Free Republic

Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild was carjacked at gunpoint in midtown Saturday morning, officials said. Shortly before 11 a.m., the mayor was leaving his home when he was greeted by a man holding a pistol, who demanded to know where his car was parked, Rothschild told the Star. Rothschild said that he pointed to his city-owned Toyota Prius and the man demanded he hand over the keys. The mayor complied, and the suspect left the scene in the Prius. Rothschild, who did not have a security detail with him when the incident occurred, was not injured and says he's doing fine....

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It was confirmed Tuesday, January 31st that President Donald Trump WILL NOT be coming to Milwaukee on Thursday, February 2nd. On Wednesday, the White House press secretary was asked about the decision to not make the trip to Milwaukee. “No decision had been made or announced as to what we were doing. We looked at different options, and ultimately the easiest thing to do in accordance with the President’s schedule was to invite them here, to Washington, to talk about some of the stuff we’ve been doing,” Sean Spicer said. The Milwaukee Business Journal reported Tuesday that...

President Trump's scheduled trip to a Harley-Davidson factory in Milwaukee on Thursday has been canceled over the likelihood of protests, CNN reported Tuesday. An administration official told the news network that the plans were scrapped after the motorcycle giant became uncomfortable with the threat of demonstrations. Over the weekend, massive protests broke out at airports across the country after Trump signed an executive order on Friday banning citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. Other large protests were planned for the president's Milwaukee visit, according to CNN. Trump was originally supposed to head to the factory for a...

The Obama administration will begin moving towards reform of the nation's immigration laws early next year to give legal status to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. An updated version of immigration laws could be supported by many members of congress only if border security is improved, according to Janet Napolitano — Homeland security Secretary — who was designated by US President Barack Obama to lead the administration's efforts to overhaul immigration laws.

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials. The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said. There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the...

More than half of the whopping $426.9 million Barack Obama has raised has come from small donors whose names the Obama campaign won't disclose. And questions have arisen about millions more in foreign donations the Obama campaign has received that apparently have not been vetted as legitimate. Obama has raised nearly twice that of John McCain's campaign, according to new campaign finance report. But because of Obama�s high expenses during the hotly contested Democratic primary season and an early decision to forgo public campaign money and the spending limits it imposes, all that cash has not translated into a financial...

A new sharia law controversy erupted last night over Government plans to issue special "Islamic bonds" to pay for Gordon Brown's public-spending programme by raising money from the Middle East. Britain is to become the first Western nation to issue bonds approved by Muslim clerics in line with sharia law, which bans conventional loans involving interest payments as "sinful". The scheme would mark one of the most significant economic advances of sharia law in the non-Muslim world. It will lead to the ownership of Government buildings and other assets currently belonging to British taxpayers being switched wholesale to wealthy Middle-Eastern...

Space exploration has become a topic of interest in U.S. presidential debates for the first time in over 40 years. Seventeen individuals are running for president in the two major parties' primaries. Several of them have expressed opinions about space; but most, to our knowledge, have not spoken directly about space, or addressed it at all. Below are statements from the candidates and/or their campaigns.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama released today the education plan he would enact if elected. The full 15-page plan includes a variety of proposals, including reforming early education programs. The last section of the plan, titled “A Commitment to Fiscal Responsibility” explains how he would pay for these initiatives. The passage of relevance here: “The early education plan will be paid for by delaying the NASA Constellation Program for five years,” among other steps. According to MSNBC, Obama would leave in place $500 million/year for Constellation’s “manufacturing and technology base”, but would otherwise transfer the funding to the education effort....

A federal appeals court allowed the Navy today to resume using underwater sonar blasts in anti-submarine warfare tests off the Channel Islands in Southern California, saying the nation’s military needs outweigh the safety of endangered whales. In a 2-1 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco suspended an April 6 injunction by a federal judge in Los Angeles that ordered the Navy to halt the sonar experiments during training exercises scheduled through 2009. In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper said the underwater sound waves could harm nearly 30 species of marine mammals, including five...

RICHFIELD, Minn. - Charles W. Lindberg, one of the U.S. Marines who raised the first American flag over Iwo Jima during World War II, has died. He was 86.

IRANIAN forces are being choppered over the Iraqi border to bomb Our Boys, intelligence chiefs say. Military experts claim this worrying move means we are at WAR with Iran in all but name. Last night an intelligence source told The Sun: “It is an extremely alarming development and raises the stakes considerably. In effect, it means we are in a full on war with Iran — but nobody has officially declared it.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's president said on Sunday the Lebanese and the Palestinians had pressed a "countdown button" to bring an end to Israel. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who triggered outrage in the West two years ago when he said Israel should be "wiped off the map", has often referred to the destruction of the Jewish state but says Iran is not a threat. "With God's help, the countdown button for the destruction of the Zionist regime has been pushed by the hands of the children of Lebanon and Palestine," Ahmadinejad said in a speech. "By God's will, we will witness...

Iran branded Israel "a uniquely grave threat" to world peace because of its alleged nuclear weapons Thursday, after the UN atomic agency sharply cut aid to Tehran because of its own atomic programme. "Nuclear weapons in the hands of the Israeli regime with ... a long and dark catalogue of crimes and atrocity such as occupation, aggression, militarism, state terrorism, crimes against humanity and apartheid pose a uniquely grave threat to regional and international peace and security," Iranian ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh told the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran and Arab states complain that it is...

The Salahaldin Al-Ayoubi Brigades, the military wing of JAMI, Al Jabha Al-Islamiyya l'il-Muqawama Al-'Iraqiyya, announced via Islamist websites that today, January 10, 2007, it had fired four missiles loaded with chemicals at a U.S. base near Samara, Iraq. The organization posted a film showing militants wearing gas masks and filling the missiles with a liquid which the organization claims are chemicals. Below are images from the film.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University and Joop Houtkooper of Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany, argue that even as new missions to Mars seek evidence that the planet might once have supported life, we already have data showing that life exists there now—data from experiments done by the Viking Mars landers in the late 1970s. “I think the Viking results have been a little bit neglected in the last 10 years or more,” said Schulze-Makuch. “But actually, we got a lot of data there.” He said recent findings about Earth organisms that live in extreme environments and improvements in our understanding of...

The New Horizons team got a faint glimpse of the mission's distant, main planetary target when one of the spacecraft's telescopic cameras spotted Pluto for the first time. The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) took the pictures during an optical navigation test on Sept. 21-24, and stored them on the spacecraft's data recorder until their recent transmission back to Earth. Seen at a distance of about 4.2 billion kilometers (2.6 billion miles) from the spacecraft, Pluto is little more than a faint point of light among a dense field of stars. But the images prove that the spacecraft can find...

Martin Sieff UPI Senior News Analyst Washington DC (UPI) Nov 21, 2006 It's official: The United States and Japan are boosting their already strong cooperation on ballistic missile defense development. New Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and U.S. President George W. Bush publicly announced their commitment to further accelerating the speed of the program after holding bilateral talks Saturday while attending the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported. "We agreed to strengthen and accelerate cooperation in ballistic missile defense and we will instruct our foreign and defense ministers to study...

I just went to a class on Iraq (Well Mesopotamia lol) and I noticed all these multi-colored fliers. I am scanerless but here is the flier as best as I can recreate it: Concerned students of UCLA call for: (Bold) Democracy not hypocrisy Our government, our people, our rights! End voter disenfranchisement!!! Mobilize to keep elected offical(note the lack of plural lol) accountable to the people!!! (Image of an upside-down flag with the words sElection 2004 (looks like a printing error) over the flag. Thursday November 4th 2004 Noon Meyerholl Park (by Kerckhoff steps) That is the flyer. They are...

Lol, this is my first post. I am a student at UCLA, the mood is....somber to say the least! You would think USC had come through to pillage and burn down the school. HA!