Free Republic

For months, District Attorney Abel Reyna and his staff made clear they were champing at the bit to try strapping, 35-year-old Dallas Bandidos chieftain and locomotive engineer Jake Carrizal before any of the other bikers rounded up after the deadly 2015 shootout at Waco’s Twin Peaks restaurant and watering hole. Consequently, many of us in the peanut gallery leaned closer to better understand, perchance appreciate, Reyna’s strategy of legally pursuing 154 bikers on identical organized crime charges, as opposed to the more discriminating capital murder charges Waco police originally contemplated. So much for that idea. The Nov. 10 mistrial only...

“Be a warrior!” says Oprah Winfrey’s Mrs. Which to Storm Reid’ Meg in the new trailer for Disney’s highly-anticipated adaptation of A Wrinkle In Time. The new look at the Ava DuVernay-directed fantasy pic includes tons of new footage that takes you into an adventurous and visually stunning world created by author Madeleine L’Engle. The epic adventure based on the timeless classic takes audiences across dimensions of time and space, examining the nature of darkness versus light and, ultimately, the triumph of love. Through one girl’s transformative journey led by three celestial guides, we discover that strength comes from embracing...

Argentina's Navy could not confirm Sunday if seven brief satellite calls received a day prior were from a lost submarine with 44 crew members onboard. ... Navy has intensified its aerial search off the country's southern Atlantic coast after adverse weather conditions spurred waves up to 26 feet and made a maritime search difficult. ... Enrique Balbi said the low-frequency satellite signals received Saturday lasted a "few seconds," but had not connected with a base, partly due to inclement weather. The communication attempts were originally thought to indicate that the crew was trying to re-establish contact. On Sunday, search units...

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Two people were killed when a wrong-way driver crashed into another vehicle along the 118 Freeway in Porter Ranch early Sunday, according to the CHP. The California Highway Patrol began hearing reports of a car driving west along the eastbound carpool lane of traffic at a high-rate of speed about 12:25 a.m. Stringer video captured the wrong-way driver along the 118 in San Fernando. About 12:30 a.m. the wrong-way driver crashed head-on into another vehicle along the eastbound side of the highway near De Soto Avenue, according to the CHP log. The vehicles, which were mangled in the crash, were...

Maura Pfefferman’s journey has come to a premature end. Jeffrey Tambor has announced that he will not return to Transparent for its upcoming fifth season. He issued the following statement to our sister site Deadline: Playing Maura Pfefferman on Transparent has been one of the greatest privileges and creative experiences of my life. What has become clear over the past weeks, however, is that this is no longer the job I signed up for four years ago. I’ve already made clear my deep regret if any action of mine was ever misinterpreted by anyone as being aggressive, but the idea...

The film of Rodgers & Hammerstein's The Sound of Music opened in March 1965, and was a smash. Its soundtrack album was just as phenomenal, and in Britain that year it quickly toppled Bob Dylan to become the country's Number One album. And it stayed Number One, on and off, for almost three years. The Rolling Stones and the Monkees and Val Doonican Rocks, But Gently would come along and hit the top for a week or two, and then Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer would effortlessly re-assert their dominance for another couple of months. Rodgers & Hammerstein were particularly...

We are beyond brainwashing now. We have reached the point of university instructors physically assaulting those who fail to conform to left-wing ideology: A University of Illinois graduate instructor was arrested for assaulting two students during an anti-Trump protest Thursday, stealing the phone of one student and throwing it on the sidewalk. Tariq Khan is a PhD candidate at the university and has taught courses such as “Constructing Race in America” and “U.S. Gender History since 1877.” He is also involved with various anarchist and communist organizations including Black Rose Anarchist Federation and Antifa, in addition to working with the...

French authorities will stop Muslims from praying in a street north of Paris, the country’s interior minister said on Sunday, after a series of protests by lawmakers and locals over what they view as an unacceptable use of public space. “They will not have prayers on the street; we will prevent street praying,” Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told Questions Politics (Franceinfo, France Inter, Le Monde). Prayers in the street have taken place every Friday in the multiethnic suburb of Clichy-la-Garenne since March to protest the closure of a popular local mosque that had operated in a government building but since...

President Trump complained Sunday that the father of one of the three UCLA basketball players who were arrested in China for shoplifting had played down his role in winning their release, and that he therefore should not have interceded with China’s president. “I should have left them in jail!” the president tweeted. Trump’s tweet drew a quick backlash on social media. Many expressed incredulity that a sitting U.S. president would publicly regret having come to the aid of American citizens being held by an authoritarian government. Among Trump’s sharper critics was Rep. Adam Schiff, (D-Burbank) who tweeted back, “How can...

Nick Cave, the dark poet of rock, on Sunday accused the anti-Israel boycott movement of trying to bully musicians and said he was taking a “principled stand” by performing in the country. The Australian artist, known for music that can be both melancholic and uplifting, is popular in Israel and is set to perform a pair of nearly sold-out shows. At a news conference, Cave spoke about the pressure on artists by the international movement that seeks to ostracize Israel by lobbying corporations, performers and academic institutions to sever ties with the Jewish state. He said record producer Brian Eno...

There are some situations in the news just begging to be mocked. One such example was the report that snowflake social justice warrior students at Reed College in Oregon objected to one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits ever performed: Steve Martin singing "King Tut" in 1978. The song even became a hit single that sold a million copies and hit the Top 40 on the radio. Four decades ago, Egypt sent its Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit to America. The traveling exhibit was so wildly popular with the public that it was inevitable there would be some commercialization in...

I thought this was great! So before the Seasons meaning gets buried in the noise and minutia take a watch!

Friends it's Sunday night again and time to relax. Warm up the tubes for another 4 hours of classic radio Americana. Listen LiveInfo *tonight's show will be available at the "Info" link starting tomorrow.Official OTR Blog of "The Big Broadcast" thread: http://kallmansalley.com/

At 05:20 8,000 Soviet artillery pieces began an 80-minute bombardment of the Rumanian 3rd Armies’ position North of the city of Stalingrad. Marshal Zhukov had launched Operation Uranus. The plan’s objective was to encircle the 6th German Army in the city of Stalingrad. Within 24 hours, the Soviets would throw the fire power of 13,400 artillery pieces, 800 tanks, and 1,100,000 soldiers against the two Rumanian armies on North and South flanks of the 6th Army. By the 23rd, the Soviet pincers met at Kalach on the Don. Between 250 and 300 thousand German and ally soldiers were now trapped

Tiffany Ariana Trump’s instagram dress has some serious staying power, and Twitter can’t seem to get enough of last week’s Instagram picture of her in the super sexy mini dress. With the conversation revolving around Donald Trump’s youngest and low-profile daughter, many are digging deeper into Tiffany Trump’s personal life and are curious about her boyfriend, Ross Mechanic. The picture of Tiffany Trump’s minidress took on a life of its own recently. On Google Trends over the past seven days, netizens conducted droves of searches about the aspiring attorney: “Tiffany Trump dress,” “Tiffany Trump colored dress,” “Tiffany Trump sheer dress,”...

As the sun moves through its 11-year cycle, it experiences active and quiet periods known as the solar maximum and solar minimum. While solar maximum can present itself in a host of different ways, a new study has found that microwaves emitted during the solar minimum have largely remained the same for more than half a century. Astronomers in Japan have been continuously monitoring solar microwaves across four-frequencies since 1957. This began at the Toyokawa Branch of the Research Institute of Atmospherics, Nagoya University, and was later relocated in 1994 to the NAOj Nobeyama Campus. In a new study, researchers...

It was far from the most egregious case of workplace sexual misconduct in American history. But it was unusually high-profile, the facts were not in dispute, the perpetrator had a lot of nominal feminist ideological commitments, and political leaders who shared those commitments had the power to force him from office. Had he resigned in shame, we all might have made a collective cultural and political decision that a person caught leveraging power over women in inappropriate ways ought to be fired. Instead, we lost nearly two decades.

NEW YORK -- Actress Ann Wedgeworth, who gained fame on film and Broadway before taking on the role of a flirty divorcee on "Three's Company," has died at age 83. Wedgeworth died Thursday in the New York area after a long illness, her daughter Dianna Martin said. Wedgeworth landed her first Broadway role in the 1958 comedy "Make a Million" and continued to take on stage roles for decades. She won the 1978 Tony award for best featured actress in a play for her performance in Neil Simon's "Chapter Two."