Free Republic

It was just another night in the living room of a suburban Boston home in 2021. Thirty-five-year-old Ashley Randele, along with her parents Tom and Kathy, was watching an episode of “NCIS.” Tom laid on the couch, which had become his domain following a recent lung cancer diagnosis. Doctors had told the 71-year-old he was probably six weeks away from death. “When I moved here, I had to change my name,” he said mid-show, as casually as if asking his daughter to pass the remote control. “And the authorities are probably still looking for me.” Stunned, his family absorbed the...

t was the fall of 1986, some six months after the catastrophic Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explosion, and a group of soldiers suited up to enter the radiation-riddled site. Their task: Clean hundreds of tons of expelled, highly radioactive, nuclear fuel from rooftops near the reactor. Dressed in what appears to be foul-weather gear, one of the young men cinches his gloves and tightens the drawstring of his hoodie to shield his cheeks. Another slips a .1-inch-thick piece of lead, thinner than the protective coverings provided for dental X-rays, over his back. Some insert the sheets inside their undershorts, creating...

A day after a career criminal was arrested in the fatal shooting of philanthropist Jacqueline Avant at the lavish Beverly Hills home she shared with her husband Clarence, a 90-year-old music producer inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, her family issued a statement that read in part, “Now, let justice be served.” But in Los Angeles, where left-wing lawmakers and activists have pushed a litany of progressive reforms that help violent criminals spend less-time behind bars, justice is not only fleeting — it’s twisted, critics say.

So far, Heidi Fleiss’s 2020 hasn’t exactly been a flying success. The former Hollywood madam — during the 1990s she furnished call girls to Charlie Sheen and other A-listers — began the year worried about the ­future of her macaw sanctuary. Since 2006, she has cared for some three dozen rescued birds at her extremely remote desert home in Pahrump, Nev., but three years ago she was allegedly fleeced out of a $400,000 inheritance that grew into a $4 million investment, leaving her penniless. Her lawsuit over that matter seemed stalled earlier this year. Then there was the pandemic and...

In 1987, McDonald’s launched an ingenious sweepstakes based on the game of Monopoly. Customers would purchase sandwiches, fries, drinks, etc., that included peel-off game pieces on the packaging — potentially rewarding them with anything from a Filet-O-Fish to a new car to $1 million. People went wild for it and business spiked by 40 percent for the fast-food giant, which kept it up for years. But it wasn’t all happy meals. “It seemed like an opportunity for ordinary people to get ahead, but there were consequences,” said Brian Lazarte, co-director of the HBO docu-series “McMillion$,” premiering Monday, about the contest. In fact,...

Long before the murder, the girls and a role in “The Godfather,” Gianni Russo was a 13-year-old with a bum arm. Freshly sprung from Bellevue’s polio ward, he ditched his neglectful parents to sleep on flour sacks in the back of a Little Italy bakery and sell pens in front of the Waldorf-Astoria. It was 1956 and one of his regular customers was mob boss Frank Costello. The don would throw Russo a fiver and rub the boy’s withered shoulder for luck. After a few months of that, Russo objected to being touched. Costello respected the kid’s gumption — and...

The Atlantic Institute will be partnering with the Maitland Holocaust Center and the Interfaith Council of Central Florida on a special program entitled, Is History Repeating Itself? Jewish and Muslim Immigrant Experiences in America, scheduled for Thursday February 25, 2016 at the Holocaust Center, 851 N Maitland Avenue in Maitland, FL. The Atlantic Institute is partnered with the Alliance for Shared Values which is openly affiliated with the Gülen Movements Hizmet social initiatives in the United States. The Atlantic Institute on their website, praises Mr. Fethullah Gülen as their Imam and political leader. Fact #1 Recently, FBI agents carried out...