Free Republic

The young woman, whose name is being withheld for her privacy, said she went to the Cedar Springs nightclub Saturday night, Jan. 16, with her female fiancee and her fiancee’s co-worker. She had become separated from them in the crowd when she met Prince Karim, a 31-year-old Middle Eastern man that she assumed — based on the way he was dressed, his hairstyle and the fact that he was in a gay bar — was a gay man. The woman said she and Karim went out onto the S4 patio to smoke, and that while they were there, she realized...

Markets have been going haywire.And according to Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, that has the potential to lead to layoffs through the first half of the year.BlackRock is the world's largest investor, with about $4.5 trillion under management.Fink said in an interview Friday morning with CNBC that the market volatility of late could affect CEO confidence and could lead to more layoffs.He said (emphasis ours):Having a market decline like this in the first couple of weeks of the year really, in my mind, puts a negativity across the economy. A negativity to every CEO who is looking at his or...

Edmonton trustees trapped between government policy and the church, parent saysSome Edmonton parents are asking why the Catholic school district sent them a link to a Calgary bishop's controversial tirade against the province's new guidelines regarding gender identity in schools. One parent Michelle Comeau said she believes trustees feel caught in the middle between what the government wants and what the church wants. She thinks the district sent the letter to say, "Well we're doing what the province wants, but here's what the church wants and ... we're just caught in the middle." Last week Calgary's Roman Catholic Bishop Fred...

Interfax reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin called to European Jews to come to his country, during a meeting with representatives of the European Jewish Congress. .....

RUSH: About Trump supporters - "I don't think they care whether the person's a conservative, liberal, or a Martian" So... There you have it... Trying to convince the Trumpites that the Donald isn't a conservative is a futile effort. They already know it and they don't care. And now we know - without a doubt - that Palin doesn't either. Personally, I never thought much of Palin one way or the other. That she's also an opportunist, really doesn't surprise.

GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Tuesday that when voters reflect on the policy proposals from Donald Trump there's going to be a "reality check." "Crazy talk isn't going to get us out of the mess we're in," Bush told CNBC's "Squawk Box." He said he has a "more credible message" than Trump, who's leading the Republican primary race by a wide margin, according to an aggregation of national polls. "Either Trump will change his mind on these subjects, which I doubt, or he's going to pay a price," Bush said, citing as an example the recent controversy over what...

A new UN-backed Libyan government has been unveiled and tasked with uniting its warring factions, but rejection by leaders of the two existing parliaments leaves a question mark over its future. The prime minister, Fayez Sarraj, has appointed a 32-member cabinet tasked with ending the civil war, stemming immigration to Europe and halting the expansion of Islamic State. But for now the new government of national accord is based in a hotel in Tunis, capital of neighbouring Tunisia, after Libya was deemed too unsafe. Sarraj’s government is the result of more than a year of mediation by the UN, whose...

Headling on Drudge

Saudi Arabia is not ruling out developing a nuclear bomb if its regional rival Iran obtains one, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told the Reuters news agency on Tuesday. Asked if Saudi Arabia had discussed seeking a nuclear bomb in the event Iran managed to obtain one, al-Jubeir replied the country would do "whatever we need to do in order to protect our people". "I don't think it would be logical to expect us to discuss any such issue in public and I don't think it would be reasonable to expect me to answer this question one way or another,"...

Of course, to hear Branstad say it, what he actually said was that he hopes Ted Cruz loses. The problem with Branstad's jeremiad against Cruz is that Brandstad is everything that is wrong with both the Republican Party and the political class in the country as a whole. The fecklessness and self-dealing of Terry Branstad would put any fat cat Republican Senator in the caucus to shame. It's the shameless behavior of people like Branstad who have given rise to the Trump/Cruz phenomenon in the first place. Basically, at the end of the day, Republican voters have shown that they...

During the Jan. 17 Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton argued against, as she put it, doing away with Obamacare and trying to replace it with the type of single-payer system her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, wants to implement. Attempts to do that when Democrats controlled the government failed, she noted, arguing that Obamacare has accomplished a lot. "We have the Affordable Care Act. Let's make it work," Clinton said. "We now have driven costs down to the lowest they've been in 50 years. Now we've got to get individual costs down. That's what I'm planning to do." Health care costs...

The White House denied Tuesday that the U.S. paid Iran $1.7 billion as ransom to gain the release of American prisoners, saying the payment settled a long-running claim by Tehran over military equipment. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the payment last weekend was “a very good deal for taxpayers” because Iran was actually seeking interest payments of up to $8 billion for the decades-old claim. “Our exposure when it came to paying interest could have been much higher,” Mr. Earnest said. A spokeswoman for Speaker Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, criticized the administration for paying “ransom” to gain the...

Full title: Steven Avery's ex-fiancee makes new claims, telling TMZ Avery once tied her to a bed with rope Steven Avery's ex-fiancee, Jodi Stachowski, is making new claims against him -- including that he once put her into circumstances similar to the circumstances that led to the death of Teresa Halbach. TMZ says Stachowski has said she believes Avery's nephew, Brendan Dassey's account of Halbach's rape and murder -- because Stachowski says Avery once tied her to a bed post with rope and tried to videotape it. (snip) TMZ says Stachowski has said she believes Avery's nephew, Brendan Dassey's account...

GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared to walk back his campaign spokesman’s earlier comments about Gov. Sarah Palin’s expected endorsement of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump in Ames, Iowa on Tuesday evening.

Katharina Unger and Julia Kaisinger, 25 and 28, have developed a device to breed in the comfort of your own home the protein-rich grubs of the meal beetle, to then eat. "With this current design you can make 200-500 grams (seven to 18 ounces) of mealworms every week," Unger told AFP at a recent tasting and fundraising event in Vienna. "You freeze them and then you make them like any other type of meat. You can cook them, roast them, make them into burger patties and mix them into sauce for pasta," she said. Into the top of the sleek,...

In May 2013, Huma Abedin and Anthony D. Weiner allowed filmmakers full access to his mayoral campaign with the hopes that the end result would document a spectacular political comeback, with Mr. Weiner being sworn in as mayor of New York having emerged from a scandal centered on explicit texting that forced him to resign from Congress. Things did not go quite according to plan. Instead, "Weiner," a new documentary that The New York Times was allowed to view exclusively ahead of its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday, provides an unfettered look at the implosion of Mr....

Tattooing portraits of presidents is also a thing people do. You only have to run a quick image search to find hundreds of President Obama tattoos, with varying attention to detail. It's less common, however, to find tattoos of presidential candidates. There just aren't that many tattoos of Al Gore or John McCain out there. At least based on my 12-second Google search. But that didn't deter 33-year-old Justin Smith, a campaign volunteer for Hillary Clinton. Smith explained that Clinton had been his "hero for 23 years," in between answering phones at the Hillary for 2016 campaign headquarters in Charleston,...

Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz received an anti-endorsement from the governor of Iowa, Tuesday, host of the country's lead-off presidential caucus, on account of his failure to support renewable fuels like ethanol.Gov. Terry Branstad,a Republican who has not endorsed any of the GOP presidential candidates for president, said at a renewable fuels conference near Des Moines that Iowans should reject Cruz because he supports phasing out the fuel standard.His comments,which come within two weeks of the state's critical Feb. 1 caucus,could resonate with state farmers who grow the corn used in ethanol,and the soybeans widely used in biodiesel or risk...

Last week, President Obama delivered his final State of the Union address. In the lead-up to the speech, there was a lot of discussion about the nature of the president's legacy. Less discussed, however, was that most of the president's so-called legacy may not outlast his presidency, since most of his supposed achievements have never been enacted into law.Early on in his presidency, it became clear that the president didn't have much interest in working with Congress in a bipartisan manner, and after losing large majorities in the House and Senate, he made it clear that he did not want...

Univision Communications Inc., the parent company to the nation's leading Spanish-language broadcast channel, has acquired a controlling stake in the satirical news site The Onion, NPR has learned. The agreement between two seemingly disparate media outfits was described to NPR by a person with direct involvement in the negotiations. A second person who was briefed on the deal by Univision executives also confirmed its broad strokes. The amount of money involved in the deal was not disclosed. NPR has also obtained a memo from the CEO of The Onion announcing the deal to staffers.