Free Republic

The Alabama woman who mysteriously reappeared two days after vanishing when she stopped to help a toddler who was walking on the side of a highway was likely not the target of sex traffickers, according to a report. A human trafficking expert on Monday threw cold water on Carlee Russell’s parents’ suggestion that the tot was used as “bait” to lure the 25-year-old nursing student out of her car and kidnap her. “As far as we are aware, this is not a tactic that traffickers use,” Sabrina Thulander, a spokesperson for Polaris, the nonprofit that runs the National Human Trafficking...

MOSCOW, June 22 (Reuters) - A top Russian official warned the West on Wednesday to stop talking about triggering NATO's "Article 5" mutual defence clause in a standoff between Lithuania and Russia. Moscow has promised practical retaliation that will affect Lithuania's population after the Baltic state blocked the transit of goods subject to EU sanctions from Russia to its Baltic exclave. "I would like to warn Europeans against dangerous rhetorical games on the topic of conflict," the Interfax news agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Wednesday.

The London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat is reporting that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has informed the United States, Egypt and Jordan that he will implement the PLO's central council decision to sever ties with Israel in lieu of the Jerusalem Day events. According to the report, Abbas' move came after Jordanian and Egyptian efforts failed to persuade the US administration to adopt a plan to open a political process towards the establishment of a Palestinian state. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Abbas yesterday. According to State Department spokesperson Ned Price, the two discussed "the importance of...

San Francisco police are preparing for a pro-Trump protest at Twitter's headquarters, a building which has been essentially abandoned since the start of the pandemic last year, with most Twitter employees working remotely. The potential protest comes days after Twitter banned the president from using its service — his favorite form of communication to millions of followers — following what the company called his continued incitements to violence in the wake of the January 6 assault on the Capitol last week by a mob of his followers. "The San Francisco Police Department is aware of the possibility of a demonstration...

The USDA Agricultural Research Service in Wapato, Washington, will receive 18 live Asian giant hornets so scientists there can develop bait superior to the attractants used this year to lure the invasive wasps into traps. The worker hornets will be the only live specimens sent to researchers from a nest the Washington State Department of Agriculture eradicated Oct. 24 in a dead tree near Blaine in northwest Washington. USDA research entomologist Jackie Serrano said that the service will try to chemically replicate hornet pheromones in time for next year’s trapping season. The department had planned to provide frozen hornets to...

Apparently, cops don’t love doughnuts just because they taste good; but also because they make effective tools in protecting the public. For proof of this, look no further than Fort Myers, Florida. That’s where animal control officers saved helpless citizens from a menacing bear with nothing more than a box of Krispy Kremes. After a young 250-pound bear was spotted wandering through the streets of Fort Myers Tuesday morning, officers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission were called out to tranquilize it, says Officer Adam Brown. However, because tranquilizers usually don’t take effect right away, they felt using...

A young guy from North Carolina moves to Florida and goes to a big "everything under one roof" department store looking for a job. The Manager says, "Do you have any sales experience?" The kid says "Yeah. I was a vacuum salesman back in North Carolina." Well, the boss was unsure, but he liked the kid and figured he'd give him a shot, so he gave him the job. "You start tomorrow. I'll come down after we close and see how you did." His first day on the job was rough, but he got through it. After the store was...

Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein used Prince Andrew as bait in an attempt to lure women to his private island, according to an explosive new allegation from one of his alleged victims. The woman, identified as “Jane Doe 15,” was 15 years old when she says agents for the late, disgraced financier approached her about the possibility of meeting the randy royal on Epstein’s Little St. James island in the Caribbean. **SNIP** “A central element of [Epstein’s] predatory behavior was to present himself as having connections to the world’s most powerful people,” Allred wrote. “In trying to persuade her [to go...

George Papadopoulos A junior member of the Trump foreign policy advisory team in 2016, George Papadopoulos was approached by FBI agents in Chicago, where he lived with his mother after the election while waiting for what he hoped would be an offer to join the new administration. The agents said they just wanted to talk to him about contacts he’d made with people in London during the campaign. He spoke to them without a lawyer or the benefit of notes, emails or a calendar to refresh his recollection — a decision he would later regret. One of the interviews was...

A Penn Township couple alleges that a porch party was disrupted Saturday by a neighbor hitting their backyard fence with an aluminum baseball bat as she yelled threatening racial epithets toward the gathering, township police said. Beth D. Knapp, 50, of Nancy Drive was charged with ethnic intimidation, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct by township police after the 10:54 p.m. incident. The complaints were served on Knapp via mailed summons by Harrison City District Judge Helen Kistler’s office. Patrolman Thomas Seefeld said the male victim who hosted the porch party is black. Seefeld reported in court documents that the couple...

The fact that it’s being proposed by Republicans doesn’t make it any more economically palatable. Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule — Friedrich Nietzsche ‘Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way,” Barack Obama declared after Democrats’ disastrous losses in the 2010 midterm elections. That shellacking finally killed off the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. From it was born the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and the Obama administration’s war on coal, in turn a contributory factor to Donald Trump’s election and Republicans’...

<p>A draft document obtained by The Associated Press concludes that citizenship is an "unlikely indicator" of terrorism threats to the United States and that few people from the countries Trump listed in his travel ban have carried out attacks or been involved in terrorism-related activities in the U.S. since Syria's civil war started in 2011.</p>

Donald Trump said in an interview Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin isn't going to go into Ukraine, even though the Russian military has intervened in the nation's affairs since 2014.

A group of tea party activists is convinced that Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has struck a secret deal with rival Sen. Ted Cruz to guarantee the Texan the vice presidential spot on the ticket, and conservatives are raving that it would be the best pairing since Harry Burnett Reese combined peanut butter and Hershey’s chocolate.The Cruz campaign vehemently denied that there was an agreement to form the conservatives’ “dream ticket,” while the Trump campaign remained mum.“There is no such secret deal,” said Cruz campaign national spokesman Rick Tyler.Still, speculation about an arranged marriage of Mr. Trump’s self-styled conservative crusade...

Garry Olson Jr., the man who recorded the video was fishing at Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas early Saturday morning when the owl swooped down and snatched his lure out of the water, which then caught on to its talon causing it to fall into the water.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin praised Jeb Bush on Monday, highlighting his remarks on raising children with special needs. The comments from Palin, who remains a favorite with some grassroots conservatives, come a day after Bush’s official entry to the presidential race. “It was encouraging today to hear Governor Jeb Bush speak directly to an issue that touches so many lives in these challenging times, both culturally and fiscally – raising a child with special needs,” Palin wrote on her Facebook page. “I'm glad Jeb's life was touched by God's purpose-filled children, and hope he continues with a positive message...

To avoid overfishing and aid in sustainable exploitation, the status of the fish stocks has to be monitored regularly. In many cases stock assessment is based on fishery-dependent data generated from fish markets or creel surveys. The assumption is: the lower the catches in a certain unit of time, the smaller the stock of fish should be. The scientists Dr. Josep Alós and Prof. Dr. Robert Arlinghaus from the German Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin have now shown that some fish species show enhanced gear-avoidance behaviour in regions with high angling intensity compared...

Satan, it would seem, does not act in an arbitrary manner to tempt us. Rather, he is more of a master hunter who carefully sets traps, or a skilled fisherman who, having studied our behavior chooses just the bait he thinks most effective. He’s calculating, and clever.Sadly most of us, by comparison, are far less calculating and clever in seeking to avoid temptation and sin. We seem more often to engage in the wishful thinking that no trouble will befall us, and our strategy seems to live more with dumb luck. Would that we were as ingenious in holiness as...

The Justice Department is claiming, in a little-noticed court filing, that a federal agent had the right to impersonate a young woman online by creating a Facebook page in her name without her knowledge. Government lawyers also are defending the agent’s right to scour the woman’s seized cellphone and to post photographs — including racy pictures of her and even one of her young son and niece — to the phony social media account, which the agent was using to communicate with suspected criminals. The woman, Sondra Arquiett, who then went by the name Sondra Prince, first learned her identity...

Establishing a bond with a pocket pistol is similar to marriage—in one way: You have to be willing to accept compromise. To make any compromise worth the effort, there must be a clear objective. In this case preserving your life is the goal, and pocket pistols, whether diminutive semi-automatics or small-frame revolvers, do their part and offer a solution that is easy to carry concealed. Merely slipping one into the front pocket of your jacket, however, will not prevent a determined threat from causing you bodily harm. To stop a violent attack, you must be prepared to counter with force...