Free Republic

NBC’s Richard Engel told Andrea Mitchell on Meet the Press that the growth of ISIL in Iraq and Syria was “incredibly predictable.” “We reported about it. Reporters risked their lives going into Syria to talk about this buildup of extremists in the country, yet nothing seems to have been done. And now we have a very serious situation,” said Engel. Engel also reported that military commanders are “apoplectic” over the president’s inaction in Syria: “I speak to military commanders, I speak to former officials, and they are apoplectic. They think that this is a clear and present danger. They think...

But most interesting, perhaps, was the race of the officers who fired their weapons. About two-thirds were white, and one-third black — effectively identical to the racial composition of the St. Louis Police Department as a whole. In this study, at least, firing at a black suspect was an equal-opportunity decision. The experiment’s 102 subjects, a mixture of police officers, combat veterans and civilians, were run through a random sample of 60 scenarios drawn from actual police encounters. The scenarios, using white, black and Hispanic actors, were projected in life-size high-definition video on laboratory screens. Whether officers, veterans or civilians,...

Accusations of Russian involvement in the fighting in eastern Ukraine are nothing new, but now they are accompanied by a growing concern from relatives of Russian servicemen unable to locate them or, in the worst cases, having to receive their bodies. In Kostroma, north of Moscow, relatives of those serving with the elite 98th Airborne division headed to their base on Thursday trying to find out where their relatives were. The soldiers were last known to be flying on manoeuvres. This is the same unit from which 10 Russian soldiers were captured in Ukraine earlier this week.

Images showing high-powered military rifles in the hands of law enforcement in Ferguson, Mo., after the police shooting of an unarmed black man focused attention on a controversial Pentagon program that supplies that kind of weaponry to local police departments. Now reports reveal how some of those guns have been lost by law enforcement officials who received the weapons.

The first suspect has been arrested in a pair of racially-motivated pellet-gun shootings earlier this month in Central Park.

PRINCE GEORGE COUNTY, Va. — A 51-year-old bicyclist remains in intensive care at VCU Medical Center after he was targeted in what a witness called a “knockout game-style” attack. The man was riding his bicycle on River Road near the Prince George County-Hopewell line at about 7:30 Sunday morning when a car came up from behind and slowed down, the bicyclist’s friend said. The friend, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said someone in the car reached out and hit the bicyclist in the back with either his hand or an object. The bicyclist had time to...

Legally, it doesn’t matter that both Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin were “unarmed” when shot to death.One of the most common laments to come out of Ferguson these last days has been that surely it was outrageous for Office Darren Wilson to use his service pistol to shoot an “unarmed” Mike Brown. (Earlier iterations of this narrative went further in their misinformation, describing the 18-year-old 6’4″ 292 pound Brown as a “kid” or “child,” as well as falsely claiming that Wilson shot Brown in the back, but such misinformation falls outside the scope of this post.) Similar arguments were made...

Back in 2006, Joe Biden, then a Senate candidate ran into trouble for a remark that "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent." Gaffe-prone Biden got away by explaining that it wasn't a racial slur but "was meant as a compliment" for the "vibrant Indian-American community" making "a significant contribution to the national economy as well." A spin or not, Biden who went on become vice president in 2008, was speaking a home truth as according to the Asian-American Convenience Store Owners Association its 50,000 members own over 80,000 convenience...

Inmates Used Grandmother’s Coffin To Smuggle Marijuana, Police Say August 31, 2014 Sheriff’s deputies in Georgia say they foiled a bizarre smuggling scheme in which two jailed inmates used their dead grandmother’s casket to help them smuggle drugs and other contraband back into the jail. Jailers escorted Henry Ison Rouse, 27, and Nekoase Antwan Vinson, 30, in handcuffs and leg restraints to the Bentley Brothers funeral home Thursday evening to bid farewell to their grandmother. Emma Mae Faulk of Macon died last Sunday at age 74 and the prisoners were allowed a private viewing. “One of them stayed in there...

FERGUSON, Mo. — Dorian Johnson had just moved from his mother’s house in St. Louis to a two-bedroom spot in the Canfield Green Apartments that he was sharing with his then-pregnant girlfriend and another roommate. Sometime in March, a buddy stopped by with a stranger. “Wow,” Johnson said, “that’s a big dude.” The dude, Michael Brown, was 6-foot-4, and he had brushed past Johnson with barely a hello as he headed to the video-game console and began to play. “I asked, ‘Why he don’t speak?’ ” Johnson recalled in a 90-minute interview with The Washington Post last week — his first...

President Obama found himself under fire Sunday for his cautious approach to beating back the Islamic State's march through Iraq and Syria and stamping out other diplomatic fires around the globe, with a top House Republican suggesting his foreign policy was in free fall and that Western allies no longer view the U.S. as a leader in the fight against bad actors. Rep. Mike Rogers, Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said the administration is sitting on its hands while radical Islamist fighters grow in influence, recruit from abroad and seize more territory in...

At least two people have been killed and 24 others wounded in Chicago amid a long Labor Day weekend. The weekend's first homicide took place late Friday night in the city's Back of the Yards neighborhood.

The children who set off for their first day of school 10 years ago in the small Caucasus town of Beslan, North Ossetia, will graduate from high school this coming academic year — at least, those who survived will. On Sept. 1, 2004, a group of 32 armed terrorists took as their hostages more than 1,110 people, including schoolchildren, their parents, relatives and teachers. The group demanded that Moscow recognize Chechnya's complete independence and withdraw all Russian forces from the restive republic. The three-day hostage crisis claimed 385 lives, including those of 156 children, and left 700 victims injured. Ten...

Full Title: Nude Photos Of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Ariana Grande Leak In Massive iCloud Hack Jennifer Lawrence, Ariana Grande, and Kate Upton were among a handful of celebrities whose nude photos were leaked late Sunday afternoon following what appears to be a large-scale hack. The photos first appeared on a 4Chan thread (very NSFW). So far, only Lawrence’s publicist Bryna Rifkin has confirmed, in an official statement to Buzzfeed, that the photos were of her client... ...The leaked photos were apparently obtained via a massive hack of Apple’s iCloud. They were then posted on 4chan by users offering more...

On September 1, 2004, Chechen and Ingush militants stormed an elementary school in the town of Beslan in the Russian republic of North Ossetia. Surging through the back-to-school crowds, the militants took 1,100 teachers, children, and relatives hostage, holding them for more than two days and demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya. On the third day, a series of explosions ripped through the building, igniting fires and sparking a deadly gun battle between the militants and Russian security forces. More than 330 hostages died in the violence. A decade later, correspondent Tom Balmforth and photographer Diana Markosian traveled...

The New York Times is not blind to the lawsuit that conservative publicist and historian Craig Shirley has filed against left-wing author Rick Perlstein, claiming he purloined chunks of his 2004 book "Reagan's Revolution." They not only reported a story on it, the public editor Margaret Sullivan then strangely apologized for advancing a conservative “swift-boating” agenda.

So much has been written about the incident at Ferguson, Missouri, that it’s remarkable none of it is of any use. So let’s try something new. My idea is to look at the shooting as a shooting, not as an avatar of social malaise, a tragedy or an inevitability. Instead, let’s determine what can be learned from the few facts known and considered incontrovertible. I am no expert but I do know a little about this stuff. The four shots that hit Michael Brown in the right arm, according to autopsy drawing provided by Dr. Michael Baden at the insistence...

Sometimes this administration is simply beyond parody: The FBI’s most recent national threat assessment for domestic terrorism makes no reference to Islamist terror threats, despite last year’s Boston Marathon bombing and the 2009 Fort Hood shooting—both carried out by radical Muslim Americans. Instead, the internal FBI intelligence report concluded in its 2013 assessment published this month that the threat to U.S. internal security from extremists is limited to attacks and activities by eight types of domestic extremist movements—none motivated by radical Islam. They include anti-government militia groups and white supremacy extremists, along with “sovereign citizen” nationalists, and anarchists. Other domestic...

One of the strangest periods of Roman history was the period right before the republic collapsed and became an empire. The Romans weren't known for losing, but during this period, they lost nearly everything they put their hands to. Catiline nearly overthrew the republic by rallying profligates, whoremongers, and drunken hipsters under the flag of rapacity. A Numidian king named Jugurtha practically walked into the Senate, bribed a bunch of senators, and caused them to overlook his hostile foreign policy – which cost a friendly kingdom its ruin. Pirates practically owned the seas, so that all sea trade had practically...

Moving from the Capitol, British Navy Rear Admiral George Cockburn, Army Major General Robert Ross, and 150 redcoats marched to the White House. Rocca asked Allman what the Britons' impression of the White House would have been as they walked in the door: "I think that it was a pretty good-sized house, but not a palatial one. No Buckingham Palace. No Versailles. That it was, you know, reasonably well decorated." The biggest surprise? A dinner set for 40. So the British feasted in the White House dining room before burning the mansion down. Here, too, the walls survived. But little...