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In the wake of the damning American Senate report on the CIA’s torture practices French far-right leader Marine Le Pen risked a backlash when in an interview she claimed there are times when torture can "be useful to make someone talk". The report uncovered the brutal CIA interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects in the years after 9/11 and sent shockwaves around Washington and the rest of the world. The UN and human rights groups are now even calling for the prosecution of the US officials involved but Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing Front National party, seems to have a...

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, says the proverb, but rather the hero’s heart. Maybe this is true in any battle; it is surely true of a war that is waged with bleach and a prayer. For decades, Ebola haunted rural African villages like some mythic monster that every few years rose to demand a human sacrifice and then returned to its cave. It reached the West only in nightmare form, a Hollywood horror that makes eyes bleed and organs dissolve and doctors despair because they have no cure.

What lessons has Harry Reid learned from not one but two midterm wave elections that crushed his party and (finally) booted him into the Senate minority? Not much, it seems. Reid tells Jeremy Peters in a New York Times profile that the American people agree with Democrats on the issues, despite what the polls and two elections have made very clear to practically everyone else. If it hadn’t been for those darned kids at HHS, Reid would have gotten away with another election cycle, dagnabbit (via TWS): Mr. Reid’s remarks, which he made in an interview from his suite just...

Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday asked lawmakers debating legislation to authorize the war against the so-called Islamic State not to rule out the use of U.S. ground troops in combat. “The president has been clear that his policy is that U.S. military forces will not be deployed to conduct ground combat operations,” Kerry began. “However,” he added, "while we certainly believe this is the soundest policy, and while the president has been clear he's open to clarifications on the use of U.S. combat troops to be outlined in an AUMF, that does not mean we should preemptively bind...

Starting next month, Mary Landrieu is going to have a lot more time on her hands. That can be a great thing if you’re really looking forward to finally catching up on the Grand Theft Auto online game series, but such pursuits don’t really do much to pay the bills. The soon to be former Senator probably won’t have to worry about that too much, though. She’s reportedly a very hot topic on K Street . Mary Landrieu may have lost her Senate seat, but the Louisiana Democrat is a hot commodity on K Street. Several headhunters, veteran lobbyists...

After a teachers union president lost a legal battle involving forcing a non-union member to pay part of her salary for union-related activities, she responded by publishing the names of all former members who opted out of the union in a newsletter. Under Michigan's right-to-work law, employees can no longer be required to belong to or support a union as a condition of employment. According to Adam Neuman, the former Brighton Education Association member who sued to avoid having to pay part of BEA Union President Ellen Lafferty’s salary, the BEA president also put bright red “I Opted IN” buttons...

For years, teachers’ unions, and the politicians they support, have been equating caring for children with public school funding. Apparently, parents do not agree. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) released a new report which recounted the results of a poll taken by the group Stand for Children which found that the main issues that parents are concerned about are strong teachers and principals, curriculum and standards, charter schools, pre-Kindergarten and early learning, and equity in education. The issues that are of lower concern to parents? School funding, it turns out, is number 10. Moreover, in the survey, “parents were given...

Nine males were accused of being part of a heinous rape. The alleged injustice fomented a mob mentality. An enraged community wanted to skip any talk of a serious investigation, never mind a trial, and go straight to the punishment. I’m not talking about the now-discredited allegations against fraternity members at the University of Virginia, but of the legendary case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. Despite testimony from one of the women that she had made up the whole thing, the Scottsboro Boys were convicted in trial after trial. All...

BERKELEY (CBS SF) – A lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley who posted a tweet offering extra time on an assignment to students injured during anti-police brutality protests has received numerous threats, prompting her to delete her Twitter account. Kaya Oakes, an author who teaches writing at the university, tweeted Sunday, “If any of my #Berkeley students were teargassed, batoned or shot w/rubber bullets last night, you can have an extension on your essay.” Since then, Oakes and her colleagues at the university have received complaints and threats.

The left ratcheted up its unceasing war on America and took it to a whole other level today. America’s fifth column. The release of the torture report was unnecessary and uneventful. Big yawn. The savages who attacked this country were more sleep-deprived than originally thought? Awww. Fed rectally? Awww. More than 3 were waterboarded? Awww. They lived when they should have faced a firing squad. On Tuesday, following the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogation techniques, supporters of the Islamic State and other terror groups took to Twitter to decry the United States with the hashtag...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some Americans will soon be able to buy a home with a down payment as low as 3 percent, compared with the current minimum of 5 percent, the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say. The new lending guidelines announced by the companies Monday are designed to help more low-income and first-time buyers afford homes. Millions of Americans lost their savings or no longer had the income needed to set aside money for a home in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. That has held down the sales of houses and...

A few hours after demonstrators in their ongoing Black Lives Matter protest unsuccessfully attempted to disrupt a professional basketball game in Brooklyn attended by the British Prince William and his wife Kate, a black man with a large knife entered a synagogue/study hall a few miles away, yelling, "Kill the Jews!"  The large building complex in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood is the headquarters of a large religious Jewish movement renowned for its outreach to Jews around the world and is open all day, all night for those who want to study and/or pray. Carrying out his threat, he slashed...

 expand slideshow to fullscreen U.S. Presidents, Ranked By Wealth U.S. Presidents, Ranked By Wealth jornal.us Posted on 10/15/14 By Ethan Wolff-Mann @ewolffmann Share on Facebook Pin it on Pinterest Tweet this article Share this article on Google+ 197339 America might not have a royal family, but it's sure had a pretty large correlation between wealth and power, especially in our early years. Fueled by a heavy dose of curiosity, Wikipedia, and the public domain repository of presidential portraits, below we've ranked all the presidents by net worth*.Perhaps the biggest conclusions from this list? Family money + law firms...

There is a form of derangement to which professors at highly competitive elite institutions are vulnerable. Jonathan Gruber of MIT (Economics PhD, Harvard) is much in the public eye right now, but Ben Edelman of Harvard Business School (Economics PhD, Harvard, along with a Harvard Law School diploma and a masters in statistics) is beginning to join him in the ranks of infamously arrogant. Hillary Sargent of Boston Magazine gained access to an email exchange between Professor Edelman and a Chinese restaurant, which he believes overcharged him, based on the prices in their menu that was part of their...

First, the once-honored and vital role of objective journalism in our society is at a crisis point. Members of the media know how reckless, sloppy, and partisan many in their field have become, but like a gambler going all-in, they keep tempting Americans to call their bluff. Their sins of commission have been understood for decades, with a heavy thumb on the left side of the scale for either cultural, institutional, or ideological reasons. The second, and more dangerous fault line on display in each one of these stories is the Left’s desire for separate standards and systems across every...

Those are not the facts but facts never matter when Barack Obama is involved. Barack Obama has been in overdrive in trying to boost his appeal to his base (blacks and Hispanics, in particular) as he loses the respect of the rest of America. His latest bid to bolster his support among his most loyal of supporters is his recent claim that racial equality has improved under his reign. He did this in an interview with Univision-the Spanish-language network controlled by one of his most generous donors. Justin Sink reports at The Hill  that President Obama believes racial equality...

....When Ramos asked Obama if it’s his “responsibility” to improve race relations and address “white privilege” in the United States, the president argued race relations have improved dramatically over the decades — even some in the time that he’s been in office. He never did specifically address the “white privilege” portion of the loaded question. ..... I don’t think were living in the 50s and remembering what it was like to be black or Hispanic and interacting with the police then,” Obama added. “There has been improvement, the question is: What more do we need to do?”

The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round, just like the endless cycles of big, bad government programs to federalize preschool and daycare. On Wednesday, the White House Summit on Early Education will unveil nearly $1 billion in new "investments" to "expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America" from "birth and continuing to age 5." It's a retread of President Obama's 2013 State of the Union school-spending plan, which was a repackaging of his 2011 Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge program. Those Obama initiatives are knockoffs of moldy-old Democratic policy chestnuts, such...

Al Sharpton drew a $241,545 salary from National Action Network in 2013, even as the social-justice organization’s finances worsened, with the nonprofit ending the year $1.33 million in debt, new tax filings show. As the 2013 tax filings clearly show an organization in financial trouble, the records list most expenses in only vague, unhelpfully broad categories. Several of the expenditures listed in any detail suggest behavior considered questionable for nonprofits. And as of December 31, 2013, the organization’s unpaid tax liabilities, highlighted by the New York Times recently, had grown slightly over the past year, to around $819,000. Sharpton’s high...

Éric Zemmour is probably the most famous and influential journalist and commentator in contemporary France. Though not a Catholic (he has Jewish-Algerian origins, from a family that was granted French citizenship with the historic Crémieux Decree, of 1870), he is considered "controversial" in France since he is an unabashed old-style conservative in a strongly "Progressive" environment - and he is not afraid, as a conservative thinker, to defend the great history of France, including its Catholic roots. (More about him, and his recent book, "Le suicide français", on how extreme "progressivism" is destroying France, in this recent extensive article of...