Free Republic

The office headed by the woman poised to become the next attorney general has used an unusual method to keep many of its prosecutions hidden from the public, an NBC News investigation has found. Federal prosecutors in New York's Brooklyn-based Eastern District pursued cases against secret, unnamed "John Doe" defendants 58 times since Loretta Lynch became head prosecutor in May 2010. Two of the 58 are terrorism cases. Eastern District prosecutors have also sought permission to close the courtroom to the public for 11 different Doe cases during the same period, and judges have granted permission in at least 10...

(CNSNews.com) – Iranian American Lisa Daftari, an investigative journalist and contributor to Fox News, said on Friday that Sharia law is being followed by practitioners of radical Islam right here in the United States, even if many Americans think of the human rights abuses towards women by these practitioners as something that only takes place in the Middle East and Africa. “And some might ask why should Americans care about what goes on in those countries?” asked Daftar, whose family fled Iran during the 1979 revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and established an Islamic state in the country. “How...

Two physicists are trying to revive one of the great debates of twentieth-century science, arguing that the Big Bang may never have happened. Their work presents a radically different vision of the universe from the one cosmologists now work with. "The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," says Dr. Ahmed Farag Ali of Benha University, Egypt. In collaboration with Professor Saurya Das of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, Ali has created a series of equations that describe a universe much like Hoyle's; one without a...

There were plenty of winners and losers in this week's Chicago city elections, and you can always follow the losers by the echoes of their shrieks through the alleys. And there are famous names of Chicago Democratic politics among them, names like Berrios and Mell and Daley and Preckwinkle. We'll get to them. The biggest loser of all, of course, is Mayor Rahm Emanuel. He was forced into a runoff campaign with Cook County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, and given the unrest in the wards and Emanuel's huge likability deficit, it's looking as if he could be a loser in...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The truck driver arrested in a rail crash that injured 50 people in California had been cited for multiple driving violations in his home state of Arizona, including a 1998 conviction for driving under the influence, the Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday. Jose Alejandro Sanchez-Ramirez, 54, was found walking and "in distress" more than a mile from the accident on Tuesday and was later taken into custody on suspicion of felony hit-and-run for leaving the scene, police said. Bamieh said Ramirez ran for help following the impact but did not immediately call authorities because he...

That father, Jamiel Shaw, and Michael Ronnebeck, the uncle of another man murdered earlier this month by an illegal immigrant, testified at Wednesday’s hearing in front of a subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Both men asserted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) lax detainment policies contributed to the death of their family members. ICE came under intense scrutiny last year when it was revealed that in 2013 the agency had released over 36,000 convicted criminal aliens from its custody. Of those, nearly 200 had committed murder. Shaw told of his son, Jamiel Shaw II,...

MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry delivered a laughable, childish speech at Cornell's Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Lecture on Feb. 23, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA9GsEja0Oc

It's a national mystery that has left both the social media world and the Secret Service scratching their heads. On Sunday night, a photo of what appears to be Malia Obama wearing a Pro Era shirt surfaced on Instagram. It quickly went viral after the Brooklyn-based hip-hop collective posted the pic to advertise its online store. A rep for the group told Gawker on Monday that the photo was from "a mutual friend of Malia and the pro era member," but White House officials aren't so sure. Fox News reports that government officials are looking into the photo's origins. Michelle...

Fighters for the Islamic State terrorist groups are desperately seeking male-enhancement medication in an effort to fuel their desire for “brutal and abnormal” sexual behaviors, according to a report from activists in the Syrian city of Raqqa. The report from the group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently reveals that usually ultra-conservative Islamic extremists spend part of their salary on “kinky underwear” for their wives and for hundreds of young women and children that are kidnapped and sold as sex slaves. Anonymous doctors told the website that a “large section of ISIS members suffer from sexual anomalies and brutal instinctive desire...

The European Union’s executive has unveiled a vast plan to boost coordination between the EU’s 28 national energy markets to wean Europe off unstable Russian gas supplies and provide cheaper energy for consumers. European Commission Vice President Maroš Šefčovič on Wednesday called it “undoubtedly the most ambitious energy project” since the inception of the EU over half a century ago. He believes that improving links across borders in Europe’s energy grid could save businesses and consumers up to €40 billion ($45.4 billion) a year. A more energy-independent Europe will also increase the EU’s political options in eastern Europe. […] “Our...

I've been watching the news on Bibi Netanyahu's visit to Congress and have noticed an old demon raising it's ugly head again. If you are a Christian, you have but one response to all things Jewish. They are your family. If you are an atheist or some other pagan being, you can think what you want, but a Christian cannot be an anti-Semite. God's covenant was with Abraham and Moses, both Hebrew. The Jews were chosen to reveal Jesus to the world, even if they didn't believe. Jesus came as a Jew and taught the Torah in the Synagogue. We...

Gerbils are cute and furry creatures. They may also, according to scientists, have been responsible for killing millions of people across Europe by spreading the plague. Researchers now believe that gerbils from Asia, rather than native black rats, were behind the repeated outbreaks of the bubonic plague in Europe.

LONDON - In research that contradicts years of health advice, scientists said on Monday that babies at risk of developing a childhood peanut allergy can avoid it if they are given peanuts regularly during their first 11 months.

In an article chock full of "could" and computer model projections, the San Jose Mercury News speculates in the headline, "Climate change may flatten Santa Cruz's famed surfing waves." Key word is "may" since it also may not. However, this doesn't prevent reporter James Urton from engaging in extreme conjecture about surf conditions in a century while computer model projections are often unable to correctly project the weather for the next day. Let us now join Urton in the midst of his Chicken Little mode concerning the future of Santa Cruz surfing:

Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald apologized today for mistakenly saying in a videotaped exchange with a homeless man that he had served in the special forces, though his service was entirely with the 82nd Airborne Division. "Secretary McDonald has apologized for the misstatement and noted that he never intended to misrepresent his military service," a White House officials told ABC News. "We take him at his word and expect that this will not impact the important work he's doing to promote the health and well-being of our nation's veterans." The exchange with the homeless man was part of a report...

Seven times on Monday, the Obama White House assured Americans that there is no "specific, credible plot against the Mall of America or any other domestic commercial shopping center here in the United States." In response to multiple questions, Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was just reminding Americans to "remain vigilant," when Johnson told the Sunday news shows that an al Qaeda-linked terror group, Al-Shabaab, is publicly calling for attacks on shopping malls in the United States, specifically the Mall of America in Minneapolis.

Robert Luther "Bob" Sales Sr. enlisted in the National Guard at the age of 15, lying his way into the service. It was 1941, before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. “My father told my mother, ‘don’t worry, because he won't last a week,’ but I lasted five and a half years, won many decorations, killed a lot of Germans, done a lot of things,” he had said in a 2011 interview with The News & Advance recorded in his Madison Heights home. Sales, an Amherst County native who landed in France on D-Day at the age of 18 and then...

Two former CBS reporters have strongly disputed Bill O’Reilly‘s accounts of what happened one night when they covered a riot in Buenos Aires, but on The Factor tonight, O’Reilly brought on a former NBC News bureau chief who backed up his story. Don Browne was the NBC News Miami bureau chief at the time, and he oversaw the network’s Falklands coverage. And Browne told O’Reilly his account was accurate. As opposed to some of the other accounts, which have to some extent downplayed the danger, Browne said the situation “got progressively more intense” and there were demonstrations in Buenos Aires...

Reuters) - Comcast Corp and Time Warner Cable Inc have been sued for $20 billion for allegedly discriminating against African American-owned media and employing advocates such as the NAACP and the Rev. Al Sharpton to advance their bias. The lawsuit was filed on Friday in Los Angeles federal court by the National Association of African-American Owned Media as U.S. regulators review the proposed $45 billion merger between the two biggest U.S. cable operators.

Two more very cold arctic blasts are going to hit Michigan this week. Conditions may be right late in the week for rapid ice making on the Great Lakes. This makes me think we could make a run at record ice cover on the Great Lakes by this coming weekend. As of Sunday, Feb. 22, 2015, the total Great Lakes ice cover was 84.4 percent. Record total ice cover on the Great Lakes is 94.7 percent, set in 1979.