Free Republic

A couple has been arrested in connection with the kidnapping of two Amish girls who went missing Wednesday night from their farm in Upstate New York. Fannie and Delila Miller, ages 12 and 6, reappeared after 24 hours missing when they knocked on a stranger's doorstep 36 miles from their home in Oswegatchie, New York. They have since been reunited with their family. On Friday, local authorities announced the arrests of Stephen Howells II, 39, and 25-year-old Nicole Vaisey. According to the suspects' Facebook accounts, they appear to be a couple.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan Thursday ordered the Internal Revenue Service to come up with new answers after IRS employees contradicted sworn testimony about damage to Lois Lerner’s hard drive. Sullivan ruled that “the IRS is hereby ORDERED to file a sworn Declaration, by an official with the authority to speak under oath for the Agency, by no later than August 22, 2014″ on four issues: the IRS’ attempted recovery of Lerner’s lost emails after her computer allegedly crashed, bar codes that could have been on the hard drive, IRS policies on hard drive destruction, and information about an...

If you’ve been watching cable news, reading Hollywood celebrities’ tweets, and listening to race-hustling opportunists, you might think that every police officer in America has a finger on the trigger, hunting for any excuse to gun down defenseless youths. This hysterical nonsense must be stopped. The Cirque du Cop-Bashing, with Al Sharpton as ringmaster, is working overtime to exploit the deadly incident in Ferguson, Mo. That means stoking anti–law enforcement fires at all costs. Are there bad cops? Yes. Does the police state go overboard sometimes? Yes. Do the demagogues decrying systemic racism and braying about “assassinations” know what happened...

The California Supreme Court has ruled that the silence of suspects can be used against them. Wading into a legally tangled vehicular manslaughter case, a sharply divided high court on Thursday effectively reinstated the felony conviction of a man accused in a 2007 San Francisco Bay Area crash that left an 8-year-old girl dead and her sister and mother injured. Richard Tom was sentenced to seven years in prison for manslaughter after authorities said he was speeding and slammed into another vehicle at a Redwood City intersection. Prosecutors repeatedly told jurors during the trial that Tom's failure to ask about...

Islamic militants killed 80 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority in a northern village, sources told Fox News on Friday. The latest killings came just a day after President Obama said U.S. air strikes and humanitarian aid drops on Sinjar mountain, where thousands of Yazidi have been stranded in an Islamic State siege had been ended.

The police officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown did not know that he was a suspect in a convenience store robbery, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson said Friday.Jackson said the officer, previously identified as 28-year-old Darren Wilson, initially stopped Brown and a friend ”because they were walking down the middle of the street blocking traffic.” Police earlier Friday released security footage they said showed Brown grabbing a box of cigars from a convenience store and then shoving the clerk away to leave.Daryl Parks, an attorney for the Brown family, confirmed that the security footage “appears to look like” the teenager,...

Palin backs Tea Party favorite Joe Miller for Alaska GOP Senate nod Published August 15, 2014 Sarah Palin is throwing her support behind Tea Party favorite Joe Miller in the looming Republican primary for the Alaska Senate race.  The former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential nominee announced her support Friday in a written statement, provided to Fox News.  The statement said:  "To restore liberty, to defend our Constitution, to build American exceptionalism, we must send fighters to the U.S. Senate who will stop Barack Obama's fundamental transformation of the nation we love. The status quo has got to go,...

A six-year police veteran named Darren Wilson was identified Friday as the officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager in a St. Louis suburb last weekend, touching off a week of sometimes violent protests and a military-style police response. A police report made public Friday also revealed that the teen, Michael Brown, was suspected of stealing a box of cigars from a convenience store and assaulting a clerk minutes before the officer shot him to death. Read the police report Thomas Jackson, the police chief of Ferguson, Missouri, said later that the officer did not know Brown was...

<p>FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — The friend who was with Michael Brown when he was shot and killed by a police officer near St. Louis over the weekend is reportedly confirming that he and Brown had taken part in the theft of cigars from a convenience store that day.</p>

After listening to excuses from IRS officials about why they cannot produce "lost" emails requested through a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered the IRS to come up with a better explanation as to why the agency cannot produce valid documentation. He's also asking for details about IRS hard drive destruction policy and wants verification from an outside source that IRS hard drives in question were in fact destroyed as officials have claimed. "In an extraordinary step, U. S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan has launched an independent inquiry into the...

The United Nations Security Council took aim at Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria on Friday, blacklisting six people including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) spokesman and threatening sanctions against those who finance, recruit or supply weapons to the insurgents. The 15-member council unanimously adopted a resolution that aims to weaken ISIS and al Qaeda's Syrian wing Nusra Front, Reuters reported. ISIS has long been blacklisted by the Security Council, while Nusra Front was added earlier this year. Both groups are designated under the U.N. al Qaeda sanctions regime. EU ministers agreed Friday to back the arming...

Los Angeles is considering turning voting ballots into lottery tickets. With fewer than a fourth of voters showing up for recent local elections, the city's Ethics Commission voted unanimously Thursday to recommend that the City Council consider a cash-prize drawing as an incentive to vote. Commission President Nathan Hochman suggests the prizes could be $25,000 or $50,000, saying a pilot program should be used first to find out the number and size of prizes that would bump up turnout. The Los Angeles Times reports (http://lat.ms/1uV1Ekw) that federal law prohibits payment for voting, but Ethics Commissioner Jessica Levinson says that statute...

Erbil, Asharq Al-Awsat—Leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and self-proclaimed caliph Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi fled the northern city of Mosul to return to Syrian territory after the US authorized airstrikes on ISIS positions in Iraq, a Kurdish official said. In comments to Asharq Al-Awsat, Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) spokesman Saeed Mamo Zinni said: “Caliph of the Islamic State Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi left Mosul for Syria a few days ago.” “According to our intelligence sources, Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi traveled to Syria as part of a convoy of 30 Hummer vehicles after fearing being targeted by US airstrikes,” Zinni said. He...

August 14, 2014 Since 2006, the Pentagon has distributed 432 mine-resistant armored vehicles to local police departments. It has also doled out more than 400 other armored vehicles, 500 aircraft, and 93,000 machine guns.

A tea party-backed candidate asked a Mississippi court on Thursday to declare him the winner of the June 24 Republican runoff against incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran or order a new election. Certified results of the June 24 runoff show Cochran defeated McDaniel by 7,667 votes. But McDaniel says his campaign found thousands of irregularities, including about 3,500 people who voted in the June 3 Democratic primary and June 24 runoff. Mississippi voters don't register by party, but such crossover voting is prohibited.

Retired Marine Cpl. Robert Richards, a combat veteran who was badly wounded in Afghanistan and later appeared in a controversial video urinating on dead Taliban insurgents, was found dead Wednesday night in his home in North Carolina. He was 28. The death was confirmed Thursday morning by Guy Womack, a lawyer who represented Richards in his long legal battle with the Marine Corps after the video was published anonymously on YouTube in January 2012 and erupted into an international scandal. Womack said the death does not appear to have been a suicide, and the cause will not be known until...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Islamic State militants are massing near the Iraqi town of Qara Tappa, 122 km (73 miles) north of Baghdad, security sources and a local official said, in an apparent bid to broaden their front with Kurdish peshmerga fighters. The Sunni militants have made a dramatic push through the north to a position near Arbil, capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region. The movement around Qara Tappa suggests they are getting more confident and seeking to grab more territory closer to the capital after stalling in that region. "The Islamic State is massing its militants near Qara Tappa," said...

JERUSALEM—White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval. Since then the Obama administration has tightened its control on arms transfers to Israel. But Israeli and U.S. officials say that the adroit bureaucratic maneuvering made it plain how little influence the White House and State Department have with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu —and that both sides know it.

The Obama administration has ruled out for now a risky US military mission to rescue thousands of Iraqis stranded on a northern Iraqi mountain, declaring a siege by Islamist extremists to be over. After a small complement of special forces and US aid workers landed on Mount Sinjar to assess the situation of the Iraqi Yazidis – who for days have received air drops of food, water and medicine – the Pentagon said things were not as bad as initially feared. “An evacuation mission is far less likely,” said Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, late on Wednesday....

The police department in a St. Louis suburb where a man was shot and killed by a police officer is asking protesters to gather only during daylight. Ferguson has been the site of nightly protests and unrest since 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed during a confrontation with an officer on Saturday. In a news release issued Wednesday, the department asked that all people who assemble to pray or protest do so in “an organized and respectful” manner and disperse well before evening to ensure the safety of participants and the community. “The City of Ferguson mourns the loss of...