Free Republic

The U.S. Army is awarding its Medal of Heroism to three Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) cadets killed in last week's school shooting in Parkland, Florida, an Army spokesperson confirmed Tuesday. Alaina Petty, Peter Wang and Martin Duque were all students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where the deadly attack unfolded. The Army awards the Medal of Heroism to JROTC cadets who perform "acts of heroism." "The achievement must be an accomplishment so exceptional and outstanding that it clearly sets the individual apart from fellow students or from other persons in similar circumstances," the Army said in a...

More than a century of tradition changed at Yale University on Tuesday. The Whiffenpoofs, the senior a cappella group, admitted its first female singer. Sofia Campoamor was picked to be one of the 14 new members of the Whiffs’ Class of 2019. “I’m really excited,” said Ms. Campoamor, a 20-year-old junior from Washington, D.C. “To me the overall goal is to change the conversation around senior a cappella to one that is not about gender, but about music.” *** Founded in 1909, the Whiffenpoofs bills itself as the oldest collegiate a cappella group in the U.S. The Whiffs and an...

An MS-13 gang member in Texas was sentenced to 99 years behind bars after he was convicted of killing a man to achieve a higher position within the violent organization, officials said. Jonathan Steven Guevara, 21, was handed the lengthy sentence by a jury on Tuesday for killing Hector Daniel Diaz, 28, in November 2015, according to a news release from the Harris County District Attorney’s office. “The jury’s verdict and sentence on the case we presented speaks volumes about society’s judgment of this vicious behavior,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said. “We will hold these gangs accountable, convict...

It’s en vogue for enraged liberals to compare Trumpism to Argentine Peronism, wielding the analogy as a warning about the potential apocalypse that they fear is about to engulf us. Most recently it was Larry Summers, a member of the Democratic establishment for decades, who took to Twitter to declare: “I worry about the Argentinization of US government.” Summers sent the tweet after President Trump accused Democrats of treason and the media reported on the president’s childish wishes for a military parade. He employed a standard characterization of Peronism as an authoritarian movement, a familiar depiction that no doubt had...

Social media and politics go crazy whenever there's a crime that involves a mass shooting and guns. However, there's something that kills a lot more people on a daily basis and we need to talk about that problem before we try to fix a gun issue. America has a massive drug problem right now. Did you know that nearly 64,000 people died of a drug overdose in 2016, and that number is more than the number of people who were killed in the Vietnam War? We need to refocus and put our efforts and political arguments towards drugs because 64,000...

Supreme Court justice says the #MeToo movement is important, but so is due process.Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg thinks colleges and universities are violating the due process rights of students facing sexual misconduct charges. The Atlantic's Jeffrey Rosen asked the Court's second-ever female justice for her thoughts on the #MeToo movement. Unsurprisingly, Ginsburg was happy about the increased public attention being paid to the problems of sexual harassment and gender-based inequality in the workplace. But she was also concerned about protecting the due process rights of the accused—particularly on college campuses: Rosen: What about due process for the accused?...

A busload of surviving students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to the Florida state capital Tuesday to lobby on behalf of gun control legislation. Despite their efforts, the Florida House has voted down a motion take up a ban on the AR-15, tabling the measure. The vote was 36-71.Seventeen people were killed and over a dozen injured when a former student opened fire on the school last week. The shooter, Nikolas Cruz, used an AR-15.Soon after the carnage, lawmakers renewed their calls for a ban on the rifle. It got support from even Republican governors like John Kasich,...

ELK GROVE (CBS13) – A war was lost before it ever could begin, according to local historians who were hoping to fire up a mock battle. The Elk Grove Historical Society planned a Revolutionary War reenactment for more than a year and has had similar events in the past, but it’s now forced to cancel the event because of local gun laws. The group had already printed up flyers to market the mock battle, hoping to draw in 3,000 people for the two-day event at a regional park. “We would have encampments and all kinds of entertainment for the kids...

Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas told the United Nations Security Council that PA residents are the direct descendants of the Canaanites, claiming that ‘Palestine’ made significant contributions to humanity prior to the 1917 Balfour Declaration. During his address at the UN Security Council in which he called on the international community to hold a Middle East peace conference, with the goal of launching multilateral negotiations, Abbas claimed that the Arab residents of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza were in fact descended from the ancient Canaanites. "We are the descendants of the Canaanites who lived in the land of Palestine 5,000 years...

Two years ago, the Regavim movement for protecting Israel's resources and sovereignty uncovered Israeli police data showing that every year police respond to 1,000 complaints of camels roaming roads in the south (a total of 7151 cases from January 2008 until June 2015). Regavim publicized the issue, petitioned to have law enforcement intervene, and wrote letters and drafted legislation to kept the issue alive in the media and the Knesset. Yesterday their efforts paid off: The "Camel Law" passed the first legislative hurdle towards enactment. For nearly two years, Regavim, together with MK Bezalel Smotrich, has been working on formulating...

RUSH: I’m looking at the clock. I don’t have sufficient time. We have a Marie Harf sound bite is what’s coming up, and it’s awesome. The only thing it’s missing… She was on Fox a couple hours ago, and the only thing that’s missing is her pronunciation of the word “admini-shration,” and it was all of this sound bite, and it was hoping when I requested this that it would be in there, but it didn’t fall within our allotted time. But it was… No, Michelle Obama. We’re down for the sh’truggle, “admini-shtration.” It’s almost now a required pronunciation technique...

RUSH: I’ll holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a printed piece from the recent issue of The Politico magazine, and the headline: “Why the NRA Always Wins.” And in the second paragraph is their answer: Rush Limbaugh. “Rush Limbaugh went on Fox News, right after an interview with several Parkland [student] survivors critical of the gun lobby” but of course they’re not political, you see “to scold those who ‘bash the NRA’ and insist the only solution to school shootings is ‘concealed carry in the schools.’ … “Why does the NRA always win, despite the repeated national traumas, and...

New: Trump just said he signed a memo directing the Attorney General to propose a rule outlawing bump stocks, all devices "that turn legal weapons into machine guns." He expects those regulations to be finalized "very soon."

MSNBC host Katy Tur asked viewers on Tuesday if they values guns or children more while previewing her next segment about high school students from Florida convening in Tallahassee to confront Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R.) about gun reform. After speaking with a guest about special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of 13 Russians last week, Tur previewed her next segment about high school students speaking out about gun reform. "Kids or guns? What do you value more?" Tur said. "Students from south Florida head north to confront Gov. Rick Scott. We're on the bus with them." Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old...

RUSH: Florida school shooting survivors to head to Tallahassee, Florida, state capital, to press lawmakers on gun control. But it’s not political, you see. It isn’t political, but they’re going up there to the state capital. It isn’t political. The students, They’re not political. They’re the ones that were shot at. That means they’re the only ones we should listen to. And they’re on their way to the state capital to talk to lawmen, lawmakers, but it isn’t political. You see, this is exactly how it happens. Greetings, my friends. Great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh raring and loaded,...

Germany's air fleet was grounded this week after "too much biodiesel" fuel found its ways into the gas tanks, according to German reports saying the Luftwaffe cannot safely fly with such a mixture. Germany's Tornado fleet of war planes was reportedly grounded after an unsafe mixture including too much biodiesel was used to fuel the planes, requiring the fleet to be grounded and their fuel tanks flushed. "The tolerance values are minimally exceeded," Colonel Kristof Conrath of the Tactical Air Force Squadron 51 was quoted as saying in media reports. "It's not that the aircraft would fall from the sky....

Knives kill far more people in the United States than rifles do every year. In the wake of the horrific school shooting in Florida last week, the debate over guns in America has surged again to the forefront oft the political conversation. Seventeen students were killed when a deranged gunman rampaged through the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida. Many are calling now for stricter gun laws in the wake of the shooting, specifically targeting the AR-15 rifle and promoting the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban. However, recent statistics from 2016 show that knives actually kill nearly five...

Our nation’s Founding Fathers - were geniuses. They overcame the unbelievable handicaps of being white, male and by nigh all accounts all heterosexual - to create the greatest form of government in the history of personkind. Amongst their very many brilliances - was federalism. The concept of a very limited federal government with expressed powers - leaving the unexpressed and all the rest to the states and the people. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments to our Constitution help lock down this federalism. The Founders knew they weren’t perfect (though they came exquisitely close). Their federalism allows states to experiment with...

Mike Rowe shared his thoughts on the recent tragedy at Stoneman Douglas High School, and it will blow anything the establishment media has to say out of the water. Rowe wrote on Facebook, “Evil is real. As long as humans have walked the earth, people have chosen to do evil things. This is what happened in Florida. A nineteen-year old man chose to do an evil thing. He planned it. He executed it. He succeeded.” “Evil is real. As long as humans have walked the earth, people have chosen to do evil things,” he continued. “This is what happened in...

George Clooney continues his charitable giving– now half a million dollars to the March for Our Lives. He and wife Amal will make an appearance at the gun control rally. Clooney is an ardent supporter of civil rights in places like Sudan with the still-going Not On Our Watch (They are still giving hundreds of thousands of dollars there to protect the South Sudan). But this may signal a new political move by him by actual going to Washington DC on March 24th. Clooney– thanks to the sale of his Casamigas Tequila company for $1 billion– now has the money...