Free Republic

On December 11, 1941, several days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States declaration of war against the Japanese Empire, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, in response to what was claimed to be a series of provocations by the United States government when the US was formally neutral during World War II. The decision to declare war was made almost entirely by Adolf Hitler, without consultation. Hitler had received no advance notice from the Japanese about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Although he and his Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had verbally indicated a willingness...

It didn’t take all that much to tip a great civilization into the shackles of empire. Rome holds a special place in the popular imagination. Cast as a culture steeped in myth, with values reminiscent of our own, it is often treated as the forebearer of our own political system, an ancestral democracy that provides a republican link between the present and the ancient past. From architecture to literature to political system, Rome is where it all began. But in his latest book, Richard Alston wants us all to think a little more critically about our beloved Rome. Alston is...

A suspected burglar jumped in a Florida lake apparently hiding from law enforcement before an 11-foot alligator killed him, investigators said Monday. His hand and foot reportedly turned up inside the animal's stomach. Brevard County Sheriff's Maj. Tod Goodyear says 22-year-old Matthew Riggins told his girlfriend he would be in Barefoot Bay to commit burglaries with another suspect. Authorities received calls Nov. 13 about two suspicious men in black walking behind homes and investigated. Riggins was reported missing the next day.

Rabia Chaudry kept her 7-year-old daughter home from her private Islamic school in Maryland on Thursday, fearing anti-Muslim backlash from Wednesday’s massacre nearly 3,000 miles away in San Bernardino, Calif. “I think we are all feeling exhausted and very vulnerable,” said Chaudry, a lawyer and national security fellow at the New America Foundation. “I’m angry at those people who did this attack. And I’m angry at how this is being politicized. Everything boils down to, ‘We should fear Muslims. And they shouldn’t be here.’ ” American Muslims say they are living through an intensely painful moment and feel growing anti-Muslim...

Law enforcement sources tell CBS News senior investigative producer Pat Milton the suspects’ explosive devices owned by California shooters Syed Rizwan, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, are nearly a carbon copy of bomb constructing instructions provided for in one of the very first issues of al Qaeda’s online magazine, INSPIRE, entitled “How To Build A Bomb In the Kitchen of Your Mom.” At their home, they had 12 pipe bombs, tools for making more such explosives, and over 3,000 more rounds of ammunition, Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said. The bombs in their various stages were made of the ingredients provided...

San Bernardino Shooter Passed DHS Counterterrorism Background Check Heck of a job, Department of Homeland Security: Federal investigators believe there is a “very serious” possibility that Tashfeen Malik, one of two shooters who murdered 14 people and wounded 21 others in San Bernardino, Calif. Wednesday, radicalized her husband and co-assailant, county restaurant inspector Syed Farook, Fox News has learned. Investigators also believe that the couple had planned a second attack after the shooting at a social service center for the disabled when they were killed in a shootout with local authorities approximately two miles away… Officials said Thursday that Malik...

President Obama says the attackers’ motivations in Wednesday's mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., are not yet clear. President Barack Obama said Thursday the mass shooting on Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif., could have been terrorist-related, but a motive is not clear yet. “We don’t know” the attackers’ motivations, Obama told reporters at the White House. He said it was also possible that the shooting was workplace-related. Authorities are investigating the killing of at least 14 people and wounding of at least another 14 at a government services center in the city. Suspects identified in San Bernardino shooting(0:56) Two suspects,...

Starting at least three years ago, I have heard on the radio station WJR AM 760 Detroit, a recruitment ad for the Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, MI which lists the various types of people they are looking for to enroll in their school. Among these most desired types are "the risk-takers" and "the anarchists"... This ad is usually run during the early morning drive but I have not heard it on any other station or at any other time. The fact that they announce that they are actively seeking "anarchists" is somewhat bothersome but since I first heard this...

Thanks to Obama’s open border policies there are now hundreds of thousands of cases of Chagas Disease in the United States today. Chagas disease also known as American trypanosomiasis, is a potentially life-threatening illness caused by the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi (T. cruzi). It is found mainly in endemic areas of 21 Latin American countries. The disease is transmitted to humans by contact with feces of triatomine bugs, known as ‘kissing bugs.’ Chagas disease is spread by the Kissing Bug in Latin American countries. Chagas often leads to a fatal condition known as Chagasic cardiomyopathy. The National School for Tropical...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted for the first time Tuesday that Israeli forces have been operating in Syria, where the Iran-backed regime is battling rebels including the jihadist Islamic State. î‚€ "We occasionally carry out operations in Syria to prevent that country from becoming a front against us," Netanyahu told reporters during a visit to northern Israel. "We also do everything to prevent weapons, particularly lethal ones, being moved from Syria to Lebanon," he added. Netanyahu did not provide further details and his comments were the first public recognition that Israel has been active in conflict-riddled Syria.

Asked about how the U.S. could commit to environmental action if a Republican were to succeed him, President Barack Obama on Tuesday said he was confident that Democrats would retain the White House. “I am anticipating a Democrat succeeding me,” Obama said at a press conference in Paris at the end of a conference on climate change. “I am confident in the wisdom of the American people on that front,” he added. The latest polls lend some credence to Obama’s prediction. The RealClearPolitics average of national polls has former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leading the Republican front-runner, businessman Donald...

That ISIS fighter who was seen "crying like a baby" in a video that went viral over the weekend may have had a very good reason to cry. ISIS fighters captured in Iraq with the help of U.S. forces are allegedly being tortured, the Daily Beast reports. And because the fate of ISIS prisoners is apparently low on their priority list, the Obama administration is looking away. On Oct. 22, a team of Kurdish soldiers, backed up by elite commandos from the U.S. Army’s Delta Force, raided an ISIS prison compound in the Iraqi town of Hawija, where Kurdish intelligence...

The King of Sweden has called for a ban on baths to help save the environment. King Carl XVI Gustaf, who once had a reputation as a lothario and is now a staunch environmentalist, said he realised how much water and energy they used when he was recently staying somewhere without a shower. The 69-year-old ‘green king’ told Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet: ‘It hit me how much water and energy it used. ‘I thought “I can’t believe I’m having to do this”. I felt quite ashamed.’ Apparently in jest, he added: ‘We should ban all baths.’ The Swedish head of...

More than 1,300 people, around two-thirds of them combatants, have been killed in Russian air strikes in Syria since Moscow's aerial campaign began on September 30, a monitor said Friday. The figure supplied by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is more that double the overall toll it gave in its last report on the Russian campaign three weeks ago. The Britain-based Observatory said it had documented 1,331 deaths in Russian air strikes, most of them of Islamic State group jihadists or other fighters.. It said 381 IS fighters had been killed, along with 547 militants from Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra...

I've always been that adult who squeezes in with the kids at their mini coloring table and delves into the arts and crafts right along with them. I may have even snagged a page or two out of their coloring books and created my own masterpiece- and then proudly displayed it to all of the 4-year-olds in the room. But now the doodling dreams of grown-ups worldwide have come true with coloring books for adults. We can unwind with our very own coloring books tailored for an older crowd, containing countless pages of intricate designs. Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure...

BOSTON (MyFoxBoston.com) -- The Mass. Registry of Motor Vehicles is allowing a Pastafarian woman to wear a colander in her driver’s license picture. This comes after The American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center's attorneys were enlisted to assist with the woman's appeal after she was denied the right to wear it in her license photo by the RMV. Lindsay Miller says she is a Pastafarian, also known as a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which is a secular religion that believes the existence of a "spaghetti monster" to be just as possible as the existence...

There are times when you see or read something that you just know you want to share. On this Veterans Day I was fortunate enough to have the following excerpts shared from the logs and diary of a then 23 year old B-24 pilot. Mr. Drummond, who is still with us today and is the 94 year old father of our banker, wrote these words back then and I think they say something to each of us. To those of us who are aviators they surely speak to how it must have felt to command a 4 engine bomber with...

A group of University of Massachusetts students is attempting to bring attention to rights and access that transgender and non-gender conforming people have on campus. Gender Liberation UMass has already held a rally, delivered a letter of demands to Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy’s office and dropped a banner, and has more events planned for the rest of the week. Justin Killian, a junior majoring in women, gender and sexuality studies, and social thought and political economy, as well as one of the organizers of the week’s events, said that this week would set a precedent in terms of activism of the...

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is offering “voice feminization therapy” for male students claiming to be transgender women. As part of the university’s “Transitioning at UWM” resource, the university encourages students to utilize “voice feminization therapy for male-to-female transgender clients” offered by the UWM Speech and Language Clinic, which claims to treat “voice disorders in adults and children.” Elsewhere on the UWM website, the university claims voice feminization therapy is a “non-medical option” that allows transgender students to “live their gender identities.” Michelle Johnson, the Media Content Manager at UWM, told Campus Reform that the school provides the voice feminization therapy...

For the press, the debate over ObamaCare is over. There may be a few proverbial Japanese soldiers wandering on isolated islands yammering on about the failure of ObamaCare, but word will eventually filter down to them, too. This assumption is so deeply embedded that it is impervious to new evidence that ObamaCare is an unwieldy contraption that is sputtering badly. Yes, ObamaCare has covered more people and has especially benefited those with pre-existing conditions (to be credible, Republican replacement plans have to do these things, as well), but the program is so poorly designed that, surely, even a new Democratic...