Free Republic

Joyce Thacker has been given the pay-off as she was named as one of the people singled out for criticism in a new report into the child sex abuse scandal ... Shamed former Rotherham children's services boss Joyce Thacker has received a £40,000 pay-off. The revelation comes as Mrs Thacker is among key figures in the town's child sex abuse scandal singled out for criticism in a new report. Mrs Thacker agreed the five-figure sum as a pay-off for leaving her £130,000 per year job, which took immediate effect last month. Furious abuse victims said Mrs Thacker should donate her...

In this Tuesday Jan. 21, 2014 file photo, former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell speaks during a news conference in Richmond, Va., accompanied by his wife, Maureen.AP As governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell was a savvy southerner often talked about as a hot Republican presidential prospect for 2016. Now he’s fighting to stay out of jail. The fall-from-grace narrative is a classic one, a rising-star politician who accepted lavish gifts from a rich businessman seeking help from state government. But this tale had a twist: McDonnell’s wife, Maureen, was a key go-between with the executive, Jonnie Williams. In a Richmond courthouse,...

Qatar and Kuwait have joined the nations praising the nuclear agreement struck between Iran and a group of world powers, while Israel continues to criticize the deal. The agreement reached in Geneva early on Sunday calls for Iran to limit its enrichment of uranium and freeze reactor construction. In return, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany agreed to ease some international sanctions on Iran's economy.

In this morning's interview Former Cigna exec seems to be cautiously optimistic about Obama's "fix" and the future of Obamacare.

Time managing editor Rick Stengel's decision to join the Obama administration is just the latest example of a new trend among mainstream media journalists who are making it official by officially joining the Obama administration. Stengel, who is joining the State Department, is just one of 15 (or 19) who have given up a career in journalism to join Obama's crusade to fundamentally transform America:

Foreign diplomacy doesn’t always resolve world-class problems, but it sure does rake in the swag. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was given a half-million bucks worth of diamond and ruby jewelry by Saudi Arabian King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz and received $58,000 worth of bling from Brunei. The lavish gifts were among a treasure trove of keepsakes bestowed upon U.S. leaders in 2012, the State Department disclosed Thursday. ... Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden got a bare-breasted female bust from Liberia. The Constitution prohibits U.S. government employees from keeping presents worth more than $350. But officials at the U.S....

Sen. Max Baucus (D) of Montana, (l.), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah, the co-chair, confer during testimony in Washington May 21. Baucus and Hatch came to the floor only a few minutes after passing the immigration reform bill – a top priority for leaders in both parties – to tell senators it was time to address tax reform.

WASHINGTON — A White House official says Tom Donilon is resigning as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser and will be replaced by Susan Rice. Rice is currently the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She has been harshly criticized by Republicans for her initial accounting of the attacks on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, which later proved to be incorrect.

(CNN) – Susan Rice, United States ambassador to the United Nations, will replace Tom Donilon as President Barack Obama's national security adviser, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

<p>President Obama says Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has requested and received the resignation of acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller, after critical report on targeting of conservative groups.</p>

North Korea’s young leader Kim Jong-un is waiting for United States President Barack Obama to make a phone call to Pyongyang to discuss easing tensions on the Korean peninsula, according to Russia’s news agency Itar-Tass. The report cited United Kingdom diplomats, saying Pyongyang was demanding the U.S. president personally call Kim Jong-un as one of the conditions to relieve the current conflict at hand.

Anonymous, a band of online vigilante activists, has turned its ire on the U.S. Department of Justice, threatening to release secret, internal documents the group hacked in memory of Aaron Swartz, the Internet prodigy who committed suicide before his federal trial. “With Aaron’s death we can wait no longer. The time has come to show the United States Department of Justice and its affiliates the true meaning of infiltration. The time has come to give this system a taste of its own medicine,” read part of the message and video posted on the U.S. Sentencing Commission website, which the activist...

A federal judge has issued three key rulings over a four-year period that favored companies in which he owned stock, a California Watch analysis has found. Measures are in place to prevent judges from violating federal conflict-of-interest laws. But Judge Manuel Real, a 46-year veteran of the bench appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, appears to have skirted those safeguards, records and interviews show. Judges are supposed to disclose everything from their investments to their attendance at expenses-paid seminars. When a financial conflict arises, no matter how small, they are required to step aside, by federal law and the Code of...

(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration named Holly Petraeus--wife of retired Gen. David Patraeus, who resigned last week as CIA director after revealing he had had an extramarital affair--to a $187,605-per-yer job in the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB, created by the Dodd-Frank law, was placed by that law under the umbrella of the Federal Reserve. The funding of the CFBP, which comes from the Federal Reserve, is not subject to congressional oversight. Mrs. Petraeus became a member of the CFPB Implementation Team on Jan. 12, 2011. She is now the assistant director for the Office of...

Nothing says class and glamour quite like comparing voting for the first time to losing your virginity. And nothing says grace and style like winning a national award for doing so. Now, the epitome of class, glamour, grace and style – Lena Dunham, who cut the infamous Obama campaign commercial suggesting that sleeping with Obama and voting for him were one and the same – has won Glamour’s “Woman of the Year Award.” In fact, Glamour labels her The Voice of a Generation. To which the American people reply: we’ll sell our bonds. Other winners include important figures ranging from...

Adding another wild-card to the 2012 campaign’s final days, a former aide to Vice President Joe Biden has written a tell-all Washington memoir in which he lacerates the former Delaware senator as an “egomaniacal autocrat” who was “determined to manage his staff through fear.” The book is hardly an objective study of the vice president, however. Author Jeff Connaughton, a Biden Senate staffer turned lobbyist, is by his own admission deeply disillusioned with the capital and embittered about his experience with the man who inspired him to enter politics. Connaughton wrote “The Payoff,” which came out last month, in the...

Friendly fire likely was to blame in a shooting near the Arizona-Mexico line that killed one federal agent and wounded another, the FBI said, noting the investigation was still ongoing in the case that reignited the political debate over border security. "There are strong preliminary indications that the death of United States Border Patrol Agent Nicholas J. Ivie and the injury to a second agent was the result of an accidental shooting incident involving only the agents," FBI Special Agent in Charge James L. Turgal Jr. said in a statement Friday.

President Barack Obama appointed Cheryl Saban, wife of the owner of Univision, as U.S. representative to the United Nations, according to reports from various news blogs. According to the Politico blog, Haim Saban, owner of the television network, backed Hillary Clinton in 2008, but during the summer donated $1 million to groups supporting the campaigns of Democrats. And according to another blog in Spanish of Yahoo, the appointment of Cheryl Saban to the diplomatic post was made last Wednesday, the day before Obama appeared at a forum at the University of Miami hosted by Univision.

This year, Americans have to work until July 15 to pay for the burden of government, more than six months.

The jury deciding the fate of John Edwards has asked to see more evidence exhibits. The former presidential candidate faces 30 years in prison after pleading not guilty to six campaign finance corruption charges. The jury began considering its decision Friday, after nearly four weeks of testimony. Deliberations continued Monday morning. On Monday afternoon, the jurors asked to see eight evidence exhibits. Prosecutors have accused the Democrat of masterminding a scheme to use nearly $1 million in secret payments from two donors to help hide his pregnant mistress as he sought the White House in 2008.