Free Republic

Piers Morgan has sensationally quit Good Morning Britain hours after the launch of a social media campaign which saw more than 40,000 complaints made to Ofcom. The tough-talking morning show host, who has helped rocket the ITV show to its highest ever viewing figures, received a backlash on Twitter after saying he 'didn't believe a word' of Meghan Markle's bombshell Oprah interview - in which the Duchess said she felt like she 'didn't want to be alive anymore'. Today the UK's television regulator announced it would launch an investigation into the comments following a flurry of complaints - driven by...

One of the UK’s largest trade unions is to ban its members from visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories on delegations organized by the Trade Union Friends of Israel (TUFI), a London-based organization supporting cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian workers. The GMB, which has over 617,000 members from an array of sectors, voted on Thursday at its annual conference in Plymouth to uphold a 2011 decision to “take a lead in driving forward the boycott and divestment initiatives” of “companies who profit from illegal settlements, the occupation and the construction of the wall.” Last week, after the motion was moved...

The surrender is complete now. The Hindu reports that the Obama administration has turned to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading jurist, to mediate secret negotiations between the United States and the Taliban. I wrote about Qaradawi at length in The Grand Jihad and, here at NRO, have regularly catalogued his activities (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here; see also Andrew Bostom’s “Qaradawi’s Odious Vision”). For those who may be unfamiliar with him, he is the most influential Sunni Islamist in the world, thanks to such ventures as his al-Jazeera TV program (Sharia and Life) and website...

Gulf media is reporting on the “International Conference for the Defence of occupied Jerusalem” opening in Qatar today. According to a Gulf News report: February 22, 2012 Manama: Qatar’s Emir Shaikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani will open the International Conference for the Defence of occupied Jerusalem, to be held in Doha next week. The conference will include speeches by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the Arab League Secretary-General Nabeel Arabi, Secretary-General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Ekme Al Deen Ihsanoglu, and United Nations Coordinator for the peace process in the Middle East Robert Serry. Some 350 figures...

In an appearance on Fox News this morning, Newt Gingrich returned to his roots; he called out the double standard of the mainstream media --- and to good effect. The subject of his judgment this time? ABC's new TV show, "GCB" based on the novel "Good Christian Bitches" From Politico: “Here’s to show you the biases of the elite media, look at the new show that’s on that has the word ‘Christian’ in it and I want you to take the exact name, drop out Christian and put in Muslim,” Gingrich said. “And ask yourself, is there any network that...

A test of the U.S. territorial missile defense system ended in failure because the sea-based cuing radar for the interceptor did not perform as planned, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) announced Jan. 31. The Jan. 31 test was the first of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system in which the Sea-Based X-band radar was the primary source of tracking and targeting information, MDA spokesman Rick Lehner said Feb. 1. “It was the only radar used in the test,” he said. Previous tests of the GMD system have relied primarily on other radar tracking assets, such as the very high...