Free Republic

Workers in Bursa protesting the dismissals demanding their jobs back. An Amnesty International report was released on Monday focusing on the dismissal of public servants, including police officers, teachers, soldiers, doctors, judges, prosecutors and academics, by executive decree issued under the powers of the 10-months long state of emergency in Turkey.The mass dismissals have according to the report been “carried out arbitrarily on the basis of vague and generalized grounds of ‘connections to terrorist organizations’”.The summary dismissals were accompanied by expulsions from all forms of public service resulting in the complete deprival of any sort of income. While completely depending...

Picture from International Business Times Turkey has been crowned the ‘champion’ of Twitter bans as more and more accounts are being flagged up for ‘security reasons’, a report released by the social media giant shows.Twitter’s ‘transparency report’ announced that Turkey topped the list of countries that requested account closures, with Twitter closing 3,076 accounts in the last six months alone at Turkey’s request.Of these, 2,232 cases were requested by the government, police and other state institutions, and 844 were requested by the courts. A total of 8,417 tweets were also reported by Turkey, with Twitter closing 290 accounts and deleting...

Envoy Nikki Haley says Washington outraged by publication; Sec-Gen Guterres distances self from it; Israel slams it as ‘despicable’ The United States on Wednesday demanded that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres withdraw a report by a UN body accusing Israel of imposing apartheid on the Palestinians and of racially dominating them. Guterres distanced himself from the report by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) but US Ambassador Nikki Haley said it should be scrapped altogether. “The United States is outraged by the report,” said Haley in a statement. “The United Nations secretariat was right to distance itself...

Contents I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ......................................................................................................... 2 II. AN OVERVIEW OF REPOR TED HUMAN RIGHTS CONCERNS ............................................................. 5    A. Right to life .................................................................................................................. 7    B. Destruction and expropriation of property, including housing ..................................................... 9    C. Right to health ............................................................................................................. 13    D. Enforced disappearances ................................................................................................. 14    E. Internally displaced people ............................................................................................... 14    F. Physical and mental integrity ............................................................................................ 15    G. Right to liberty and security ............................................................................................. 16    H. Access to justice, fair trial and effective remedies .................................................................... 18    I. Rights to freedoms of opinion and expression, to freedom of association and to participate in publicaffairs . 20    J. Labour rights ................................................................................................................. 23...

Federal lawmakers seeking to pinpoint the number of illegal immigrants who successfully sneak across the southern border ordered up a report from the Department of Homeland Security, but the agency refuses to release it and instead cites a misleading statistic that overstates the number who are nabbed, sources told Fox News. DHS denied it is holding back the report, but sources say it was completed in November and that it shows roughly half of adults who attempt to cross the border make it - approximately 250,000 in total. But that number is at odds with DHS’ official estimates. The agency...

On the Friday before the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, a new report emerged on the terrorist attack of December 2, 2015, the day Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California. Bringing Calm to Chaos: A Police Foundation Review of the San Bernardino Terrorist Attacks provides a chilling description by those on the scene. “Out of the blue, multiple popping sounds crackled outside,” the report says. “Several of the county workers thought fireworks had been lit, but others recognized the sound as gunfire.” The burst claimed two victims, then the terrorists headed inside, to a room...

“WH [White House] very worried about the politics. This was all their doing.” [pg. 132] The Benghazi Committee has released their final report. The public statements made by Obama and Hillary Obama on the Benghazi attacks are strikingly at odds with what private communications reveal. It is devastating.This should be Hillary’s Waterloo. But we are living under the spiked boot of a left-wing apparatus with near total control of the elite media. There will be an eerie silence on this in the vast enemedia echo chamber. The Obama administration knowingly provided the American people a false story about the Benghazi...

Washington, D.C. – Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (SC-04) released the following statement after the committee’s Majority released a mark of its investigative report: “Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were heroes who gave their lives in service to our country. Their bravery and the courageous actions of so many others on the ground that night should be honored. “When the Select Committee was formed, I promised to conduct this investigation in a manner worthy of the American people’s respect, and worthy of the memory of those who died. That is exactly what my colleagues...

Democratic members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi published their final report on the investigation into the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attack Monday, front-running the findings from committee Republicans that are expected to be released within days. The 339-page report was accompanied by the unclassified versions of transcripts from interviews with dozens of witnesses involved in the handling of the attack. Democrats vowed their report would highlight "abuses" from Chairman Trey Gowdy and panel Republicans who probed the circumstances surrounding Benghazi for more than two years. The minority report, entitled "Honoring Courage, Improving Security, and Fighting the Exploitation of...

Hillary Clinton spent yesterday doing damage control after the release of the Inspector General report on her use of a secret e-mail server exposed her continuous stream of lies over the last 15 months on the topic. As part of that effort, Hillary called into Meet the Press Daily, where Chuck Todd took a skeptical view of the spin coming from Team Hillary, as Leah Barkoukis notes at Townhall. Todd zeroed in on one statement from the IG report in which Hillary refused to use an official State Department e-mail. Until yesterday, Hillary claimed she wanted one system for “convenience,”...

"The new IG report gives clarity to the screamingly obvious. Hillary Clinton used an unauthorized and unsecured private e-mail server to avoid compliance with legitimate Congressional oversight and Freedom of Information Act requests. Under her leadership, the State Department misled several courts and a number of Congressional inquiries about the existence of Clinton’s e-mails..."

The Middle East Quartet, made up of the US, EU, UN, and Russia, is scheduled to release a major policy report later in coming weeks, and senior diplomats involved in its drafting have indicated that the US is taking a far harder line on Israel than in the past. The report, which is likely to be released in late May or early June, will focus heavily on Israeli construction in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem, senior diplomats told AP. The Quartet’s report will also take Israel to task for the demolition of illegal Arab buildings – many of which were built...

"A 'twisted ideology' drove an Israeli soldier to fatally shoot a Palestinian assailant in the head as he lay subdued in the road," the US news site Vice claims, based on a classified IDF report on the recent incident. "A few seconds before the attack, few seconds before the attack, as came up in the investigation with Sergeant M, (Azariya) told him that 'a terrorist that wounded their friend needs to die," the site reported, adding that "Sergeant M tried to calm the soldier down telling him, 'Relax, our wounded friend will be just fine.'" Despite this, Azariya still shot...

Hillary Clinton’s State Department kept tabs on the Drudge Report, new emails released Thursday reveal.In an April 2012 email, then-Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Michael Hammer alerted then-Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton Cheryl Mills about a story “running on Drudge.”Image source: Screen grab The story was about a USAID program using federal dollars to train individuals for English-speaking jobs. The headline on the Drudge Report read, “Fed Gov’t Training Foreign Workers for English-Speaking Jobs.”Mills forwarded Hammer’s email, which included a press guidance and draft statement, to Clinton as an “Fyi.”In another email, this one from Dec. 2011, Hammer...

As representatives from 195 nations gather in Paris to hammer out a global agreement to slash greenhouse gas emissions, a new study finds that the failure to do so could leave the world gasping for breath. Marine plants such as phytoplankton are estimated to produce more than half the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the study, Sergei Petrovskii, an applied mathematics professor at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, calculated how unrestrained global warming could affect phytoplankton and thus the ocean’s ability to generate breathable air. He ran computer models that...

Is it just me or do others wonder what the Drudge Report is up to? It seems like so many headlines and stories are more Hollywood BS and other unimportant things, than any relevant information that concerned people would care about. Did Drudge turn into Nero just fiddling while Rome (the rest of the world) burns? One of the first sites (also Free Republic) I go to is Drudge, but unfortunately it is not usually not very important.

Politics Report: The Obama Administration Conducts More Closed-Door Meetings Than Ever Before Photo of Chuck Ross Chuck Ross Reporter 3:28 PM 11/03/2015 94 693 A new report finds that in the past decade, federal agencies held the highest percentage of closed-door meetings in 2013 and 2014, undermining President Obama’s commitment to running the “most transparent administration in history.” The report, from the Congressional Research Service, looked at data provided by federal agencies under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). The executive branch utilizes federal advisory committees as a way to allow outside experts to provide advice and recommendations to the...

A report this week by the California Department of Justice showing that homicides and other violent crimes continued to drop statewide in 2014 also gave a look at the nature of killings last year. Overall, 1,697 people were slain — an eye-opening amount to be sure but a 3 percent decline from 2013 and the lowest number since 1971. In 1993, a staggering 4,095 people were killed in the Golden State.

Earlier this year, the Democratic National Committee said it would release its full report on what went wrong for the party in the 2014 elections and what it can do to better perform in future elections by May. It’s now July, and that hasn’t happened yet. In February, the DNC released a preliminary nine-page report, saying its Democratic Victory Task Force final recommendations would be made public by mid-2015. “In May of 2015 the Task Force — in partnership with the Democratic National Committee — will release a strategic plan to guide the Party’s efforts through the 2022 elections,” the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A phosphate export firm owned by the Moroccan government will give the Clinton Foundation a donation of at least $1 million in advance of a May meeting the charity is to host in Morocco, Politico reported Thursday. The gift adds to the Clinton family charity's reliance on contributions from foreign nations as Hillary Rodham Clinton prepares to enter the 2016 presidential race. Clinton Foundation spokesman Craig Minassian did not confirm the Politico report about the donation from OCP, but said Thursday that international participants in the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in Marrakech in early May would work...