Free Republic

Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's five relatives are being guarded by 16 FBI staffers -- and the feds want them to testify this week so they can be sent back to Russia on Friday, according to court transcripts. “It’s an enormous expense and distraction for the agency, and that’s just part of the expense that the government has endured,” federal prosecutor William Weinreb said during a closed-door meeting Monday with the defense and Judge George O’Toole, according to transcripts shown on the court's public terminal. “The FBI is devoting 16 personnel full time to taking care of them, both guarding them...

So the anti-feminist feminist got heckled again by the PC kids. We can disdain them. But instead let’s turn to Plato, who can explain them. Beyond its entertainment value, mockery plays a useful role in a society as riven and weary as ours: it substitutes for understanding. Confronted with incomprehensible public rage, the quickest way to survive is simply to denigrate it from a safe distance. Diving down the rabbit hole, sinking into the morass, seems an act of cultural suicide. But as the deepening of our campus culture crisis should alert us, the strategy is leading to mutually assured...

Journalists in NBC News’s powerful Washington bureau expressed strong opposition to the potential return of suspended anchorman Brian Williams during a contentious meeting with the head of the network’s news division in February. In a sometimes angry series of comments, the journalists told NBC News President Deborah Turness in the private meeting in Washington that Williams’s embellished statements about his reporting exploits had damaged NBC’s credibility and that he should not be permitted to return to the anchor chair, according to several people who attended the session. The meeting — details of which have not been made public before —...

Marco Rubio had changed his mind. It was December 2012. The Senate gym. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) was making the ask. “You ought to be a part of this,” Durbin told Rubio (R-Fla.), as Rubio rode a stationary bike. Durbin and six other senators wanted to rewrite U.S. immigration laws. In the process, they wanted to give illegal immigrants a way to become legal residents and — eventually — citizens. Just two years earlier, Rubio had been against doing that. “It is unfair,” he had said, as a tea party candidate for Senate, “to create an alternative pathway for...

Obama took office vowing to end America’s wars. Now we’re in at least five, and U.S. officials are unsure what to do about it. President Barack Obama’s expression of remorse on Thursday for the death of two hostages in a U.S. drone strike underscored one of the great frustrations of his presidency: His dream of extricating the U.S. from messy foreign conflicts remains just that. Obama pledged in his 2013 inaugural address that “a decade of war is now ending,” but the numbers suggest otherwise. The U.S. takes regular lethal action in at least five countries. U.S. troops are deployed...

“A polygraph is nothing more than a psychological billy club used to coerce and intimidate people,” says Doug Williams, a former Oklahoma City police detective and polygraph examiner who for 36 years has trained people to pass the lie-detector test. The first step is not to be intimidated. Most tests include two types of questions: relevant ones about a specific incident (“Did you leak classified information to The New York Times?”) and broader so-called control questions (“Have you ever lied to anyone who trusted you?”). The test assumes that an innocent person telling the truth will have a stronger reaction...

ADEN, Yemen — Rooftop snipers have emptied the streets of this dusty seaside city and swelled its hospitals and morgues. Weeks of fighting between armed groups have left nearly 200 people dead and the city starved of water, fuel and electricity. Hospitals struggle to obtain anesthetic and dressings. Barefoot, nervous teenagers with matted hair and guns mind checkpoints on the treacherous roads. Gun battles sweep across the city while residents lie low and worry that Aden’s suffering will only increase. “The war of hunger has not started — yet,” said Ali Bamatraf, a grocer with dwindling stocks, standing among empty...

The geopolitics of presidential visits sometimes is news, like when Presidents are unpopular in a state where the governor comes from the President's party. Yet recent Presidents have traveled so much - Barack Obama included - that some trips aren't that newsworthy, except in the places the Commander in Chief visits. But when Obama landed in Utah last week it was the 49th state he'd visited since his inauguration in 2009. The math made it more newsworthy than normal because it's down to one Obama-less state - South Dakota. Your correspondent's home state. The land of the Black Hills, Badlands,...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. — Police here say they have found no evidence to support claims in a Rolling Stone article that a University of Virginia student was gang raped at a campus fraternity in September 2012, noting that months of investigation led detectives to discredit several claims about the alleged assault. Police Chief Timothy J. Longo on Monday afternoon said the police department had multiple meetings with “Jackie” — the woman who claimed she was gang raped at a fraternity party — and that she declined to speak about the alleged incident or provide any information about it. Numerous lines of...

KATHERINE BYRON, a senior at Brown University and a member of its Sexual Assault Task Force, considers it her duty to make Brown a safe place for rape victims, free from anything that might prompt memories of trauma. So when she heard last fall that a student group had organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed. “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” she told me. It...

Walter E. Fauntroy had been overseas for months when longtime friends gathered on a March evening to discuss the 82-year-old civil rights legend’s worrisome absence and the legal and financial difficulties engulfing him and his wife. Fauntroy, who helped the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. plan the 1963 March on Washington and became the District’s first congressional delegate in a century, had just missed a huge gathering in Selma, Ala., to mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the brutal confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that helped spur passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And where was the...

Bent over their computers in Salt Lake City, a dozen cyber sleuths scan the vast reaches of the Internet for contraband. Only, they’re not hunting traffickers of drugs or sex. It’s standardized testing season across the U.S. — and they’re on the lookout for student tweets about the tests. The web patrol team works for Caveon, a test security company charged with protecting the integrity of new Common Core exams developed by the publishing giant Pearson. To that end, they’re monitoring social media for any leaks about test questions. News of the surveillance broke this week, sparking a firestorm. The...

It would be hard to imagine a news event better tailored to MSNBC’s Venn diagram of “lean forward” liberals and “place for politics” political junkies. Yet when Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ presumptive 2016 presidential nominee, held a news conference about her private email use last week — a media frenzy that functioned, albeit inadvertently, as the informal launch to her highly anticipated campaign — less than 13 percent of the total cable news audience was tuned to the network. The low turnout wasn’t a fluke: Year-to-date, MSNBC’s daytime viewership is down 21 percent overall and 41 percent in the coveted...

This phrase became a rallying cry for Ferguson residents, who took to the streets to protest the fatal shooting of a black 18-year-old by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. Witness accounts spread after the shooting that Brown had his hands raised in surrender, mouthing the words “Don’t shoot” as his last words before being shot execution-style. The gesture of raised hands became a symbol of outrage over mistreatment of unarmed black youth by police. That narrative was called into question when a state grand jury could not confirm those testimonies. And a recently released Department of Justice investigative report...

As it becomes increasingly difficult to obtain the drugs needed for lethal injections, several states have sought to resurrect bygone ways of killing death-row inmates. In Utah, which outlawed death by firing squad in 2004, lawmakers voted last week to reinstate that execution method should the state run out of drugs for lethal injection. Tennessee chose the electric chair last year as its own backup method. Last week, the Alabama House passed a bill that would do the same. Similar measures in Virginia, Missouri, and Wyoming failed last year. But in Oklahoma, a bill is advancing that would introduce an...

The late evening of Aug. 9, 2014, I couldn’t sleep. I was due to substitute-anchor MSNBC’s “UP with Steve Kornacki” and should have been asleep. But after looking at my Twitter feed and reading the rage under #Ferguson, I felt compelled to type a reaction to the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. Tying the shooting to the inane whine of certain politicians about a “war on whites,” I decried the next morning the death of yet another unarmed black man at the hands of a white police officer. In those early hours and early days, there...

FERGUSON, MO (KTVI)- St. Louis County Police have confirmed to FOX 2 that the suspected shooter of two police officers early Thursday morning outside of the Ferguson police department is in custody. The two officers were shot just after midnight, as many protestors were headed home following a night of protests after the resignation of the city’s police chief. One of the wounded officers is from Webster Groves Police and was shot in the cheek, just under his right eye. The other wounded officer is with the St. Louis County Police and was hit in the shoulder and the bullet...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In between completing problem sets, writing code, organizing hackathons, worrying about internships and building solar cars, a group of MIT students make their way to the athletic center, where they stand side-by-side, load their guns and fire away. They are majoring in biological engineering, brain and cognitive sciences, aeronautics, mechanical engineering, computer science and nuclear science. Before arriving at MIT, nearly all of them had never touched a gun or even seen one that wasn’t on TV. “Which is strange because I’m from Texas,” said Nick McCoy, wearing a ­T-shirt advertising his dorm and getting ready to...

Congressional Republicans may be singularly focused on unraveling President Obama’s executive orders and actions, but when it comes to what is left of his viable policy agenda on Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama’s biggest problems are now often with Democrats. The administration’s most pressing goal, expansive trade legislation, is adamantly opposed by scores of Democrats in the House and Senate even as most Republicans support it. Mr. Obama’s formal request for congressional authorization to fight the Islamic State is deeply imperiled, in no small measure because Senate Democrats find it wanting. The president’s dismissal of the role of Congress in approving...

President Obama was on his way to an event in Selma, Alabama, when the noise was heard. Press were immediately moved out of the way while the First Family were not yet outside the building. For more read on. 4:11 pm Obama running late The incident means the president is now running 30 minutes late for the event in Selma, Alabama. Obama and his family were due to leave for the region at around 10.30am local time, but they are now well past that. No news on whether or not the visit is going to be cancelled. 4:04 pm What...