Free Republic

All over Europe, voters are turning in a conservative direction, and against the autocratic European Union and its big government enablers. New York Times reporters Steven Erlanger and Stephen Castle write a dripping-with-disdain account of local election results in the UK, which will be followed tomorrow by results for the European Parliament. To them, conservatgives are “right wingers” or “far-right” and those who object to EU takeover of sovereignty are “anti-Europe.” Voters in Britain sent a forceful message of discontent to established political parties on Friday, as returns from local elections showed an even stronger following than expected for the...

Women have come a long way, Miss Baby, since Betty Friedan railed against "the feminine mystique" of the suburban woman locked in a "comfortable concentration camp" and since Gloria Steinem mocked the attentions of men at the Playboy Club who were seduced by her pink bunny costume with its tall floppy ears and saucy cotton tail. Women with nothing better to do argue whether a woman earning $525,000 a year (plus bonuses) as executive editor of The New York Times was getting as much as her male predecessor. Some of these women similarly complain that Hillary Clinton -- having moved...

Most scientists will tell you that race has no biological basis—it is, in academic-speak, a “social construct.” But a new book by distinguished journalist Nicholas Wade challenges that assumption, concluding that race is real and human social behaviour is subject to natural selection just like everything else. As the New York Review of Books put it, in its coverage of Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, there is now a “statistical sense” in which races are real. Scientists can tell, based on genetic variance, which continent a DNA sample comes from. That might not sound revolutionary to...

Nicholas Wade, a British-born science reporter and editor for more than 30 years with The New York Times, is no longer with the newspaper — just days after the release of his latest book, in which he depicts blacks with roots in sub-Saharan Africa as genetically less adapted to modern life than whites and Asians. Was The New York Times uncomfortable with Wade’s science or his conclusions? It’s unclear. Neither Wade nor his former employer returned requests for comment. Wade’s last Times article appeared April 24. His Penguin Press book “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” arrived in...

".. The orthodoxy's equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific tenets. The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in "The Apportionment of Human Diversity" (1972), is that the races are so close to genetically identical that "racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance." The second, popularized by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that "human equality is a contingent fact of history," as he put it in an essay of that title in 1984." "Since the sequencing...

CNN President Jeff Zucker declared his network would “not going to be shamed” into covering Benghazi and other stories without “real news value” at an awards dinner Monday. Capital New York reports that Zucker explained CNN’s post-plane plans during an interview at the Deadline Club’s annual dinner on Monday night. “I don’t think there’s any question about our commitment to breaking news, as evidenced by all the questions about the plane,” Zucker told The New York Times’ Bill Carter (RELATED: The five most ridiculous aspects of CNN’s missing Malaysian flight coverage). “So we’re still there whenever that happens,” he continued,...

Climate change and the missing Malaysian flight are important to CNN. The Obama administration’s continued evasion of serious investigation into the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, not so much. At least that’s what Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide, told a New York Times reporter at the Deadline Club’s annual awards dinner Monday night. “We’re not going to be shamed into [Benghazi coverage] by others who have political beliefs that want to try to have temper tantrums to shame other news organizations into covering something,” Zucker said. “If it’s of real news value, we’ll cover it.”

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Sitting in the headquarters of the Wyoming Liberty Group, Susan Gore, founder of the conservative think tank, said new national science standards for schools were a form of “coercion,” adding, “I don’t think government should have anything to do with education.” Ms. Gore, a daughter of the founder of the company that makes Gore-Tex waterproof fabric, was speaking here weeks after the Republican-controlled Legislature made Wyoming, where coal and oil are king, the first state to reject the standards, which include lessons on human impact on global warming. The pushback came despite a unanimous vote by a...

Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation," former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Hillary Clinton would make a "spectacular candidate" for president in 2016. “I think she would be a spectacular candidate on the Democratic side. Bloomberg also praised former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) and Govs. Chris Christie (R-NJ) and Scott Walker (R-WI) pointing to their "executive experience"on the potential candidates on the Republican side of the ticket.

A New York City cab driver insisted Friday that it is his right, hands down, to wear a Nazi armband – even if the Taxi and Limousine Commission says otherwise. As CBS 2’s Lou Young reported Friday evening, Gabriel Diaz, 26, spoke outside of his family’s home in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx, after he was suspended for wearing a swastika while driving the cab. “I am. I’m a National Socialist – what you guys call a Nazi. I am. I’m a believer of it,” Diaz said. Diaz was suspended for wearing the armband while driving his cab....

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger fired executive editor Jill Abramson after concluding that she had misled both him and chief executive Mark Thompson during her effort to hire a new co-managing editor, according to two sources with knowledge of the reason for her termination. While several factors contributed to Sulzberger’s frustration with Abramson’s management of the newsroom, the sources, who are sympathetic to the Times management, said it was this incident that sealed her fate. In conversations and emails, Abramson led both Sulzberger and Thompson to believe that she had consulted with other newsroom leaders about her decision to...

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, released a statement Saturday afternoon detailing his decision to fire the newspaper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson. He was responding to a growing controversy over accusations by Ms. Abramson’s supporters that gender played a role in her dismissal. The decision to remove her, which was announced on Wednesday, “has been cast by many as an example of the unequal treatment of women in the workplace,” Mr. Sulzberger wrote. Instead, the statement said, it “was a situation involving a specific individual who, as we all do, has strengths and weaknesses.”

NEW YORK (MYFOXNY) - A New York City cab driver has been suspended for wearing a Nazi swastika armband while on duty. The Taxi and Limousine Commission confirmed to Fox 5 News on Friday that the driver had been suspended for 30 days. His name was not released.

RYE BROOK - New York Republicans have officially nominated Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino (R) as their candidate in the race for governor. Republicans wrapped up their state party convention Thursday at the Hilton Hotel in Rye Brook after nominating Astorino. Other candidates nominated include Onondaga County Comptroller Bob Antonacci for comptroller and chief of staff to former Gov. George Pataki John Cahill as attorney general. Astorino says his success in Westchester shows he can appeal to all kinds of voters in heavily Democratic New York. In his acceptance speech, Astorino called for hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and the...

Not only does Jill Abramson have to endure speculation about her departure from the Times, she also has to live with the question of what will happen to her tattoo of the signature T logo. In the spirit of solutions, the Cut asked several tattoo artists across north Brooklyn how Abramson could conceal it. “If I was her, I’d [get] a really nice tattoo from some famous artist where I had a piece of his artwork that would also work as a cover-up,” says Gavan Daly of Williamsburg’s Magic Cobra Tattoo Society. “Cover-ups suck. You are erasing a bad memory—your...

This "all the news that's fit to print" business is tricky... especially when you're firing your first-ever! female executive editor and replacing her with your first-ever! black executive editor. The fit-to-print article — "Times Ousts Its Executive Editor, Elevating Second in Command" — is some of the best raw material for interpreters of crafty text that I have ever seen. How did the NYT call Jill Abramson a bitch? Well, it all started with the unfit-to-print image of the new executive editor, Dean Baquet, as the angry black man. I'm going to do a little editing and cut this text...

“Our journalism advantage is shrinking,” a committee led by the publisher’s son warned. A call to get rid of the metaphor of “Church and State.” A 96-page internal New York Times report, sent to top executives last month by a committee led by the publisher’s son and obtained by BuzzFeed, paints a dark picture of a newsroom struggling more dramatically than is immediately visible to adjust to the digital world, a newsroom that is hampered primarily by its own storied culture. The Times report was finalized March 24 by a committee of digitally oriented staffers led by reporter A.G. Sulzberger....

... Abramson recently learned her pay package was not commensurate with that of her predecessor, Bill Keller, and sought parity... “‘She confronted the top brass,’ one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was ‘pushy,’ a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect.” [Publisher Arthur] Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits ...

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was abruptly fired from the paper on Wednesday, sources familiar with the news informed POLITICO. Managing editor Dean Baquet will take over as executive editor, effective immediately. The news of her departure was met with shock throughout the newsroom. Senior editors were unexpectedly summoned to a 2 p.m. leadership meeting at the Times headquarters in New York. The news was then announced in a staff-wide meeting by publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. In his announcement, Sulzberger said Abramson’s departure was related to “an issue with management in the newsroom,” and had nothing to do...

… A while back, the Times ran a huge front page photo of young men and women dashing for a table full of food. The headline told a million readers that these were Palestinian Arabs who had been STARVED by Israel, but after international pressure Israel relented and the kids were finally allowed to eat. I noticed that these kids were laughing and so did some other observers, until the Times finally admitted (on page 36) that Israel had nothing to do with this.Muslims had been fasting for some holy day (Ramadan?) and were finally allowed to feast. But the...