Free Republic

A New Jersey man who works as vice president of facilities for Columbia University has been arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a girl under the age of 13 in Bergen County, officials said. Marcelo Velez, 56, of Woodcliff Lake, was arrested Monday and faces charges of aggravated sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child, Bergen County Prosecutor Mark Musella said in a statement Tuesday. Woodcliff Lake police were notified Sunday that Velez allegedly engaged in sexual acts with a girl less than 13 years old at a home on Saturday morning, the prosecutor’s office said. The girl...

As Jews rang in the New Year, students at Columbia University voted in favor of an anti-Israel referendum that calls on the university to divest from companies that do business with Israel. The vote will have no tangible impact—Columbia University president Lee Bollinger has said he opposes any move to economically isolate Israel—but signals rising anti-Israel sentiment on the college campus. The referendum, the results of which were announced Tuesday morning, was pushed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a group that argues Israel is an apartheid state. The referendum's most ardent opponent, the Students Supporting Israel group, lobbied against the...

Columbia University is holding a five week long series of lectures for white students on “deconstructing whiteness.” The workshop series is titled “From Ally to Accomplice at Columbia: Working Group for Examining and Deconstructing Whiteness to Mitigate Racial Trauma.” According to the Facebook page for the series, the aim is “for white-identified students to engage in exploration of their white identities and build community and accountability around deconstructing whiteness and white privilege to facilitate the development of an anti-racist lens.”The description adds that it “will not be a support group for white students. Nor will it be comfortable or...

His anti-intellectual endpoint became the reality on America’s great city streets. Twenty years ago, on July 3, 2000, an incident occurred along the Lebanese border with Israel that, at the time, seemed both bizarre and, in the broad span of things, unimportant. But with the hindsight of 20 years, it was a seminal moment and a harbinger for the mob violence now taking place in many parts of America. That day, Columbia University professor Edward Said was photographed on the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese side of border with Israel throwing a rock at an Israel Defense Forces watchtower 30 feet away. Said, who passed...

A Columbia University political science professor told a Republican college student to 'drop dead' and called him a 'neo-nazi enabler' for supporting President Trump's coronavirus efforts during an argument on social media. . . . Montalvo, the New York State Vice Chairman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, told the newspaper that his response to the cartoon 'defended President Trump on how he's handled the pandemic.' 'People choose what they want to see and everyone has an opinion,' Montalvo wrote on Facebook, according to the screenshot he tweeted out. 'Doesn't help that it's constant bash POTUS with a side of...

Millions of college students will be closing out the semester from home, with online courses replacing in-person offerings. Due to the abrupt change, many schools are acknowledging the disruption, and associated changes in students’ circumstances, may lead to a decrease in academic performance unrelated to effort or intelligence, and are therefore instituting grading policies that provide appropriate understanding for the bizarre situation. Many universities, including Georgetown, Duke, University of Pennsylvania, have extended the deadline for taking a class pass/fail until either the last day of classes or even a week after report cards are released. However, many student groups are...

Double impact may have caused tsunami, global cooling Pieces of a giant asteroid or comet that broke apart over Earth may have crashed off Australia about 1,500 years ago, says a scientist who has found evidence of the possible impact craters. Satellite measurements of the Gulf of Carpentaria (see map) revealed tiny changes in sea level that are signs of impact craters on the seabed below, according to new research by marine geophysicist Dallas Abbott. Based on the satellite data, one crater should be about 11 miles (18 kilometers) wide, while the other should be 7.4 miles (12 kilometers) wide....

Several members of Columbia University’s 2019 championship fencing team wanted to hand deliver a letter to President Trump Friday, accusing his administration of having “perpetuated a culture that conditions women and minority gender identities to be silent.” Elise Gout and three of her teammates planned to hand the letter to the president during a White House visit for athletes and coaches from 22 collegiate national championship teams. Gout said that the letter argued that the Trump administration has “perpetuated a culture that conditions women and minority gender identities to be silent — to sacrifice the space they have every right to take...

Over 250 news outlets and journalists partnered with Columbia University School of Journalism’s flagship magazine to shape control of “climate crisis” coverage in the lead up to the United Nations climate conference. The coverage-coordination initiative included directing how much time, space and prominence should be devoted to the coverage, and asking that climate “news” be added to seemingly unrelated stories. Some of the biggest media outlets in the country, such as CBS and Bloomberg, joined the effort. But others, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, declined to participate in a project they reportedly feared appeared activist...

President Trump might be openly hostile to the mainstream media, but it was the Obama administration that was engaged in a widespread effort to thwart the media. Which do you think is more harmful to a free press? The full extent of Obama’s actions against the press are only now coming to light. The Columbia Journalism Review reports on a newly released government document showing that the Obama Justice Department engaged in a far more sweeping effort to spy on the Associated Press than previously believed. “In 2013, the Justice Department launched a brazen attack on press freedom,” the CJR...

A scientist in New York is conducting experiments designed to modify DNA in human embryos as a step toward someday preventing inherited diseases, NPR has learned. For now, the work is confined to a laboratory. But the research, if successful, would mark another step toward turning CRISPR, a powerful form of gene editing, into a tool for medical treatment. A Chinese scientist sparked international outrage in November when he announced that he had used the same technique to create the world's first gene-edited human babies. He said his goal was to protect them from infection with HIV, a claim that...

A professor recently claimed that the way President Donald Trump formulates his sentences raises concern that he may be unfit to fulfill his duties as president of the United States—all just months after he defended "Black English" as an "alternate form" of the language. John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, pointed out how Trump’s grammatical and spelling mistakes disqualify him from serving as commander-in-chief, in an op-ed for The Atlantic. McWhorter further stated that Trump’s informal style "betray[s] his lack of fitness for the presidency."

An international team of geoscientists from the United States, Canada and Europe has discovered a large impact crater beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in remote northwest Greenland. A paper on the discovery was published in the journal Science Advances. The Hiawatha impact crater is approximately 19.2 miles (31 km) wide and lies under an ice sheet that is 0.6 miles (1 km) thick.The scientists believe this crater was formed by a 0.6-mile wide iron asteroid that slammed into the Earth at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, perhaps as recently as 12,000 years ago. ..." “Researchers were looking at the map...

On a bright July day 2 years ago, Kurt Kjær was in a helicopter flying over northwest Greenland—an expanse of ice, sheer white and sparkling. Soon, his target came into view: Hiawatha Glacier, a slow-moving sheet of ice more than a kilometer thick. It advances on the Arctic Ocean not in a straight wall, but in a conspicuous semicircle, as though spilling out of a basin. Kjær, a geologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, suspected the glacier was hiding an explosive secret. The helicopter landed near the surging river that drains the glacier, sweeping out rocks...

The link is to a Columbia University debate where Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace argue that their duty is to cover the news at the risk of the American troops they're embedded with.Watch to the very end where a Marine officer talks about the journalists being in danger but he's expected to rescue them and put his men's lives in danger, but he will do it.This is the crap we've been dealing with since the 1960's.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGg_dpGhlf0

Another name for the neo-Marxism of increasing popularity in the United States is "cultural Marxism.” This theory says the driving force behind the socialist revolution is not the proletariat—but the intellectuals. While Marxism has largely disappeared from the workers' movement, Marxist theory flourishes today in cultural institutions, in the academic world, and in the mass media. This “cultural Marxism” goes back to Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and the Frankfurt School. The theorists of Marxism recognized that the proletariat would not play the expected historical role as a “revolutionary subject.” Therefore, for the revolution to happen, the movement had to depend on...

James Comey’s friend, Columbia University professor Daniel Richman, leaked classified information that Comey gave him. During this leaking period, Richman was apartment-building neighbors with a partner at the law firm that strategized with Fusion GPS operative Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian plant who set up Don Jr. in Trump Tower. “Yes, he is my neighbor,” Amy Wenzel, a partner at Cozen O’Connor, confirmed in a phone conversation with Big League Politics, confirming that they spoke. They live near each other in a Brooklyn high-rise.

My life has crossed paths with President Obama on multiple occasions. According to Obama, we were Columbia University classmates, both Pre Law and Political Science majors in the Class of ’83. I also ran against Obama in 2008 on the Libertarian Party Presidential ticket. What are the odds? But something about “the Obama at Columbia story” has always bothered me. Earlier in the week right here at The Blaze I wrote about having just returned from New York, where I attended my 30th Columbia University reunion. I celebrated with my esteemed classmates. Everyone except Barack Obama. As usual- he wasn’t...

Before I introduce myself and tell you about the most important decision of my political life, let me first cut to the chase. If Obama is re-elected on November 6th, you haven’t seen anything yet. Because the first Obama term was just a small taste of things to come. Without ever having to answer to voters again, he will be free to be his REAL radical self. Without any need for restraint, Obama will throw caution to the wind, ignore Congress, and govern by Executive Order. He will be free to truly wreck this economy from sea to shining sea-...

I am President Obama’s classmate at Columbia University, Class of ’83. I am also one of the most accurate Las Vegas oddsmakers and prognosticators. Accurate enough that I was awarded my own star on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars. And I smell something rotten in Denmark. Obama has a big skeleton in his closet. It’s his college records. Call it “gut instinct” but my gut is almost always right. Obama has a secret hidden at Columbia- and it’s a bad one that threatens to bring down his Presidency. Gut instinct is how I’ve made my living for 29 years...