Free Republic

A Toronto television journalist is believed to be Canada’s first anchor to don a Muslim head scarf at one of the city’s major news broadcasters. Ginella Massa was asked to fill in on the anchor desk for CityNews’ 11 p.m. broadcast last week and created a buzz after the broadcast ended and she Tweeted, “That’s a wrap! Tonight wasn’t just important for me. I don’t think a woman in hijab has ever anchored a newscast in Canada.” Massa, 29, said Friday that she became Canada’s first hijab-wearing television news reporter in 2015 while reporting for CTV News in Kitchener, Ontario,...

A Somali-American woman will be the first to compete in the Miss Minnesota USA contest while wearing a hijab and other modest Muslim clothing that keeps her fully covered. Nineteen-year-old Halima Aden of St. Cloud will be part of the competition Saturday and Sunday in Burnsville. In addition to her hijab, she'll wear a full-body outfit called a burkini during the swimsuit competition, and she'll modify evening gowns to be more modest.

Louisville Police are investigating after multiple people were shot Thursday at Shawnee Park. Officials told WLKY that at least seven people were shot, two of whom are confirmed dead. Scene Images Officers responded to the park around 1:30 p.m. The shooting happened during the annual Juice Bowl Football Tournament, where several hundred people were in the attendance. In a Facebook video posted by one of the event-goers, at least 20 shots are heard ringing out. The video, which has over 1,000 views on Facebook, began with the man grilling with friends in the park. Shortly after the video began, gunshots...

FLINT (WJRT) - UPDATE: (11/23/16) - A woman is in custody in connection with an apartment fire that left 11 families homeless for the holidays. The investigation into how the fire started at Village Shores Apartments is just beginning. Police took a woman into custody Tuesday afternoon. She was actually evicted from her apartment a day earlier. She told police her 2-year-old daughter lit some clothes on fire with her cigarette lighter, which erupted into an out of control fire. Investigators are looking into possible neglect charges. Depending on what fire investigators find at the scene over the next couple...

JUNIATA (WTXF) - Police are investigating a triple shooting that took place in Juniata Wednesday night. According to police, officers responded to a report of a shooting on the 4000 block of Howland Street at 10:46 p.m

An Indiana mother has been arrested for allegedly injecting feces into her 15-year-old son's IV bag while he was undergoing cancer treatment. Tiffany Alberts, 41, of Wolcott has been charged with six counts of aggravated battery and one count of neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury. Alberts' son, who is not named, was being treated at Riley Hospital for Children for leukemia and officers were called to the facility for possible child abuse last Thursday, according to WXIN.

What’s Thanksgiving without some skinny dipping? A woman in South Florida kicked off the holiday just that way: with a naked swim to a fountain in a lake in Lauderhill. Lauderhill Fire Rescue found her Thursday morning in a crab walk position on top of the fountain, according to the department’s Twitter account. The woman was found in the lake inside the Waterford Park apartment complex at 7525 NW 44th Street. Divers assisted her in getting back to shore. Officials said the woman was not injured, but was potentially under the influence of drugs or alcohol, according to NBC 6...

Germany’s private schools are violating the constitution by picking students according to their parents’ wealth, a new study has found. The result is increasing social segregation and elitism, the authors say. German state governments are allowing schools to disregard an article of the country’s constitution designed to ensure that a mixture of social classes are able to attend private schools, according to a new study by the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). Article 7, Paragraph 4 of the “Basic Law” guarantees the right to establish private schools as an alternative to state schools — but only subject to their approval...

Stockholm’s recent cold snap was just a taste of what’s to come. American meteorologists predict that the Scandinavian winter is going to be even colder than previously thought. US-based weather agency The Weather Company has revised its forecast for the December-February period after an unusually chilly November which broke snow records in Stockholm. […] “It is clear that the polar vortex is weaker than we originally expected and that more blocking is likely going forward, especially in the Eurasian sector. Given this, along with the continued colder-looking model guidance for December, we have made significant colder changes to our forecast.”...

Anyone seeking to understand the psyche of Donald Trump might want to visit a nearly century-old packaging company just off Route 19 in Paterson. There sits Levine Industries, an operation owned by three generations of the same family — most recently by Ted Levine, a 68-year-old businessman who has a few similarities to the billionaire real estate mogul who is now the front runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He doesn't look like Trump. But his personality? "We are going to have the best product that ever existed," Levine exclaimed Friday while discussing an innovative alternative to the hazardous...

Chattanooga, Tennessee (CNN)No traces of alcohol or drugs were found in the blood of the school bus driver involved in a fatal accident that killed five children, Chattanooga, Tennessee, police Sgt. Austin Garrett said Wednesday. The accident in which the bus flipped on its side Monday was actually the second time in two months that driver Johnthony Walker crashed a school bus. Garrett said investigators had obtained warrants for all data devices on the bus and were reviewing video of front, back and side views of the vehicle.

Vegan wallets? I get a lot of e-mail at work — mostly requests for coverage of an event or someone wanting to be mentioned in my Standing O column, or spam (not the canned variety). The other day, I received one that touted quality vegan wallets — yes, quality vegan wallets. I queried this one too. What exactly does that mean? Is the wallet made out of plastic or a similar man-made material? Did the maker of the wallet not eat meat? Or was the material ethically taken from a free-range cow that wanted to give of itself for the...

World War II veteran Francis Robert "Frank" Royal made a fateful trip to the National Museum of World War II Aviation in Colorado Springs. "Having had a life long interest in flying, I had to come see what they had," he told Fox 31. Royal served as a squadron commander of the 39th Pursuit Squadron, 5th Army Air Corps in Papua New Guinea. He flew the P-38 Lockheed Lightning in combat. The Germans called it the fork-tailed devil, "It was a real godsend. From a pilot's standpoint it was great," Royal said. So there it was, in the museum. A...

FULL TITLE: Chattanooga school bus driver was involved in another collision just two months ago - and only got his license to drive the vehicle in April The school bus driver charged after a crash that killed five children was involved in another collision just two months ago – and only got his license to drive a school bus in April. Johnthony Walker, 24, was arrested and charged after with five counts of vehicular homicide after the collision in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Monday. Five Woodmore Elementary students - three fourth-graders, a first-grader and a boy in kindergarten – died in...

A Fort Worth man faces up to 21 years in prison after he admitted lying about his military service to get a mortgage-free house and monthly veterans' benefits. Brandon Blackstone claimed to have received a Purple Heart when his Humvee drove over a bomb in Iraq and it exploded. "I was blown up while I was there," he said in a 2012 interview with NBCDFW. "I had to be medevaced home." He offered more details about the explosion in a YouTube video. "The one (Humvee) behind me got totally destroyed," he said. "I suffered a head injury and a head...

A Muslim Indian man who was hacked to death a day before his flight back to Saudi Arabia, reportedly saw his death coming, local daily Indian Express reported. After converting to Islam in Riyadh, Anil Kumar - who then took on the name Faisal – saw a Muslim cleric at Kodinji in Kerala’s Malappuram district that suggested to Faisal to seek protection from the community. Faisal, 30, turned down the suggestion, saying, “After embracing Islam, I have entrusted everything to Allah (God). If they want to kill me, let them’’. Faisal, who belonged to an upper-caste Hindu Nair family, was...

The heir to a property in Normandy moved in only to find his forebear had hidden 100kg of gold coins, bars and ingots around the house, which he has just sold for €3.5m. The unnamed individual made the incredible discovery after inheriting the plush home in Evreux, a town south of Rouen. He started looking around the house to work out what his relation had left behind, and was stunned at what he found, according to the auction house of Evreux, which sold the entire collection. “There were 5,000 gold pieces, two 12-kilo gold bars and 37 ingots each weighing...

CNN and others, QUIT telling our leaders who to denounce or silence, etc. because we didn't vote for these people so YOU could tell them what to do and negate the results of the election. We voted to get something done about illegal immigration and their involvement and voting in our elections, which is something no other country would tolerate, not soft pedal it. We voted for a ban on muslim immigration and severe restrictions on what they can do while living here and the influence they can have (they hate us). We voted for fiscal responsibility. We voted for...

AKRON, OH (WOIO) - The Akron Fire Department says that a 69-year-old man set himself on fire Saturday after yelling about the election results in a local coffee shop. The department says the man, who was dressed in a U.S. Marine Corps uniform, walked into Angel Falls Coffee on South Highland Ave. yelling about the recent protests over the election results. He then left the coffee shop and approached a passerby and handed the passerby his cellphone and asked him to video record him, according to the police report. Police said the man grabbed a can of gasoline from his...

An 18-year-old man was rushed into surgery Sunday afternoon after police say his father shot him with a shotgun when an argument over going to the store for a can of tobacco turned heated at their home on Quiet Avenue. Horry County police were called to a Conway Medical Center emergency room at 12:30 p.m. for a victim who arrived there with a gunshot wound, according to Lt. Raul Denis of the Horry County Police Department. The young man told police he was shot with a 12-gauge shotgun. “At first the victim stated that it was accidental, but after further...