Free Republic

A Philippine court on Tuesday convicted a U.S. Marine of killing a Filipino last year after he discovered she was a transgender woman in a hotel in the Philippines while he was on a break after participating in joint military exercises in the country. Lance Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton was convicted of homicide by first strangling Jennifer Laude and then dunking her head into a toilet bowl in the hotel they had checked into after meeting in a disco bar in Olongapo city, northwest of Manila. He was sentenced to 6-12 years in jail, with time already spent in detention...

Socialist Pope Francis announced today that the world is “near suicide” if no climate change deal is reached this week in Paris. The freewheeling Argentinian also blamed the West for African poverty. 75 million Africans were paid bribes in the last year. – which had nothing to do with the West.

This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “ "victimized" by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love! In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable. I'm not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic! Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims! Anyone who dares challenge...

[Snip]...I think it might be time to bring back the draft. We have become a society of ungrateful, horrid little greedy, grabby whiners. Everybody wants something for nothing. And it is most evident on our college campuses. College students today are thin-skinned, navel-gazing crybabies so desperate to be victims they create elaborate hoaxes and whine over “micro-aggressions” while they scamper to their safe spaces. But it’s nothing that six weeks with a drill sergeant screaming in your face couldn’t fix.

A retired truck driver flying through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) is warning American flyers their experience may not be secure, after he was able to pass a loaded handgun through a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint. Speaking to Britain’s Daily Mail, the flyer says while packing his gun was purely accidental, he feels the TSA should have caught it prior to departure. The incident happened on November 5, as 67-year-old Blake Alford was preparing to fly from ATL to Chicago Midway Airport (MDW). In his bag was a Ruger .38 pistol, loaded with a full magazine of seven hollow-point bullets....

Video

(Scroll down to 5 minute+ video)...There is a rape epidemic across Europe. If you disagree with the Muslims, they call you racists, and label you as facists, or "islamophobic." No-go zones exist in nearly every European nation now. The populations of Europe are rapidly being replaced with Muslims. Crime has gone through the roof. People are being beaten, threatened, attacked. Those coming across the borders are not "poor refugees" escaping the Syrian conflict- many are coming from Afghanistan, Senegal, Ghana...other nations. It is a flood. The video at the bottom of this article...listen to it. Hear it, know what is...

The Paris terrorist attacks bring to mind the frightening case of an Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) operative arrested in Chicago last fall and released earlier this year to serve probation in Illinois for a state crime that secretly drew federal intervention. His name is Emad Karakrah, the ringleader of a sophisticated narco-terror operation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) facilitated his release from Cook County Jail in January. Judicial Watch uncovered Karakrah's terrorism record and has reported extensively on his extremist activities, including a 2009 plot to bomb talk-show host Oprah Winfrey's Chicago studios and the...

In Karen Keller’s kindergarten classroom, boys can’t play with Legos. They can have their pick of Tinkertoys and marble tracks, but the colorful bricks are “girls only.” “I always tell the boys, ‘You’re going to have a turn’ — and I’m like, ‘Yeah, when hell freezes over’ in my head,” she said. “I tell them, ‘You’ll have a turn’ because I don’t want them to feel bad.” Although her approach might anger some parents, Keller is sticking to her guns: It’s all part of a plan to get girls building during “free choice,” the 40 minutes of unstructured play time...

Full title: 'Christmas is a charade': Pope says atrocities such as Paris massacre have made festivities meaningless in a world which has chosen 'war and hate'... The Pope has called Christmas a 'charade' during a sermon in which he reflected on recent atrocities around the world. Among the acts of inhumanity he denounced were the Paris attacks, which left 129 dead, and the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypt, which killed all 224 people on board. Christmas festivities will seem empty in a world which has chosen 'war and hate', Pope Francis said yesterday at the Vatican.

Gavin and Tom delivered their fraud right on schedule ahead of Paris, just as I predicted they would. They claim that October had the highest temperature anomaly ever recorded for any month....Somehow, they managed to calculate Earth’s temperature within 0.01 degrees – even though they had no temperature data for about half of the land surface, including none in Greenland and very little in Africa or Antarctica.

Although the Obama administration currently refuses to temporarily pause its Syrian refugee resettlement program in the United States, the State Department in 2011 stopped processing Iraq refugee requests for six months after the Federal Bureau of Investigation uncovered evidence that several dozen terrorists from Iraq had infiltrated the United States via the refugee program.

The United States passed its first official refugee legislation to address the plight of displaced Europeans following World War II. Most refugees are displaced from their country of origin to a neighboring country, and then resettled to a third country through international organizations. The United States resettles more refugees than any other country, refugees who go on to contribute to our communities and our economy.

The Russian air force just pulled off one of the biggest and most complex heavy bomber missions in modern history—sending no fewer than 25 Backfire, Bear, and Blackjack bombers on a coordinated, long-range air raid against alleged ISIS forces in Syria. The Tuesday mission, which launched under the cover of darkness from a base in Ossetia in southern Russia, signaled a significant escalation of Moscow’s air war in Syria—and heralded the rebirth of Russian heavy bomber squadrons that once had withered from a lack of funding.

Ignored in news coverage of the Paris massacre is the single most pertinent piece of background: A 2014 opinion poll found that ISIS had an approval rating in France (at 16%) almost as high as President Francois Holland (at 18%). In the 18-to-24-year-old demographic, ISIS’ support jumped to 27%. Muslims comprise about a tenth of France’s population, so the results imply that ISIS had the support of the overwhelming majority of French Muslims (and especially Muslim youth), as well as the endorsement of a large part of the non-Muslim Left. Reporting the survey, conducted by the polling organization ICM for...

[Snip]...On Tuesday, November 10, the Minnesota Student Association (MSA) — the undergraduate student government at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (UMN) — rejected a resolution for a moment of recognition on future anniversaries of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks…."I am well aware that 9/11 was a devastating tragedy but I am also fearful for the welfare of our Muslim and Middle Eastern students on campus, of which I identify with."

On Friday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell actually fact-checked Hillary Clinton’s suspicious tale of trying to join the Marines in 1975: "Those comments are being mocked by Republicans today and they’re getting two Pinocchios from Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler....Why on earth would she go to a Marine recruiter in 1975?...It doesn't make sense." Her guest, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was so taken aback that the Florida congresswoman attacked Mitchell for asking questions: "With all due respect, Andrea, why on earth are we talking about this?" Mitchell hit back: "Because she brought it up in New Hampshire the...

A Syrian passport has been retrieved from one of the suicide bombers who blew himself up outside the Stade de France stadium in Paris last night, according to two French police officers. The second of the suicide bombers is believed to have been as young as 15 years old. Meanwhile, witnesses reported hearing at least two of the terrorists at the Bataclan Theatre speaking perfect French.

Last month the Pentagon sent a tough signal to its fastest-growing rival in Asia when a U.S. Navy warship sailed close by an artificial Chinese island in the contested waters of the South China Sea. The message: The U.S. will stand by its allies as they confront China's increasingly muscular military. This month, the Defense Department picked Joint Base Lewis-McChord for a friendlier exchange between the two world powers. The Army is opening up the South Sound base for a weeklong exercise with its Chinese counterpart, the People's Liberation Army. It's fairly small compared with some of the standard engagements...

When this Philippine coastal town rid itself two decades ago of a giant US naval base, it wanted to shake off a colonial past and reject the “ugly Americans.” Yet today the town is once again welcoming American military personnel and viewing the US as a vanguard against an increasingly pushy China. The US Navy began using the base in Subic Bay last year to deliver materiel and personnel for annual joint military exercises. Some 6,000 US personnel came to Subic in April, and are set to return for exercises in 2016 in agreement with Philippine authorities, according to a...