Free Republic

Tufts University announced Tuesday it will “proactively and openly” recruit undocumented students and offer financial aid to eligible students, a clear declaration that immigration advocates hailed as a significant victory. Under the new policy, the private university will consider all students in the country illegally as regular domestic applicants, eligible for the same university aid as US citizens. Because undocumented students are ineligible for federal financial aid, the university will make up the difference out of its own funds for students who cannot afford to pay their own way. The Tufts policy applies to all undocumented students, not just those...

BOSTON (Reuters) - Law enforcement created "dangerous crossfire situations" while trying to apprehend the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, according to a state report on the emergency response that was released on Friday. Police officers lacked "weapons discipline" during a gun battle with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed a short time later, in the early hours of April 19, 2013, the report found. [snip] While the first officers in the Watertown gun-battle used their weapons appropriately, others later improperly self-deployed to the scene without assignments, the report said. "Additional officers arriving on scene...

Trooper Robert McCarthy of the state bomb squad revealed at trial that Tsarnaev abandoned three bombs. Two at the site of a police shootout; a third in the driver's seat of the stolen 2013 Mercedes SUV Tsarnaev drove while fleeing...in a Tupperware container packed with "2-3 pounds" of blast powder and "multiple fuse lengths taped together." One of two undetonated bombs was a length of metal pipe, and the other a pipe's elbow joint.....an improvised grenade...very heavy so as to stop in the spot where the bombers intended. The Chechnyan bomber brothers, in the US on expired student visas, engaged...

Something that should give would-be education reformers pause but probably won’t: when ephemeral education fads finally come in for much-needed criticism, they have already done their damage. Case in point: the self-esteem courses popular 15-20 years ago. “Raising it in isolation was counter-productive,” Martin West, an associate professor of education at Harvard said at the Brookings Institution on March 31, 2015. West is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. He was chairing a panel on “Incorporating noncognitive skills into education policy.” “Education is very faddish and there’s a danger that the fads...

Martin O’Malley may have been such a lousy Governor of Maryland that his chosen heir was defeated by a Republican (in a deep blue state), but he is turning out to be good for something. Hell may have no fury like Hillary scorned, but as Elizabeth Warren demurely bides her time despite many calls for her to run, O’Malley leaps into the breach. Nick Carasaniti reports in the New York Times: Former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, who has been promoting himself to Democrats as a potential alternative to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2016 race for the White...

Pic - Mayor Bill de Blasio, at Gracie Mansion with First Lady Chirlane McCray, activist Van Jones, and Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, plans to dip his toe into presidential politics with the launch of a push for income inequality to become a central issue of the 2016 national elections. "All of this is focused on the notion that we are not having a discussion on income inequality in this country and we are not having that discussion at our peril." GRACIE MANSION — Mayor Bill de Blasio, who supporters describe as a "national hero" among progressives, has dipped his his...

Or, "he could go down as Neville Chamberlain at Munich." Experts say we won't know true impact of any deal for years.April 2, 2015 John Kerry did not start the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. But nobody has thrown himself more into the talks and nobody's reputation has more riding on their outcome than the American secretary of State currently trying to hammer out a deal in Switzerland. The former Democratic senator from Massachusetts hoped when he took the helm at the State Department in 2013 that he would make his mark in history by finding the...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) is the only major Republican likely 2016 presidential candidate who hasn't weighed in on the controversy over Indiana's "religious freedom" law that erupted this week — and his explanation for avoiding the issue is questionable.

Overlooked in the media coverage of and academic debate about physician-assisted suicide: it’s not the people most likely to receive it who are promoting it. “It’s the well off and healthy who are calling for it,” Farr A. Curlin, M.D., the Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities at Duke University School of Medicine said at the Heritage Foundation on March 30, 2015. On the same panel on which Dr. Curlin spoke, Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation noted that disability rights groups are actively opposing such measures. Moreover, Anderson pointed out, in Oregon, which has physician-assisted suicide, “95 percent...

The push by gun-loving bullies to put weapons in the hands of almost anyone, almost everywhere and almost anyhow they can continued Thursday in ultra-conservative Kansas and even in liberal Massachusetts. â–ª Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback on Thursday signed a bill that will allow residents to stroll around with concealed guns without any permit or any training in how to use the weapons. This is pretty much the definition of madness but, hey, that Second Amendment is twisted and warped by gun backers to support all kinds of questionable actions. The law puts Kansas among only a handful of states...

Andrew Malcolm at Investor's Business Daily points out that some key state polls show that Hillary Clinton is losing support fast and that the e-mail scandal is playing a bigger role than first thought. According to the newest numbers, Hillary Clinton is now running three points behind Jeb Bush in the key swing state of Florida. And her lead over Marco Rubio there has collapsed from ten points to but two points. Of course, none of those people have yet to announce their candidacy. Everyone is pretending they don't know that she'll announce later this month, Rubio likely in...

A three-year-old named Lee defends the abortion of his sister in a new children’s book – by an author with her own “ghost sister.” “Sister Apple, Sister Pig” by Mary Walling Blackburn focuses on an adult topic: abortion. The story follows Lee as he (or “she,” as the author stressed) searches for his sister – who might be an apple, a pig, or somewhere in a tree. Lee later decides “Sister is a happy ghost!” and explicitly says he’s glad Sister isn’t around to inconvenience his parents.

In a greeting to the Iranian people on the occasion of the traditional New Year (Nowruz) holiday last week, Secretary of State John Kerry exposed a secret that journalists and academics have been agonizing over for the past six weeks: the fact that his daughter has married an Iranian-American who has extensive family ties to Iran. “I am proud of the Iranian-Americans in my own family, and grateful for how they have enriched my life,” Kerry said in the official statement. Kerry also said he was “strongly committed to resolving” the differences between the United States and the Islamic Republic...

The stated mission of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute is to teach the general public about how the U.S. Senate works, so it’s fitting that the shrine to the late Massachusetts Democrat is funded, in part, by $38 million in taxpayers’ money. The $78 million combination museum and interactive civics exhibit was formally dedicated by President Obama on Monday. Besides a section honoring Kennedy’s 46-year political career, which ended with his Aug. 25, 2009 death, the Institute will offer a “Senate Immersion Module” which aims to teach visitors how the upper chamber works. (snip) On top of an $18.9 million...

Two big Clinton stories landed last week. The first is that Hillary Clinton destroyed the electronic copies of her State Department emails on her private server after the State Department subpoenaed her emails. The second is that Hillary Clinton had an aide running a "secret spy network" that was, among other things, feeding her information on Benghazi, according to a report by Pro Publica and Gawker. Earlier this month, I noted the myriad ways that Clinton running her own private email server breathes new life into the Benghazi investigation, but this last revelation takes things to a whole new level....

A former governor on ABC’s “This Week” made a not-so-veiled threat Sunday to former Democratic Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley that he could lose a cabinet position in Hillary Clinton’s administration by running against her. Former Democratic Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who also serves as a Senior Advisor to Ready for Hillary PAC said, “She is comfortable enough to be able to withstand a primary.” Granholm added, “And Martin O’Malley, he’s a very nice guy, and I was thinking he might make a nice member of a President Clinton administration, so he better watch it.” “I think he and anybody else,...

Washington (CNN)Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley took a major shot at Hillary Clinton on Sunday, saying the country needs a "new perspective" and "new leadership" in the 2016 election. "Let's be honest here," O'Malley said. "The presidency of the United States is not some crown to be passed between two families." The Democrat's comments, in an appearance on ABC's "This Week," are another signal that he's likely to challenge Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. He's focusing in recent weeks on issues like income inequality and wage stagnation -- which liberal darling Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has made her...

In early 2008 liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy blessed Barack Obama’s long shot presidential campaign, declaring the freshman Illinois senator the next great progressive leader in a symbolic passing of the torch. On Monday, Mr. Obama heads to Massachusetts to honor Kennedy, who died in 2009 — but liberals’ enthusiasm for the president has waned from those days, and the left has moved on to other champions, most notably Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who now sits in the seat Kennedy used to hold.

On top of an $18.9 million Defense Department grant doled out in Sept. 2010, the Institute received $13.6 million from the Department of Education, according to USASpending.gov. In the 2009 federal budget, another $5.8 million was appropriated through the Department of Labor and the Department of Health and Human Services. The state of Massachusetts gave the University of Massachusetts $5 million, earmarked for the Institute. As a senator in 2010, current Sec. of State John Kerry waged an unsuccessful attempt to earmark another $28.9 million for the museum ... the $18.9 million Defense Department earmark was “funneled through the Defense...

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler uses a “Pinocchio” scale to assign a level of egregiousness to lies he uncovers, with four Pinocchios as the maximum … until now. Secretary of State John Kerry earned himself the full complement two weeks ago from Kessler for bragging about his management of the first global-warming hearing in the Senate, a hearing that he not only didn’t arrange but didn’t even attend. Kessler dug deeper on the tall tales emanating from the event, and found that one of the real organizers has been lying about what took place in the hearing in order to...