Free Republic

R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh. Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. Three months later, on August 7, Hillhouse posted a story on her blog “The Spy Who Billed Me” stating that (1) the U.S. did not learn about...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, is coming to South Carolina on May 27, a campaign official said Tuesday. No details are available on a place or time for Clinton’s visit — her first stop in the Palmetto State since announcing her White House bid a month ago. The visit also will be the first time Clinton has come to South Carolina since her 2008 presidential campaign, a campaign official confirmed.

RICHMOND, Va. – A University of Virginia associate dean is seeking more than $7.5 million from Rolling Stone magazine in a defamation lawsuit stemming from a debunked account of an alleged gang rape on campus. The suit was filed Tuesday by Nicole Eramo, who is the top administrator dealing with sexual assaults at the Charlottesville school.

RUSH: The Tom Brady circumstance. Let me find the place to start here with the audio sound bites. I guess that's number eight, as I set these aside. Okay, we've got four games. A lot of people are focusing on a phrase in the Ted Wells report, and I fear that they are not understanding its meaning legally. The Wells report does not say conclusively that anything happened. In fact, they made a point on page... Oh, I forget the page number, but they admit that they don't have any specific incontrovertible evidence. It's all circumstantial. So there's this phrase,...

Before Jaquise Lewis lost his life defending his friends from an act of racist white mob violence, he was universally loved and admired. Fun to be around, said one relative. Never got into any trouble, his aunt remembered. One after another, they lined up to tell the Albuquerque reporters the story of how Jaquise was in the “wrong place at the wrong time.” snip “Six other people were shot,” said another reporter at KOB. “And understandably people were upset.” The sanctification continued with a report from the scene of the memorial: “Jaquise was well loved,” said the somber reporter Ryan...

Some Vienna pedestrian traffic lights are suddenly not only red or green. They're also gay or straight. And Austria's right-wing Freedom Party is livid. Over the past few days, the city started setting up lights at pedestrian crossings that show pairs of figures instead of the usual stick men. Some depict a man and a woman. Others, two women. Still others, two men. All couples are complete with hearts.

Pope Francis warned the rich and powerful on Tuesday that God will judge them on whether they fed the poor and cared for the Earth "We must do what we can so that everyone has something to eat. But we must also remind the powerful of the Earth that God will call them to judgment one day," he said. "And there it will be revealed if they really tried to provide for him in every person, and if they did what they could to preserve the environment so that it could produce this food."

Three brown bear cubs rescued earlier this month on Kodiak Island are recuperating at the Alaska Zoo, and enjoying some sibling bonding time before being moved to an outdoor exhibit.

Divers in Madagascar have found a silver bar weighing about 50 kilograms (110 pounds) that they believe was part of the treasure of pirate Captain Kidd. The bar was presented to Madagascar's president, Hery Rajaonarimampianina, in a ceremony Thursday on the island of Sainte Marie, near the country's northeast coast. The bar was found in a bay off the island, the diving team said. The team was led by Barry Clifford, an American undersea explorer who has been searching for pirate treasure for many decades. Clifford believes there could be more treasure on the bay floor where he found the...

Senate Democrats filibustered Tuesday to block the first major free-trade vote in years, dealing a blow to President Obama and GOP leaders who were pushing a deal in a rare show of bipartisanship, but who once again find themselves struggling with the political fringe. Unlike the last few years’ worth of conservative objections, this time it was liberals who balked and pulled moderate Democrats with them, putting the brakes on the bipartisan push and imperiling the rest of the spring congressional agenda. The White House said the filibuster was only a “procedural snafu” and urged GOP leaders in Congress to...

Senate Democrats on Tuesday delivered a stinging blow to President Obama’s trade agenda by voting to prevent the chamber from picking up fast-track legislation. A motion to cut off a filibuster and proceed to the trade bill fell short of a 60-vote hurdle in the 52-45 vote. Sen. Tom Carper (Del.) was the only Democrat to back it. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) switched his vote from yes to no to reserve his ability to return to the measure at a later date. Fast-track is a top legislative priority for the White House, but it has run into significant...

Much of Seymour Hersh’s extensive London Review of Books exposé of the attack that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 merely reiterates what common sense had argued all along. Pakistani intelligence could not have been unaware that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. Pakistani intelligence could not have been kept entirely in the dark about the plot to kill Osama bin Laden. Despite all the public breast beating and name calling, US and Pakistan were very much working together. The “treasure trove” of materials recovered from the compound actually yielded little. There were no garbage bags filled with computers...

We have seen that, irrespective of what happened in Europe, Graeco-Roman civilization was terminated very abruptly in the seventh century in its heartlands, in the Near and Middle East, and in North Africa. In these vast territories a new civilization, quite unlike that which had gone before, appeared with surprising rapidity. This new Islamic culture inherited the resources, wealth, and learning of the old one, and was, from the very beginning, at an enormous advantage over the remnant “Roman” lands which yet survived in Europe. The latter continent was still largely rural and, for the most part, “pagan” and tribal....

An extensive study by the Pew Research Center has revealed that Christians are declining sharply in America in terms of population share, while the religiously unaffiliated are rising, and now make up a larger share than American Catholics. The rise of religious intermarriages was one trend linked to the growth of the unaffiliated. The report, which was released on Tuesday, stated: "The drop in the Christian share of the population has been driven mainly by declines among mainline Protestants and Catholics. Each of those large religious traditions has shrunk by approximately 3 percentage points since 2007. The evangelical Protestant share...

This year marks two decades since two important events in the efforts to get Baltimoreans to face hard truths about Baltimore — David Rusk's warning that a city in decline could pull the whole metropolitan region down and the filing of a major class-action lawsuit to end decades of segregative housing policy that left the city with a disproportionate share of the region's poor. Rusk's book, "Baltimore Unbound,' declared that the city had reached a point of no return in social and economic decline, and that without a new metropolitan approach to governance, the suburban counties would next feel the...

Aid to the Church in Need say 5,000 Catholics have been killed in one diocese alone People gather around the ruins of the burned Bama Market in Maiduguri, Nigeria (CNS) A new report has revealed the scale of the suffering of Nigerian Catholics at the hands of Boko Haram militants, with 5,000 Catholics killed in one diocese alone.A further 100,000 Catholics in the Diocese of Maiduguri, in the northeast of the country, have been displaced by the six-year campaign of violence conducted by the Muslim militant group, according to the Situation Report on the Activities of Boko Haram in the...

ATHENS, Ga. – A Georgia man who saved a dog from a hot Mustang has been arrested for smashing a window to free the animal. Multiple news outlets report that Michael Hammons of Athens was charged with criminal trespassing after freeing a small Pomeranian mix in distress from a hot car outside a store. Witnesses say that while a group of shoppers waited for police to arrive to free the dog, the Army veteran smashed the window.

...The Patriots have no one to blame for this but themselves. They have been arrogant and defiant from the start — demanding apologies when none were deserved, ignoring Goodell’s orders of full cooperation and obstructing Ted Wells’s investigation... Why did Wells find it “more probable than not” that the Patriots tampered with the footballs? Forget the science, which has giant holes. It’s because the Patriots couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer Wells’s legitimate and unbiased questions. Why did McNally slip out of the locker room with the bag of footballs without Walt Anderson or another official as his escort? Why did McNally...

The Obama administration is calling for the end to a lifetime ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men, acknowledging that the policy “is perceived by some as discriminatory.” The Food and Drug Administration proposed new rules on Tuesday that would roll back the ban, though it still restricts gay men from donating blood if they have had sex with another man within a year. The proposal still marks the country’s biggest step yet toward changing the 30-year-old prohibition. Critics of the ban, which was enacted during the national AIDS epidemic in 1983 and last updated in 1992, say...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz offered proposals to address income inequality, an issue that’s already a major one for the upcoming election. Warren called for an end to the so- called trickle down economic theories that seek fewer taxes and restrictions on wealthy individuals and institutions. “These advocates push for deregulation that hobbles the cops on Wall Street,” she said. “We have to work so that the balance is not tilted against workers and toward multinational corporations,” Warren said. Warren has declined entreaties from supporters who want her to...