Free Republic

The mainstream media have been doing a victory lap since the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) confirmed on Monday in testimony before the U.S. House Intelligence Committee that President Barack Obama did not wiretap Trump Tower. But that was already known. There was only one new revelation at the hearing, and it was a bombshell: senior Obama administration officials could have known the identities of surveillance targets. One of those targets, retired General Michael Flynn, lost his job after it was revealed that his conversation with the Russian ambassador had been monitored, and that...

University of Arizona wants to ‘maximize free speech in the classroom’ The correct way to tell a classmate he said something offensive is to say “ouch,” and his correct response, “oops.” The University of Arizona’s College of Humanities is offering such “suggestions” to faculty in a new 20-page handbook titled Diversity and Inclusiveness in the Classroom, credited to Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence Jesús Treviño.

A University of Arizona classroom dialogue guide encourages professors to use the “Oops/ouch method,” where students who are offended in class say “ouch” and the offender responds with “oops.” The guide, published by the Office for Diversity and Inclusive Excellence, provides outlines for how to encourage discussion about diversity in the classroom, explaining that “diversity poses both challenges and opportunities for a college campus.”

BEVERLY HILLS (CBSLA.com) — Detectives sought the public’s help Friday to locate burglars who stole more than $4 million worth of makeup from a cosmetics warehouse in the San Fernando Valley that supplies products to a store in Beverly Hills. The burglars stole more than 100,000 pallets of Anastasia Beverly Hills’ Modern Renaissance eye shadow, which is worth $4.5 million.

WASHINGTON — When Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, one of four Russians delivered to the West in this week’s spy swap, joins his family in the United States, it will be only the latest unexpected twist in a classic story of espionage and deception. For several years in the 1990s, Mr. Zaporozhsky, a colonel in Russian intelligence who became deputy chief of the American Department, was secretly working for the C.I.A., one of the highest-ranking American moles in history, Russian prosecutors say. After surprising his colleagues by retiring suddenly in 1997, he moved with his wife and three children to the United States...

The Democrat giving the response to President Trump’s congressional address Tuesday seemed to have forgotten what party he was representing — when he inexplicably called himself a Republican during his address. “I’m a proud Democrat, but first and foremost, I’m a proud Republican, and Democrat, and mostly, American,” former Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear said via telecast from a diner in his home state. It was not clear why Beshear called himself a “proud Republican,” but the small group of supporters surrounding him did not seem to balk as he flip-flopped affiliations.

In the most shocking mix-up in Oscars history, Moonlight won best picture at the Academy Awards — but only after presenter Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the winner, setting off mass confusion inside the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. “I want to tell you what happened,” co-presenter Warren Beatty explained after the mix-up was revealed. “I opened the envelope, and it said ‘Emma Stone, La La Land.’ That’s why I took such a long look at Faye and at you. I wasn’t trying to be funny.” “Well, I don’t know what happened. I blame myself for this,” Kimmel...

During a lively discussion centered on fears that President Trump is "trying to undermine the media," MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski let slip the awesome unspoken truth that the media's "job" is to "actually control exactly what people think."(video at link) SCARBOROUGH: "Exactly. That is exactly what I hear. What Yamiche said is what I hear from all the Trump supporters that I talk to who were Trump voters and are still Trump supporters. They go, 'Yeah you guys are going crazy. He's doing -- what are you so surprised about? He is doing exactly what he said he is going to...

The Islamic State group on Monday claimed responsibility for a suicide attack near Mosul it said was carried out by a British suicide bomber, the SITE Intelligence Group reported. “The martyrdom-seeking brother Abu Zakariya al-Britani — may Allah accept him — detonated his explosives-laden vehicle on a headquarters of the Rafidhi army and its militias in Tal Kisum village, southwest of Mosul,” the claim quoted by SITE said. The ISIS statement did not say when the bombing occurred. Abu Zakariya al-Britani was identified by BBC as Ronald Fiddler, a Brit who was seized by US forces in Afghanistan and taken...

<p>Hillary Clinton isn’t the only one in the Clinton clan who has recently lost a job.</p> <p>Son-in-law Marc Mezvinsky is hitting the bricks following the monumental failure of his hedge-fund company, Eaglevale Partners.</p> <p>The fund was quietly closed down in December, and now Mezvinsky and his partners are busy returning what money remains to investors. The group raised $25 million, reports Britain’s Daily Mail and Bloomberg News, but the fund lost 90 percent of its value investing in bank stocks and debt from Greece.</p>

A car ad about gender equality? By a female director? This year’s Super Bowl advertisers may have planned for a Hillary Clinton presidency. Audi’s 60-second Super Bowl commercial is pitched to dads but has a message about equal pay. The ad sees a father watching his daughter win a go-cart race and then walks her to his new Audi 5S sports car. The commercial, called “Daughter” from ad agency Venables Bell & Partners, ends with a billboard that reads: “Progress is for Everyone.”

MALCOLM Turnbull thought he could outsmart Donald Trump and trap him into taking 1250 of our boat people. Huge mistake, and now he’s been humiliated. There is no surprise that an angry Trump attacked Turnbull in their call at the weekend and hung up halfway through, after just 25 minutes. What did Turnbull expect? This political disaster was always on the cards from the moment Turnbull announced, on November 13 last year, that he’d signed a deal with then US president Barack Obama to take our boat people detained on Nauru and Manus Island. That was very dumb because just...

Kellyanne Conway, the adviser to President Trump who coined the phrase “alternative facts,” is facing another firestorm of criticism and fact-checking after she falsely spoke of a “Bowling Green massacre” by Iraqi refugees. She acknowledged and corrected her mistake Friday morning on Twitter. (snip) Ms. Conway did not specify whether she meant an attack in Kentucky, Ohio or Downtown Manhattan, for that matter. But the closest circumstance to what she described occurred in Bowling Green, Ky., in late May 2011. Two Iraqi citizens, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi and Waad Ramadan Alwan, were indicted on federal terrorism charges. According to a Justice...

A Florida pastor fled from a house naked earlier in January after a man arrived home to find the pastor having sex with the man's wife, the Tallahassee Democrat reported. Citing a police report, the Tallahassee Democrat reported that Pastor O. Jermaine Simmons was being chased by the man with a handgun after the husband caught the cheating wife and pastor in the couple's daughter's bedroom. Simmons escaped the home and hid behind a fence as the husband went looking for the pastor. The man's wife called the police as the incident took place. Simmons and the woman opted not...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sounded like a spokeswoman for an old Verizon ad campaign. "Can you hear?" she continuously said to the crowds gathered Monday night on the steps of the Supreme Court. As top Democratic leaders held a protest against President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration, the microphone they used did not work properly. The crowds could not hear what was being said so resorted to chants including "Lock him up!" in reference to Trump. "Look at that moon. It's a new moon. All right, can you hear me now?" Pelosi said at one point. She...

SAGINAW (WWJ/AP) – A man whose drug-related prison sentence was commuted in November by President Barack Obama has been fatally shot at a federal halfway house in Michigan after two men with assault-style rifles sought him out, police said. Two men wearing masks went into Bannum Place in Saginaw on Monday night with plans to kill 31-year-old Damarlon Thomas, a former Saginaw gang member. Lt. David Kaiser said Thomas was shot several times by one of the men as some of the roughly two dozen people at the home were held at gunpoint.

Donald Trump might have violated US law on his first full day as President of the United States. Trump posted to both his personal account and the official @POTUS account throughout the day but deleted one particular tweet from his personal account - a potential violation of the Presidential Records Act. On Saturday morning, he tweeted: 'I am honered to serve you, the great American People, as your 45th President of the United States!' Thousands poked fun at his incorrect spelling of the word 'honored' and within minutes the tweet was deleted and a new one went up with the...

Pinned to the ground by officers who kneed and struck him, Lawrence Crosby screamed whatever he could think of to convince them that he was a law-abiding PhD student, not a violent car thief. “This is my vehicle, sir,” he said, his voice captured by the dashboard-camera video. “I have evidence. . . . I purchased this vehicle Jan. 23, 2015, from Libertyville Chevrolet.” It wasn’t enough. The officers placed him in handcuffs in the driveway of a church, two blocks from the police station in Evanston, Ill.

The December 28 New York Times reported another “oops!” in vitro fertilization (IVF) moment. A technician in Utrecht may have mixed up sperm used to fertilize eggs, leading to the members of 26 couples perhaps not being the parents of the babies they contracted to produce.I admit that last sentence is a bit awkward: it would be nicer to say “leading to 26 couples being unsure if they are the parents of the babies they conceived.” Indulge me temporarily—I have my reasons for how I formulated that thought.In the procedure used by the technician, one sperm is injected from a...

he Orange County Fire Authority told CBS2 riders got trapped when the Sky Cabin stalled about 130 feet in the air just before 5 p.m. Emergency crews were responding to the park to conduct a technical rescue. “What we’re gonna do right now is formulate a plan on exactly how to bring them down,” Capt. Larry Kurtz told CBS2. The OCFA had four technical rescue trucks on scene. The ride is enclosed and the guests all appeared to be safe, Kurtz said.