Free Republic

    ~The FReeper Canteen Presents~ Boat Trip: USNS Mercy, San Diego, California The third USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) is the lead ship of her class of hospital ships in the United States Navy. She was named for the virtue of compassion. Her primary mission is to provide rapid, flexible, and mobile acute medical and surgical services to support Marine Corps Air/Ground Task Forces deployed ashore, Army and Air Force units deployed ashore, and naval amphibious task forces and battle forces afloat.  Secondarily, she provides mobile surgical hospital service for use by appropriate US Government agencies in disaster or humanitarian...

Greece Two Weeks From Cash Crisis - Yanis Varoufakis Greece's finance minister says his country's financial situation is "terribly urgent" and the crisis could come to a head in a couple of weeks. Yanis Varoufakis gave the warning after eurozone finance ministers met in Brussels to discuss the final €7.2bn tranche of Greece's €240m EU/IMF bailout. Ministers said Greece had made "progress" but more work was needed. The Greek government is struggling to meet its payment obligations. Earlier, Greece began the transfer of €750m (£544m, $834m) in debt interest to the International Monetary Fund - a day ahead of a...

The White House was scrambling Monday to put a positive face on an upcoming summit of Persian Gulf states after learning leaders from four of the six invited nations are expected to skip. While those nations are still sending representatives to the summit being hosted by President Obama later this week at Camp David, the absence of crucial heads of state -- notably, Saudi Arabia's new king -- could present an awkward situation for the administration. But State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf rejected the notion this was a "snub," and White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest likewise said the administration...

May 11, 2015 NFL Suspends Tom Brady, Punishes Patriots For "Deflategate" The NFL announced Monday that it was suspending New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady for his role in a scheme to deflate footballs used in last season's AFC championship game, a controversy that came to be known as "Deflategate." In a statement released Monday afternoon, the league said the Super Bowl MVP "will be suspended without pay for the first four games of the 2015 regular season for conduct detrimental to the integrity of the NFL." The league also fined the Patriots $1 million and took away two draft...

Comparisons drawn to Duke lacrosse, George Zimmerman casesMarilyn Mosby, the Baltimore City State Attorney in charge of prosecuting six police officers for the death of Freddie Gray, Jr., is coming under increasing criticism from defense attorneys and legal scholars who think she is politicizing the case and using her prosecutorial power to create her own celebrity. Ms. Mosby has raised eyebrows in several quarters with a media blitz that has spanned from a CNN interview that focused on her courtship with her city councilman husband to her decision to appear on stage with Prince during a rock concert for a...

It was a peaceful Mother’s Day at Revere Beach this past Sunday at 6 p.m.. Waves lapped against the sand, and the sun shone down on the North Shore families who’d come out to celebrate the warm May day. Fast forward fifteen minutes, and over 100 people were brawling on the shore, according to police. First two women started fighting. Then their boyfriends’ friends joined in. And it grew from there, Revere Mayor Dan Rizzo told NECN. Soon enough, Revere Beach was so chaotic that officers from multiple departments had trouble pushing through to break it up. “It’s very...

You don’t have to like Sen. Ted Cruz, or even agree with him, to find offense in a recent line of questioning he endured. More than awkwardness, Mark Halperin offered a stunning small-mindedness as he attempted to tease out Cruz’s Hispanic bona fides: What Cuban food did he like growing up? Which Cuban music does he favor today? Would he welcome fellow Sen. Bernie Sanders to the presidential race, “and I’d like you to do it, if you would, en español”? Halperin, famed for co-authoring the book Game Change on the 2012 presidential campaign and prominent today for his analysis...

A special House panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, has uncovered tens of thousands of new documents, but is still facing "obstacles" from the Obama administration, an interim report issued Monday said. An "Interim Progress Update" was released Monday revealing the investigation "has uncovered new witnesses, new documents, new facts and will result in the most detailed and complete accounting of what happened in Benghazi." And it reported that the panel in June will interview former Secretary of State Leon Panetta, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey and retired General...

Ted Cruz will raise money for his presidential campaign along the U.S.-Mexico border next month. The Texas senator -- who has made beefing up border security a calling card of his presidential campaign -- will visit McAllen, Texas, for a $1,000-a-head fundraiser on June 9, according to an invitation obtained by CNN. Cruz deplores the White House's executive actions on immigration and has proposed tripling the size of the U.S. Border Patrol. On the stump, he frequently jokes about staffing the border with reassigned Internal Revenue Service agents. ï…‡ "Imagine you had traveled thousands of miles in the blazing sun....

Hackers claiming to be affiliated with the Islamic State group are threatening a series of cyberattacks in the United States and Europe, according to a video released Monday. The hackers also claimed the ability to monitor electronic devices and communications of Americans and Europeans. “The electronic war has not yet begun,” according to the video. We observe all the movements that you are doing from your devices,” the video warned, directing the threat specifically at the United States and Europe. “Soon you will see how we control your electronic world.”

...What first struck me about the interview was not so much the objectively asinine questions Halperin asked but his obvious motive and attitude in asking them. Aside from a few throwaways, all of his questions were aimed at exposing Cruz as an inauthentic Hispanic. And as insulting as that is, there is something more noteworthy about it that some are missing in all the hubbub about the interview. Halperin’s unstated premise underlying his questions is that one cannot have a bona fide Hispanic heritage if he doesn’t continue to bathe himself in the Hispanic culture and view American politics from...

If Jeb Bush would still invade Iraq knowing what we know now, 12 years after the fact, then “there has to be something wrong” with him, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham said Monday morning. In a pre-taped Fox News interview, Megyn Kelly asked Bush whether he’d still send American forces into Iraq, as we did in 2003, knowing now about the faulty intelligence that drove the initial occupation. Not only did he answer in the affirmative, but he suggested Hillary Clinton would do the same. That response was worrisome, according to Ingraham. “No, Hillary wouldn’t,” she exclaimed. “[She] wouldn’t authorize...

Review of "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission" by Charles Murray.BY THE PEOPLE: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission By Charles Murray Crown Forum. 319 pages. $27. From the tea party to Occupy Wall Street to #BlackLivesMatter, America has spent much of this young century questioning its premises. And as the battles over federal spending, economic inequality and racial injustice continue, Charles Murray comes forward to identify another threat to the nation’s purpose and self-image: the rise of the regulatory state, a rapacious shadow government that has left us “at the end of the American project as the founders intended it.”...

A vibrant, multi-hued painting from Pablo Picasso set a world record for artwork at auction, selling for $179 million in New York on Monday night. "Women of Algiers (Version O)" was part of a sale at Christie's auction house that also featured Alberto Giacometti's life-size sculpture "Pointing Man," which was poised to set a record as the most expensive sculpture sold at auction. They were among two dozen masterpieces from the 20th century Christie's offered in a curated sale titled "Looking Forward to the Past." The Picasso price included the auction house's premium. Experts say the prices are driven by...

"For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way" (2 Thess. 2:7). The number of emails I receive from people who are discouraged, frustrated, even despondent, is steadily increasing. They point to current conditions in the world and wonder how much worse things can get. You no longer have to be an astute observer to notice how rapidly our world is changing. It wasn’t that long ago when the standard measure was a comparison between what was acceptable...

Tatiana Guerra, 30, will soon give birth to her son, Murilo. She's blind, so she can't see the fuzzy results of a sonogram. To promote the Huggies diaper brand in Brazil, the ad agency Mood created a 3-dimensional model of her son as he appeared in a sonogram. It then surprised Guerra with the model, giving her a wonderful glimpse of her son that she could touch and study with her fingers.

The Obama administration is involving itself again in the case of an American teen beaten by an Israeli Border Policeman last summer, in a move that CNN describes as connected to Israel-US tensions. The American cable network reported that White House National Security Council staffers recently took the unusual step of meeting in the West Wing with Tariq Abu Khder, 16, who was beaten by the policeman last summer during riots in eastern Jerusalem on July 3, 2014. The riots took place during the tension that followed the abduction and murder of three Jewish teens, and a revenge attack in...

No one knows how Hillary Clinton will do as president, if she gets the chance. But we do know she is probably the best qualified presidential candidate ever, at least when it comes to checking off relevant boxes. This comes up today because a writer for the Weekly Standard claimed she would be an “affirmative-action” president (an argument easily knocked down by Jonathan Chait at New York). Let's go through her resume: She has been a senator (for longer than Barack Obama was and longer than Rand Paul or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio will have been in 2016). Remember,...

ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti demonstrates

A Subway sandwich shop worker whose social media posts about Saturday's killing of two police officers in Mississippi sparked outrage online said her comments were misconstrued — and now she's being threatened. "They took the status the wrong way," Sierra McCurdy of Laurel, Mississippi, told NBC News Monday. McCurdy wrote the Facebook post following news of the fatal shooting of two officers, Benjamin J. Deen, 34, and Liquori Tate, 25, during a traffic stop in Hattiesburg. "2 police officers was shot in hattiesburg tonight…GOT EM," read the post, which also included a crying-laughing emoticon and a gun emoji. "They took...