Free Republic

TAMPA — Her business card is utterly ordinary. No big titles. No hint of connections with the military and political elite. It lists her address, her phone number and her name in elegant script: "Honorable Jill G. Kelley." But the outsized portrait of herself that Kelley presents to the world will fit on no card. It's seen in her emails to Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn and others. She drops names. She mentions lunch at the White House in a casual aside, one of three visits she has made there in the last six weeks. The top U.S. general in Afghanistan...

Idaho Department of Fish and Game officials struggling to manage a growing beaver population in the 1940s and 1950s struck on an unusual solution.

<p>TUCSON, Ariz. — The U.S. military has identified a member of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 who died during parachute training in southern Arizona.</p> <p>Navy officials say 31-year-old Special Warfare Operator Chief Brett D. Shadle of Elizabethville, Pa., died when he and another SEAL collided in midair Thursday. Shadle was taken to University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, where he was pronounced dead.</p>

Jeb Corliss wants to fly — not the way the Wright brothers wanted to fly, but the way we do in our dreams. He wants to jump from a helicopter and land without using a parachute. And his dream, strange as it sounds, is not unique. Around the globe, Mr. Corliss said, at least a half-dozen groups — in France, South Africa, New Zealand, Russia and the United States — have the same goal in mind. Although nobody is waving a flag, the quest has evoked the spirit of nations’ pursuits of Everest and the North and South Poles. “All...

SEATTLE, Jan. 25 - It is about time, politicians here are saying, for the state of Washington to catch up with the rest of the world. Florida has struck down a law forbidding unmarried women from parachuting on Sundays. Michigan has done away with a law making it illegal to swear in front of women and children. Texas women no longer face 12 months in prison for adjusting their stockings in public. And the ladies of Maine can now legally tickle a man under the chin with a feather duster. But here in Washington, in 2005, it is still illegal,...

GARDINER, N.Y., Aug. 20 - From 5,000 feet up, a parachutist glides gently to earth, destined for a soft, feathery landing in the grassy airfield here at the Blue Sky Ranch, at the base of the Shawangunk Mountains. But suddenly, at about 500 feet, the jumper abruptly begins plummeting in a downward spiral and seems in a free-fall death plunge. At precisely this unnerving moment, though, cheers erupt from a crowd assembled around a small artificial pond below, and the jumper deftly pulls out of the plunge by banking a turn toward the water. In a steep, swooping approach, he...