Free Republic

KIEV — Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded and won his parliament's approval on Saturday to invade Ukraine, where the new government warned of war, put its troops on high alert and appealed to NATO for help. Putin's open assertion of the right to send troops to a country of 46 million people on the ramparts of central Europe creates the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the Cold War. Troops with no insignia on their uniforms but clearly Russian — some in vehicles with Russian number plates - have already seized Crimea, an isolated peninsula in the Black...

A California couple spotted the edge of an old can on a path they had hiked many times before. Poking at the can was the first step in uncovering a buried treasure of rare coins estimated to be worth $10 million. "It was like finding a hot potato," the couple told coin expert Dr. Don Kagan from Kagin's, Inc. The couple hired the president of Kagin's, Inc. and Holabird-Kagin Americana, a western Americana dealer and auctioneer, to represent them. "Since 1981, people have been coming to us with one or two coins they find worth a few thousand dollars,...

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas likes to present himself as a deficit hawk—a red-state conservative who “believes that Congress must be a good steward of the taxpayers’ money,” as his official website declares, and that “fiscal responsibility is the cornerstone for good governance.” So the revelation in the National Journal that the 61-year-old Cornyn is collecting three different state-government pensions while receiving his federal salary as a senator (a total of $239,383 in taxpayer-funded largesse) is slightly off-message, and just a tad inconvenient, as he gets ready to run for a third term next year. “There’s a lot of...

Apparently in the eyes of the Ohio National Guard, if you're a staunch defender of the US Constitution, you're an extremist and a domestic terrorist. That's the basic message that we can take away from a training exercise drill that took place in Portsmouth, Ohio on January 17, 2013. The Ohio National Guard ran a drill responding to a biological attack at a local junior high school. The nasty evildoers behind the fake attack? A janitor and science teacher who were fervent Second Amendment supporters and white supremacists to boot! This is how our taxpayer dollars are spent in conducting...

While President Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, faces a possible perjury charge and increased calls for his resignation over the Justice Department's outrageous spying on the media -- elsewhere, another scandal is taking another kind of toll. A new Quinnpiac poll shows that the public is far from satisfied that the IRS matter is settled. A full 76% want a special prosecutor named; that includes 63% of Democrats. Well, Obama did promise to bring us together. Let's just hope he was wrong about the oceans rising. Quinnipiac also shows that the confluence of three scandals (the two listed above and...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The former New Jersey official at the center of a political scandal dogging Governor Chris Christie said on Friday the prominent Republican knew about a traffic jam orchestrated by his top aides during the blockage, the New York Times reported.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The long-delayed Keystone XL oil pipeline cleared a major hurdle toward approval Friday, a serious blow to environmentalists' hopes that President Barack Obama will block the controversial project running more than 1,000 miles from Canada through the heart of the U.S

Rosetta, the first spacecraft built to orbit a comet and land a probe on these icy nomads, is now waking up after more than two years of slumber, and videos filmed as part of an international competition will help greet the spacecraft after it awakens. Comets are some of the most primitive building blocks of the solar system, with many dating to soon after its formation. Comets also likely helped seed Earth with water and other ingredients of life. By analyzing the composition of the comet, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will help scientists learn more about the role...

One of the biggest public supporters of the Affordable Care Act has reportedly decided that some of his staff should be exempted from the new law. CNN reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is the only top congressional leader to exempt some of his staff from having to buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges. That’s right, even House Majority Leader John Boehner and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who have voted against the healthcare law dozens of times, have told their staff to sign up for insurance plans through the federal exchange. The news will likely provide...

The clerk recognized that the gun the suspects were using was a fake, so he reached down and brought his own gun up, telling the would be robbers that his gun was “bigger”. The suspects ran out of the store, and quickly left in their getaway car.

ELKHART - Many stores and restaurants will be open this year on Thanksgiving Day, and one local man says he lost his job because of it. Tony Rohr worked at Pizza Hut for more than ten years, but says he was fired recently because he refused to open on Thanksgiving. He says he doesn't think people should have to work on a holiday like Thanksgiving. He started at Pizza Hut as a cook and worked his way up to being a general manager of the Jackson Boulevard Pizza Hut in Elkhart. He was told opening on Thanksgiving this year was...

This is a total bombshell for the financial media world. CNBC's "Money Honey" Maria Bartiromo is headed to Fox Business Network, Matt Drudge first reported while she was anchoring "Closing Bell" this afternoon. CNBC has confirmed this for us. "After 20 years of groundbreaking work at CNBC, Maria Bartiromo will be leaving the company as her contract expires on November 24th. Her contributions to CNBC are too numerous to list but we thank her for all of her hard work over the years and wish her the best," CNBC's Brian Steel said in a statement to Business Insider. This summer,...

Philip Chism admitted to police that he followed math teacher Colleen Ritzer, 24, into a second-floor bathroom at Danvers High School — where he attacked her, according to a report. The teen used a recycling bin to bring her body to the wooded area behind the school. The 14-year-old boy accused of killing a beloved Massachusetts teacher has allegedly confessed to slashing her throat with a box cutter in a school bathroom before dumping her body in a nearby patch of woods, according to a report. Philip Chism admitted to police that he followed math teacher Colleen Ritzer into a...

The families of four soldiers and one Marine killed in Afghanistan over the weekend have been told that they will be denied death benefits while the government shutdown continues, leaving at least one mother in despair and disbelief. The families will also be denied travel re-imbursement should they choose to go to Dover Air Force Base, Del., for the solemn return of the caskets of their loved ones, Pentagon officials said Tuesday. "For the sacrifice our kids are making, at the age that they're making them, I don't understand how this can be a benefit that's withheld. I won't ever...

– Some Catholic priests under contract or GS (general schedule) to the military are not allowed to offer the Catholic sacraments--including saying Mass, consecrating marriages, or performing baptisms--on military property during the government shutdown, and if they do, even on a volunteer basis, they risk being arrested, according to the general counsel for the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA.

Global Warming: Temperatures have flat-lined for 15 years, the Arctic and Antarctic are gaining record amounts of ice, most computer models have been wrong, yet the networks are buying into the alarmists' narrative. Earth might not have a fever but the media do, judging by their hyperventilating about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's quite fraudulent report (Fifth Assessment Report or 5AR) released Sept. 27. One network — CBS— even turned a blind eye to the truth and claimed that temperatures "could have risen by more than 200 degrees." This fiction came from CBS' Ben Tracy, who said the carbon...

<p>President Barack Obama summoned congressional leaders to the White House on the second day of a partial government shutdown that has furloughed hundreds of thousands of workers and closed military cemeteries as far away as France. Republican leaders welcomed the Wednesday afternoon meeting but questioned whether Democrats were ready to deal.</p>

WASHINGTON — Wheelchair-bound elderly veterans pushed aside barricades to tour the World War II Memorial Tuesday morning, in defiance of the government shutdown which closed all of the memorials in the nation’s capital. The four bus loads of veterans — visiting from Mississippi as part of a once-in-a-lifetime Honor Flight tour — ignored National Park Police instructions not to enter the site as lawmakers and tourists cheered them on. “We didn’t come this far not to get in,” one veteran proclaimed. The scene was both emotional and comical at once. After it was clear they had lost control of the...

A group of World War II veterans in an Honor Flight group Tuesday knocked over barriers imposed during the government shutdown at the WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C., to get inside. As part of the federal government shutdown, national parks are closed. But the group of veterans continued to the monument Tuesday, as reported by Stars and Stripes reporter Leo Shane.

MULBERRY, Fla. (AP)— Polk County sheriff’s deputies arrested Pastor Terry Jones, 61, and his associate pastor, Marvin Sapp Jr., 34,..He had said he was heading to a nearby park to burn 2,998 Qurans — one for every victim of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks... Mulberry’s mayor, along with area elected officials, a sheriff’s deputy and several Polk County residents have talked about the need to express love and tolerance for all faiths on Sept. 11. [snip]