Free Republic

Nurses treating Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev say their natural inclination toward compassion makes it difficult to see the 19-year-old as a possible terrorist. And they have to make concerted effort — and buddy-system pacts — to keep from referring to him with terms of endearment such as “hon.” One 29-year-old nurse said on Gawker: “When you’re in the room, it’s just a patient. You’re here to … make sure they’re feeling better. When you step away, you take it in. I am compassionate, that’s what we do. But should I be? The rest of the world hates him right...

Harvard students, outraged over a doctoral dissertation arguing that Hispanic immigrants lack “raw cognitive ability or intelligence,” this week urged the university to investigate how the thesis came to be approved and to ban future research on racial superiority. The students presented 1,200 signatures to president Drew Faust and the dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, David Ellwood. “Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community,” the petition said. “However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination.” …

A former Arlington Boys & Girls Club program director, arrested Friday at his New York home, returned in shackles to Massachusetts last night to face charges he sexually assaulted five young children while working at the youth organization in the late 1970s and until mid-1980, when he left the Bay State, according to authorities. Paul A. Collins, 62, is expected to be arraigned tomorrow in Cambridge District Court on charges of rape of a child with force, open and gross lewdness and three counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14. Prosecutors said the five known victims,...

Massachusetts universities and colleges that say they’re trying to hold down costs have increased their number of administrators three times faster than their number of students, according to federal data analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. The pace with which administrators have been added at Massachusetts higher-education institutions has also outstripped the increase in the number of research and teaching faculty and other instructional employees, by a margin of two-to-one. Over the last 25 years, the universities’ enrollments have collectively grown by 26 percent, while their ranks of full-time administrators have risen 75 percent. This has happened...

<p>MyFoxBoston.com) – The Boston Business Journal and The Boston Globe are both reporting that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft wants to buy The Boston Globe.</p> <p>The reports say members of the Kraft Group have received a presentation from the company hired by the New York Times to sell the Globe. The sale also includes Boston.com and the Worcester Telegram.</p>

BOSTON, May 16, 2013 /Christian Newswire/ -- On Monday, May 20th, Students for Life of America (SFLA) and other local and national pro-life organizations will host a prayer vigil and public witness (notatbc.com/?page_id=172) outside the Boston College graduation ceremony to protest Ireland's 1st pro-abortion Prime Minister giving the commencement address and receiving an honorary degree at the Catholic institution. SFLA will gather together to stand up for women, show the value and worth of children in the womb, and voice support for keeping Ireland abortion-free. Event Details: When: Monday, May 20th
 8am - Prayer Vigil and Public Witness
 9am -...

Finally, we get the note in the boat — a month late. Do you how much media effort has been devoted to unearthing what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev apparently thought was his last will and testament? But somehow, the cops held it tight until yesterday. Unconfirmed stories have circulated that in Dave Henneberry’s backyard in Watertown that Friday evening, the feds went so far as to check out the cellphones of the local cops, to make sure no one had snapped a photo of the note in the boat. No big surprises in the note. The Joker said his brother Speedbump was...

(CBS News) Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left a note claiming responsibility for the April 13 attack on the Boston Marathon, reports CBS News senior correspondent John Miller.

Tipsville . . . Sneed is told that Attorney General Eric “Fast and Furious” Holder’s days are numbered. Sneed hears President Barack Obama, who is this/close to Holder, has set his sights on Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick as a possible replacement “when the heat dies down on the latest hot-button scandals to hit the U.S. Justice Department,” said a top White House source. Last year, Holder became a hot button over a congressional probe of the sale of government guns to drug cartels. This time it’s the double whammy of an IRS scandal and the U.S. Justice Department’s seizure of...

Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left claiming responsibility for the April 13 attack on the Boston Marathon, reports CBS News senior correspondent John Miller. Sources tell Miller that Tsarnaev wrote the note in the boat he was hiding in as police pursued him, and as he bled from gunshot wounds sustained in an earlier shootout between police and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The note, scrawled with a pen on the interior wall of the cabin, said the bombings were retribution for U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the Boston victims collateral damage in the same way...

BELCHERTOWN (CBS) – Shortly after midnight Tuesday, seven people were caught trespassing at the Quabbin Reservoir. State Police say the five men and two women are from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, and “cited their education and career interests” for being in the area. The men told police they were chemical engineers and recent college graduates. Update: MWRA: Quabbin Reservoir Water Safe The Quabbin, in Belchertown, is one of the country’s largest man-made public water supplies. Boston’s drinking water comes from the Quabbin and the Wachusett Reservoirs. State Police say there were no warrants or advisories on any of the...

Seven foreigners from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Singapore were arrested for trespassing at the Quabbin Reservoir on Tuesday. The Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts is one of the country’s largest man-made water supplies. (VIDEO-AT-LINK) CBS Local reported, via Free Republic: Shortly after midnight Tuesday, seven people were caught trespassing at the Quabbin Reservoir. State Police say the five men and two women are from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, and “cited their education and career interests” for being in the area. The men told police they were chemical engineers and recent college graduates....

BELCHERTOWN (CBS) – Shortly after midnight Tuesday, seven people were caught trespassing at the Quabbin Reservoir. State Police say the five men and two women are from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, and “cited their education and career interests” for being in the area. The men told police they were chemical engineers and recent college graduates.

President Barack Obama says he wants to “see if we can institutionalize” in Washington the community spirit that sometimes emerges after a terror attack or an industrial explosion. The president made the comments during a fund-raising trip to New York, shortly after leaving Washington, D.C. in an uproar over an explosion of scandals, including last week’s revelations of politically motivated IRS investigations and the White House’s editing of reports on the lethal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. Shortly after Obama flew north, D.C. was rocked by another political explosion when the Associated Press said the Justice Department obtained two months...

US Representative Michael E. Capuano on Monday said he was troubled by reports that the Internal Revenue Service had aggressively pursued conservative organizations, and called them reminiscient of the Nixon administration. On the growing focus in Congress on the attacks on the US diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya last year, Capuano said the death of four Americans there raised “legitimate questions.” But he said, based on the information available, he expected the issue to end up becoming “the typical right-left type of nonsense you see on one station, but eventually falls off the others.” He said the recent reports that...

WATERTOWN — When Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed after a fiery­ shoot-out with police, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect and his younger brother were making their last stand in a neighborhood Tamerlan knew well. On at least a dozen occasions, Tamerlan had visited a two-family home on Boylston Street, just a few short blocks from the scene of his violent death, to meet with friends who knew him as a freewheeling Muslim who danced to hip-hop music, smoked marijuana, and always kept a prayer rug in the trunk of his car. “He’d wash his hands and lay it out in the...

In February radical Islamist cleric Anjem Choundary urged his followers to use their welfare checks to fund the jihad. Now this… Records show the Boston Marathon bombers may have used their EBT cards to fund their terror spree that left 4 dead and 260 injured. The Boston Herald reported, via FrontPage Magazine: A mountain of new welfare records shows numerous EBT card cash withdrawals made by the Tsarnaev family, but so far there is no information about how terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev and others may have spent the money. The EBT receipts were handed over by the state to the House...

Shortly after Barack Obama won reelection in November, New Jersey governor Chris Christie pointed out that Republicans’ cloudy political prospects had a bright silver lining. “One of the reasons you have 30 Republican governors in America, and why we’re the only organization to add Republican strength,” Christie said, “is because people see us getting things done.” Christie’s stance countered most of the elite postelection commentary, which gleefully pronounced the Republican Party’s political irrelevance. But the governor was right. Since Obama first took office in 2008, Republicans have picked up a net nine governorships, bringing their total to 30 states,...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Flabbergasted Virginia officials have asked authorities there to look into whether the secret burial of accused marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a rural Muslim cemetery broke any laws — but one expert says they likely have no ground to stand on. Tsarnaev’s burial at the Al-Barzakh Cemetery in Doswell, Va., sent shock waves yesterday through Caroline County, where local officials — unaware of the hush-hush funeral until reporters started flooding their voicemails — say they don’t want the stain of his remains on their quiet community. The brouhaha prompted the state attorney general’s office to step in and review...

<p>Forensic evidence appears to link Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to an unsolved triple murder committed in suburban Boston in 2011, according to a source.</p> <p>Initial testing of evidence found at the scene may also link his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to the murders, the source said. Additional testing is under way, according to the source, who said the brothers made cellphone calls from an area near the crime scene around the time of the murders.</p>

Famed Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz ranks Sen. Ted Cruz among the school’s smartest students, adding that the Canada-born Texan can run for president in 2016. Cruz was a “terrific student,” Dershowitz told The Daily Caller. “He was always very active in class, presenting a libertarian point of view. He didn’t strike me as a social conservative, more of a libertarian.” “He had brilliant insights and he was clearly among the top students, as revealed by his class responses,” Dershowitz added. Dershowitz also gave a high estimate of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who has decidedly different political...

Boston Public Schools officials have no idea how many of their 9,000-plus employees may have criminal records — a shocking revelation that has triggered a sweeping round of background checks that already has found nearly a dozen workers with rap sheets. The school department has fired or placed on paid administrative leave 11 “support staff” employees, but officials refused to release their names, their positions, the schools where they worked and why they were flagged, citing their privacy rights. None was a full-time teacher, but the troubled staffers may include coaches, custodians, lunch monitors and paraprofessionals, officials said. The 11...

WASHINGTON — Five days before two bombs tore through crowds at the Boston Marathon, an intelligence report identified the finish line as an "area of increased vulnerability" and warned Boston police that homegrown extremists could use "small-scale bombings" to attack spectators and runners at the event. The 18-page report, similar to others sent to police and first responders before major events in the Boston area, was written by the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, which is funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security and helps disseminate intelligence information to local police and first responders. The assessment noted that there...

Six months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, just 25 percent of Americans said Islam is more likely to encourage violence than other religions. That number has climbed to 42 percent, according to a new poll released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The survey, conducted after the Boston bombings, found that opinions have not changed much as a result of those attacks. In March, 40 percent of Americans said Islam is more violent, 42 percent disagreed.

(CNN) -- The difficult question of where Tamerlan Tsarnaev's body would be laid to rest appears to have been settled. The remains of the slain Boston Marathon bombings suspect have been entombed thanks to a "courageous and compassionate individual (who) came forward," police in Worcester, Massachusetts, said Thursday. Police did not say where the remains were entombed but did say that they are "no longer in the city of Worcester," where the body had been at a funeral home while a relative and officials tried to determine what to do. The city's police chief "thanks the community that provided the...

Boston and Massachusetts law enforcement officials confirmed Thursday that federal agents left them in the dark on the growing warning signs about Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the run-up to the Boston Marathon bombing. Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis, in testimony on Capitol Hill, said his officers on a joint terrorism task force were never told about an explicit warning from the Russian government or about Tsarnaev's travel to the Chechnya region last year. Davis said he would have liked to have known about that activity, and that it "absolutely" would have merited a second look at Tsarnaev.

WASHINGTON -- Five days before two bombs tore through crowds at the Boston Marathon, an intelligence report identified the finish line of the race as an "area of increased vulnerability" and warned Boston police that extremists may use "small scale bombings" to attack spectators and runners at the event. The 18-page report was written by the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, a command center funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security that helps disseminate intelligence information to local police and first responders. The "joint special event assessment" is dated April 10. It notes that at the time there was...

The body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been buried somewhere outside of Massachusetts, according to a funeral home official briefed on the situation. The official said that the remains of the suspected Boston Marathon bomber were removed sometime before midnight Wednesday from the Graham Putnam & ­Mahoney Funeral Parlors where his body has been since last Friday.

Worcester Police Chief Gary J. Gemme — bleeding $10,000 a day in detail costs to protect the funeral home holding accused terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body and out of prospects to find a burial plot — today issued a desperate plea to state and federal officials to bail his city out of the macabre melodrama.

Federal education officials today told UMass Dartmouth they cannot release academic and financial records of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, according to a letter received by the Herald. "From the limited information you provided, it appears that the academic and financial records that have been requested would be protected by FERPA, and that the University may not release them without the consent of the student," wrote Dale King, director of the Family Policy Compliance Office for the U.S. Department of Education.

The way the nation met 33-year-old MBTA Transit Police officer Richard Donohue was — like much of the conflicting information from that night of mayhem in Watertown, Massachusetts — violent, fast, and scary: He was exchanging fire with the Tsarnaev brothers, the story went, and he took a gun shot to his right thigh from the Boston bombing suspects — an injury that would see Donohue lose all of his own blood, sever three blood vessels, send him into cardiac arrest, and almost die. Now comes a more complete picture, with more eyewitnesses telling a new story, that Donohue was probably shot...

Investigators are ramping up their focus on Katherine Russell, the widow of Boston Marathon bombing suspect and alleged planner Tamerlan Tsarnaev after an inspection of her computer turned up radical Islamist material, law enforcement sources said. With Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, alive and in custody, police are trying to determine what involvement, if any, Russell had in the plot to plant bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15. Russell’s attorney, Amato DeLuca, released a statement earlier this week saying his client was willing to provide “as much assistance to the investigation as she can.” The younger...

Bill Ayers, the 1960's radical who went on to become a college professor and associate of President Obama, said Saturday the bombings he helped the Weather Underground carry out to protest the Vietnam War bear no resemblance to the deadly Boston Marathon attack - and glossed over the fact that his group's bombs killed three fellow terrorists and have been linked to the murder of a San Francisco police officer. “How different is the shooting in Connecticut from shooting at a hunting range?” Ayers told a reporter who asked him to compare the incidents after Ayers spoke at a commemoration...

Federal prosecutors have agreed to release a college pal of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who was locked up last week on charges he lied to FBI investigators.

A Massachusetts state senator says the federal government should intervene in the quest to find a final resting place for the elder Boston Marathon bomber. State Sen. Harriet L. Chandler, D-Worcester, said Uncle Sam needs to alleviate a Wochester funeral home’s onerous burden of having accepted Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s corpse on Friday after it was released by the state medical examiner.

In the wake of the Boston Bombings, media commentators, academic experts and Obama administration officials exhibited classic signs of the five stages of liberal grief when faced with a mass casualty terrorist attack:Stage 1 — Anger: Whoever did this was obviously a right wing, Tea Party-affiliated, patriot, militant, white, religious, Republican, tax-protesting, NRA-loving gun nut.Stage 2 — Self Righteousness: Anyone who assumes that this tragedy was perpetrated by Muslim extremists is engaging in the worst form of racial profiling, jumping to conclusions based on no evidence whatever, and is undoubtedly a racist Islamophobe.Stage 3 — Bargaining: The fact that the...

After the city of Cambridge and several other cemeteries turned him down, Stefan said he is hoping Gov. Deval Patrick’s office will intervene and choose Tsarnaev’s final resting place. If not, “I’ll call the White House,” he vowed.

The family of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect killed in a shootout with police can’t find a place to bury him, even as his body is being prepared for just that purpose. An uncle of suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev arrived in Worcester, Mass., on Sunday to “prepare the body” of his nephew for burial. Ruslan Tsarni, of Mongomery Village, Md., came to the city about 40 miles west of Boston with three other men, who were not family members, and met with the director of the Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Parlors.

Lawyers for Robel Phillipos, the Cambridge native accused of covering up for marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, painted him as a “frightened and confused” teen who didn’t mean to lie to investigators in a bid to convince a judge he should be released with a GPS monitor. “This case is about a frightened and confused 19-year-old who was subjected to intense questioning and interrogation, without the benefit of counsel, and in the context of one of the worst attacks against the nation,” said Phillipos’ lawyers, Derege B. Demissie and Susan B. Church, in court papers filed yesterday, later adding, “Mr....

NOTE: I was driving in Boston on Atlantic Ave. late yesterday afternoon. I haven't been to that part of the city in a couple of years. All of a sudden, I spotted this HUGE mural on the side of a building. I really could not believe my eyes. You can read the accompanying article here.

A Worcester funeral home director is pleading for government officials to use their influence to convince a cemetery to bury Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, but so far no state or federal authorities have stepped forward to help out. “We have a body for burial that has caused a lot of controversy and we can’t continue to play this game,” said Peter Stefan, owner of the Graham, Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors. “Under normal circumstances, the government would say it’s (the funeral parlor’s) responsibility to find a place for burial, but this is not normal circumstances. This is a nightmare.”

There was an extraordinary moment Saturday night when Boston bombing victim Jeff Bauman served as banner captain for the Boston Bruins. “Now THIS picture should be plastered all over the media,” said one post on the 27-year-old’s Facebook page. “They put up enough photos of poor Jeff in a time of distress, show him in his glory.” Bauman’s lower limbs were blown apart when bombs went off near the finish of the Boston Marathon where he had been waiting for his girlfriend to finish. “I want to thank everyone for their amazing support for me and all those injured and...

On the same day that the 2013 NRA Convention began in Houston, TX Barack Obama was in Mexico telling an audience that “most of the guns used to commit violent crimes here in Mexico, come from the United States.” What he didn’t tell that audience was that his administration is responsible for Operation Fast and Furious, a program in which the ATF told reluctant gun store owners to sell high-powered guns to bad guys who would then ‘walk’ those guns to drug cartels in Mexico. Yet, Republicans and gun rights activists have avoided bludgeoning those in the administration and on...

Polls show Gomez closing on Markey days after Massachusetts Senate primary Two new polls have Gabriel Gomez, the Republican candidate for a Senate seat out of Massachusetts, within single-digits of the front-running Democratic candidate -- just days after the Tuesday primaries.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Thursday the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings shows how difficult and sensitive the issue of racial profiling can be. Speaking with young students in Denver, Sotomayor noted that some people asked whether authorities had done enough to track the two suspects, both ethnic Chechens. “Is that profiling? Could be,” she said. “Is it something you just can't ignore? Maybe sometimes not.” …

Coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing has ignored admitted bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s connection to his college’s Muslim Student Association, a group that has close relations with both the Muslim Brotherhood and a local imam friendly with an al-Qaida operative. Although a student leader and the mainstream media have downplayed Tsarnaev’s ties to the the group, Tsarnaev associated frequently with the Muslim Student Association (MSA) at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. The Washington Post on April 27 reported that Tsarnaev, who has admitted his role in the Marathon terrorist bombing to police, played intramural soccer with MSA members, contradicting earlier reports that the...

The missing laptop in the Boston Marathon bombing has been found, according to CBS and WTOP. Authorities hope that the laptop might provide clues to any other accomplices, or at the least to the pattern of radicalization that led to the bombing: Investigators found the bag last week in a New Bedford landfill,CBS News’ Elaine Quijano reported. Sources tell CBS News the laptop has also been recovered.So far, there’s no evidence the three had knowledge of the Boston plot in advance. However, one of them did say that about a month before the attack Dzhokhar Tsarnaev casually mentioned he knew...

A laptop tied to the Boston bombing suspects has been recovered and could provide important clues as authorities look into how the suspects were radicalized. Pete Williams, NBC justice correspondent, says the FBI has the laptop, although investigators have not spoken publicly about the computer. Both Williams and Bryan Bender, national security correspondent for the Boston Globe, spoke with WTOP on Thursday about the latest developments in the investigation. "The laptop could be critical in learning how they became radicalized and how they learned to make the bombs," Bender says. "(Investigators believe the suspects) became more religious, they became more...

The instant Jim Asaiante heard the first explosion, he flashed back to Iraq. "That was an IED," he said to no one in particular. The former Army nurse fought the urge to rush toward the wounded. He knew there would be a second blast. Tending to soldiers blown up by roadside bombs had taught him that. Asaiante paused and waited a few seconds. The ground shook again, a percussive explosion that sent more people scrambling, more smoke roiling down Boylston Street. While most ran for their lives, first responders like Asaiante swooped into action. In the days to come, first...

(CNN) -- The number of people potentially embroiled in the Boston Marathon bombings case grew Wednesday to include friends of surviving suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Not much is known yet about the three 19-year-old men -- Azamat Tazhayakov, Dias Kadyrbayev and Robel Phillipos. But here is what CNN has learned so far. All started at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth in 2011, along with Tsarnaev. Each is accused of removing items from Tsarnaev's dorm room after the April 15 attack, which killed three people and wounded more than 260.