Free Republic

A Dutch lawyer in a major gangland case has been shot dead outside his Amsterdam home - a crime described by police as exceptionally brutal. Derk Wiersum, 44, was the lawyer for a state witness in a case against members of a violent drug gang, who are accused of five murders between 2015 and 2017. A hoodie-wearing suspect fled on foot. Police chief Erik Akerboom said "with this brutal murder, a new limit has been crossed: now even people simply doing their work no longer seem safe". Jan Struijs of the NPB police union said "organised crime has got totally...

Blended route” for the way to San Jose—and beyond. California’s ongoing bullet train project is late, over-budget, and politically assailed everywhere from Sacramento to the White House, but the nearly $80 billion venture still (pardon the term) chugs along, as the High Speed Rail Authority board voted Tuesday for routes that will eventually connect trains to the Bay Area. Out of four route proposals, board members favored a Merced-to-San Jose connection designated Alternative Four, one that “blended configuration between San Jose and Gilroy in the existing Caltrain and Union Pacific Railroad corridors before continuing to a dedicated high-speed rail alignment...

They’re not just in Oregon. University students from Saudi Arabia have vanished while facing criminal charges here and in at least seven other states as well as Canada — evidence that a growing number of defendants from the wealthy Persian Gulf kingdom have fled justice in the United States. There are likely more to be discovered. The Oregonian/OregonLive uncovered five examples in Oregon and began searching other states in late January. We’ve found similar cases in Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin. We also found two cases in Nova Scotia: Saudi students in two separate incidents skipped bail...

Since the start of the decade, a million people have moved out of New York. For Andrew Cuomo, that’s not a problem, that’s a victory. It has solidified his party’s hold on power, and it has reshaped the state and its culture in a fashion more congenial to his interests and agenda. ... From the summer of 2017 to the summer of 2018, New York had a net loss in population of more than 48,000. Illinois, another Democrat state, was the second-most abandoned state, with 45,000 net reduction in population. Of the seven other states which had a net loss...

Denver is widely regarded to be among the more liberal major cities in the United States. But it's also home to Colorado Christian University, which the research website Niche just ranked the seventh-most-conservative American college — and it's among the fastest-growing, too. "We've had nine years of record enrollment at Colorado Christian University," says Jeff Hunt, CCU's vice president of public policy and director of the Centennial Institute, the branch that puts on the annual Western Conservative Summit. "And a lot of that has to do with the fact that we're unapologetically Christian and conservative. People know exactly what they're...

There is no indication of collusion, but there is evidence Rod Rosenstein’s appointment of a special counsel violated the Constitution, federal regulations, and his authority. After more than one year investigating claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, Robert Mueller’s special counsel team has exposed exactly zero evidence of misconduct involving the president in the run-up to the 2016 election. This absence of proof has prompted calls for an end to the special counsel investigation. What should be garnering our attention, though, is not that there is no indication of collusion, but that there is evidence Deputy Attorney...

At Brooklands College in July 2017, Ahmed Hassan was awarded a prize as "student of the year". He used the £20 Amazon voucher he received to purchase the first of the ingredients he needed to build his bomb. Mr Justice Haddon-Cave seems almost to suggest that "violating" the law of the Quran and Islam is an offense in itself -- one worth noting alongside the crime of putting a bomb on a packed commuter train. ... Ahmed Hassan .. left a homemade bomb on the train. At Parson's Green tube station, the device detonated. Fortunately for the commuters, which included...

In Fiscal Year (FY) 2016, Colorado collected $25.4 billion in state and local taxes—or $4,590 for every man, woman, and child. While this is an impressive sum of money, it tells us little about whether or not the average Colorado taxpayer can afford this level of taxation. ... Colorado’s state and local tax burden (tax collections divided by private sector personal income) was the sixth lowest in the nation for FY 2016 at 11.8 percent—or -17 percent below the national average of 14.3 percent. ... Colorado’s tax burden has increased over time by only 3 percent to 11.8 percent in...

A religious-based charity has received nearly $18 million in federal grants to help refugees and immigrant children who entered the country illegally since Donald Trump was elected president.. The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) has received nine federally-funded awards since Nov. 8, all of which came from the the Department of Health and Human Services ... Seven of those – worth over $13 million – were awarded under the Unaccompanied Alien Children Program, and the remaining two – worth $4.5 million – were used to helped refugees. ... LIRS ultimately raked in $60 million total for fiscal 2016 –...

For eight decades, the iconic Hagia Sophia [Ἁγία Σοφία, “Holy Wisdom”] – museum in Istanbul [Constantinople] has stood as a symbol of Turkey’s commitment to a secular society. Now that tradition is under siege by growing calls to convert the historic structure back into a practicing mosque. The 1,500-year-old structure originally was built as an Orthodox Christian cathedral. It was turned into a mosque in the 15th century after the Ottoman Turks defeated the Greek emperor in Constantinople and renamed the city Istanbul. In the 1930s, the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, turned it into a museum in his...

It appears that the "animal spirits" unleashed by President Trump are not contained to the stock market: according to the BLS, one of the most notable observations to emerge from the February (and January) jobs reports is that the number of Americans no longer in the labor force plunged since December, declining by 736,000 in January (to a modest extent due to a data revision) and a further 176,000 in February to 94,190K. The combined two-month addition of 912,000 was the biggest drop in the "not in labor force" series on record. ... The 94,19 million people who are considered...

the obvious sampling bias in the latest ABC / Washington Post poll that showed a 12-point national advantage for Hillary. Like many of the recent polls from Reuters, ABC and The Washington Post, this latest poll included a 9-point sampling bias toward registered democrats. ... for all of you out there who still aren't convinced that the polls are rigged, we present to you the following Podesta email, leaked earlier today, that conveniently spells out, in startling detail, exactly how to rig them. The email starts out with a request for recommendations on "oversamples for polling" in order to "maximize...

Observers are warning about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly neo-Ottoman stance and disregard for secular prerogatives.” Indeed, and this new appointment essentially completes the motion of making the Hagia Sophia into a functioning mosque again. European Union officials ought to see this for what it is: a decisive rejection of any pretense of dealing with the Christian or post-Christian West on a mutually respectful basis. Erdogan is an Islamic supremacist and is pursuing an openly supremacist imperative. European officials who are still pushing for Turkey’s entry into the EU, as well as the ongoing phenomenon of massive Muslim immigration...

Hillary Clinton’s top aides sprang into damage-control mode after hearing about a new book detailing her husband Bill’s affair with socialite neighbor Julie Tauber, according to the latest emails published by Wikileaks. The book was “The First Family In Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal The Hidden Lives Of Presidents” by Clinton gadfly Edward Klein — and news of its impending publication sent the Clinton inner circle scrambling to set up a conference call. ... The chain begins with Bill’s former deputy White House Counsel and Clinton family confidante Cheryl Mills, reaching out to Hillary’s campaign chair, John Podesta, Bill’s former...

We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law. - From a leaked German intelligence document. The mayor of Molenbeek, Belgium ignored a list she received, one month prior to the Paris attacks, "with the names and addresses of more than 80 people suspected as Islamic militants living in her area," according to the New York Times. "What was I supposed to do about them? It is not my job to track possible terrorists," Mayor Schepmans said. In October 2015, Andrew Parker, director general of...

It took just a few days after the stunning defeat of Obama's attempt to fast-track the Trans Pacific Partnership bill in the Senate at the hands of his own Democratic party, before everything returned back to normal and the TPP fast-track was promptly passed. Why? The simple answer: money. Or rather, even more money. Because while the actual contents of the TPP may be highly confidential, and their public dissemination may lead to prison time for the "perpetrator" of such illegal transparency .... fast-tracking the TPP, meaning its passage through Congress without having its contents available for debate or amendments,...

Hillary Clinton has sought to avoid public scrutiny of her emails since before she was sworn in as secretary of state. When she did turn over some of her emails to the State Department, it was Clinton and her lawyers who decided which ones they would make available and which they would withhold. While it might be useful for Clinton defenders to pretend otherwise, there was no expectation that Clinton would voluntarily share incriminating emails, especially now, in the first weeks of her presidential campaign. .... Sidney Blumenthal is at the heart of those new questions. A noted conspiracy monger...

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani says President Barack Obama is to blame for the police shootings in Ferguson, Missouri, and other disturbing events because he sets the tone for the nation. ... Giuliani also says Obama should say the kinds of things comedian Bill Cosby used to say before he was accused of sexual assault, which Cosby denies. Cosby often exhorted black people to focus on education and parenting.

Among the 34 OECD countries, the US performed below average in mathematics and is ranked 27th ... While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance (e.g. the Slovak Republic, which spends around $53k per student, performs at the same level as the US, which spends over $115k per student).

The Department of Veterans Affairs is promoting an administrator who advised against publicly disclosing a deadly Legionnaires' outbreak at its Pittsburgh hospital system, the agency told Congress. David Cord, deputy director of VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System since June 2012, will become director of the Erie VA Medical Center within 60 days, the VA informed Congress. The VA disclosed the Legionnaires' outbreak that killed at least six and sickened at least 16 others on Nov. 16, 2012 — two days after Cord told a VA spokesman not to alert the public about it, according to an internal email from the spokesman...