Free Republic

A celebrated sea otter who survived a natural oil slick and was tracked by researchers for six years has been killed by a shark. The seven-year-old marine mammal named Olive was found dead by a beachgoer on March 22 near Sunset State Beach in California. Wildlife biologists retrieved a large, serrated tooth fragment from white shark in a wound on the mother-of-three's body, indicating the cause of death.

A Texas babysitter's text messages paint a horrifying picture of abuse that includes sexually assaulting children as young as 11 months old and detailing the acts to her boyfriend, prosecutors say. Some of the graphic exchanges between Ashley Dack, 29, and Patrick Schuneman, 37, were released in court documents obtained by The Huffington Post. The couple -- who are both successful geologists for oil companies -- was arrested after Dack allegedly bragged about the sexual abuse to one of her friends, who called police. The documented assaults date back to 2012, according to Tiffany Dupree, a lead prosecutor in the...

Milwaukee man has pleaded guilty to threatening Gov. Scott Walker's adult son on Twitter. Online court records show Robert Peffer pleaded guilty Friday to four misdemeanor counts of using a computer to send threatening or obscene messages. Judge Dennis Flynn sentenced him to 90 days in jail and ordered him to pay a $1,000 fine on the first count. He stayed 90-day jail stints on the other three counts in lieu of probation. The judge also banned Peffer from using social media for anything besides looking for work.

A jury decided Friday that a prestigious venture capital firm did not discriminate or retaliate against a female employee in a case that debated gender imbalance and working conditions for women in Silicon Valley. The jury in San Francisco reached the verdict after three days of deliberations in a lawsuit filed by Ellen Pao against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Former Facebook Worker Sues for Sexual Discrimination The lawsuit claimed Pao was fired when she complained about discrimination at the firm.

Clinton claims she wiped her server. I would think the NSA has unwittingly provided a backup service for her. Would certainly like to know what's in the emails.

WITH 596 days to go before America’s next presidential election, the first serious candidate has announced that he will run (see article). Ted Cruz is an intelligent man with an inspiring life story. His father fled from Cuba with a few dollars sewn into his underwear and settled in the United States. The young Ted made a name for himself in Texas while still a teenager, giving lectures to Rotary clubs about the constitution. By his early 30s he was arguing cases before the Supreme Court—and winning. At 41, he was elected to the Senate, overcoming long odds in a...

Claim White House ignoring human rights, working with murderous regime A group of Iranian dissidents and political prisoners have lashed out at the Obama administration, lambasting its ongoing diplomacy with Iran, according to two open letters sent to the White House in recent days. In each letter, the dissidents—most of whom are currently political prisoners in Iran—criticize the White House for ignoring the issues of human rights and democracy in Iran as they push to finalize a deal with a regime that the dissidents says is murderous and untrustworthy. Iranian reformers and those seeking a change in the country’s leadership...

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Secretary of State John Kerry sent a letter to the State Department’s Inspector General requesting a review of email and records management, the State Department said today. The timing of Kerry’s request has many asking if this push for reform is connected to former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s recent scandal involving her use of a private email server, rather than a State Department account. State Department Spokesman Jeff Rathke denied this had anything to do with Clinton, citing instead the State Department’s need to better manage the overwhelming number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and requests for information from...

A MetroLink beating captured on video is now lighting up social media in St. Louis.  Viewers sent the video to FOX 2 on Twitter and Facebook pages looking for answers.  Police say the beating happened on Monday evening at 9:54pm.  The victim, a 43-year-old white male,  tells investigators that a question about Mike Brown sparked the incident. -snip He told investigators that he was seated on the train when he was approached from behind.  The man in the red hat and shirt asked for his cell phone.  The victim refused. The suspect in the red hat then asked the seated man what he thought...

A long-awaited audit of Maryland's health insurance exchange has found that the state improperly billed the federal government $28.4 million as former Gov. Martin O'Malley's administration struggled to launch what would become one of the most troubled websites in the nation. Though the year-long probe by the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general found no fraud or criminal wrongdoing, auditors said the state lacked oversight and internal controls — and they recommended that Maryland refund what the federal government paid to subsidize the cost of signing people up for coverage. The report — obtained by The Baltimore Sun...

Long before Ted Cruz was a big-name senator and conservative rock star, wowing the crowd at Liberty University in the early days of his presidential bid, he was just another lawyer toiling away in virtual anonymity under George W. Bush. While Cruz’s time in the Senate is best known for fiery speeches and high-profile gestures like his 21-hour filibuster, in his earlier time in Washington he demonstrated a wonkish eye for detail and an eagerness to take on powerful industry groups that he saw as stifling competition. Though his efforts ultimately succeeded on a much smaller scale than he’d initially...

resident Obama has nothing scheduled after Monday next week, a blank space that just happens to coincide with the deadline Obama set for his nuclear weapons deal with Iran."The president's schedule for the rest of the week actually remains pretty fluid," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said at the daily press briefing Friday. Asked why he wasn't able to provide any information on Obama's activities next week, Earenst replied, "We've got some more details on the schedule that need to be hammered out."Earnest did say that Obama will be traveling to Florida on Saturday, but he assured reporters that...

A Wisconsin court struck down a collective bargaining agreement between a local school district and its unions for violating the labor reform law known as Act 10, according to a statement released Friday.Carrie Ann Glembocki and Kristi LaCroix, two teachers from the Kenosha School District, filed the lawsuit in 2013 to challenge a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) which they argue violated Wisconsin state law. With legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation (NRTW) and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, the two have won the case.“The court grants summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs on their Second Cause of...

President Barack Obama’s push to legalize millions of illegal immigrants is leaving many Americans’ families locked out of the United States.American engineer Jimmy Gugliotta and his Argentinian wife and children have been stuck in Chile for so long that he’s pleading for donations to buy food and airfares while the U.S. visa agency slowly processes the visa documents needed by his wife and children.“I was initially told the process would take 6 to 9 months and we had enough money to get us through until that time,” he wrote in his March 19 GoFundMe online appeal.“We are trying to sell...

(Reuters) - Apple Inc's Tim Cook, one of the most prominent openly gay American CEOs, has joined fellow tech industry chiefs in decrying a controversial Indiana law that opponents say could allow companies to deny services to gay people. Cook, who publicly declared his sexual orientation last year, joined other tech chief executives, including Salesforce.com Inc's Marc Benioff, in blasting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which could let business and individuals turn away customers by citing "religious freedom." Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed the controversial bill into law on Thursday.

Venezuela has cut in half its subsidized shipments of crude oil to Cuba and Petrocaribe member nations to 200,000 barrels per day, down from 400,000 shipped in 2012, a Barclays report says. Also, the British investment bank’s report considered it “ironic” that Venezuela would ship any oil at all, highlighting that while the country is going through extreme difficulties, it continues to subsidize oil sales to countries that have healthier economies. . . Because of the cuts in oil shipments to the Caribbean, the firm reduced its deficit forecast for Venezuela to $22.6 billion, down from more than $30 billion...

The mother of murdered British student Meredith Kercher said she was “surprised and very shocked” by an Italian court’s decision to overturn the convictions of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. Ms Kercher, 21, from Coulsdon, Surrey, was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in her bedroom in 2007 while studying in Perugia, Italy. ********************* Francesco Maresca, the lawyer for the Kercher family, was also disappointed by the ruling, saying: “I think that it’s a defeat for the Italian justice system.” On Friday night the long-running case appeared to have been brought to a conclusion after more than seven years of...

The Republicans are facing a 16 million person problem. With the Obama administration announcing this month that some 16 million people have obtained health insurance since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the Republicans' intense focus on completely repealing the law is increasingly looking unrealistic.

A massive U.S. military drill dubbed “Jade Helm 15” lists Texas, Utah, and part of California as “hostile” or “insurgent pocket” territory. The unclassified information about this drill is causing widespread alarm nationwide, with more than a few analysts suggesting it may be some sort of exercise practicing to impose martial law on Americans fed up with an out-of-control federal government. During the exercises, which will take place over the summer, Special Forces from various branches of the military will work with local law-enforcement in scenarios that, to critics at least, sound suspiciously like they are aimed at subduing rebellious...