Free Republic

This year's Davos summit was attended by political leaders, business executives, intellectuals and celebrities. Notable politicians who attended included U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. Prominent business leaders included Bill and Melinda Gates, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman. Celebrities included Kevin Spacey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Emma Watson and will.i.am.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is re-establishing a law enforcement group to fight those it designates as domestic terrorists, with an announcement expected on Tuesday, Department of Justice officials said. Following hate-motivated shootings such as the one at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, Missouri in April, federal prosecutors have pressed the need to coordinate intelligence of such criminals on a national level, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The group will coordinate cases that involve Americans who may be spurred to violence for political or prejudicial reasons.

The U.S. Administration under President Barack Obama is on defense after media revelations of large-scale surveillance programs that tapped into ordinary U.S. citizens' use of telephones and the internet. The director of national intelligence confirmed Thursday night that the federal government has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple. Officials told the New York Times that the data was gathered as part of a program code-named Prism, which is authorized under a foreign intelligence law that was recently renewed by Congress, and that...

Is the pornography business racist? Seriously. A cursory — and entirely dispassionate — examination of the marketplace seems to indicate that it is. Pornographers hire on the basis of race all the time. There are porn films, websites, magazines, etc. dedicated solely to African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and, of course, whites. Worse, I suppose, the porn industry regularly traffics in hurtful ethnic slurs — calling young Hispanic women "spicy," for example — the vast, vast, vast majority of which I cannot mention on this family-oriented website (not to be confused with families-of-Orientals fetish sites). Hollywood long ago broke the racial...

Amid vibrant cheers, hamburgers grilling at tailgate parties, and the swing of marching bands, another season of college football is thrillingly underway. But in the background, like the blue-gray October sky of old, lies a quiet discord that is wrenching the heart of college athletics. For hundreds of athletes in sports like track, baseball, swimming, or wrestling, this season they will be told to stay off the fields of play, don't get on the track, get out of the pool, or stay off the mats — if the students happen to be men, that is. That’s because, despite the pleas...