Free Republic

There was something thoroughly distasteful about that Robin Williams press conference the other day. It sounded wrong. It looked bad. It smelled. Was it newsworthy, so much so that news networks would break into their regular afternoon programming to broadcast live the first official law enforcement press conference surrounding Williams' death? We think so. Williams was not just an iconic American comedian since he burst onto the scene with "Mork and Mindy" in the 1970s, he was perhaps the single funniest man in America. That he would die so suddenly understandably generated interest. When the word "suicide" appeared we became...

Robin Williams' suicide this week shook up people across the political spectrum -- and for good reason. When a highly successful, incredibly popular figure from our culture decides to take his own life, it feels as though suicide could happen to anyone. It can't. Robin Williams reportedly suffered from mentally illness. He stated during an interview in 2006 that he hadn't been formally diagnosed with depression or bipolar disorder, but stated, "Do I perform sometimes in a manic style? Yes. Am I manic all the time? No. Do I get sad? Oh yeah. Does it hit me hard? Oh...

LIMASSOL, Cyprus -- Cyprus is a beautiful island. But it has never recovered from the Turkish invasion of 1974. Turkish troops still control nearly 40 percent of the island -- the most fertile and formerly the richest portion. Some 200,000 Greek refugees never returned home after being expelled from their homes and farms in Northern Cyprus. The capital of Nicosia remains divided. A 112-mile demilitarized "green line" runs right through the city across the entire island. Thousands of settlers from Anatolia were shipped in by the Turkish government to occupy former Greek villages and to change Cypriot demography --...

The terror gang now known as the Islamic State planned and executed an astonishingly successful military and media offensive. Hatched in 2010 when the gang still went by al-Qaida in Iraq, the combined military-and-message punch banked on a complete U.S. military withdrawal. The jihadists got it. Iraq needed a U.S. "security nightlight" to protect and mentor its fragile democracy, but America failed to leave a residual force. Iraq's crony-ridden government and a U.S. administration peddling the nostrum that a decade of war was receding share responsibility for this strategic blunder. The terror gang, under the nom de guerre Islamic...

I am getting tired of this "they killing us" screed from African Americans. While I do not know the facts of what happened in Ferguson and I think the police are coming off as shady the fact of the matter isit isn't quite like what the left wants you to believe. First off although blacks make up 12.6% of the US population. Whites make up 72.4%. Which means there are 5.75 times more Whites in the US. Why is this important? Well black leadership and columnists are claiming they are disproportionately the victims of racial violence. Well the cold hard...

Al-Qaeda. The Taliban. Boko Haram. The Islamic State. Islamic Jihad. Hamas. Christians being beheaded. Muslims slaughtering Muslims. Schoolgirls being kidnapped. Schoolboys being burned alive. These are the images of Islam that we see on the news day and night, but we are told repeatedly that this does not represent true Islam. Instead, we are told, these atrocities are examples of radical Islam, committed by savages who know nothing of the real faith, people who misuse the Koran for their own malicious purposes and who represent perhaps 15 percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims. That would mean that the...

<p>What began as a peaceful protest of the shooting of an 18-year-old unarmed black man by a police officer in a St. Louis suburb turned into what the town's mayor called a "huge mess" as several businesses were looted and cars were vandalized.</p>

A cleric read the verdict before the truck came and dumped a large pile of stones near the municipal garden. Jihadi fighters then brought in the woman, clad head to toe in black, and put her in a small hole in the ground. When residents gathered, the fighters told them to carry out the sentence: Stoning to death for the alleged adulteress. None in the crowd stepped forward, said a witness to the event in a northern Syrian city. So the jihadi fighters, mostly foreign extremists, did it themselves, pelting Faddah Ahmad with stones until her body was dragged away....

Shortly before taking leave of this world, Sir Winston Churchill, who had lived a very long and illustrious life, was reportedly asked about the state of his soul: “I am perfectly ready,” he said, “to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” Only someone of the stature of Sir Winston could pull off a piece of effrontery that egregious. And, thank God, there’s probably not much of him in most mortal men. I doubt that there was any at all in my brother Michael. He was far too humble to...

The day we learned of the two American aid workers stricken with Ebola in Liberia, I started hearing from talk show listeners with a variety of views. Here in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, there was particular attention to the Fort Worth church community of Dr. Kent Brantly, who has earned appropriate praise for his selflessness in traveling across an ocean to care for people in a cauldron of poverty no American has ever experienced. His colleague, Nancy Writebol, is no less honorable for her devotion to the cause. But as the story broke, a common sentiment began to attach itself...

Do I as a living, breathing, conscious person have a concrete hope for my future? What do I have to look forward to? At times, when I discover that my own spirit is sagging and a sense of heaviness intrudes on me, I sometimes wonder why the gloomy cloud is perched above my head. Biblical eschatology gives us solid reasons for expecting a personal continuity of life. Eternal life for the individual is not an empty human aspiration built on myth, but an assurance promised us by Christ Himself. His own triumph over the grave is the church’s hope for...

To judge from the ghastly details of “The Wichita Massacre” that I relayed in a recent article, it is difficult not to think that this abomination of a crime supplies us with as blatant an expression of unmitigated evil as any that we’re likely to encounter. Indeed, Reginald Carr and his brother Jonathan are in fact the “soulless monsters” that one of their two surviving victims described them as being, and if they were white and their victims were black—rather than the other way around—there isn’t a person in America who wouldn’t have long known this. Yet as a...

Kevin LoriaAugust. 4, 2014 Both of the Ebola-infected U.S. citizens in Liberia received a rare dose of what news reports called a "secret serum" to treat the virus before being transported to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, according to a CNN report. And while some people do fight off the disease on their own, in the case of the two Americans, that experimental serum may have saved their lives. As Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol waited in a Liberian hospital, someone from the National Institutes of Health reached out to Samaritan's Purse, one of the two North Carolina-based...

Tyler Durden 07/30/2014 As Ebola spreads mercilessly across the world, it appears Florida has a problem that sounds just as awful. As CBS reports, Florida health officials are warning beachgoers about a seawater bacterium that can invade cuts and scrapes to cause flesh-eating disease. At least 11 Floridians have contracted Vibrio vulnificus so far this year and two have died, according to the most recent state data. Not exactly great news for Florida beach season... Vibrio vulnificus –- a cousin of the bacterium that causes Cholera –- thrives in warm saltwater, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and...

Two women were caught in the middle of a railway bridge in Monroe County as a train was coming their way earlier this month on July 10. It was an 80-foot drop down into the water.

Today is my youngest brother's birthday. He died a week before his 51st birthday. In his honor, and to show what kind of person he was, I thought I'd share something he wrote for our Mother's Day in 2010 for her, while she was dying of esophageal cancer. "Promises (Between a Mother and a Son)" Dear Mother, When I was conceived, you promised to bring me into this world healthy. And you did. When I was young, you promised to love me and nurture me. And you did. When things got rough, and you were all alone, you promised to...

Wichita police say a 10-month-old baby was left alone in a hot car for two to two and a half hours Thursday afternoon. The girl was found dead at around 6:40 pm in the 1500 block of S. Topeka. Police say the girl's 29-year-old foster father picked her up from a babysitter at around 4:00 in the afternoon. They returned to the home along with a five-year-old child. Police say, somehow, the child was left behind in the car as the 29-year-old and the 5-year-old went inside. The foster father's partner, a 26-year-old man who is also a foster parent,...

Dan Borislow, the inventor of magicJack and a pioneer in developing phone calls over the Internet, died Monday, officials at the company he founded said. He was 52. A spokeswoman for MagicJack Vocaltec Ltd., said he died of a heart attack. In a statement, MagicJack CEO Gerald Vento praised Borislow as a visionary.

First, Howard Dean wanted to ship all Republicans to the Ukraine or Russia. Now, unions and at least one elected official are calling for the GOP’s death. As The Colorado Statesman reports, state Rep. Crisanta Duran marched with a Latino group and the Service Employees International Union as they chanted “Death to the Colorado GOP.” At a rally on Tuesday in downtown Denver led by the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, Latino leaders and community groups held a mock funeral procession in which they declared, “Death to the Colorado GOP for killing immigration reform.” Joining the demonstration was state...

The hunt for a perfect contraceptive has gone on for millennia. A new candidate is now on the horizon: a wireless implant that can be turned on and off with a remote control and that is designed to last up to 16 years. If it passes safety and efficacy tests, the device would be more convenient for many women because, unlike existing contraceptive implants, it can be deactivated without a trip to the clinic and an outpatient procedure, and it would last nearly half their reproductive life. Developed by MicroCHIPS of Lexington, Massachusetts, the device will begin pre-clinical testing next...