Free Republic

Al Gore and Joel Hyatt have filed a lawsuit against Al Jazeera claiming that the news channel is withholding money they were to receive from the sale of the network they co-founded, Current TV. Al Jazeera relaunched the network as Al Jazeera America last year. The lawsuit was filed under seal in the Delaware Court of Chancery, but Gore and Hyatt’s attorney David Boies said in a statement, “Al Jazeera America wants to give itself a discount on the purchase price that was agreed to nearly two years ago. We are asking the Court to order Al Jazeera America to...

Jerusalem (AFP) - First Israel's Iron Dome air defence system protected millions from rocket attacks. Now the state is assembling a "legal Iron Dome" to defend itself against potential allegations of war crimes in Gaza. For Israel, the threat of another fight -- not on the battlefield but in the courts -- materialised on Monday with the appointment of a UN committee to investigate "all violations of international human rights and humanitarian law" in the occupied Palestinian territories since mid-June. Israel has been engaged in a bloody conflict in Gaza which has its roots in the kidnapping and murder of...

A key official overseeing the ObamaCare launch last fall asked a subordinate to “delete” an email exchange on the matter, according to newly released records, fueling Republican concerns that the administration may be hiding internal discussions from Congress. “Time and again, the self-proclaimed 'most transparent administration' has been anything but,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said in a statement. “And now we know that when HealthCare.gov was crashing, those in charge were hitting the delete button behind the scenes.” Upton and other GOP committee leaders on Friday released an email exchange from Oct. 5, 2013, shortly...

For the pro-coal senator, the "war on coal" begins at home. ... while McConnell presents himself as a defender of Kentucky coal mining, a member of his own family who serves as a key campaign surrogate is taking a role in an organization that funds one of the most aggressive anti-coal campaigns in the country. McConnell’s wife, former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, sits on the board of directors of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has plunged $50 million into the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal initiative, an advocacy effort with the expressed goal of killing the coal industry. In 2011, Bloomberg Philanthropies...

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Egyptian Islam Yakin calls himself Abu Salma Bin Yakin and has tweeted photos of himself fighting in SyriaA gym freak, a fan of rap music and a philanderer, Islam Yakin, 22, has recently raised many eyebrows in his homeland Egypt after joining the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), an Al Qaida splinter group in control of vast swathes of Iraq and Syria. Yakin studied high school at the French Lycee la Liberte in the eastern Cairo quarter of Heliopolis and earned a law degree at Ain Shams University in the Egyptian capital. Months after his graduation in...

ISTANBUL — Yazidi leaders and emergency relief officials on Thursday strongly disputed American claims that the siege of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq had been broken and that the crisis was effectively over, saying that tens of thousands of Yazidis remained on the mountain in desperate conditions. On Wednesday, the United States military said that a small team of 18 Marines and Special Operations soldiers had completed an assessment of conditions on Mount Sinjar and found that most of the Yazidis, a small Iraqi religious minority, had succeeded in escaping, and the numbers remaining were in the low thousands. American...

The main way companies are seeking to curb health care costs is by moving workers into high-deductible health plans, according to the survey by the National Business Group on Health. Nearly a third are offering such plans as the only option to their workers in 2015, the survey found. Reuters: U.S. Benefits Enrollment Season To Bring More Cost Cutting When benefits enrollment season arrives this fall, employees around the country can expect to see the impact of corporate cost-cutting on their finances. Benefits costs will rise only 5 percent for employers that take certain cost-reduction measures, instead of 6.5 percent...

**SNIP** As early as November 2012, an FBI wiretap request noted that the investigation team’s leader had concerns about the agent. But according to the filing, an FBI “review has not resulted in any formal findings or determinations regarding the credibility of [the agent].” In early 2013, according to the filing, the agent was no longer involved in the case, but there is no clear explanation as to why. Still, the filing said there was a “series of outrageous behavior” on the part of the agent that might explain why he was removed. That behavior included arranging $20,000 or more...

Earlier this year, supporters of the federal healthcare law known as ObamaCare enthusiastically celebrated reaching its signup goal, with reported enrollment topping eight million Americans. In the months since, however, there has been a noticeable dearth of updates regarding the relative success of the law since its famously rocky implementation. If a recent Investor’s Business Daily report is any indication, there might be good reason for the Obama administration’s silence. **SNIP** Another barometer of public sentiment comes from enrollment numbers reported by individual states. Washington, for example, is the only state that waited until enrollees had paid their first month’s...

FR CANTEEN MISSION STATEMENT Showing support and boosting the morale of our military and our allied military and the family members of the above.Honoring those who have served before. FReeper Canteen Just Hangin' Cafe Come on in, we're open Need a place just to hang out? This is it. We serve coffee, tea, conversation and music. Our AWESOME military, our AWESOME allies, and their families are welcomed and honored here. No worries in the FReeper Canteen Just Hangin' Cafe. Grab a cup and start a conversation. You never know who you might meet in the Cafe. Glad you could...

The white trucks of humanitarian aid rumbled through Russia in a convoy stretching for miles,...But, while the trucks came to a halt well short of Ukraine's border, a different Russian convoy did make the crossing into Ukrainian territory late on Thursday evening. The Guardian saw a column of 23 armoured personnel carriers, supported by fuel trucks and other logistics vehicles with official Russian military plates, travelling towards the border near the Russian town of Donetsk – about 200km away from Donetsk, Ukraine.

the latest Fox News national poll finds voters oppose the law by a 52-41 percent margin. As in the past, the new poll shows that most Democrats favor Obamacare (74 percent), while most Republicans (84 percent) and independents (61 percent) are against it. Voters in every age group are more likely to oppose the law than favor it, with one exception: those ages 65 and over. And that group only favors it by two percentage points. President Obama receives higher job approval ratings on health care than on almost any other issue: 42 percent of voters approve, while 53 percent...

~~snip~~ I was curious to see how substantial a demonstration MoveOn could turn out against the hated (on the Left) John Boehner (“We need a big crowd downtown!”). I also wondered how the demonstrators would transport a recliner to the Minneapolis Club, and whether they would be able to get close enough to Boehner to “present” the recliner to him. So I showed up. The demonstration was even weaker than I expected. The local police precinct had told the club’s manager to expect around 200 protesters, based on “chatter.” I counted 16 quiet, dispirited liberals

Hacktivist collective Anonymous had a Twitter account suspended today after they named the wrong police officer in the Michael Brown cop shooting. Police told NBC that the person who Anonymous had named online is a dispatcher and was not involved in the Ferguson shooting on Saturday. In a comment today to MailOnline, a Twitter spokesperson said: 'We do not comment on individual accounts, for privacy an security reasons.' Twitter rules state: 'You may not publish or post other people's private and confidential information, such as credit card numbers, street address or Social Security/National Identity numbers, without their express authorization and...

Leftist Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua is saying that Israel should not refer to Hamas as a “terrorist organization” but as an “enemy”. In an opinion piece published in the New Republic magazine, Yehoshua wrote that Israel should give Hamas the status of a “legitimate enemy”. “What accounts for the fact that, after the retreat of Israel from the Gaza Strip, the departure from Israeli settlements and the transfer of authority to Hamas, we continue to characterize Gaza as a terrorist state rather than as an ‘enemy’?” he wrote. “Is it that the expression ‘a regime of terror’ is a stronger...

The outrage over the shooting death of Michael Brown escalated in part because of a sense that nothing had changed, that police officers were still operating in minority communities with a wantonness and brutality that belonged to another era. But over the past two days — as the police in Ferguson have responded to very angry protests with an alarmingly heavy hand, looking and reacting as if they were not the community's own peace officers but an invading army — something remarkable has happened. The longstanding liberal concerns about police racial hostility has seemed to merge with the longstanding libertarian...

IRS contractors without background checks had access to sensitive information, potentially putting confidential taxpayer data at risk, according to a federal audit. The Treasury inspector general for tax administration found more than a dozen cases in which the IRS awarded contracts that required access to taxpayer information without background investigations or before those checks were completed. Under IRS policy, background checks are mandatory for contractors who work with that kind of data. "Allowing contractor employees access to taxpayer data without appropriate background investigations exposes taxpayers to increased risk of fraud and identity theft,” said J. Russell George, the inspector general....

a debate is emerging between the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency over the potential disaster if the 89-year-old Mountain Tunnel, which supplies 2.6 million Bay Area homes and businesses with water, collapses. The PUC acknowledges that the tunnel does have a chance of "catastrophic collapse," which would require repairs costing $100 million or total replacement, costing up to $630 million. But the PUC’s 10-year-old 4.6 billion water system improvement program did not include the Mountain Tunnel in its plans. ... The risk right now is that the tunnel lining could...

Washington (AFP) - Israel secured supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon last month without the approval of the White House or the State Department, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Since officials there were caught off guard as they tried to restrain Israel's campaign in Gaza, the administration of President Barack Obama has tightened controls on arms shipments to Israel, the newspaper said, quoting US and Israeli officials. But the case illustrated that the White House and the State Department have little influence over the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the paper said, quoting officials from both countries. ......