Free Republic

The Maarif Foundation, which was established by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government in 2016, has taken over the management of two schools linked to the Gülen group in Venezuela, the pro-gov’t Sabah daily reported on Saturday.The Foundation has so far taken over at least 78 schools linked to the Gülen group in Guinea, Somalia, Sudan, People’s Republic of the Congo, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Tunisia, Senegal and Chad with their 8,506 students. The foundation has recently signed an agreement to take over Gülen movement schools in Afghanistan, which have more than 8,000 students.The foundation also has opened...

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq will close on Wednesday to honor former President George H.W. Bush following his death, spokespeople confirmed Saturday. NYSE spokeswoman Kristen Kaus told The Hill that the exchange will also observe a minute of silence on Monday in honor of the late president, who died on Friday. The Nasdaq will also observe a moment of silence on Monday, with spokesman Will Briganti saying it "plans to close its U.S. equities and and options markets on December 5 in honor of the national day of mourning." President Trump has called for a national...

Homer Simpson’s ignorance of New Mexico’s statehood is now being replicated by multiple real life government employees in Washington D.C. When I read this recent news article, it reminded me of this joke from The Simpsons. In 1993, during the season 5 episode “Boy-Scoutz ‘n the Hood,” Homer was shown to not know that New Mexico was a U.S. state. Here’s a video of it:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3jYO0TKcm4When I was searching for that video, I found out that The Simpsons had later recycled that same joke with Mr. Burns seven seasons later in the episode “Homer vs. Dignity,” which I had never seen, because...

Video LinkThis is a great talk given by the incomparable Heather Mac Donald at Hillsdale College.Here's a snippet: It is in the sciences where the diversity imperative becomes actually dangerous. Every academic science department whether physics, mathematics, or chemistry is in the victimology crosshairs. The federal government is demanding that scientific departments hire based on gender and race rather than scientific merit science. Education is being slowed down and watered down in the hope of graduating more females and underrepresented minorities. An oncologist at an Ivy League medical school was berated by his Dean for an exam in pharmacology that...

Google employees debated whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, internal Google communications obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation reveal. The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically singled out as outlets to potentially bury, the communications reveal. Trump’s election in 2016 shocked many Google employees, who had been counting on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win. Communications obtained by TheDCNF show that internal Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again.

Boeing has officially delivered 2,000 aircraft to China. The latest plane — a Boeing 737 MAX operated by Xiamen Airlines — marks yet another milestone for Boeing and China. It took Boeing four decades to reach the first 1,000 deliveries. But with China’s rapid growth rates, this new milestone was reached in just five years. Boeing says that currently one out of every four aircraft it’s producing is headed to China. Boeing has heavily invested in China, now the second largest economy on the planet. Its work there reportedly accounts for $1 billion in economic activity in China. Every...

Harvard graduate student Leyla Pirnie was asked to move out of her apartment after her roommates discovered she possessed legally owned firearms. The Washington Free Beacon reports that Pirnie’s roommates allegedly rummaged through her belongings while she was away from the apartment, discovered her guns, and emailed the landlord to complain. One of the roommates told the landlord: “We discussed with Leyla that all of us are uncomfortable with having firearms in the house, and that their presence causes anxiety and deprives us of the quiet enjoyment of the premise to which we are entitled.” The landlord, Avid Management’s Dave...

New police tactics to ram thieves off their mopeds have left two with broken bones, The Met chief has said. The controversial move sees officers using their vehicles to stop dangerous chases and arrest suspects. The tough new approach was unveiled this month with dramatic footage of moped muggers being wiped out. Moped muggers ‘left with broken bones’ as police start ramming bikes

A coalition of women's rights organizations filed an appeal to the High Court of Justice arguing that Israel's recently-relaxed gun laws are causing more women to be murdered. According to Ynet, the ten different organizations say that a recent uptick of murders are the direct result of a decision by Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan to allow veterans of IDF infantry units to obtain personal handgun permits. In addition, the appeal claims that 40% of all women are murdered in Israel by handguns compared to only 28% in the OECD. "There is a clear and proven connection between the extent...

According to CNN’s Jim Acosta, the revelation that persons in the United States illegally are entitled to more than $40,000 a year in federal benefits “casts a sinister light on the Trump Administration’s extraordinary efforts to block the Central American caravan’s efforts to claim these benefits for its members.” “Why would there be such a program if these immigrants weren’t entitled to this compensation?” Acosta asked. “Trump’s attempt to characterize those who are merely asserting their legal rights as an ‘invasion’ is a slander designed to conceal his government’s refusal to recognize and enforce these immigrants’ rights to this money.”...

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) says it was the "spectacle" created by Senate Democrats during their crusade to stop Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court that hurt her reelection campaign. McCaskill's vote against Kavanaugh became a central theme of Republican Josh Hawley's successful campaign to unseat the two-term incumbent Democrat, but she says her vote wouldn't have been as disastrous if the effort wasn't mishandled by her party. "I don't think my vote [against Kavanaugh] hurt me as much as the spectacle that occurred," McCaskill told NPR on Friday morning, in her most extensive interview since her defeat. "There...

WASHINGTON — A high-ranking State Department official has offered a stark warning about the potential of “computational warfare” to destroy the Enlightenment order that has governed Western society for more than two centuries. And he called for an “Enlightenment 2.0,” one that would bring the ideals of the original Enlightenment — reason, civil discourse, humanism — to the digital sphere. “We don’t need to say that this is the death of the Enlightenment. We need to create Enlightenment 2.0,” said the official, Matt B. Chessen, who serves as acting deputy science and technology adviser to the secretary of state. He...

Democrats and Republicans are hardening their positions on President Trump's proposed border wall, raising the odds of a partial government shutdown this month. The White House and Senate Democrats are already pointing fingers over who would be to blame if a shutdown occurs, with each accusing the other side of precipitating a potential funding lapse over the wall. "If President Trump wants to throw a temper tantrum and shut down some departments and agencies over Christmas, that's certainly within his power," Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday on the Senate floor. The White House shot back, accusing Democrats...

Judicial Watch Sues for Documents on Obama DOJ Effort to Shut Down Clinton Foundation Investigation Judicial Watch Files Supreme Court Brief against Government Abuse Judicial Watch Fights for Rule of Law in Battle with Anti-Trump Politicians Not Forgotten – Judicial Watch Sues for Vietnam POW-MIA Docs Is Maxine Waters Fit to Chair House Financial Services Committee? Judicial Watch Sues for Documents on Obama DOJ Effort to Shut Down Clinton Foundation Investigation A major scandal, largely uninvestigated, is the Obama Justice Department’s protection of Hillary Clinton. As per usual, Judicial Watch is taking the lead on this issue. We just...

Local officials in a Washington neighborhood have voted to rename a street outside Saudi Arabia’s embassy in honor of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. If approved by the city council, the advisory commission’s measure means a stretch of road going past the expansive embassy building in the upscale Foggy Bottom neighborhood would be ceremonially renamed “Jamal Khashoggi Way.” Khashoggi, a US resident, was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October. […] According to CNN, the idea to change the street’s name started about a month ago following an online petition. …

A lawsuit set to by filed Monday puts journalist Jerome Corsi in a unique position to legally end special counsel Robert Mueller’s “reign of terror,” contends attorney Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch. Klayman, who is representing Corsi, said in a WND column Friday night he will file a complaint against Mueller with acting Attorney General Mathew Whittaker and the heads of the Office of Professional Responsibility and Inspector General of Justice Department. The special counsel is probing a theory that Corsi and Trump operative Roger Stone had a WikiLeaks contact who previewed hacked emails of...

Los Angeles police Thursday were investigating the scrawling of four swastikas on an iconic South Los Angeles mural as a hate crime. The vandalism was reported about 11:45 a.m. in the area of 48th Street and Crenshaw Boulevard, according to LAPD. Social media images showed the mural was defaced by swastikas scrawled in white paint on the faces of prominent Black Panther members. No suspects were in custody, according to LAPD. The swastikas were promptly scrubbed from the mural. Police said the vandalism appears to be an isolated act and are asking for witnesses and anyone with possible security camera...

Dominatrix specializes in turning ‘white, right-wing men’ into socialists A growing wave of sex-positive feminists are working to usher in what they describe as a “pleasure revolution” in which women’s sexuality is embraced, rather than stigmatized, by both individuals and society at large. According to advocates of the movement, such as author and feminist Stephanie Theobold, the pleasure revolution is “about women asserting their own pleasure,” just as the #MeToo movement was about the problem of “men imposing their pleasure on women.” But for Reba Maybury, a 27-year-old political science professor and professional dominatrix, the larger problem is a historical...

Once upon a time, we lived in leaf huts, with interiors that looked a lot like our outdoor environment. Soon we moved to round houses, then square houses and finally to air-tight apartments in cities. Now we close our windows, use products that claim to kill 99% of germs and have unknowingly domesticated bedbugs—so they adjust their workdays around ours. Our homes no longer resemble the garden outside but have a weird human-centered microbial signature that is also found on the International Space Station, and that’s not a good thing. The problem, according to Mr. Dunn, “is not what is...

Are the editors of Politico Magazine even aware of what they have previously published? One has to ask that question since a mere six weeks ago, that periodical published an article by Jack Shafer mocking the the notion of Beto O'Rourke idolatry in the media called "Stop the Press Before It Profiles Beto O’Rourke Again." So what did Politico Magazine do on December 1? It hyped O'Rourke as another Lincoln. I kid you not. Before we dive into Beto as Abe idolatry, let us look at some excerpts from when Politico mocked such silly puffery provided by NewsBusters' Executive Editor, Tim...