Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO, May 9 - The incident seemed alarming enough: a breach of a Cisco Systems network in which an intruder seized programming instructions for many of the computers that control the flow of the Internet. Now federal officials and computer security investigators have acknowledged that the Cisco break-in last year was only part of a more extensive operation - involving a single intruder or a small band, apparently based in Europe - in which thousands of computer systems were similarly penetrated. Investigators in the United States and Europe say they have spent almost a year pursuing the case involving...

An Orange County jury has reached a verdict in the Irvine 11 case of Muslim students accused of conspiring and disrupting a February 2010 speech by the Israeli ambassador to the United States. The case garnered national attention over free-speech rights and centered on conflicting views of who was being censored. Prosecutors argued that Ambassador Michael Oren was "shut down" when his speech was interrupted by students who took turns shouting preplanned phrases in a crowded UC Irvine ballroom.

Sheinbaum, 61, is poised to make history as Mexico’s first female president and first Jewish head of state. Polls a week before Mexico’s election show her enjoying a wide lead over the next candidate, the conservative entrepreneur Xóchitl Gálvez. Still, after nearly a quarter-century in the public eye, she remains an enigma, known mainly as the low-key protégé of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the charismatic leader known as AMLO. AMLO doesn’t speak English and dislikes traveling abroad. Sheinbaum did postdoctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley; her sister and daughter live in the United States. The president,...

Anti-fascist activists had a difficult time pushing back against James O’Keefe’s investigative reporting during a planned press conference Thursday. They got kicked out of a food court, but not before showing pornography to a reporter. The DC Antifascist Coalition had booked a room at the National Press Club to hold a press conference in which they would unveil damaging information about O’Keefe and his group Project Veritas. In the lead-up to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Project Veritas released videos which resulted in the arrest of a member of DisruptJ20 and foiled a plot to use stink bombs at an inauguration...

Pro-Palestinian protesters reportedly firebombed “the side of a building” on the University of California Berkeley (UCB) campus and claimed that students had been “attacked” on another campus. In a post on Instagram on Thursday, Palestine Action in the United States shared a post from an anonymous user who claimed responsibility for firebombing the side of Koshland Hall, a building at UCB that houses “labs from the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology.”

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum claimed to be in the business of buying and selling real estate, but he really bought and sold human kidneys for transplant, according to a federal complaint filed Thursday. The 58-year-old Brooklyn man was accused of trafficking in human organs, after a sting by an undercover FBI agent who agreed to pay $160,000 for a kidney from a live Israeli donor for her sick New Jersey "uncle." Investigators said Rosenbaum bragged about doing "quite a lot" of transplants over the last 10 years. "I am what you call a matchmaker," the complaint said the man, also known...

In 1985, Harold Washington issued an executive order that relaxed federal immigration laws under then-President Ronald Reagan, whose administration “aggressively used [the] detention of Central Americans as a device to deter migration from that region, where violent civil wars had caused tens of thousands to flee,” according to University of California Davis law professor Kevin Davis. Since Aug. 31, 2022, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has bussed or flown to Chicago nearly 40,000 individuals seeking asylum in an effort to use the welcoming aspects of Washington’s executive order as a political cudgel. On April 14, Mayor Johnson called out the...

The 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was found deceased at the University of California, Berkeley, on Tuesday. His grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, confirmed the devastating news in a Facebook post. The student, identified as Marco Troper, was discovered unresponsive in his dorm at the Clark Kerr Campus, a student housing complex, around 4:23 p.m. local time. Despite immediate life-saving attempts by the Berkeley Fire Department, Troper was pronounced dead at the scene. The University of California Police Department (UCPD) stated that there were no signs of foul play discovered, according to the New York Post. The heartbroken grandmother...

A tenured professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has long been accused of fabricating her Native American heritage, will be allowed to retire with full benefits and her title intact. Ethnic Studies Professor Andrea Smith will reportedly be allowed to keep her current position through August of 2024. She will be allowed to teach classes until then. The separation agreement comes in the wake of a recent complaint by more than a dozen faculty members, who accused her of violating academic integrity by lying about her Native American lineage. The agreement is unusual both in that it will...

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — The University of California, Santa Cruz has received two separate reports of incidents of antisemitism and hate. In a statement, they say one happened on campus and the other to a student in downtown Santa Cruz.

Robert Reich, who served as Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration and is currently a Professor of Public Policy at University of California, Berkley, expressed interest on Tuesday in making the last name of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis an official synonym for "fascist." Reich is not the first left-wing person to dub the governor a fascist. It has become a more common occurrence as DeSantis has increased his national profile, some think with an eye toward running for the presidency in 2024. "The View's" Sunny Hostin previously called DeSantis a "fascist and a bigot," MSNBC host Joy Reid call...

Johnathan Perkins, director for Race and Equity at University of California, Los Angeles, tweeted his wish for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to die after news broke that Thomas was hospitalized for an infection. "This whole rule we’re not to wish ill on people is silly," he said. Perkins added "Uncle Thomas is a sexist token who’s committed himself to making us all share in he and his treasonous wife’s misery" and "I’m over it. He is bad. He’s LITERALLY endangered lives of countless of this country’s vulnerable populations." Perkins further said he did not believe Thomas was not actually...

Dong Jingwei, who has been rumored to be a high-ranking defector to the United States, attended a meeting in Beijing on June 23, according to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS). The MPS announced on its website that Dong participated in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) security meeting in Beijing on Wednesday, as a member of the China team which was led by Zhao Kezhi, China’s public security minister. In the announcement, the ministry released a photo, in which Dong was sitting at the right end of the table. This is the first time that the Chinese regime has...

Researchers with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) found and extracted a mammoth tusk deep under the ocean. According to MBARI, their team spotted the tusk 185 miles offshore and 10,000 feet deep on top of a seamount in 2019. They returned on July 2021 to bring the tusk to the surface. "The researchers have confirmed that the tusk—about one meter (just over three feet) in length—is from a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi)," reported the institute. They believe it could be the oldest well-preserved mammoth tusk recovered from this area of North America. The Columbian mammoth went extinct around 11,500...

Millions of people who have refused to get an experimental mRNA vaccine may soon be forced to consume the gene therapy in their food. Researchers at the University of California were awarded a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation developing technology that infuses experimental mRNA Covid-19 vaccines into spinach, lettuce and other edible plants. The team of nanobiotechnology experts is currently working on successfully delivering DNA containing mRNA BioNTech technology into chloroplasts, the part of the plants that instruct its cells’ DNA to replicate the vaccine material. The researchers are tasked with demonstrating the genetically modified plants can produce...

Dear profs X, Y, Z I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field. In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them. In the extended links and...

The University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral program in second language acquisition recently held a virtual lecture on “Undoing White Supremacy in the Language Disciplines.” Professor Mary Bucholtz from the University of California-Santa Barbara spoke as a guest at the virtual lecture. Bucholtz identified herself as being “racist” because she is “a White American.”

... [A] task force of the faculty senate at the University of California, of all places, is resisting the movement to ban test scores in admissions. The 227-page report, completed in late January, recommends that the UC system keep standardized tests like the ACT and SAT as admissions requirements, and it demolishes the logic of the politically motivated anti-testing movement. The report dispatches the myth that standardized math and reading tests are useless for predicting college performance. Based on data from tens of thousands of students in the UC system, the report concludes that “test scores are currently better predictors...

A mathematics professor at the University of California, Davis, has faced significant pushback for criticizing university-mandated “diversity statements,” testimonies that purportedly help determine the degree to which job applicants will be able to advance and promote diversity on campus.

The University of California, Los Angeles recently published an interview with a professor who claims that mass shootings motivated by racism have only been a problem since Trump’s election. In addition to Trump’s “hate speech,” the professor blames American “gun culture” for the gun violence epidemic. He insists that a solution includes “qualifications” to both the First and Second Amendments, which he says are not “absolute.”