Free Republic

Colin Cowherd had been a lame duck at ESPN anyway, but today the sports giant said he’s done there for good. Eight days after the company said its popular radio host and sometimes TV guy was leaving its ranks, ESPN has yanked him off its airwaves over remarks he made questioning the intellect of Dominicans. On his radio show The Herd on Thursday, Cowherd was talking about how baseball is no more of a “thinking-man’s game” than other sports. “I’ve never bought into that whole ‘baseball is too complex,'” he said. “Really? A third of the sport is from the...

Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is taking rhetorical sniper fire for large contributions to The Clinton Foundation taken from dirt-poor foreign nations while she was Secy of State. The Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and others have hinted at impropriety on two levels… 1) A potential presidential candidate becomes beholden to certain foreign nations. 2) A Secretary of State whose private foundation grows in prestige from foreign donations, while those same nations lobby the State Department for special treatment (b/c of abysmal human rights violations). Both questions merit vigorous exploration, but for two of the Clinton Foundation’s...

Tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants in the Dominican Republic -- the vast majority Haitians -- face deportation as a deadline to apply for legal status looms. The problem of what to do with thousands of workers who entered illegally from a neighboring country is not an unfamiliar one in the hemisphere. The plight of undocumented immigrants in the United States and lawmakers' failed attempts at reform come to mind. The Dominican government tackled the issue with a "regularization plan" that offered a path to legal status for the undocumented. But critics say it was designed to fail the migrant...

Columbus mystery nearly solved 500 years after death By Phil Stewart Fri Mar 10, 11:30 AM ET ROME (Reuters) - Nearly 500 years after the death of Christopher Columbus, a team of genetic researchers are using DNA to solve two nagging mysteries: Where was the explorer really born? And where the devil are his bones? Debate about origins and final resting place of Columbus has raged for over a century, with historians questioning the traditional theory that he hails from Genoa, Italy. Some say he was a Spanish Jew, a Greek, a Basque or Portuguese. Even the location of his...

It's been nearly two years since Spanish scientists asked to examine the contents of this Caribbean nation's most celebrated tomb to determine whether the centuries-old bones are actually those of Christopher Columbus. They've been told yes, no and maybe. The protracted deliberation through two Dominican administrations has deepened suspicions that authorities here don't really want a definitive answer for fear that the mammoth lighthouse mausoleum they've built into a tourist draw isn't the bona fide resting place of the explorer. Even those who favor letting modern science settle the matter are loath to concede that they might have invested millions...

Young bones lay Columbus myth to rest Giles Tremlett in Madrid Wednesday August 11, 2004 The Guardian (UK) A centuries-old historical row over the whereabouts of the body of Christopher Columbus appeared to have been solved yesterday when scientists in Spain conceded that the corpse buried at Seville's gothic Santa Maria cathedral was not that of the famous explorer. Instead, the bones they studied were probably those of his lesser known son, Diego, who was a small and weedy man, unlike his father. Christopher Columbus's body, the experts say, almost certainly lies back in the "new world" he sailed to...

Even while the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba could be heard singing, “Avanza, Lincoln, avanza! Tu eres nuestra esperanza!” (Onward, Lincoln, Onward! You are our hope!) – as if they knew, even before the soldiers fighting the war far to the North and long before most politicians understood, that the war in America would change their lives, and the world. The secession crisis of 1860-1861 threatened to be a major setback to the world antislavery movement, and it imperiled the whole experiment in democracy. If slavery was allowed to exist, and if the world’s leading democracy could fall apart...

Alternate headline via Dave Weigel: “DOJ confirms that Bob Menendez is a New Jersey politician.”There’s no louder Democratic critic of Obama’s Iran deal than Menendez and now here he is, about to be indicted. Hmmm. Maybe I spoke too soon in questioning Lee Smith’s theory that the White House has decided to start destroying the Iran-deal skeptics on its own side. People briefed on the case say Attorney General Eric Holder has signed off on prosecutors’ request to proceed with charges, CNN has learned exclusively. An announcement could come within weeks. Prosecutors are under pressure in part because of...

A team of former Navy Seals and CIA operatives splash beer on their faces as they prepare to play the part of American sex tourists. They’ll have to maintain laser-sharp focus as they engage in negotiations with some of the world’s dirtiest criminals. One suspicious move or remark could put their whole team at risk and prevent the rescue of dozens of innocent children. This team, known as Operation Underground Railroad, works to prosecute child sex traffickers and to rescue the victims. Heading the team is Tim Ballard — a husband, a father of six children and a BYU alumnus....

Rising Turkish Menace: U.S. and NATO Ally Wants Islamic Advance in Latin America By Julio Severo The president of Turkey has re-written history by claiming Muslim explorers, not Christopher Columbus, discovered America. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Recep Tayyip Erdogan, chief of America’s NATO ally, said November 15 that Islamic sailors found the New World in 1178. He said, “Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus.” Turkey is the only Islamic nation in the NATO. His theory — which is supported only by Islamic historians — came to light in a televised speech during an Istanbul summit of...

Scandal has rocked the Vatican for the second time in a week. On Thursday (September 25), officials confirmed Pope Francis had sacked Bishop Livieres, head of the Paraguayan diocese of Ciudad del Este. Livieres is suspected of protecting a priest believed to have sexually abused young people. His dismissal followed the arrest two days earlier of former archbishop Josef Wesolowski, who is accused of paying for sex with children during his time as papal ambassador in the Dominican Republic. Pope Francis, has vowed to take a zero-tolerance policy on clerics who abuse minors. The pontiff approved Wesolowski’s arrest and earlier...

This year, many of the speakers were lesser-known Dominican activists and political strategists. The headliner was Dominican entertainer Frederick Martinez, also known as “El Pacha,” a popular Spanish-language radio and television host. Those changes to the guest list tell almost the entire story of the political peril that threatens to end one of the iconic careers in American politics

Many believe the world is run by a secret organization like the Illuminati, and the people we think are in power are nothing but stooges. It sounds implausible, but is it really a crazy idea? Yes. Yes, it is. And yet there have been secret organizations that created the world as we know it. 10The Carbonari After Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the European powers had to decide what to do with the territory that he’d ruled as part of the First French Empire. The borders of Europe were redrawn at the Congress of Vienna, mainly decided by Great Britain, Russia,...

* Divers spent two years recovering the haul from the bed of the Caribbean * The unnamed galleon is thought to have sunk around 1540 * It held 1,200 top quality items, bound for Spanish ambassador's mansion Specialist divers spent two years extracting the pewter plates and bowls from beneath the waves off the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. More than 1,200 items of the finest quality English pewter were recovered from the wreck of the unnamed galleon which is thought to have sunk around 1540... It is believed the ship was transporting the incoming Spanish ambassador from Seville to...

Holy smoke! Police set light to $250 million of cocaine seized from an international organized crime ring. Armed officers stood by as others burned 2,551 lbs of the Class A drug inside a military base in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. According to the attorney general, the 1.2-ton haul was confiscated from a drug smuggling gang in a recent police operation in Peravia Province. …

President Obama's on-and-off-again planned American attack on Syria is nothing new. Besides its five declared wars, America has a habit of intervening all over the world. Even apart from clandestine CIA operations, and even after the unhappy end of the Vietnam War, we have attacked lots of countries and non-state militias. The roll call of recent American military interventions is quite astounding: Cambodia, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Liberia, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Zaire and Afghanistan. Even the notion of Past American isolationism is a myth. In the four years between 1912 and 1916 alone, the U.S. sent...

To save his skin, Nelson Castro, a native of the Dominican Republic, and corrupt NY state assemblyman, made a deal to get wired to root out govt corruption. Now Castro's beached the deal to save himself---recently pleading guilty in federal court to lying...prosecutors caught Castro stupidly lying on YouTube. No one's opposed to ferreting out corruption in Albany....which some consider to be organized crime. But the indicted, wired Castro was allowed to run for re-election......the corrupt Castro presented himself to voters under false pretenses....a curious way to clean up corruption. Former Assemblyman Nelson Castro

There was nothing to set off alarm bells about a traffic stop in Ottawa on Aug. 16. But what began as routine turned into the arrest of American gangster Manuel Falcon-Lopez, who was on the lam from attempted murder and other charges. He was a passenger in the backseat of a run-down car, with Ont. plates, that didn't have all of its lights working properly. Yet as red flags began piling up for police, Falcon-Lopez was calm and collected. "He was so relaxed, he was so cool," recalled Ottawa police Const. Nermin Mesic, who told the fugitive he was under...

<p>EXCLUSIVE Food-stamp fraud has turned into foreign aid — to black-market profiteers in the Dominican Republic.... welfare recipients buy food with EBT cards and ship it to relatives. But not to starving children. The NY Post found people hawking barrels of American products on Dominican streets. “It’s a really easy way to make money, and it doesn’t cost me anything,” a seller said. She also vends EBT goods out of her Dominican home “I know a lot of people are doing it,” she said.</p>

Food stamps are paying for trans-Atlantic takeout — with New Yorkers using taxpayer-funded benefits to ship food to relatives in Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Welfare recipients are buying groceries with their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and packing them in giant barrels for the trip overseas, The Post found.