Free Republic

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...

Despite being arrested, fired from his job, called “crazy” and an “infidel” and being left destitute, Jordanian writer Jihad Ali Alwan, 42, has no intention backing off his full-throated support of Israel, and from every possible platform, Israel’s NRG News reported Monday. “I don’t care what price I’ll pay. I will not apologize for my beliefs,” Alwan said, writing on his personal blog, “I suggest the Arabs normalize relations with Israel,” he wrote in October of last year. “Hamas is the real killer because its men hide behind civilians and it does not have the courage to go into face-to-face...

Remember the old conservative charge that many of the Democrats here in America were playing footsie with the Soviets? Some Republicans even said the Russians viewed the Democrats as their favorite party. Now bombshell revelations prove these accusations beyond a shadow of a doubt. Peter Schweizer, a Hoover Institution research fellow, has just written a new book, "Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism." This book may well well force historians to revise the history of the Cold War. Schweizer, after scouring once classified KGB, East German Stasi and Soviet Communist Party files,...

Pierre Ryckmans, writer and academic. Born 1935, died 2014 Nowadays Mao is generally regarded as a tyrant on a par with Hitler and Stalin — worse, by some measures, if “indirect deaths” (starvation due to his policies) are counted in the overall toll. Yet in the 1970s he was the darling of the European radical Left. Pierre Ryckmans was born in Brussels into a well-off, devout Roman Catholic family. One relative was a monsignor; another a governor of the Belgian Congo. He first visited China in 1955 as a student and subsequently worked in Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong before...

"[The U.S. is] reducing our [nuclear] arsenal. We are investing less. All the while our enemies are exponentially increasing their expenditures, making more sophisticated weapons, flouting arms control agreements, and…Vladimir Putin announced a couple of weeks ago that he was taking titular control personally of the Russian arms control agency. So we have a crisis here, and one that’s both been unacknowledged and un-discussed.”

For a guy who claimed to spend 17 years in China as a confidant of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo left a surprisingly skimpy paper trail. No Asian sources mention the footloose Italian. The only record of his 13th-century odyssey through the Far East is the hot air of his own Travels, which was actually an “as told to” penned by a writer of romances. But a set of 14 parchments, now collected and exhaustively studied for the first time, give us a raft of new stories about Polo’s journeys and something notably missing from his own account: maps. If genuine,...

The Parthenon represents, for many, a golden age in human achievement: the 5th-century b.c. Greek flowering of democracy, sciences, and the arts. But what if its chief ornament, the Parthenon frieze, turned out to be not an embodiment of reason and proportion—of stillness at the heart of motion, quiet piety, and enlightened civic responsibility—but (or, rather, also) something darker, more primitive: a representation of the critical moment in an ancient story of a king at war, a human sacrifice, and a goddess’s demand for virgin blood? That’s the argument at the heart of The Parthenon Engima. The plot involves not...

Canterbury Cathedral, where Archbishop Thomas Becket was killed, is the city’s biggest tourist attraction with a million visitors every yearAfter nearly 1,000 years, murder in the cathedral is still luring visitors to Canterbury. It was in the Canterbury Cathedral in 1107 that Archbishop Thomas Becket was killed, viciously, by four knights who believed they were doing the bidding of King Henry 2. As a result, Becket became a martyr and the cathedral a place of pilgrimage to his shrine. The homicide was the subject of Murder in the Cathedral, a verse drama by T.S. Eliot, and was more famously immortalised...

It is one of the tragedies of recent cultural history that, thanks to Mel Gibson's preposterous movie "Braveheart," the world knows more about William Wallace's short-lived Scottish rebellion of 1296-97 than about Robert the Bruce. For it was Bruce who, after 18 years of plotting and war making, finally threw off the yoke of the English king and consolidated a sense of Scottish identity. "Never will we on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English," said the Declaration of Arbroath, a diplomatic letter commissioned by Bruce in 1320. "It is in truth not for glory, nor riches,...

Less than a month after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton distanced herself from President Obama by ridiculing his foreign policy, a key member of the Clinton kitchen cabinet is out with a new book that slams U.S. policy as “muddled, irresolute, and even feckless.” Doug Schoen’s double-barreled blast at Obama in the new book, The Russia-China Axis: The New Cold War and America’s Crisis of Leadership, is the latest sign that Clinton’s team will throw Obama under the bus if that’s what it takes to get her into the White House. “President Obama’s America is a passive, confused and...

Pro-choice author Anne Eggebroten, edited a book entitled Abortion: My Choice, God’s Grace which tells the stories of Christian women who had abortions. The book celebrates abortion as an acceptable choice and tries to justify it based on the Bible. There is one story in particular I want to comment on. It is a first-hand account of a pro-choice clinic escort who describes how she got involved in the pro-choice movement. I think what she said is worth considering: My participation in the pro-choice march was motivated by boredom and restlessness as much as by a desire to be of...

Via the Daily Caller, you would think an eyewitness account of the disappearance of the last American POW in Afghanistan would be easy money for a publisher. But sometimes there are higher considerations. While the U.S. Army weighs whether to bring charges against Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was freed earlier this year after spending nearly five years as a Taliban captive in Afghanistan, six of his former platoon mates are shopping proposals for a book and movie that would render their own harsh verdicts… “I’m not sure we can publish this book without the Right using it to their ends,”...

'The CIA plotted twice to assassinate President Richard Nixon during the years before the Watergate scandal because the agency was angered when 'Tricky Dick' turned dovish and began to withdraw troops from Vietnam, according to an explosive book from a longtime Nixon confidant due for release on Monday. One hit was planned to occur at Nixon's Key Biscayne, Florida vacation house. A second plot to kill him was to culminate during a Miami speech in 1972. When both plots failed, writes best-selling author Roger Stone in 'Nixon's Secrets: The Rise, Fall and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the...

Former President Bill Clinton is a “classic narcissist” who is “always faithful [only] to himself” and who may not want his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary, to realize her ambitions for the White House in 2016, Daniel Halper, author of the book Clinton, Inc., suggested today. When speaking to Clinton confidantes, Halper said he was initially skeptical of these rumors, but found that many sources independently confirmed each other, and, “All of a sudden it begins to make sense. [When] you start hearing [this] from multiple people, from multiple good sources, and you start to realize—this is a man...

In the first paragraph of the prologue to his new book, The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way... And It Wasn't My Fault... And I'll Never Do It Again, political humor writer P.J. O'Rourke declares in no uncertain terms that he is "full of crap." Similarly, in the introduction to his upcoming book You Can Date Boys When You're Forty, humor columnist Dave Barry explains that his book, despite its subtitle "Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About," is not about parenting. It's easy to imagine that when these two bestselling authors and longtime pals get together,...

Trevor Loudon’s The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the US Congress is to be turned into a “game changing” movie. Timed for release in August 2015 “The Enemies Within” will be like no other film ever released in America. Production standards will be Hollywood quality. Guiding values however, will be 100% American. The Enemies Within will name names, and and go where no one has gone in modern times, in its quest to awaken Americans to the enemies within their own government.

I don’t know who the next U.S. attorney general will be. But I know I pity that person. Restoring the Justice Department’s reputation in the wake of Eric Holder’s tenure will take a lot of work. You can find out just how big a task it will be in “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department,” a new book by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky. Even at a relatively slim 217 pages, it’s quite a bill of indictment. It’s one thing to read about certain cases as they pop up in the news cycle -- an article about a civil-rights...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com - Untold Stories of Israeli InnovationPosted By Jim Fletcher On May 30, 2014 @ 12:20 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments Marcella Rosen knew what she had to do. Standing on the sidelines while the state of Israel was being denigrated just wouldn’t work for the marketing professional from New York. If the news about Israel is almost always negative, she’d do something about it.She’d share untold news. And that’s how Untold News (www.untoldnews.org) was born.Untold News gathers and disseminates positive stories about the myriad ways Israeli innovation brings help, hope, and healing to...

Boys are being put off reading because of the influence women have on children’s literature, says an award-winning children’s author. Jonathan Emmett warned that children’s books were too girly because of the influence of mostly female panels of editors, publishers, reviewers and judges. One publishing company’s research suggested women bought 95 percent of picture books for children, he added. The writer believes boys are being starved of what they enjoy in books, such as swashbuckling pirates, battles, or technical details about spaceships, and so are driven to more action-packed video games instead. …

FULL TITLE: Boys turning to action-packed video games because books are 'too girly' for them, says award-winning children's author Boys are being put off reading because of the influence women have on children’s literature, says an award-winning children’s author. Jonathan Emmett warned that children’s books were too girly because of the influence of mostly female panels of editors, publishers, reviewers and judges. One publishing company’s research suggested women bought 95 per cent of picture books for children, he added. The writer believes boys are being starved of what they enjoy in books, such as swashbuckling pirates, battles, or technical details...