Free Republic

A New Jersey high school has come under criticism for digitally removing Donald Trump logos from two students' yearbook photos and removed a quote by Trump set to appear under the freshman class president's photo. Wall Township High School junior Grant Berardo was disappointed to see that the "Trump: Make America Great Again" text on his shirt was no longer there; the logo was there in the photo proofs in November, according to a report from CNN. "He was disappointed. This was the first election he has been interested in," Berardo's father said. He wants the yearbooks reissued and an...

The map of the Middle East displayed in an Obama administration video released days before President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel shows the Jewish state dispossessed of substantial parts of its current territory, including its capital. The map of Israel, displayed repeatedly during the video, shows the Golan Heights, Jerusalem, northern Israel, and areas surrounding what is currently the West Bank as non-Israeli territory. The Golan Heights is shown as part of Syria; Jerusalem is shown as part of the West Bank; and northern Israel is shown as part of Lebanon. The itinerary on the White House website also implies...

Quietly and without much notice, the Air Force has reversed its policy of publishing statistics on drone strikes in Afghanistan as the debate about drone warfare hits a fever pitch in Washington. In addition, it has erased previously published drone strike statistics from its website. Since October, the Air Force had been providing monthly updates on drone strikes -- or in its words "weapons releases from remotely piloted aircraft (RPA)." But today, Air Force Times reporters Brian Everstine and Aaron Mehta discovered something was amiss: The statistics published for February "contained empty space where the box of RPA statistics had...

Guess MSNBC missed the part of Pres. Obama's Tucson speech decrying the way our politics have become "so sharply polarized" . . . During today's Morning Joe, MSNBC aired a promo for PBO's impending State of the Union that featured video from previous SOTU speeches. Notably missing were any clips from past Republican presidents. Instead we were treated to a montage of JFK, LBJ, Clinton, Obama and even Jimmy Carter. Think Ronald Reagan, or W just a few months after 9-11, might have said something inspirational in their SOTUs? Not in the mind of MSNBC.

A long-time Jewish neighborhood in the Lebanese city of Sidon that kept its Jewish name throughout the tribulations of Lebanese-Israeli tensions has finally lost the name. The residents renamed the neighborhood, known for decades as Haret al-Yahud (Neighborhood of the Jews), Haret Gaza. It happened at the end of last week, when the Arab world commemorated International Quds Day (Jerusalem Day). Sidon is the third-largest city in Lebanon, located about midway between the two largest cities, Tyre and Beirut, and only some 60 kilometers from Israel. Haret al-Yahud was long populated mostly by Jews, part of the Lebanese Jewish population...

Army Spc. Claudia Carreon has a 2-year-old daughter, but cannot remember being pregnant or giving birth. She has two brothers and two sisters, but doesn't know who they are without nametags. She sometimes can't recall what she ate for breakfast, or where she put things when she cleaned up. "My mother found the toaster in the refrigerator," said Carreon, 32, an Iraq War veteran left with a brain injury that wiped her memory clean. The Tucson woman now lives in a discombobulated world, where conversations often don't make sense, hallucinations come without warning and relationships must be reconstructed daily from...

When time erases written languages By Greg Lavine The Salt Lake Tribune While researchers periodically hail new finds as the earliest examples of human writing, few scientists have systematically peered into the other end of the process -- the fall of a culture's written symbols. Writing systems, like cultures, have come and gone throughout human history. Brigham Young University anthropologist Stephen Houston and other colleagues studied several dead script systems from around the globe to look for similarities and differences in their respective demises. "What's interesting is why people choose, or are forced, to drop something that had been enormously...