Free Republic

China warned it is ready for any “type of war” with the US in an alarming escalation as President Trump’s tariffs went into effect. “If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said late Tuesday. Tensions grew stiff between the two nations on Tuesday as Trump bumped up a 10% tariff on Chinese imports to 20%, claiming the trade measure would halt the flow of fentanyl into America. Jian’s statement, reiterated on X by...

President Biden on Tuesday signed a proclamation creating a national monument in honor of Mamie Till Mobley and her son Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose brutal killing in Mississippi helped galvanize the civil rights movement. The monument, spread over three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, will tell the story of Till’s murder in 1955, and of his mother’s efforts to ensure it would never been forgotten. “I can’t fathom what it must have been like,” Biden said Tuesday — on what would have bill Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday. “It’s hard to believe I was 12 years old. I know no...

By her own telling, Mississippi authorities provided Carolyn Bryant Donham with preferential treatment rather than prosecution after her encounter with Emmett Till led to the lynching of the Black teenager in the summer of 1955. Instead of arresting Donham on a warrant that accused her of kidnapping days after Till’s abduction, an officer passed along word that relatives would take her and her two young sons away from home amid a rising furor over the case, Donham said in a 2008 memoir made public last month. The sheriff would later claim Donham, 21 at the time, could not be located...

Emmett Till protesters stormed a senior living facility in search of the woman who has been accused of setting a lynch mob on him after a 1955 arrest warrant was unearthed in a Mississippi courthouse. Carolyn Bryant Donham, now in her 80s, of Raleigh, North Carolina, reportedly accused Till of whistling at her in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. A week later, the 14-year-old Till was abducted, tortured, fatally shot and dumped into the Tallahatchie River, where his body was found swollen and mutilated three days later. His open casket shocked the nation. Donham's husband, Roy Bryant,...

ATLANTA — The Justice Department announced on Monday that it had closed an investigation into the abduction and murder of Emmett Till, the African American teenager whose gruesome killing by two white men more than six decades ago in Mississippi helped begin the civil rights movement. In a news release dated Dec. 6, federal officials said there was not enough evidence to pursue charges in the case, which was reopened after a historian claimed in a book that Carolyn Bryant Donham, the central witness whose account of an encounter with Emmett led to his death, had recanted the most salacious...

Emmet Till was a young African-American teenager who was brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. His death was an atrocity which shocked America into action against racism and the denial of civil rights of blacks. In an attempt to draw attention to her movie,”The Butler”Oprah Winfrey recently invoked the outrage, comparing Trayvon Martin to Emmet Till, as an example of racist injustice. Obviously there is no comparison to the frightened teenager who was dragged out of bed by the KKK and brutally murdered, with the street fighting teenager whose attempt at bashing in the...

Lt. General Henry A. “Trey” Obering, Missile Defense Agency director, announced today the successful completion March 15, 2007 of the first in-flight test of the laser targeting system for the Airborne Laser (ABL), a boost-phase missile defense system that is designed to use directed energy to destroy a ballistic missile in the “boost” phase of flight. This important milestone involved multiple firings of the Tracking Illuminator Laser (TILL), mounted inside of the world’s most heavily modified Boeing 747-400 aircraft, to engage a missile-shaped target painted on the side of a KC-135 aircraft nicknamed “Big Crow,” and used as an aerial...

Editorial: Raiding the tobacco till Friday, December 3, 2004 Three years ago, when the cash was flowing freely on Beacon Hill, Massachusetts led the nation in spending on anti-smoking programs. Voters had agreed to raise cigarette taxes to fund anti-smoking initiatives, and the state's share of the huge federal tobacco settlement brought in even more cash intended to mitigate the health effects of smoking. That investment was paying off. National polls consistently found Massachusetts teen-agers trailing teens from around the country in smoking rates. That was then. After years of budget shortfalls, Massachusetts has fallen to 40th place in tobacco-control...

Why the "60 Minutes" Story on Emmett Till Was a Disappointment By David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito Mr. Beito is an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama and Linda Royster Beito is chair of the Department of Social Sciences at Stillman College. They are writing a biography of T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader and entrepreneur who helped to find witnesses and evidence in the Emmett Till case. David T. Beito is also a member of Liberty and Power, a group blog at the History News Network. In the wake of memogate, "60 Minutes" has...

When Incrementalism Really Means Compromise I was a mere high school student when I attended my first "contemporary" church service during the "Jesus Freak" movement of the early 1970's in Costa Mesa, California.  Up to that point in my life, I was exposed to more formal type church services only.  Nevertheless, this new kind of church service shocked me very little, because I was made aware (many times, until the point was driven home), of the "logic" behind this modern type worship. The example I heard most promoting the positive aspects of this new movement was, "we are building bridges to...

Nearly fifty years ago, one of the most sensational murders in American history took place. In August 1955, two white half brothers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, kidnapped Emmett Till, a fourteen year old black boy, from his great uncle’s home. Several days later, his brutally beaten and horribly disfigured body was fished out of the Tallahatchie River. What had Till done to merit such treatment? Witnesses said that he wolf-whistled, and perhaps made suggestive remarks, to Bryant’s pretty young wife while buying bubblegum at Bryant’s store in the hamlet of Money, Mississippi. Like countless black males before him, Till...

The RantNuke 'em 'till they glow and then shoot 'em in the dark By DOUG THOMPSON Feb 5, 2003, 13:23 OK. I’m convinced. Warm up the B-52s, fire up the Stealths, unleash the smart bombs. Time to nuke Iraq until it glows and then shoot Saddam in the dark.Using the massive snooping capabilities of the National Security Agency, whose recorders could hear a fly fart from 2,000 miles away, Powell laid out the long-awaited evidence that Saddam and his goons are moving his weapons of mass destruction out of sight just before the United Nations weapons inspectors show up.It’s a...