Free Republic

Gov. Eric Greitens was indicted Thursday afternoon by a St. Louis grand jury on a felony charge of invasion of privacy. The charge stems from a 2015 affair and allegations that he threatened to release a nude photograph of the woman, taken while she was blindfolded and her hands were bound, if she ever spoke publicly about the affair.

It’s like clockwork. Sick, twisted clockwork. A mass shooting happens. There is a flurry of confusing reports. A death toll is announced, a shooter identified. And then, even before the crime scene is cleaned up, come the pleas for gun control. But you already know how this will play out. Gun-control advocates and their allies in the media will attack the gun-rights crowd as cold-hearted, stubborn, and out of touch. They will complain that no new legislation will result from the tragedy, and they will be right. There are many reasons that this cycle repeats as it does. We live...

In a private meeting of Democrats on Wednesday, Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) begged his colleagues to push a measure that might have actually prevented Sunday morning’s carnage in Orlando: an assault weapons ban. Cicilline was answering the call of President Barack Obama and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, to keep “weapons of war” off the streets. But Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi nixed it. Better, she said, to focus on barring terror suspects from buying guns. That measure’s a no-brainer for Democrats, she reasoned, and easier to explain to the public. "It’s not that we’re not strong enough to make the...

JENSEN BEACH, Fla.— Omar Mateen visited a gun shop in this town near his home about five or six weeks ago. His request: heavy-duty body armor—rated IIIA, the sort typically used by law enforcement—and bulk ammunition. While at the store, Mateen had a phone conversation in which he appeared to be speaking in a Middle Eastern language, according to Robbie Abell, the co-owner of the store, Lotus Gunworks of South Florida. Staffers also noticed him texting on his phone. Mateen “just seemed very odd,” Mr. Abell said. “The questions he was asking [about body armor] were not the normal questions...

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) is working with former New York mayor and vocal gun-control advocate Michael Bloomberg’s organization to attempt to come up with a measure to keep terrorists from acquiring guns. A spokeswoman from Bloomberg’s organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, said Wednesday that the group was “working with Toomey’s office on the terror gap,” referring to a quirk in the laws that makes it legal for people on the government’s terrorist watch lists to purchase firearms. Toomey’s office would not comment Wednesday. It’s unclear if the effort will result in the actual drafting of a bill or is a...

"Let me tell you the story." Kenneth Catania, a biologist at Vanderbilt University, takes a breath. He hasn't known this tale long, but it's quickly become one of his favorites. Alexander von Humboldt, a famous German scientist, was on an expedition to document the geography and ecology of South America. He traveled for the better part of five years, debunking myths about mystical lakes, observing celestial events, naming new creatures, and investigating questions large and small. He once spent three whole months studying bird feces. "And one part of his quest was to get eels to do experiments on electricity,"...

The journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates said on Monday that he and his family would not move into a $2.1 million Brooklyn brownstone they recently bought because media coverage of the purchase had made them worried for their safety. Mr. Coates and his wife used a limited-liability corporation to shield their identities during the transaction — a legal maneuver frequently used by celebrities seeking privacy — but word of the sale leaked to The New York Post, which published an article about the purchase with pictures of the house last week. Real estate and other news organizations soon followed suit....

Walter E. Fauntroy was worried about spies. The renowned civil rights figure, who had left the District in 2012 amid mounting financial and legal troubles, was living in the United Arab Emirates and believed his emails were being “wiped out” by American intelligence officers assigned to block his outgoing messages, according to dozens of emails obtained by The Washington Post and acknowledged as authentic by his lawyer. So he began using an alias email address, while still signing his messages with his real name or “The Congressman” — a reference to his nearly two decades as D.C.’s delegate to the...

The people of Chicago are deeply riven by race, class and neighborhood, distrustful of the police, fearful of the growing rate of violent crime and united chiefly in their disapproval of the mayor’s performance and their conviction that the city is headed down the wrong track. These are among findings of a new survey by The New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation, which polled residents of a city that has been upended in recent months by revelations of questionable actions by the police, threats of a teachers’ strike, a school funding crisis and an uptick in violence. The...

President Barack Obama is opening a new front in the gun control debate, readying a big push for so-called smart gun technology — an initiative that the gun lobby and law enforcement rank and file is already mobilizing against. As early as Friday, Obama is set to formally release findings from the Defense, Justice and Homeland Security Departments on ways to spur the development of guns that can be fired only by their owner, according to industry and gun control sources. Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett is slated to preview the announcement for stakeholders on Thursday afternoon. It’s an intensification of...

President Barack Obama insists he does not obsess about “the narrative,” the everyday media play-by-play of political Washington. He urges his team to tune out “the noise,” “the echo chamber,” the Beltway obsession with who’s up and who’s down. But in the fall of 2014, he got sick of the narrative of gloom hovering over his White House. Unemployment was dropping and troops were coming home, yet only one in four Americans thought the nation was on the right track—and Democrats worried about the midterm elections were sprinting away from him. He wanted to break through the noise. Obama’s strategists,...

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2016-04-21/trump-wave-builds-in-a-steel-town-forsaken-by-the-world-economy

President Barack Obama will drop in on three of America's most important allies this week, possibly for the last time. But he isn't expecting an adoring reception in any of them. The U.S. relationship with all three nations is distressed, and Obama will be doing more than a little damage control. In Saudi Arabia, where he lands on Wednesday, Obama will try to soothe anger over his nuclear deal with Iran and his increasingly public complaints about the Saudi kingdom. In London, he’ll make amends for comments about British foreign policy that rattled the teacups at 10 Downing Street. And...

MOKOLO, Cameroon — As the convoy barreled through a village in northern Cameroon on Monday, a 7-year-old boy darted to the road, excited to see the chain of white S.U.V.s carrying Samantha Power, the first cabinet-level American official to visit the country since 1991. Distracted by a thundering noise, the boy glanced up at the helicopter providing security from above. Suddenly, he was struck dead — killed by the same convoy that had brought officials to showcase American efforts to help protect West Africa’s women and children. After hitting the boy, one S.U.V. carrying State Department employees pulled to the...

For someone who preaches the importance of diplomacy and outreach, even to longtime enemies, President Obama can be awfully tough on his friends. In recent months, he has offended most of the United States’ Persian Gulf allies. “All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats,” he joked privately, according to a recent profile in the Atlantic magazine. Publicly, he has said he “weeps” for Saudi and Kuwaiti children. The United States’ European allies, he complains, have grown too dependent on American firepower to keep them safe. Even the United Kingdom, a U.S. “special” partner, has received...

The world economy is nearing what international policymakers fear could be a dangerous turning point, as populist uprisings in the United States and Europe threaten to unravel decades-old alliances that have fostered free trade and deepened economic ties. The tension has reached boiling point in Britain, which in two months will vote on whether to leave the European Union. The International Monetary Fund, warned that a so-called Brexit is a “real possibility,” one that could usher in a new era of uncertainty and undermine the already fragile global recovery. But the unrest is not limited to the United Kingdom. Anti-EU...

The people of St. Louis weren’t really surprised when, on January 12, the National Football League announced its decision to let E. Stanley Kroenke, the owner of the St. Louis Rams, move his team to Los Angeles. Kroenke had long signaled his intentions, and L.A.’s media market beckoned as the nation’s second largest. Moving the team meant more revenue for the league, and therefore more money in owners’ pockets. And that, as serious football fans know, is the point. The NFL isn’t a charity. It’s a legally sanctioned cartel that strictly limits the number of franchises in order to maximize...

COPENHAGEN — Lise Ramslog was out for a barefoot amble on the warm day last September that Europe’s refugee crisis came to her remote village in southern Denmark. The 70-year-old grandmother had planned a simple stroll. What she found in her ­quiet, coastal community were hundreds of exhausted asylum seekers who had arrived on the ferry from Germany only to be stranded without access to public transportation. Some had begun to walk along the highway in desperation. Ramslog decided on the spot that she would help: She ended up giving two young couples, a small child and a newborn baby...

CHICAGO — Federal prosecutors on Friday for the first time provided details of sexual abuse allegations against J. Dennis Hastert, the former speaker of the House, asserting that he molested at least four boys, as young as 14, when he worked as a high school wrestling coach decades ago. Mr. Hastert, 74, is not charged with the incidents of abuse because of statutes of limitation, prosecutors said, but he was accused last year of illegally structuring bank withdrawals for money he was paying to one of his victims in an effort to hide the abuse. He pleaded guilty in October...

Huma Abedin hasn’t freshly read any of her email exchanges with Hillary Clinton that have been released by the State Department, but the longtime Clinton aide said it is "terrifying" to know that the messages are out there. “It’s something I can’t really think about, but I can’t even imagine what’s in those emails. But I’m sure I would probably be mortified. I have no idea. I haven’t read any of them,” Abedin, who served as one of Clinton's top aides at State, said in an interview with the podcast "Call Your Girlfriend." The State Department publicly released thousands of...