Free Republic

An award-winning local TV news anchor in New Orleans died in a plane crash while working on a story about a stunt pilot. Nancy Parker, 53, was killed along with the pilot, Franklin J.P. Augustus, on Friday when the plane crashed into a field near the New Orleans Lakefront Airport. The cause of the crash in under investigation, local officials said. Parker, who earned five Emmy Awards for her work as a journalist, was a fixture in New Orleans and at the station she worked at for 23 years, her station said. Her colleagues choked back tears as they shared...

A cozy alliance between insurers and law enforcement has turned the justice system into the industry’s hired gun and left innocent customers facing prison.... These tactics can be applied with impunity, thanks to legislation in all 50 states restricting the ability of customers to sue insurers for wrongly accusing them of fraud

Afghanistan: Bomb rips through wedding in Kabul An explosion has ripped through a wedding hall in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and many casualties are feared. Eye witnesses told the BBC a suicide bomber detonated explosives during a wedding ceremony. Witnesses said they had seen bodies. The explosion happened at around 22:40 local time (18.10 GMT) in an area mostly populated by Shia residents. No group said it carried out the attack, which happened in the west of the city. Sunni Muslim militants, including the Taliban and the Islamic State group, have repeatedly targeted Shia Hazara minorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan....

President Donald Trump couldn't stop talking about the importance of strengthening background checks as he addressed reporters last Friday after a week steeped in the aftermath of the country's latest pair of mass shootings. He uttered the term "background checks" 18 times as he fielded questions from reporters about what kind of action he would take in the wake of the shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, that killed 31 people. While he shied away from specifics, he made clear that he wanted to strengthen the system and that he felt he could rally Republican support for "common...

The El Paso shootings were horrific. Patrick Wood Crusius, a crazed man with white supremacist views, gunned down over 20 people at a local Walmart on August 3 and wounded scores more. He was targeting Mexicans. His manifesto is littered with racial overtones, yes, but he noted that his views predated Trump’s 2016 win, that Republicans are terrible, and that a lot of people have to die to in order to maintain the sustainability of the planet. There is an eco-terror angle that makes up the core of his manifesto that the media is ignoring. Eco-terrorism isn’t an activity of...

For every person who fits the profile of the El Paso shooter, there are likely thousands who fit the profile of Maurice Hill, the man arrested for shooting six cops in north Philadelphia yesterday. Based on a quick look at court documents from Philadelphia and Delaware Counties, Hill has a rap sheet dating back to 2001 that includes charges for illegal gun possession, drugs, driving offenses, assault, burglary, theft, robbery, kidnapping, and attempted murder. However, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, he was only “convicted six times on charges that involved illegal possession of guns, drug dealing, and aggravated assault.” Will...

A ransomware attack has hit at least 20 local government entities in Texas, the State's Department of Information Resources (DIR) announced on Friday. When a ransomware attack occurs, a computer cannot be utilized until a ransom is paid.The Texas Division of Emergency Management is currently assisting. As of now, DIR, the Texas Military Department and the Texas A&M University System’s Cyber Response and Security Operations Center have deployed teams to the "most critically impacted jurisdictions." As requests come in, other resources will be implemented. The goal is to provide computing services and expertise that would get local entities back online, The...

Like a song that won't leave my head, I am looking for the movie where in a courtroom scene, the opening to "A Tale Of Two Cities" is used in (I think) a copyright case.

ISIL has largely taken over control of a huge camp in northeast Syria, and there’s no plan for what to do with the 70,000 people there (including more than 50,000 children). The United States and Europe must immediately address this urgent national security and humanitarian crisis, before a new caliphate is established while we watch. After the fall of Raqqa and the coalition defeat of ISIL’s strongholds, President Donald Trump announced that “100 percent” of the caliphate had been destroyed. But the tens of thousands of ISIL fighters and family members left over were herded into massive fenced internally displaced...

Dean Katherine Baicker to host conversation and present Justice Ginsburg with Dean’s Award U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will visit the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy on Sept. 9 for a conversation hosted by Harris Public Policy Dean Katherine Baicker, who will award Justice Ginsburg the 2019 Harris Dean’s Award. The award is given annually to an exceptional leader who has championed analytically rigorous, evidence-based approaches to policy, and who is an example for the next generation of policy leaders and scholars. “The distinguished career of Ruth Bader Ginsburg serves as an inspiration for our...

An adorable photo of a group of service dogs sitting in a Canadian theater last week catching a production of "Billy Elliot" has gone viral. The photo shows the crowd of mainly poodles and golden retrievers taking up at least four rows and attentively watching the stage during the Stratford Festival in Ontario. The objective was to prevent fur from flying during live theater so the pups can help their handlers navigate a theater atmosphere.

FULL TITLE: Michael Moore: Let’s Hope ‘The Squad’ Is the Face of the Democratic Party ‘Because That’s How We’re Going to Win’ Friday on MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour,” liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore said he was all for Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) being the face of the Democratic Party, a suggestion President Donald Trump has made in recent weeks. The foursome known as “The Squad” representing the Democrats’ brand is how they win according to Moore. “Let’s hope that Alexandria and Rashida and Ilhan and Congresswoman Pressley are the face...

Beneath a blazing mid-August sun at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines last week, liberal voters crowded around the Des Moines Register’s political soapbox to hear the Democratic presidential candidates speak. Meanwhile, on the other side of the fairground, farmers in the sheep, cattle and swine barns tended to their animals. A Trump poster hung from a rafter in the sheep barn and a Trump flag flew in front of a row of massive black cows in the cattle barn. Yet the farmers—who will play a key role in the 2020 presidential race in Iowa—didn’t talk much about politics...

“‘But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast’” (Matthew 9:15). Fasting is meaningless if done merely from habit and if it doesn’t derive from a deep concern over some spiritual need. And as we saw yesterday, even the best and most foundational spiritual practices, if not done with sincere motives and right purposes, are only hypocritical and pretentious. Jesus was obviously referring to His crucifixion when He said He would be taken away from the disciples. From that time on, it would be fitting to fast and mourn. Fasting naturally...

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire — President Donald Trump threw himself another big rally Thursday night, this time in Manchester, New Hampshire, a state he nearly clinched in 2016. We invited Lucas Meyer, the president of the Young Democrats of New Hampshire, to attend the rally with VICE News and talk to Trump’s fanatical supporters about why they love him so much. He agreed to attend because it’s “instructive to experience.” "Maybe I'll learn something new. I don't count on it. And part of it is I want to see it to, like, motivate myself for the next year and a half,”...

To the extent that I care at all about Israel blocking entry to two U.S. congresswomen who partner with anti-Semites who seek its destruction, I agree with critics who argue that Bibi Netanyahu should not appear to bow to Donald Trump’s tweeted demands and that blocking Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from visiting Israel handed them a short-term propaganda victory. But that’s not the most important part of the story. The most important element of the story is the fact that two American congresswomen shunned a bipartisan congressional delegation to Israel to go on an independent trip to Israel sponsored...

... Bitmojis, in case you've managed to escape them so far, are cartoon avatars that can be customized to a thoroughly creepy level to resemble the person using them. "Create your Bitmoji and be yourself wherever you go," the company's site proclaims. And apparently some job hunters are adding the friendly little cartoons to their please-hire-me documentations, whether electronic or otherwise. The Journal's example is especially egregious: an applicant for a teaching job at the Indianapolis high school included a bitmoji of himself waving and the word "hi" at the top, quickly making himself the hey-get-a-load-of-THIS-guy story of the faculty...

BEIT UR AL-FAUQA, West Bank, Aug 17 (Reuters) - Sitting under an olive tree in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Muftia Tlaib scoffs at the attention she has recently received from the president of the United States. "May God ruin him," she says. Tlaib is the grandmother of U.S. congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, at the center of an affair that has drawn Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu together against U.S. Democrats. On Thursday, bowing to pressure from Trump, Israel barred a visit by Rashida Tlaib and fellow Democrat Ilhan Omar that it had initially said it would allow.

NEW YORK CITY — A new survey found that 45% of Americans claim to have worn the same pair of underwear for two days or longer. Underwear company Tommy John surveyed 1,000 men and women to determine how long they wear and keep their underwear. Almost half of participants said they had worn the same pair for two days or more, while 13% said they had worn the same pair for a week or more. 85% of Americans don’t know how long they’ve owned their oldest pair of underwear, according to the survey. The company states you should swap out...

Everyone is debating “red flag” laws like they’re some new thing, but California has had variations of them for decades. We call them domestic violence restraining orders, civil harassment restraining orders, workplace restraining orders, elder abuse restraining orders, mental health seizures and prohibition orders, and, more recently, gun violence restraining orders. They’re all meant to disarm dangerous people — but they’re all fundamentally flawed. None of these red flag laws would have prevented recent mass shootings. And in my 23 years practicing law in the heart of Silicon Valley, I have litigated dozens of these cases. I’ve seen firsthand the...