Free Republic

* Silence from authorities turns coincidence into currency. * Information vacuums don’t calm the public, they activate pattern-seeking. * When motive disappears, attention shifts to everything else. =========================================================================== BRIEFING There are a lot of questions swirling around the Brown University shooting, and as usual, the internet did what the internet does. People started digging, and they’ve turned up some details about the shooter that have caught some attention. Let’s break it down. After the assassination of Ella Cook, a conservative student at Brown University, the details haven’t necessarily been coming out at breakneck speed. On the contrary, they’ve had to...

A Brown University custodian spotted depraved gunman Claudio Neves Valente pacing school hallways and peering into classrooms nearly a dozen times in the weeks before his mass shooting — and alerted campus security twice about the suspicious figure, a new report said. Derek Lisi, who has worked at the elite school for 15 years, told the Boston Globe he “knew something was off with” the mass shooter before the sicko opened fire in a lecture hall, killing two students, Dec. 13. While Lisi said he twice told the same security guard about a suspicious person lurking around the same building...

Authorities say the same suspect was responsible for Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University and the Monday night murder of an MIT professor in Brookline, Mass. At a news conference Thursday night in Providence, that city’s police chief Col. Oscar Perez identified the Brown suspect as 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente.At a separate news conference in Boston, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley said Valente, a Portuguese national, is also believed to be the gunman who killed MIT physicist Nuno F.G. Loureiro.Ted Docks, the Special Agent in Charge of Boston’s FBI field office, told the press a search warrant was...

The suspected Brown University shooter has been found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside of a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire on Thursday evening. The shooter has yet to be identified. Via Fox News: The suspected shooter had a storage unit in the facility where the abandoned car was found. BREAKING… Photo of author Cristina Laila

Police are responding to a reported multi-victim shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. At least two persons were injured by gunshot wounds. Authorities said that more victims are feared. Authorities confirmed that a masked suspect opened fire and then fled the spot. Officers have secured parts of the campus and are searching for the suspect. The condition of the victims is not yet known. Police have urged people to avoid the area as the investigation continues.

Wednesday morning, August 27, between 11 am and 1:30 pm EST or 9 am and 11:30 am mountain time, I'll be chairing a New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force event in Denver at the Colorado History Museum. The keynotes are Senator JOHN KERRY (D-MA), Obama National Security Adviser GREG CRAIG, Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School Dean ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER, former Congressman and Obama Adviser MEL LEVINE, former German Foreign Minister JOSCHKA FISCHER, and Aspen Institute President (and former CNN Chairman and CEO and TIME Managing Editor) Walter Isaacson. Our panel will be former Israeli negotiator and New America Foundation Senior Fellow...

“I believe in being transparent here. If I were editing The New York Times, I don't think I’d put it in the paper,” says @MarkHalperin . But people are telling me that the family of Ella Cook, the Alabama young woman who was a sophomore, has been told that she was the target of what happened at Brown. I have no idea whether that’s true. There’s other theories about why the person did what they did. And since we don’t know who the assailant is, it’s going to be harder to say. But if it’s true that she was targeted,...

A shooter dressed in black killed at least two people and wounded nine others at Brown University on Saturday during final exams on the Ivy League campus, authorities said, and that person appears to still be at large as police are releasing a person of interest, who was detained Sunday amid their active investigation...

Ella Cook, a 19-year-old sophomore from Birmingham, Alabama, was a student at Brown University, tragically killed in the December 13, 2025, campus shooting. An active parishioner at the Cathedral Church of the Advent, she was remembered as a grounded, faithful, and bright light in her community. She served as Vice President of the Brown University Republican Club and was described by peers as a staunch conservative unafraid to express her views on a liberal campus. Prior experience included work at Oxbridge Academic Programs and Mountain Brook Creamery

In October, Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, hosted a conferenceopens in a new tab or window on the lessons of COVID-19 in order "to do better in the next pandemic." He invited scholars, journalists, and policy wonks who, like him, have criticized the U.S. management of the crisis as overly draconian. Bhattacharya also invited public health authorities who had considered his alternative approach reckless. None of them showed up. Now, the "contrarians" are seizing the reins: President Donald Trump has nominated Bhattacharya to lead the NIH and Johns Hopkins University surgeon Marty Makary, MD, MPH, to run the...

Benjamin Erickson has been identified as the person authorities detained after the Brown University shooting at Providence, Rhode Island on December 13. (snip) Now, many social media handles have speculated about Erickson's political affiliation and whether he is MAGA and a Donald Trump supporter. To be sure, these are speculations from unverified profiles. Erickson's actual political leanings are not known since his details have not been publicly shared by authorities. He only remains a person of interest, and authorities have clarified that he is not in custody, merely in detention, as a person of interest in the case. Is Benjamin...

Federal authorities said the Brown University assistant professor and doctor deported to Lebanon despite having an H-1B visa expressed support and attended the funeral of a slain Hezbollah leader responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans. Rasha Alawieh, a 34-year-old physician specializing in kidney transplants who was most recently living in Rhode Island, was detained at Boston Logan International Airport on Thursday while coming back from a trip to Lebanon. Alawieh was questioned by CBP and allegedly told federal agents she had attended the funeral of Nasrallah, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Sady reportedly wrote in a new filing Monday....

A law enforcement source says the person of interest was detained at a hotel in Coventry, Rhode Island. A CNN crew saw a large police presence gather at the hotel before officers moved in on a room, banging on the door and calling for the person to come out. Coventry is a town outside Providence, where the university is located.

An alleged gunman remains on the loose after “multiple” people were shot and at least two were killed on the campus of Brown University, police said. The Rhode Island Ivy League school sent out a first alert to students on campus shortly after 4:20 p.m. of an active shooter near the Barus & Holley Engineering school building.At least two people have been killed, a law enforcement source said.Providence police confirmed multiple people have been shot.“Multiple shot in the area of Brown University. This is an active investigation. Please shelter in place or avoid the area until further notice,” the PD...

Brown University removed a news story it had published about research suggesting that young people’s decisions to transition from one sex to another is influenced by their peers and social media after angering the transgender community.

Police officers at Brown University are no longer including the race of criminal suspects when announcing crimes, after an outcry from Brown students who said the practice stigmatized certain groups. The policy was first implemented a year ago, but was only publicized Wednesday by The Brown Daily Herald. Including a suspect’s race is often harmful because “vague descriptions can reinforce stereotypes,” causing hostility towards some community members, according to police chief Mark Porter. To solve the problem, Brown police are making the descriptions even vaguer, including only the suspect’s age, sex, build, and general appearance (sans skin color). The shift...

Tampons are now a genderless necessity, according to Brown University, who have announced that they will be providing tampons for both men’s and women’s bathrooms across the university this academic year. The tampons will be delivered to bathrooms by the university’s student president, Viet Nguyen, as well as 20 volunteers, with Nguyen claiming the initiative is a means of educating students that men menstruate as well as women. In an email to the student body, Nguyen said, “There’s been a lot of conversation about why pads and tampons are a necessity, not a luxury, but not a lot of action....

Brown University's student body president will be hand-delivering menstrual products to all nonresidential bathrooms on campus, including men’s rooms, with the help of 20 other students. The initiative is intended to communicate the message that "pads and tampons are a necessity, not a luxury," and that not all people who menstruate are women. Brown University's student body president will be hand-delivering menstrual products to all nonresidential bathrooms on campus, including men’s rooms, with the help of 20 other students. Viet Nguyen, President of the Undergraduate Council of Students, announced the initiative in a campus-wide email Tuesday, saying he wants to...

Police found the body of a man in the Providence River and they think it is 'very possible' that it is missing student Sunil Tripathi who was wrongly accused of being one of the Boston Marathon bombers. Tripathi, 22, was a Brown University student and has been missing since the middle of March.

A corporate responsibility advisory committee at Brown University reportedly is recommending that the Ivy League school withdraw its investments in 15 of America’s largest coal companies. The divestment campaign began last October, when a student group, called the Brown Divest Coal Campaign, asked the university to stop investing in coal. “We believe that our university should not be profiting from an industry as dangerous and outdated as coal, which devastates human health and the environment at each step in its life cycle,” the group says on its website. …