Free Republic

A devastated family wants answers after their beloved Catahoula hound dog was shot and killed last month in their front yard by an Ocoee police officer. But a police report released this week sheds little light on what happened. Stevens Bertrand, a school resource officer at Ocoee High, shot the 11-year-old dog named Duke in the head outside Charlie and Lisa Brooks’ home on July 17. “I couldn’t believe something like that happened. I was completely shocked,” Charlie Brooks said. The incident has prompted questions and outrage from the Brooks family, who expressed frustration at the Police Department’s vague description...

A former congressional information technology (IT) aide allegedly threatened to have his stepmother’s Pakistani relatives kidnapped if she talked to U.S. law enforcement authorities, according to court documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s (TheDCNF) Investigative Group. “Imran Awan threatened that he is very powerful and if I ever call the police again, [he] will … kidnap my family members back in Pakistan,” Awan’s stepmother, Samina Gilani, claimed in the documents filed April 14 in Fairfax County, Va., in the case of Americo Financial Life and Annuity Insurance Company v. Abid A. Awan and Samina Ashraf Gilani. Imran Awan...

Ahead of a highly anticipated Senate hearing later this week, FBI Director James Comey is being accused of making inconsistent statements about the bureau’s relationship with Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy behind the Trump dossier. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made the allegation in a letter sent to Comey on Friday. “There appear to be material inconsistencies between the description of the FBI’s relationship with Mr. Steele that you did provide in your briefing and information contained in Justice Department documents made available to the Committee only after the briefing,” Grassley wrote to Comey....

Some lawmakers want to give the VA secretary more authority to fire bad VA employees, including those who steal controlled substances. “VA employees who illegally divert or steal controlled substances are harming our families and communities,” wrote Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. in a letter to the VA Secretary David Shulkin, on Thursday. “They should be fired and denied taxpayer-funded benefits.” Rubio has introduced legislation to help the VA secretary to discipline, demote and terminate employees, removing some of the rules and laws that currently bar him from doing so. The Department of Veterans Affairs Accountability First Act has passed the...

Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the infamous anti-Donald Trump dossier, acknowledges that a sensational charge his sources made about a tech company CEO and Democratic Party hacking is unverified. In a court filing, Mr. Steele also says his accusations against the president and his aides about a supposed Russian hacking conspiracy were never supposed to be made public, much less posted in full on a website for the world to see on Jan. 10. He defends himself by saying he was betrayed by his client and that he followed proper internal channels by giving the dossier to...

1. He Was Nominated by President Barack Obama Judge William Orrick was appointed to his current position by President Barack Obama. At the time of the appointment, Orrick was working at the law firm Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass LLP. He has previously served as deputy assistant attorney general for the Civil Division of the United States Department of Justice. Obama nominated Orrick in June 2012, but Orrick was not approved until February 2013. This was mainly a party line vote, though Republican Jeff Flake broke with his party to vote to confirm Orrick. 2. He Donated Money to Barack...

The knives are out in Hillary Clinton’s camp about who leaked embarrassing information to the authors of a bombshell new book about her “doomed presidential campaign.” There is a witch hunt underway among Clinton’s presidential campaign staffers after the release of the autopsy book, “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign” by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. We’re told the details in the book, which depicts the campaign as inept, “could only have come from someone in the inner circle.” Dennis Cheng, the finance director of Clinton’s presidential campaign, has been sending out messages to determine where the leaks come...

The fake Indian’s new book tour is just getting underway, but it will hard for Fauxcahontas to top her appearance on CBS over the weekend, where she at least twice yelled out her favorite “curse word:” “Poop!” she blurted out at somebody named Chip Reid. This network nonentity had asked Lieawatha for her favorite expletive, and when she came up with “Poop!” he instantly dismissed it as “so goody two-shoes.” Are you kidding?” she shot back. “Have you ever seen a woman like me look you straight in the face after you’ve finished some long explanation of something and then...

Washington (CNN)The FBI last year used a dossier of allegations of Russian ties to Donald Trump's campaign as part of the justification to win approval to secretly monitor a Trump associate, according to US officials briefed on the investigation. The dossier has also been cited by FBI Director James Comey in some of his briefings to members of Congress in recent weeks, as one of the sources of information the bureau has used to bolster its investigation, according to US officials briefed on the probe. This includes approval from the secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)...

The former Federal Election Commission chairwoman Ann M. Ravel says that political speech must be controlled on social media. She presented her remarks in a speech at UC Berkeley, calling for regulations against “fake news.” Speaking at an event called “Future of Democracy,” Ravel argued the proliferation of “fake news” and political advertising on platforms like Facebook influenced elections. She warned that the lack of disclosure by the creators of these campaigns was becoming a huge problem. “We know that there’s a lot of campaigning that’s moved to the internet, whether it’s through fake news or just outright advertising and...

The Army has upgraded the power of its emerging Stryker-mounted laser weapon 5kW and confirmed the new weapon's ability to incinerate numerous enemy drones and launch offensive attacks during ongoing testing at Fort Sill, Okla., service officials said. No bullets were fired, and no sounds were made as the experimental laser, called Mobile High-Energy Laser (MEHEL), destroyed drone targets during recent testing. Silent defense and attack provide a substantial tactical advantage as it can afford Stryker vehicles the opportunity to conduct combat missions without giving away their position. Army officials said that after a few attempts to destroy the drone...

Ballistic rockets were on display at Saturday's military parade at Pyongyang to mark the 105th birthday of the state's late founder Kim Il Sung. Almost 60 long-range and submarine-based missiles were on show as tensions mounted overJong-un's nuclear ambitions. The display initially caused international fears North Korea's nuke program was more advanced than previously thought. A senior analyst at the Korea Defence Network told AFP: “I suspect they all might be mock-ups aimed to impress the outside world.” The nose cone of one of the devastating rockets “wobbled quite noticeably” according to Chad O’Carroll, managing director of specialist service NK...

The award for the worst public policy idea of the year goes to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo presides over a state with a rich diversity of educational institutions. But he also presides over a state, like all states, where many students don’t complete college and where many are unprepared for the information economy. For example, fewer than half of the African-American and Hispanic students in New York public colleges graduate within six years. Cuomo could have done many things to improve New York’s higher ed system. He could have poured all available money into the Tuition Assistance Program,...

MOSCOW, April 8. /TASS/. Syrian Army could not repel the U.S. missile strike at the Shayrat airbase in the early hours of Friday, as the Syrian air defense system covers separate facilities and, quite possibly, the Syrians did not have air defense missile systems around that base, Igor Korotchenko, the editor-in-chief of the Moscow-based National Defense magazine told TASS. "In the first place, the Syrians have island-like air defenses," he said. "This means that the units and weaponry systems cover separate facilities. They don’t have an integrated air defense net and I don’t rule out there were no air defenses...

Google is to start displaying fact-checking labels in its search results to highlight news and information that has been vetted and show whether it is considered to be true or false, as part of its efforts to help combat the spread of misinformation and fake news. The fact-checking feature, which was first introduced to Google News in the UK and US in October, will now be displayed as an information box in general search results as well as news search results globally. The small snippets display information about the claim made by a particular page or site and who made...

(CNN)ISIS has revealed the chief editor of its online propaganda magazine was an American computer scientist. The group named the media operative as Sheikh Abu Sulayman ash Shami in the eighth edition of its online magazine Rumiyah, which was released early Thursday. It said he was killed in a coalition airstrike near Tabqa, Syria, just to the southwest of Raqqa, during the second week of January. His picture and his biography have striking similarities with Ahmad Abousamra, a 35-year-old Syrian-American who grew up in the leafy Boston suburb of Stoughton, Massachusetts, and who was first placed on the FBI most...

he first tests of Elon Musk's revolutionary high-speed transport system could begin soon after Hyperloop One, one of 12 companies competing to make the idea a reality, completed its test track. The company has finished work on its 500 metre long testing tunnel, which is situated in the Nevada desert, near Las Vegas, and has a diametre of 3.3 metres. It is expected to run initial trials on the near-supersonic speed train in the first half of this year. Hyperloop One announced the news alongside 11 proposed routes for the super-fast transport, all of which are in the US. The...

A total of 42 ineligible voters went to the polls in Putnam County, Fla., according to a Thursday report from the Florida Times-Union. The ineligible votes came from deceased persons, convicted felons, or people who weren’t registered residents of the state of Florida, according to the report. The election in question was a local sheriff’s race between Sheriff Homer DeLoach, a Democrat, and Jonathan Kinney, a Republican. DeLoach won the race in 2016 by only 16 votes. The original tally showed that Kinney led by 18 votes, but a state-mandated audit revealed that as many as 430 ballots didn’t appear...

On Aug. 21, 2013, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas to kill 1,429 of his own people, including 426 children, in the town of Ghouta. I watched these horrific events unfold from an unusual perch for an American: At the time of the attack, I was working as a technical adviser to the United Arab Emirates’ special envoy for Syria. The work entailed accompanying my boss, a former Emirati air force general, to meetings in Turkey and elsewhere to coordinate with the Syrian opposition and the ambassadors of the countries — including the United States — that were assisting...

Thursday on the “Ron Paul Liberty Report,” former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) suggested the chemical weapon earlier this week blamed on the Syrian government could be a false flag. He went as far to say there was zero chance Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was to blame because it wouldn’t make sense for him to use chemical weapons at this point in time. “I looked at The New York Times to get the explanation, and they said ‘Worst Chemical Attack In Years In Syria, U.S. Blames Assad,'” Paul said. “So it is all over and done with? But it is not...