Free Republic

If you’re one of those people who doesn't like having your picture taken, here's some dubious advice courtesy of a great white shark: try to eat the camera. Discovery Channel's website recently featured a series of videos of sharks inspecting, intimidating, and even attacking an underwater vehicle that was filming the marine predators in their native habitat.

Justin Bieber may have millions of fans worldwide, but Russia's bears don't appear to admire the pop brat's music - which proved fortunate for one lucky fisherman. Igor Vorozhbitsyn had his life saved by a Justin Bieber ringtone, when his mobile phone went off during a potentially fatal attack by a brown bear. ... But as the bear began to claw at him, Igor's mobile went off. The singer's hit Baby rang out and the bear turned tail and fled back into the forest.

Mark Twain once quipped, “If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.” In Washington, D.C., the same thing can be said for the truth; in a flash, it will change -- usually with a forecast of sanctimonious apologies. The latest example of this phenomenon occurred just last week, when the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general revealed that the agency had in fact illegally hacked into computers used by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI); the body designed – ironically -- to provide oversight of America’s intelligence agencies. True to Twain’s wry observation, it...

US actress Marilyn Burns, best known for her "scream queen" role in horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, has died aged 65. The Erie, Pennsylvania-born actress, who played teenager Sally Hardesty in Tobe Hooper's 1974 film, was found dead at her home near Houston, Texas. Burns went on to play Linda Kasabian, a member of the Charles Manson "family", in 1976 TV movie Helter Skelter. In later life she made cameos in other iterations of the Massacre franchise. She was an unnamed "patient on gurney" in 1994's Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, a film notable for providing early...

A prominent CNN commentator, the top two political reporters for The Huffington Post, a Reuters reporter, the editor of The Nation magazine, a producer for Al Jazeera America television, a U.S. News & World Report columnist, and approximately two dozen Huffington Post contributors are among the more than 1,000 members of Gamechanger Salon. Founded by leftwing activist Billy Wimsatt, the group is a secretive digital gathering of writers, opinion leaders, activists and political hands who share information, ideas and strategy via a closed Google group.

As Vladimir Putin’s tanks begin to roll forth from Russia like Sauron’s legions from Mordor, a pair of American villains is working hard to undermine our resolve against the greatest threat from Europe to American values and power, and indeed to world peace, since Adolf Hitler.Evgeny Feldman, a photographer for the maverick Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, recently visited a book store in Moscow and tweeted [1] a photograph from amongst its shelves. Among volumes on one topical shelf such as The Crimes of the U.S.A. and The Third World War and Forward to Victory, in which authors offered bloodthirsty...

Russian Man/Minion Duck Video plus Plus Bonus Video...Tens of Bunnies Chasing Hong Kong Woman in Japan

"In the October-November 2011 issue of Migration Policy Practice, the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) announced that in March it had ‘partnered’ with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). An IOM/DHS workshop, held around the same time as the first ‘Morton Memo’, planned how to best facilitate a mass migration of illegal immigrants into the United States..." " On July 18, 2014, the IOM posted this article on their website clearly claiming credit for facilitating the crisis: 'IOM Stresses Need to Increase Assistance to Unaccompanied Children Traveling to the United States' excerpt - “The ability of transit countries...

Though I typically resist, my wife often tries to get me to put down the laptop and enjoy the Zen of gardening with her. So you can imagine her surprise when she returned from a trip to find a beautiful clump of nonwild flowers planted in her garden. She loved the welcome-home gift and was ready to bestow upon me many valuable (and increasingly elusive) good-husband points. The thing is, I have no idea how those flowers got there. And like George Washington, I could not tell a lie. But had I in fact been an actual president, I probably...

At 74,000 pages, the IRS code is a mind-boggling ode to lobbying, pork-barrel spending and graft. These are the only good things that I can say about the IRS. Ode may be too friendly a word, however. Let’s instead call it an incantation for our country. Because the code holds a country in thrall like the winged monkeys in Dorothy’s Oz were held. And until the witch is dead, we monkeys must do her bidding. Politicians, economists and ordinary citizens can’t follow the tax code, which has tripped up cabinet nominees, majority leaders and others who ought to know...

International experts have suspended their search for body parts at the MH17 crash site on Wednesday because of deteriorating security in eastern Ukraine, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said. "It doesn't make sense to continue with the repatriation in this manner," the Dutch leader told a press conference in The Hague. Rutte said increasing tension between Kiev -- which is battling pro-Russian separatists in the area -- has made it too unsafe to continue with the search for victims' remains. "It goes without saying that Australia and Malaysia and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation are with us on this...

The need for strong American foreign policy has never been greater. As the world burns, Barack Obama's White House tells us, "The world is less violent than it has ever been." Deaths in Ukraine and Gaza mount while anti-democratic terrorists attempt to suppress freedom and rain fire upon their enemies. This is happening in the most fragile places. Places that had more calm and resolve under the Clinton and Bush Administrations than they do under the Obama presidency. Even at home, Mexican refugees flood across the American border in historic numbers, amounting to the greatest humanitarian crisis since Hurricane Katrina....

*** Thanks to flimsy copyright laws in the region, Israeli and Palestinian television stations routinely tap into each other’s transmissions and broadcast them to their viewers. Since Gazans and Israelis are barred from entering each other’s territories, this swap of feeds often stands in for reporters on the ground. The news broadcasts—a fun-house mirror of Israeli television showing Palestinian television showing Israeli television—sometimes offer the only window into the reality of life on the other side. Occasionally, the voyeurism becomes even more surreal. Yaari, one of Israel’s most respected Arabists, often tries to strike up a conversation with the anchors...

New NAACP president: Garner's death is part of a terrible national pattern of violence against communities of color.The tragic death of Eric Garner, an African-American man who died after a New York Police Department officer put him in a chokehold, is a grim reminder of our country’s broken, ineffective and unjust system of policing. Garner’s death is not a symbol. His death is a heartbreaking symptom of the untested and overaggressive policing culture that has become commonplace from New York to California. In streets and avenues across this country, “broken windows” policing and police violence are distressing our communities. We...

I certainly didn’t know foreign policy would be front and center in the final months before the midterm elections when I wrote in late April that these issues “could have an indirect yet significant impact on the midterm elections.” But now, it looks increasingly as if foreign policy — particularly problems in the Middle East and relations with Russia — will add to the president’s woes. While international issues are a low priority to most Americans, the daily dose of bad news from the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine makes it difficult for the public to appreciate any good economic...

In eastern Ukraine, the battle lines have been shifting for months, after pro-Russian separatists asserted effective control over several key towns across the region. In a bid to assert its control, the Ukrainian forces have been fighting for months, to reinstate Kyiv’s authority over areas held by pro-Russian separatists. Law and order do not necessarily follow. In the broader context of a deteriorating security situation in the east, Amnesty International has recently raised its concerns with the Ukrainian authorities about one particularly errant MP who has been “detaining” – in effect abducting – and ill-treating individuals across the region. He’s...

Worth a watch, especially on this particular network even though Morning Joe offers much more reality than most of the rest of MSNBC’s schedule. Today’s reminder of reality comes from Wall Street Journal’s White House correspondent Carol Lee, who points out that the sunny rhetoric from Barack Obama and his administration has a “total disconnect” to the reality for most Americans, as seen in the latest NBC/WSJ poll. Time for another pivot? CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “The President was campaigning, raising money in California a few weeks ago,” Lee notes, “and he was saying, ‘People feel better than...

Independent conservative Thomas Ravenel has been certified as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina, meaning his name will appear on the November ballot alongside incumbent “Republican” Lindsey Graham, Democrat Brad Hutto and Libertarian Victor Kocher. The certification of Ravenel – the star of Bravo TV’s reality television show Southern Charm - means he has met the state’s threshold of 10,000 valid signatures, according to election officials. That’s not a big surprise, as Ravenel submitted more than 17,000 signatures last month and was within 60 valid signatures of qualifying for the ballot when we checked in on his...

Yesterday, I posted a YouTube video that had spawned the gif of the tiger attack you see below. For some reason the video was terribly disappointing and I felt that way, too. But had thought the video would be superior to a simple gif. Today, reading a commenter's disappointment totally agreed with him as I've expressed here below. Hopefully you'll all enjoy the gif and never bother to seethe video it originated from. I wouldn't, couldn't disagree with you. I first saw the famed tiger attack as a gif (here below much more dramatic than the video could ever be)and...

I just read within the last hour 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm a great article with at least 15? links to articles about Obama and his shady backround. I went to print it out but my printer fritzed so that when I finally got back to it the article had disappeared. I have looked and looked. One of the links was to Obabma paid $5million dollars in legal fees to cover his birth certificate. Could someone please help me locate this Post? Thank you.