Free Republic

When new Police Chief Cecil Smith arrived in Sanford, Fla., in April, he suspended the city's neighborhood watch program — the one under whose auspices George Zimmerman had patrolled the streets until he fatally shot unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin. Now Smith is restarting the program, but the police department says it will exercise more control over volunteers, including doing background checks and asking them not to carry guns. "We just don't see the need for anybody to be armed," Smith told the Associated Press. Smith has chosen to ask the volunteers rather than order them, perhaps because Florida law allows...

WASHINGTON — Under growing pressure, the administration refused repeatedly to state a position Tuesday on legislation formalizing President Barack Obama's oft-stated promise that people who like their existing coverage should be allowed to keep it under the new health care law. Senate Democrats spoke dismissively of the proposals, signaling they have no intention of permitting a vote on the issue that marks the latest challenge confronting supporters of "Obamacare." An earlier controversy appeared to be ebbing on a law that has generated more than its share of them. Even so, one strong supporter of the health care law, Sen. Sheldon...

MK Shimon Ohayon (Likud-Beytenu) has urged European diplomats to prevent anti-Semites from taking over the discourse over anti-Semitism, urging them to push for the implementation of the “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism” adopted in 2004 by the European Union Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). … Citing a soon to be publicized study by the EU’s own Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA)—which replaced the EUMC in 2007—which will show a significant rise in anti-Semitism over the past five years, Ohayon noted that “Anti-Semitism in Europe is at its greatest peak since the end of the Second World War.” Insisting that “Europe...

Diplomats and parliamentarians, mainly from European countries, have actively participated in popular resistance events and activities initiated by Palestinian Authority Arabs in Judea and Samaria, a report released by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) has found. The report has found that in isolated cases, these European diplomats and parliamentarians also participate in activities on the ground which defy Israel. The report cited as an example the French diplomat who was documented as she physically attacked an Israeli soldier during a demonstration in support of illegal Bedouin squatters. The popular resistance, noted ITIC, is a strategy supported...

The parents of the 13-year-old Santa Rosa boy shot dead by a Sonoma County sheriff's deputy filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Monday and laid out the findings of their own private investigation into the shooting, which they claim was unjustified. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco by the parents of Andy Lopez, accuses Deputy Erick Gelhaus of acting recklessly when he shot Lopez seven times as the boy walked through a southwest Santa Rosa neighborhood with an airsoft BB gun that resembled an AK-47 assault rifle. The lawsuit also faults the Sheriff's Office, accusing it...

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Tim Bowers loved the outdoors. Hunting gave him the quiet time during which he could reflect on a busy life that included a new wife, a successful business and a baby on the way...

An unwitting British soldier who posed for a photograph with a rogue Afghan policeman was shot dead by him seconds later. Corporal Brent McCarthy, 25, is pictured with a member of the Afghan Uniformed Police just moments before the shooting. After the snap was taken the gunman and another accomplice turned their weapons on the RAF policeman.

Created: 11/05/2013 10:45 PM By: Caleb James, KOB Eyewitness News 4 Some think they know what the 2016 Republican presidential ticket looks like. It includes New Mexico governor Susana Martinez. On Monday, Martinez made eight campaign stops with New Jersey governor, republican Chris Christie. The appearances have some saying Martinez and Christie together could be a preview of 2016's republican presidential ticket. Martinez and Christie are no new political team -- they've campaiged together before. After Monday though, some say looking at these two together could be a preview of the 2016 Republican presidential ticket: "We cross party lines, we...

Suspected Islamist militants attacked a wedding convoy in northeast Nigeria and killed more than 30 people including the groom, a state government spokesman said on Sunday. Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Muhammed Dole said only five people were killed in Saturday’s attack on the highway between Gama and Gwoza towns in Borno state. That road runs alongside forests that are a known hideout of the Boko Haram terrorist network.

TYSONS CORNER -- Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic fundraiser and confidant of Bill and Hillary Clinton, will be Virginia's next governor after defeating his conservative opponent, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, on Tuesday in a race that confirmed the state's status as an increasingly blue battleground. The marquee contest was marked throughout by historically high spending, a relentless barrage of attacks on both sides and campaign trail cameos by some of the nation's most prominent political figures. With more than 99 percent of precincts reporting, McAuliffe led Cuccinelli by less than 2 percent — 48 percent to 46 percent — or...

Two French radio journalists were found dead after being kidnapped by armed men in northern Mali in what President Francois Hollande called a “despicable” act as he ordered an emergency ministers’ meeting for Sunday. Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon of Radio France Internationale (RFI) had travelled on Saturday to the northern city of Kidal to interview a spokesman for the Tuareg separatist group the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), and were abducted outside his home, according to their employer. RFI said MNLA spokesman Ambery Ag Rhissa said he heard a commotion outside and “saw the kidnappers put...

November 6, 2013 Wednesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time    Reading 1 Rom 13:8-10 Brothers and sisters:Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another;for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.The commandments, You shall not commit adultery;you shall not kill;you shall not steal;you shall not covet,and whatever other commandment there may be,are summed up in this saying, namely,You shall love your neighbor as yourself.Love does no evil to the neighbor;hence, love is the fulfillment of the law. Responsorial Psalm PS 112:1b-2, 4-5, 9 R. ( 5a) Blessed the man who is gracious and lends to...

Bill de Blasio overwhelmingly was elected mayor here Tuesday, becoming the first Democrat to lead New York in 20 years and ushering in an era of activist liberal governance in the nation’s largest city. In early returns Tuesday night, de Blasio was soundly defeating Republican Joe Lhota, a protégé of former mayor Rudy Giuliani. De Blasio campaigned on a mantle of progressive change following Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s 12 years in office, highlighting what he saw as “a tale of two cities.” The moneyed Manhattan elite have had their mayor, he argued, and now the 46 percent of New Yorkers...

AMERICA’S CHANGING demographics, long a delicate topic, have become an increasingly prominent part of national political debate... --snip-- "The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies," that encouraging reports of higher Hispanic rates of graduation from high school often did not account for Hispanics who never entered high school in the first place. They warned that “as a group, Latino students today perform academically at levels that will consign them to lives as members of a permanent underclass in American society. Moreover, their situation is projected to worsen over time.” Academic stagnation in so large and rapidly expanding...

Bill de Blasio, who transformed himself from a little-known occupant of an obscure office into the fiery voice of New York’s disillusionment with a new gilded age, was elected the city’s 109th mayor on Tuesday. His landslide victory, stretching from the working-class precincts of central Brooklyn to the suburban streets of southeast Queens, amounted to a forceful rejection of the hard-nosed, business-minded style of governance that reigned at City Hall for the past two decades and a sharp leftward turn for the nation’s largest metropolis. Mr. de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, defeated Joseph J. Lhota, a former chairman of...

Link only, due to copyright: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/10/30/delay-obamacare-website-congress-obama-health-care-column/3315785/

Radical Left-wing activists demonstrated in Vancouver, Canada on Sunday in a call to boycott Israeli company SodaStream for operating in “occupied territories” and “mistreating” Palestinian workers. SodaStream manufactures and distributes machines for home use to make carbonated drinks, eliminating the need to buy environmentally harmful plastic bottles. It has been discriminated against by the boycott movement for holding its headquarters in the eastern Jerusalem suburb city of Ma’ale Adumim, located over the 1949 Armistice lines. …

It's a story that has left the entire country wondering about the state of law enforcement in New Mexico. 4 On Your Side revealed how David Eckert rolled through a stop sign in Deming. A K-9 named Leo alerted that it sniffed drugs on Eckert's driver's seat. And, for the next 14 hours, those police officers, and doctors at the Gila Regional Medical Center performed eight medical procedures including x-rays, rectal finger exams, enemas, and finally a colonoscopy. According to a federal lawsuit, officers Boby Orosco and Robert Chavez were two of the officers involved, and they never found drugs...

White House press secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday said Americans are more concerned with the shutdown and its long-term effects than “anything else, really,” and that issue will be on their minds as they had to the polls in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City and elsewhere. “We’ve moved on here in this room and elsewhere across Washington on what the story of the day is … but when it comes to the American people out there, I guarantee you that most of your readers and viewers and listeners care a lot more about their economic plight and how the...

President Obama will press Republican governors to allow the ObamaCare expansion of Medicaid into their states during a trip to Dallas on Wednesday, according to White House and local officials. The president will call on Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) to "put politics aside" and "not deny people healthcare because of ideology," White House deputy senior advisor David Simas told reporters on Tuesday. When the Affordable Care Act originally passed, states were required to expand Medicaid coverage for all individuals making below the federal poverty level or within 138 percent of it. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year...