Free Republic

[O]pponents of exam extensions have declared that to grant these requests [to delay exams for "distressed" students] would be a disservice to the students. Law students, they argue, must learn how to engage critically with the law in the face of intense adversity. Drawing comparisons to events surrounding the Civil Rights Movement and other times of intense turmoil, these opponents portray today’s law students as coddled millennials using traumatic events as an excuse for their inability to focus on a three-hour exam. In essence, law students are being told to grow up and learn how to focus amidst stress and...

Former Spanish police officer - previously arrested for Nazi-themed protest - scaled the walls of the enclose where 3 lions mauled him, according to local media. Whether in an act of unknown protest, plain disregard for basic safety or a test of conviction in the lions' den, an alleged neo-Nazi activist sustained critical injuries from a lion attack at the Barcelona Zoo on Sunday after he jumped into the animals' enclosure, according to Spanish daily El País. According to eyewitness accounts, the 45-year-old former Spanish police officer donned full military garb when he deliberately scaled the walls of the feline...

Jennifer Waloway, a nurse practitioner who oversees six family planning clinics in northeastern Wisconsin, was opening the mail in August when she came upon a letter from the state. It asked NEWCAP Community Health Services, which runs the clinics, to please submit a check payable to the State of Wisconsin. The amount: $1,169,837.10. "I was a little in shock," Waloway said. The letter from the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health Services said its audit showed that NEWCAP incorrectly had billed — and been paid — by the Medicaid and BadgerCare Plus programs for prescription drugs...

CAMBRIDGE (CBS) – The Andrew Peabody School in Cambridge snubbed Santa the day before the winter concert. Principal Jennifer Ford sent a letter home to parents on Thursday letting them know of the change. The letter said in part: “I am writing to you today to inform you of a change in our concert series this winter. Our First through Fourth grade concert as well as our Kindergarten concert will not include a visit from Santa Claus this year.” Robert Thompson has two kids in the school. He said the concert traditionally closed with Santa running through the aisle. He...

MOSCOW — With Russia scrambling to contain a currency crisis, the country’s central bank, in a surprise middle-of-the-night move, increased its key interest rate to 17 percent, from 10.5 percent. Aleksei L. Kudrin, a former Russian finance minister who is widely credited with having steered Russia through the 2008 financial crisis by convincing President Vladimir V. Putin to build up sovereign reserves, said that uneven policy making was adding to the erosion of confidence. “The fall of the ruble and the stock market is not only a reaction to lower oil prices and sanctions, but also distrust in the government’s...

n New Year’s Day 1915, two men flying a Turkish flag attacked a picnic train on the outskirts of Broken Hill. A gun battle later took place and both attackers were shot dead. Four other people were killed and seven wounded. Follow the re-enactment of this historic event. GEORGE NEGUS: G'day. Another week here on GNT. And tonight, a fascinating look back at some of the trickier characters lurking in our national past. Some of course will have other theories. But maybe our convict past itself could be one of the explanations for our love/hate relationship with our historical villains,...

The Senate on Monday approved President Barack Obama's nomination of Dr. Vivek Murthy to serve as U.S. surgeon general, despite opposition from Republicans and some Democrats over his support for gun control. Murthy, 37, a physician at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital and instructor at Harvard Medical School, won confirmation on a vote of 51-43. He's a co-founder of Doctors for America, a group that has pushed for affordable health care and supports Obama's health care law. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said most of Murthy's career has been spent as an activist focused on gun control and other political issues,...

...I re-registered as an Independent today. Bye Bye GOP-e 4-Ever!

Salon.com ✔ @Salon The right is coming for your birth control — they just don’t want you to know it yet http://slnm.us/btF70R8 via @kmcdonovgh RB @RBPundit Follow Not only is this idiotic piece based on a lie, the moron who wrote it couldn't even argue the lie convincingly. @Salon @kmcdonovgh 2:29 PM - 15 Dec 2014 ortly before the November elections, NARAL suggested that Cory Gardner would ban birth control in Colorado. As Salon demonstrates, such scare tactics haven’t subsided: It’s the lie that won’t die! Salon.com ✔ @Salon The right is coming for your birth control — they just...

In addition to major telecommunications firms aiming to influence the public debate on net neutrality, there’s the Ford Foundation, the second-largest private foundation in the world. “If you are a foundation for justice in the world, and you don’t understand that the Internet is going to be a major battleground in this century, and you’re not engaged in that fight and supporting people who are concerned about access and security, you’re going to be left out of one of the most important justice issues of the day,” Foundation President Darren Walker told the Council on Foreign Relations this summer. “And...

“You thought you'd sweep it under the rug! You thought there'd be no limelight!" Sharpton said. "We are going to keep the light on Michael Brown, on Eric Garner, on Tamir Rice, on all of these victims because the only way -- I'm sorry, I come out of the 'hood -- the only way you make roaches run, you got to cut the light on." Protesters chanted violent slogans: "What do we want? Dead cops!"

The rampage began around 4 a.m. at ex-wife Nicole Stone's Harleysville apartment, investigators said. Stone broke in through a glass door, firing multiple rounds and fleeing with their two children, the woman's neighbors said. He then went to two nearby communities, where her relatives lived, killed five other people and severely wounded another person before apparently holing up in a Pennsburg home, authorities said.

If you, like this author, always dreamed of using a camo-covered, Army-issue Humvee as your personal golf cart, your dreams can finally come true — for a price. According to the Army Times, the Department of Defense will start auctioning off as many as 4,000 military-spec Humvees to the public as part of its surplus-reduction efforts. In previous years, the off-road behemoths would have been sent straight to the military scrapyard, but due to changes in policies in recent years and what the Defense Logistics Agency spokesperson Michelle McCaskill describes as “cooperation from other government offices," the used Humvees will...

<p>California’s health insurance exchange extended its deadline for consumers wanting Obamacare coverage in effect by Jan. 1.</p> <p>Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, said people who start the application process or make some “good faith effort” by Monday will have until Dec. 21 to finish signing up. Monday at midnight had previously been the hard deadline.</p>

With 2015 only a couple of weeks away, Ed Schultz just managed to sneak under the wire in the race for Most Inane Question of the Year by an MSNBC Host. Speaking to Valerie Plame's husband Joe Wilson on the The Ed Show this evening, Schultz suggested: "Your wife was outed by the Vice-President and now he's saying he has no problem with torture. How do you feel about that? I mean isn't it torture what your family went through?" Wilson wasn't wacky enough to bite on Ed's bait, but in other comments made clear that he would like to...

The two individuals are not considered suspects or persons of interest, and investigators would like to interview them because they were in the area of the fire, officials said.

Follow the Greater Orlando Tea Party Lecture Series at www.GreaterOrlandoTeaParty.org Trevor Loudon is a New Zealand author, speaker and political activist who maintains a prolific blog entitled New Zeal. He is also founder and editor of the website KeyWiki, and was Vice President of the ACT New Zealand Party from 2006 to 2008. Trevor says, “I’m a libertarian activist and political researcher from Christchurch New Zealand. I believe in freedom with responsibility, not freedom from responsibility. My ideal society is one in which government is confined to protecting its citizens from criminals and external enemies. I believe in working with...

Mark Levin ripped Republicans a new one tonight as he opened his show tonight, saying that he is one inch away from leaving the Republican Party. He starts in hard, asking Republicans if they think this is a joke, if they think they can just lie to Republicans and conservatives with impunity about defunding Obamacare and fighting Obama’s illegal amnesty. He points out that Republicans go on and on about an imperial president and his illegal amnesty and they can’t even vote on a point of order challenging Obama. Levin says the Constitution is in tatters and that the Republican...

With the passage of a $1.1 trillion spending bill that fails to defund President Obama’s immigration amnesty plan (as promised), it seems many Republicans still believe in Beltway fairy tales. If President Obama had shut down the government by vetoing an appropriations bill that didn’t fund the president’s amnesty plan, so the fairy tale goes, Republicans would be blamed and damaged politically. There’s just one problem with this fairy tale: the 2014 election results. Nobody blamed Republicans for a shutdown in 2013, and nobody cared. The Washington establishment fears big bad shutdowns because they illustrate to the rest of the...

My father, James W. Bryan III 74, was in the hospital for dehydration. This morning at 10 AM he had a pulmonary embolus. Luckily he was very well oxygenated and was sent to ICU immediately. TPA anticoagulant was introduced and he is responding well to blood pressure medicine. Precedex given. working good. May have to increase. He is responding well to all medications. Thank you for your prayers and concerns. If you guys don't have an Trust or family plans in these types of events consider this a warning. Luckily we have everything set up should things go south.