Free Republic

An Iranian asylum seeker was shot dead by police as he charged at an officer while wielding an axe, the culmination of a four-hour hostage-taking aboard a Swiss regional train service. Nearly 100 members of the emergency services responded to a hostage-taking aboard a local train service stopped Essert-sous-Champvent train station after passengers managed to contact police to alert them of the situation. A “screaming” 32-year-old Iranian asylum seeker armed with an axe and a knife had tied up at least some of the 14 passengers and the driver of the Sainte-Croix to Yverdon train, leading to a four-hour hostage...

Ukraine could have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths and lost less land if it had reached a peace deal with Russia before the conflict began last February, former US President Donald Trump told NBC News in an interview aired on Sunday. The loss of Ukrainian territory to Russia is “something that could have been negotiated,” Trump told NBC host Kristen Welker, adding that “a lot of people expected” Kiev to abandon its claims to “Crimea and other parts of the country” in exchange for peace. “So they could have made a deal where there’s less territory [lost] than Russia...

Pennsylvania Lt. Governor John Fetterman isn’t really running for U.S. Senate. He’s on the ballot. He’s doing some campaign stops. He’s dodging a debate against Dr. Mehmet Oz. But he’s just a placeholder. The real candidate that nobody outside of the powerbrokers in the Democrat Party know about is his radical leftist wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman. The official candidate has been making the news lately with his odd behavior. Just before the primary election, he suffered a stroke and was away from the public eye for over a month. But now that he’s back on the campaign trail, a whole...

A North Carolina woman has been charged with the murder of man who was recently found dying in a cemetery. Maria Elizabeth Peña-Echeverria, 18, was arrested by the Raleigh Police Department on Saturday night over the murder of 69-year-old James Lacy Taylor. **SNIP** An initial police press release reads: Last night at approximately 10:05 p.m., Raleigh Police Department officers were dispatched to the 2200 block of State Farm Road, where they located an adult male suffering from serious injuries. He was transported to the hospital where he was declared deceased. Detectives were called to the scene, and a follow-up investigation...

Bahena Rivera testified that two masked men wielding a gun and a knife appeared in his living room after he finished taking a shower and ordered him into his car, a black Chevy Malibu. He said one man got in behind him and the other next to him. He testified that he followed their orders to drive and then stop near a jogger, whom he now recognizes was Tibbetts. Bahena Rivera's demeanor remained mostly calm during the stunning testimony until he described how the two masked men said "they knew Iris [Gamboa, the mother of his daughter] and my daughter"...

A North Carolina Spanish teacher and coach reportedly had a secret life and was killed during a shootout with a drug cartel last week, according to the police. Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson said Barney Harris along with a friend, Steven Alexander Stewart, shot and killed an 18-year-old member of the Sinaloa New Generation Cartel, which led to a shootout with other cartel members, local outlet WSOC-TV reported.... ...Harris, the head coach for his school’s men’s basketball and track team, was attempting to steal drugs and money from the cartel in a mobile home park in...

Disney Plus has ordered 10 episodes of a new TV series based on the popular “National Treasure” films. The show, a reimagining of the franchise, will include original producer Jerry Bruckheimer and writers Marianne and Cormac Wibberley. Directed by Mira Nair, the series will explore identity, community and patriotism through the eyes of Jess Morales, a 20-year-old DREAMer who sets off on an adventure to recover lost treasure and uncover her mysterious family history. No official announcements have been made in regard to casting the series, but according to Bruckheimer, the show will keep the same concept as the movies...

Disney has given the green light to reboot the National Treasure movie franchise into a TV series that will star a Hispanic female DREAMer, who will explore “historical authorship and identity.” National Treasure, starring Nicholas Cage, spawned two hit films in 2004 and 2007, and a third film has been long-gestating. But now Disney has taken the concept in a new direction with an upcoming series destined for its streaming service, Disney+, according to Deadline. The new series will feature lead character Jess Morales — a 21-year-old immigrant, ostensibly part of President Barack Obama’s DREAMer program — who will lead...

Reyna Montoya’s hands get sweaty and her throat feels like it’s closing just talking about the anxiety of every Monday this spring. The immigrant rights activist who’s shielded from deportation and allowed to legally work in the U.S. under an Obama-era program sets a 6 a.m. alarm so she’s alert when the latest Supreme Court decision may be posted online about an hour later. Montoya, like 650,000 others enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, is waiting for the justices to release their decision on President Donald Trump’s attempt to end the protections. The high court heard arguments...

Before progressive darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) officially endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for president on Saturday, the duo sat down with The Intercept to discuss the need for a progressive grassroots movement in America. According to Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most influential people in Congress and she has made great strides over the last year. "It's hard to believe that a year ago today you were waiting tables, is that correct?" Sanders asked AOC. "I cannot recall any political in modern history of this country who, in the course of one year – and she's the youngest woman...

Republican Whittney Williams, a President Trump supporter who used to live in the U.S. illegally, on Monday announced that she would be launching a campaign to challenge Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens (D) for the 11th District seat Stevens flipped blue during the 2018 midterms. Williams, 37, said in an announcement video that she was brought to the United States at the age of 10 from Taiwan “without knowing a word of English.” “My family overstayed their visas and, as a result, I spent the next 16 years living in the shadows as an illegal immigrant,” Williams said. Williams, the director...

DENVER, May 3 (Reuters) - A Texas truck driver who police say caused a fiery multi-vehicle crash near Denver last week that killed four people and injured four was charged on Friday with 40 criminal counts including vehicular manslaughter, prosecutors said. Police in Lakewood, Colorado said they arrested 23-year-old Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos after he lost control of his tractor-trailer truck during the evening rush hour on April 25 and caused a crash on Interstate 70 that involved at least 28 vehicles.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Saturday she will not take up President Trump’s offer to trade off $5.7 billion in wall funding for a three-year extension of a program providing legal status for "Dreamers," who illegally went to the U.S. as children. Pelosi, D-Calif., issued a statement just before Trump’s announcement, calling the plan “a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total, do not represent a good faith effort to restore certainty to people’s lives.” Pelosi said the proposal does not achieve what Democrats have long sought for the "Dreamers," which is a...

A York County-based fishing boat – the Captain Billy Haver – was 55 miles off the coast of Massachusetts a few weeks ago, dredging scallops from the sea. Then, seemingly out of the blue, a crew member started attacking his shipmates with a hammer. The vessel’s captain radioed the Coast Guard for help at 2 p.m. on an international emergency distress channel. “Mayday, mayday, mayday,” he said in a thick accent. “Can anybody hear me?” “We have a man gone crazy here on the boat, man,” the captain continued after hearing a reply. “One man, I don’t know if he’s...

Police allege Donovan Ruiz sold "fentanyl to many users" and that one of his customers overdosed and died. The arrest took place at Cher's Malibu home. A man believed to be the son of one of Cher's assistants has been arrested at the star's Los Angeles home. [snip] Police claim Ruiz, 23, "was involved in the sales of suspected fentanyl to residents of Ventura and Los Angeles Counties". [snip] "Fentanyl sold by Ruiz was eventually consumed by a victim in the city of Thousand Oaks who later overdosed and died." [snip] Sergeant Eric Buschow told People magazine that the arrest...

Washington (CNN) - Sen. John McCain said Saturday that he supports an effort in the House of Representatives to force a vote on an immigration bill. "I strongly support the bipartisan effort in the House to file a discharge petition to reopen the debate on immigration reform and bring up our #USAAct for a vote," the Arizona Republican wrote in a tweet. A bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Republican Reps. Will Hurd of Texas, Jeff Denham of California and and Carlos Curbelo of Florida, introduced the Uniting and Securing America Act in January. The bill would shield undocumented immigrants brought...

The man accused of killing a teenage girl in a car accident in Houston had previously been deported from the United States three times, federal records show. Edy Lopez-Hernandez, 27, was arrested after crashing into another vehicle and fleeing the scene Sunday. He was later determined to be under the influence of unspecified narcotics when he was driving "at a high rate of speed" and crashed into the rear of another car, according to Houston police. A 17-year-old girl in the back seat of the vehicle that he hit died on impact. Lopez-Hernandez, who is from Guatemala, got out of...

Walker County, Texas, officials issued a warrant for Platero-Rodriguez's arrest for homicide by firearm in the death of a man in the Houston area earlier this year. The suspected gang member was found with a 9 mm pistol, which the Berkeley County Sheriff's Office said Wednesday could have been the weapon used in the Texas murder. Officials said the suspect killed the man, put his body in the trunk of the vehicle and poured gasoline on it before setting the vehicle on fire. He then apparently fled to South Carolina. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told Fox News that...

A young man who came to Minnesota as a "refugee" from Somalia has been linked to Syed Farook, the shooter who, along with his jihadist wife, killed 14 Americans in San Bernardino less than a week ago. Fox News contributor Rod Wheeler provided a key piece of information about the case, linking the San Bernardino shooters to Mohamed Hassan, a known terrorist recruiter who has been on the FBI radar screen for at least seven years. As WND reported in May, Hassan also helped radicalize Elton Simpson, one of the two jihadists who tried to storm into a Prophet Muhammad...

Soon after Parthiv Patel earned a law degree at Drexel and passed demanding bar exams in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, doors slammed shut. A so-called Dreamer who was illegally brought to the United States from India at age 5, Patel was denied a law license because he is not a citizen. His story grabbed the attention of Gurbir S. Grewal, New Jersey’s newly appointed attorney general, weeks after Patel won the right to become a lawyer through a yearlong legal battle. Bucking tradition — and the Trump administration’s plans to rescind the rights of Dreamers — the first Sikh attorney...