Free Republic

BRUSSELS — Eight weeks after a Malaysia Airlines plane disintegrated over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard and triggering a frenzy of East-West finger-pointing, investigators, in their first account of the calamity on Tuesday, released evidence consistent with an attack by a surface-to-air missile but shed no clear light on who was responsible. A preliminary report issued in The Hague by the Dutch Safety Board, which is leading an international effort to get to the bottom of the tragedy, gave some indirect support to assertions by the United States and Ukraine that pro-Russian rebels shot down the aircraft with...

a longtime Chisholm subordinate reveals for the first time in this article that the district attorney may have had personal motivations for his investigation. Chisholm told him and others that Chisholm’s wife, Colleen, a teacher’s union shop steward at St. Francis high school, a public school near Milwaukee, had been repeatedly moved to tears by Walker’s anti-union policies in 2011, according to the former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office. Chisholm said in the presence of the former prosecutor that his wife “frequently cried when discussing the topic of the union disbanding and the effect it would have on the people...

In parts of Helmand province, the UK and the US lost more soldiers in the long Afghan war than any other Afghan area. Helmand – where the fighting was long and hard. Helmand – where so many lost limbs or were otherwise terribly mutilated in a long and now lost war by a Nato now thoroughly preoccupied with matters elsewhere. But 6 September the New York Times published an important report with the story Kabuli officials want to cover up and nobody anywhere near Nato would want to tell. They are saying more than 200 police officers and Afghan soldiers...

A new policy put in place by Cal State University could cost InterVarsity and other Christian groups up to $460,000 to meet on campus because they cannot change their leadership requirements to include any student. "No campus shall recognize any fraternity, sorority, living group, honor society, or other student organization unless its membership and leadership are open to all currently enrolled students at that campus," the policy states. The rule requires leadership positions to be open to any student, regardless of whether they hold the same beliefs as the Club. The policy went into effect in 2012 but up until...

Europe Published September 09, 2014 FoxNews.com 127 Never autoplay videos Efforts by U.S. intelligence officials to track American and European-born fighters who travel to the Middle East to join Islamic extremist groups like ISIS have been complicated by different approaches to sharing information and homeland security from their European counterparts, according to a published report. The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. officials are struggling to ascertain the movements of suspected extremists once they enter certain European countries. The gaps are occurring despite the fact that the U.S. and several European security services have developed close intelligence links, with intelligence...

A Minnesota youth center is at the heart of a federal grand jury investigation into a suspected ISIS terrorist pipeline. The FBI says that someone on the ground in Minnesota is convincing young people to join the terror fight in Syria, then giving them money to get there. Up to 30 Somali-Americans who have reportedly joined or tried to join terrorist groups overseas had attended Al Farooq Youth and Family Center in Minnesota. That’s the same mosque that kicked out 31-year-old Amir Meshal this summer for allegedly proselytizing radical Islam ideologies

Jim Geragthy, acclaimed author and National Review’s chief campaign analyst, has been grousing about the lack of quality polling in key Senate races this year. His frustration is well-founded. So yesterday must have felt like Christmas in September for Jim and political junkies everywhere, as two pollsters released a deluge of surveys covering the most contested races in the country. In light of the results, I’d expect that national Republicans are kicking off the week with an extra spring in their step, as well. We were leaked an advance copy of last week’s much-anticipated Politico/GWU Battleground poll, which was packed...

A Meteorite crashed to Earth Sunday afternoon, in Central America. The crater, located in the capital city of Nicaragua, is about 60 feet / 20 meters across, located near the international airport.

S. Truett Cathy, the billionaire founder of the privately held Chick-fil-A restaurant chain that famously closes on Sundays but also drew unwanted attention on gay marriage in recent years because of his family’s conservative views, died early Monday, a company spokesman said. He was 93. Chick-fil-A spokesman Mark Baldwin told The Associated Press that Cathy died at home surrounded by members of his family. Funeral plans had not yet been finalized, he said. …

Amir Meshal has a fascinating history. He's originally from New Jersey, but back in 2007 he was detained and interrogated by the FBI in Kenya after escaping from Somalia. Somehow, his travels brought him to Minnesota, and to a mosque in Bloomington, which kicked him out this summer. Friday prayers bring hundreds to the Al-Farooq Youth and Family Center, which is perhaps the largest mosque in the Twin Cities. But not everyone is welcome -- not after Meshal began attending prayer and hanging out earlier this year. In June, the center called police and had Meshal, 31, removed and ticketed...

The campaign to separate Scotland from the rest of the UK is in the lead for the first time ahead of the independence referendum later this month, according to a new poll. A YouGov survey found that the pro-independence campaign, led by the Scottish first minister Alex Salmond, had a two point lead of 51 per cent over the unionists’ 49 per cent. The poll for the Sunday Times is the latest evidence of a dramatic surge for the Yes campaign, which has seen the campaign recover from a 22 point deficit in just one month.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status.

Gazprombank GPB (OJSC), a Russian bank targeted with sanctions by President Obama over the Ukraine crisis, has hired two former U.S. senators to lobby against those sanctions, according to a new disclosure filed with the Senate. Gazprombank is controlled by Russia’s state-owned energy company Gazprom, the country’s largest gas producer; it supplies about a third of Europe’s natural gas. In a filing submitted Friday and effective that day, former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and former Senator John Breaux, D-La., are listed as the main lobbyists under the Gazprombank account for the firm Squire Patton Boggs, lobbying on “banking...

Mike Brown.’s Instagram account was located. Brown describes himself: “My Hands My Ammunition” “I’m out here to claim what’s mines” And he did. Brown was caught on camera robbing a local convenience store before his death.

A U.S. security team in Benghazi was held back from immediately responding to the attack on the American diplomatic mission on orders of the top CIA officer there, three of those involved told Fox News’ Bret Baier. Their account gives a dramatic new turn to what the Obama administration and its allies would like to dismiss as an “old story” – the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Speaking out publicly for the first time, the three were security operators at the secret CIA annex in Benghazi – in effect, the...

Job growth cooled in August, with nonfarm payrolls adding just 142,000 even as the unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent, according to the Labor Department. The fall in the headline rate came as labor-force participation fell, declining to 62.8 percent, or 64,000 workers, tying the 2014 bottom and remaining at the lowest level since 1978. Economists expected payroll growth of 225,000 in August following July's upwardly revised 212,000. The unemployment rate was forecast to drop to 6.1 percent from 6.2 percent. August's number are a notoriously volatile set, with 2013's initially reported 169,000 ultimately revised up to 238,000. In 2011,...

Cuba’s communist-led intelligence services are aggressively recruiting leftist American academics and university professors as spies and influence agents, according to an internal FBI report published this week.Cuban intelligence services “have perfected the work of placing agents, that includes aggressively targeting U.S. universities under the assumption that a percentage of students will eventually move on to positions within the U.S. government that can provide access to information of use to the [Cuban intelligence service],” the five-page unclassified FBI report says. It notes that the Cubans “devote a significant amount of resources to targeting and exploiting U.S. academia.”“Academia has been and remains...

MINNEAPOLIS — Two former employees of the Minneapolis VA Medical Center allege they were pressured to falsify patient appointment dates and medical records to hide delays, a television station reported. In a report that aired Wednesday night, the ex-employees told KARE-TV that in some cases, they were told to falsify medical records by writing that patients had declined follow-up treatments when, in reality, they say the veterans had never been contacted. The former VA workers fear that patients' lives may be at risk because they say some cases involved suspected colon cancer. "Some of them were getting missed altogether," said...

James Vanderbilt's Truth, the high-profile movie chronicling the scandal that derailed Dan Rather's career, has gotten the greenlight to begin shooting this fall. Brett Ratner's RatPac Entertainment and Echo Lake Entertainment will finance the movie, starring Robert Redford as the iconic news anchor and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, Rather's producer. At the same time, FilmNation has come aboard to represent international rights and will pre-sell the project to foreign buyers at the Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night (based on the cast, it's sure to whet appetites). Mythology Entertainment is the driving force behind Truth, which was...

Democrat Chad Taylor must stay on the ballot for U.S. Senate in Kansas, Secretary of State Kris Kobach said Thursday afternoon. Kobach said Taylor submitted a letter Wednesday to withdraw from the race but did not declare he was incapable of serving, which is also required. The Kansas Republican Party had questioned whether Taylor, the Shawnee County district attorney, could withdraw. Kansas law means “we now have no choice” but to put Taylor’s name on the ballot, Kobach told reporters at an afternoon news conference. “The law is the law.” Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/election/article1504835.html#storylink=cpy