested and disbarred. He's also received death threats and hate mail. The lawyer says his actions are meant to promote unity. A bag of small Confederate flags sits at Union Springs City Hall. They were removed from graves at an old Confederate cemetery downtown, behind the Red Door Theater, near the intersection of Highway 82 and North Prairie Street. Myron Penn pulled up the flags with his family on Mother's Day. Penn, a founding partner...

CHICAGO — This is now the city of big debt, where each of Chicago's 2.7 million residents — from infants in diapers to senior citizens on fixed incomes — is on the hook for about $20,000 in long-term pension promises and bond obligations. Like the relentless snow clogging the city's streets, it just keeps piling up. Chicago isn't bankrupt Detroit, junk-status Puerto Rico or New York at the brink of insolvency in 1975. Yet the city of gleaming skyscrapers along Lake Michigan's shore tripled its debt load from 2002 to 2012, as it ignored annual pension payments and borrowed for...

Officials say a suspected mass grave has been discovered in Serbia believed to contain bodies of ethnic Albanians who were killed during the 1998-99 war between Serbia and Kosovo.

A Sarmatian burial mound excavated this summer in Russia’s Southern Ural steppes has yielded a magnificent but unusual treasure. The artefacts contained within the mound are helping to shed light on a little-known period of the illiterate nomadic culture that flourished on the Eurasian steppe in the 1st millennium BC and interacted with the Persian Achaemenid and Greek civilizations. The archaeological study of this remarkable ancient tomb, or kurgan, was carried out by the expedition of the Institute of Archaeology (Russian Academy of Sciences), led by Professor Leonid T. Yablonsky.

'Vampire' Graves Uncovered in Poland Archaeologists in Poland believe they've made a startling discovery: a group of vampire graves. The graves were discovered during the construction of a roadway near the Polish town of Gliwice, where archaeologists are more accustomed to finding the remains of World War II soldiers, according to The Telegraph. But instead of soldiers, the graves contained skeletons whose heads had been severed and placed on their legs. This indicated to the archaeologists that the bodies had been subject to a ritualized execution designed to ensure the dead stayed dead, The Telegraph reports. By keeping the head...

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appealed Sunday for restraint to avoid an escalation in the Syrian conflict, expressing "grave concern" over Israeli air strikes, AFP reported. "The secretary-general calls on all sides to exercise maximum calm and restraint, and to act with a sense of responsibility to prevent an escalation of what is already a devastating and highly dangerous conflict," his spokesman Martin Nesirky said. Nesirky said the United Nations was unable to independently verify the Israeli strikes, and had no details about them, but Ban "expresses grave concern over reports of air strikes in Syria by the Israeli Air...

In the competition for the creepiest campaign material of 2012, we may already have a winner. It is “The Life of Julia,” the Obama reelection team’s cartoon chronicle of a fictional woman who is dependent on government at every step of her life. … The Obama campaign revives the concept of “cradle to grave” as it highlights Obama-supported programs that take care of Julia from age 3 to her retirement at age 67.

The Obama campaign has a cringe-inducing propaganda slideshow called "The Life of Julia" intended to illustrate how the Obama Administration's policies will give government help to a young woman as she is educated, works, starts a family and retires. If you had to stifle a guffaw, you're not alone. Yes, the Obama Administration's policies alone can be the savior for American children everywhere - all it takes, apparently, are piles and piles of taxpayer money thrown around recklessly. And by the end, children will still be able to retire and live comfortably on the totally-stable programs of Medicare and Social...

Police are hunting a woman who was captured on camera appearing to steal flowers from a schoolboy’s grave. She was photographed at the grave of 11 year-old, Robert Stringer, who died in a car accident in 1980, after the boy’s family installed a motion-sensing camera in a tree. It followed a string of thefts of floral tributes at Rippleside Cemetery in Barking, Essex. His family have released the pictures in an attempt to track her down. Steve Rose, 37, of Walthamstow, east London, who installed the camera, said: “I was only six when he died. My aunt, who died two...

Where do our military headstones come from? A great story. I often wondered where and how our military headstones were made .... Click on the link below turn up sound very interesting.

BERLIN — The bones of Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy, have been exhumed and disposed of because his grave in the small Bavarian town of Wunsiedel had become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis, the town’s mayor said in an interview on Thursday. Karl-Willi Beck, 56, who has been mayor of Wunsiedel since 2002, said the cemetery administrators removed Hess’s remains and his gravestone early Wednesday. “It was the right thing to do,” Mr. Beck said. He added that the bones would be cremated and scattered over a lake, but he gave no other details.

After St. Peter died upside down on a cross in the Circus of Caligula and Nero, the surviving Christians obtained his body and buried him quickly nearby, on the steeply sloping Vatican Hill to the north of the Circus. That hill had become a makeshift graveyard four months earlier after the fire of Rome had killed so many residents of the metropolis that their loved ones began to use any open spot they could find on the roadsides radiating outside the city. . . . When the tropaion of Peter was found underneath the high altar during archaeological escavations in...

LIBERTY COUNTY, Texas -- Dozens of bodies have been found in a mass grave in Liberty County, officials said Tuesday. The Liberty County Sheriff's Office said 25 to 30 bodies were buried at the intersection of County Roads 2049 and 2048 between Hardin and Daisetta. The bodies are those of children, according to preliminary reports. The FBI was called in to assist the investigation.

CINNAMINSON, N.J. (CBS) – Three New Jersey women are behind bars for a crime, that is becoming more and more common according to police. Authorities say they stole brass markers from the graves of veterans at local cemeteries, and sold the stolen markers to a scrap yard. Authorities tell Eyewitness News the suspects needed drug money.

Yogi Berra rushed to FL hospital...

You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped; you were too strong for me, and you triumphed. All the day I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I must cry out, violence and outrage is my message; the word of the LORD has brought me derision and reproach all the day. I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it....

Excavator Nicholas Stampolidis said his team discovered more than 3,000 pieces of gold foil in the 7th-century B.C. twin grave near the ancient town of Eleutherna... The tiny gold ornaments, from 1 to 4 centimetres (0.4 to 1.5 inches) long, had been sewn onto a lavish robe or shroud that initially wrapped the body of a woman and has almost completely rotted away but for a few off-white threads... The woman, who presumably had a high social or religious status, was buried with a second skeleton in a large jar sealed with a stone slab weighing more than half a...