Free Republic

Former President Jimmy Carter has scheduled a Thursday morning news conference to discuss his cancer diagnosis. The 90-year-old Democrat plans to discuss his health in detail at 10 a.m. ET at The Carter Center in Atlanta. Scheduled to last 45 minutes, it'll be Carter's first in-depth comments on his health since announcing last week that cancer is spreading through his body. Carter had a "small mass" removed from his liver in an early-August surgical procedure. Carter, elected in 1976 and ousted in the 1980 election by Ronald Reagan, has a family history of pancreatic cancer -- a disease that claimed...

Former Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican, has given the maximum amount of money allowed under federal campaign finance laws to a candidate who hopes to help Democrats retain the Senate in the 2014 election. Michelle Nunn used the $5,000 donation to appeal to conservative Georgia voters. "I am immensely honored and grateful for Senator Lugar's generous support in this race," she said. "Both in the Senate and in the international community, Senator Lugar's collaborative approach made us safer and moved our country forward. We need more leaders like Senator Lugar -- not less, and I will strive to follow this...

Islamic State fighters on the border between Syria and Iraq. The regime of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, is under mounting pressure on several fronts in the war, losing swaths of territory to opposition fighters as well as Islamic State, with strategic resources under its control coming under attack. Assad’s defeats in Idlib, eastern Homs and Deraa in the south, combined with renewed pressure in Aleppo and Deir el-Zour to the east and the possible loss of gas fields to Isis, have left the regime in a precarious position with little choice but to concentrate its forces in its...

David LettermanÂ’s departure isnÂ’t the end of an era. The era of late night talk shows ended a while back. In Johnny CarsonÂ’s final week in the nineties, he played to an audience of twenty million. Lately, Letterman has been lucky to get 2 million. His final shows have played to around 5 million viewers.Late night talk shows still exist, but their intended audience mainly watches viral clips from them the next day. The average age of LettermanÂ’s audience is 54. CBS hopes that the equally smarmy Stephen Colbert will be able to bring his younger audience demo with him,...

George Galloway, the socialist firebrand best known in America for his condemnations of Israel and the Iraq War, was soundly defeated for re-election to Parliament in Thursday's British general election. Galloway, a former Labour member who won the seat for Bradford West in the northwest of England in a 2012 special election, was beaten by Labour's Naz Shah, a political newcomer who overcome childhood poverty, a teenage forced marriage and the imprisonment of her mother for killing an abusive partner. Shah had urged voters to reject Galloway because "we do not need a one-man Messiah to tell us how to...

THE nauseating canonisation of executed convicted heroin smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran was well under way before their corpses had been returned to their families. At Castle Hill High, the words “merciless”, “barbaric”, “futile” and “weak” were plastered on the noticeboard on Wednesday by principal Vicki Brewer after students ­expressed horror at the executions of Chan and Sukumaran, and six others in Indonesia. “I think it’s affecting students and staff, they’ve been chilled by it, haunted by it and there’s been certainly a good deal of reflection and discussion about the ethical and moral dilemmas this has caused,” she...

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Federal authorities on Tuesday identified the driver killed while trying to ram a stolen SUV through a security checkpoint at the National Security Agency headquarters as a Baltimore resident with a criminal history for robbery and prostitution.. The FBI named Ricky Shawatza Hall, 27, as the driver who died. According to police, Hall and another person ended up at the gates of the huge spy agency Monday morning after stealing the vehicle from a 60-year-old man with whom they had traveled to a budget motel in nearby Elkridge.

A large crowd is expected today at the funeral in Wisconsin for Tony Robinson, the unarmed 19-year-old black man, who was killed March 6 by a police officer in Madison. Police say Robinson was shot after a confrontation in which he allegedly assaulted the officer. Robinson was shot in the head, torso and right arm, according to a preliminary autopsy. A visitation and funeral for Robinson, whose father is black and mother white, will be held today in a high school field house to accommodate the expected crowd. Protests against his death have been peaceful in line with a call...

(CNN)—An Iraqi man watching his first snowfall in his new American hometown was shot and killed by an unknown assailant, according to Dallas police. Authorities have stepped up patrols in the neighborhood where Ahmed Al-Jumaili lived -- and died -- in their effort to find whoever killed the 36-year-old early Thursday as he and his brother watched the snow while Al-Jumaili's wife took photos.

It’s 2018, and Barack Obama leans toward the computer in his Chicago townhouse and punches in the title of his memoir. He enjoys the silence and the solitude. It’s been over a decade since he had time to write. This is Obama’s third memoir and probably not the last. Aged only 57, his story is still in mid-stream. What next? Go back to teaching law? Charitable work? Whichever avenue he pursues, Obama can take encouragement from sky-high approval ratings. As soon as he departed the White House, Obama’s polling numbers started to pick up. Now, he’s one of the most...

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WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, announced Thursday she will not run for re-election in 2016.

Breaking: Mike Huckabee‘s final “Huckabee” will air tonight, TVNewser has learned. Huckabee will announce on his show that he is parting ways with Fox News as he explores the possibility of a presidential run. The show was taped at Fox News studios in Manhattan this evening and will air tonight at 8 pm ET. Huckabee began hosting his weekend show in Sept., 2008, months after he dropped out the race for the 2008 GOP nomination. In 2011, the former Arkansas governor teased on the May 14 episode of “Huckabee” that he would make a big announcement. At the time it...

A sniper killed an Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander who was training Iraqi troops and Shi'ite militia fighting Islamic State (ISIS, IS, or ISIL) militants in the Iraqi city of Samarra, official Iranian media reported Sunday. Brigadier General Hamid Taqavi, a veteran of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, was killed by snipers hiding behind a power transformer in Samarra, an embattled city north of Baghdad and home to holy Shi'ite shrines, they said, quoting a Revolutionary Guards statement. Several people with him were wounded in the rain of sniper fire, they said. "Taqavi became a martyr while fulfilling his duty as a...

The Middletown teen who was shot and killed at the Dayton Mall over the weekend was trying to steal shoes from a man with a concealed carry license, police say. Officials say the investigation shows that three male juveniles approached two men outside of the hhgregg store just after 10 a.m.. According to police, 16-year-old Jawaad Jabbar got out a gun and demanded merchandise from the men. One of the men, who police say had a valid concealed carry license, produced his gun and shot Jabbar. Jabbar died from injuries sustained from the gunshot. "This was a random act of,...

CINCINNATI — Police were studying mall surveillance video Tuesday in their investigation of the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old Ohio boy authorities say tried to rob a shopper in his quest to obtain popular, limited-edition athletic shoes. Miami Township police said a man with a concealed weapon permit fired his gun after he and another man were accosted Saturday morning by three teens on a sidewalk outside the Dayton Mall. Police said one teen had showed a gun. Jawaad Jabbar of Middletown died a short time later of a gunshot wound to his torso, authorities said.

The gunman who fatally ambushed two police officers in their squad car had a long criminal record, a hatred for police and the government and an apparent history of mental instability that included an attempt to hang himself a year ago, authorities said. Moments before opening fire, Ismaaiyl Brinsley approached people on the street and asked them to follow him on Instagram, then told them, “Watch what I’m going to do,” Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said. Brinsley, 28, had at least 19 arrests in Georgia and Ohio, spent two years in prison for gun possession and had a troubled...

David Ruenzel knew, better than most, about the white privilege that killed him. As a writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of this favorite topics was rooting out racism. And how white racism is permanent. White racism is everywhere. And white racism explains everything. This mantra of the Critical Race Theory and the Southern Poverty Law Center applied to all white people because, even if they were not personally cracking the whips, or breaking the skulls, white people benefitted from a racist system that did all that — and a lot more. Ruenzel was writing about white privilege...

Israel says it has killed a number of high-profile terrorists in its targeting of Gaza. Israel’s strongest blow to Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a guerrilla-like army that participated in the previous rounds of fighting against Israel in 2009 and 2012, was the assassination of Salah Abu Hassanein, commander of its Military Media Division.... The Israeli army also killed PIJ’s regional commanders who controlled the northern and central sectors of the Gaza Strip, as well as Shaaban Dakhdoukh, commander of the forces in Zeitoun, who worked on burying long-range rockets and helped to smuggle weapons for his forces, according to the...