Free Republic

Temperatures have plummeted to more than 10 degrees below average in places, while Sydney has had its coldest July weather in 44 years now has fallen in parts of Australia where such falls are so rare the weather bureau does not have the tools to measure it as temperatures plunged to more than 10 degrees below average. Antarctic air pushed up through central New South Wales and on to Queensland – known as the Sunshine State – over the past week bringing on a winter cold front not seen in some parts since the mid-1980s. In Queensland, snow fell in...

A homeless boy who was pictured doing his homework by the light from a McDonald's has been inundated with offers of help. People who saw the photos have now donated cash, school supplies and a college scholarship - which he hopes will enable him to fulfil his dream of becoming a police officer. Daniel's mother, Christina Espinosa, said: "We're overjoyed. I don't know what I will do with all of these blessings. "Now, Daniel will not have to suffer just to finish his studies." The ABS-CBN channel tracked down the Cabrera family and found they did not have a permanent...

During a press conference earlier this week explaining the circumstances under which local police shot a suspect they were pursuing, Sheriff Ed Mattingly of Bardstown, Kentucky, expressed relief that the man who was shot was white. "We are glad that he is white, and we shouldn't have to be worried about that. And we do not want any backlash or violence in this community because people have been misinformed," Mattingly said. Mattingly's comments have themselves caused backlash in what otherwise might have been a comparatively uncontroversial incident: Unlike high-profile cases like the killings of Walter Scott and Eric Garner —...

A shocking new video appearing to show at least 30 Christians being beheaded and shot by ISIS has been released this afternoon. The 29-minute video, titled 'Until It Came To Them - Clear Evidence', shows dozens of militants holding two separate groups captive in Libya. At least 16 men, described by Islamic State as the 'followers of the cross from the enemy Ethiopian Church', are lined up in a desert area while 12 others are filmed being forced to walk down a beach. fore the killings a masked fighter in black brandishes a pistol as he vows to kill Christians...

After 22-year-old Palestinian-born Omar EL-Hussein carried out his terror attacks on the streets of Copenhagen in Denmark, killing two innocent Danes, the last thing anyone expected was for him to be honored by hundreds of people at his funeral. However, that is what happened, as an estimated 500 Muslim sympathizers turned out to the funeral at an unmarked grave in Broendby. Before he was buried, a short ceremony was held at a Copenhagen mosque following Friday prayers, where a man of African origin told the AFP, “There were a lot of young people that you don’t normally see there… because...

All it took was a Facebook post, the kindness of strangers and eventually a helicopter to save the day for a 6-year-old Florida boy. For Glenn Buratti's birthday, his mother Ashlee Buratti said she invited his entire class over for a party. When none of the 16 kids showed up, her son was devastated. "To see the look on his face killed me inside," Buratti told CBS News Orlando affiliate WKMG. Her son, who is autistic, was so saddened by the absence of guests, she said, that he refused to smile. "I know this might be something silly to rant...

Omar El-Hussein, 22, was placed in an unmarked grave in the Muslim cemetery in Broendby, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, watched by around 500 people, mostly young men wearing thick black jackets against the cold and rain, an AFP reporter said. El-Hussein, a Danish citizen of Palestinian origin, has been identified by police as the gunman who shot dead two people — 55-year-old filmmaker Finn Noergaard and 37-year-old Dan Uzan, a volunteer Jewish security guard — in the Danish capital last weekend. Five police officers were also injured in the dual attacks that took place at an event featuring a...

The Islamic State is claiming one of its hostages, a 26-year-old American female aid worker, is dead, according to the Site Intelligence Group, a website that monitors extremists The terrorist group claimed she died when a Jordanian aircraft struck the building in which she was located in Raqqa, Syria. Jordanian fighter jets bombed Islamic State sites on Thursday, after the militants burned to death a captured Jordanian pilot. The State Department told Sky News earlier this week it was working "very hard" to free the aid worker.

Oslo Police plan to send Mullah Krekar, the former refugee who turned into a threat to national security, to the small community of Kyrksæterøra in the county of Sør-Trøndelag when he’s released from prison later this week. Krekar’s attorney Brynjar Meling raised immediate objections. “This is clearly something Krekar can’t accept,” Meling told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) after the controversial Muslim cleric’s fate was made public Tuesday afternoon. “Being moved so far from his family (in Oslo) is such an infringement that we will take this to court.” Norwegian authorities are using a new law to restrict Krekar’s movements pending his...

As the only major Danish newspaper not to republish Charlie Hebdo content in the wake of the Paris terror attacks, the newspaper behind the Muhammad cartoon crisis 'grudgingly" puts his employees well-being first .Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that caused global controversy by publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad was the only major Danish daily Thursday not to carry any illustrations from the French weekly Charlie Hebdo. Jyllands-Posten sparked protests across the Muslim world - some of which turned lethal - after its 2005 publication of 12 cartoons that included a picture of the Islamic prophet wearing a bomb in a...

The jihadist was heard claiming his attack - and the Charlie Hebdo massacre - were motivated by French military action in Mali and Syria No one answered but the line remained open for several minutes, capturing the terrorist speaking to a hostage. During a five-minute rant he says: "Every time, they try to make you think Muslims are terrorists. I was born in France. If they hadn't been attacked elsewhere I wouldn't be here." He later adds: "'I'll tell them to stop attacking the Islamic State, stop unveiling our women, stop putting our brothers in prison for everything and anything."...

Bill Maher didn’t hold back Wednesday night, blasting “hundreds of millions” of the world’s Muslims for allegedly supporting the Islamic terrorist massacre of cartoonists, writers, and editors at a Parisian satirical magazine that has mocked the Prophet Muhammad. “I know most Muslim people would not have carried out an attack like this,” the host of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher said on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live. “But here’s the important point: Hundreds of millions of them support an attack like this. They applaud an attack like this. What they say is, ‘We don’t approve of violence, but you know...

A British soldier “shakes hands” with a kitten on a snowy bank, Neulette, 1917. In the Christmas truce film Joyeux Noël, a cat runs back and forth between the enemy trenches to soldiers that feed it. One names the cat Felix and the other Nestor, and when the two meet in No Man’s Land during thet ruce, a sweet argument ensues between the two men over whose cat it is and what is, in fact, its name. The director of the film, Carion, drew on a real life story of a cat who did this during the truce and was...

Taliban terrorists allegedly burned a teacher alive and made the students watch during their attack on a Pakistan school which left over 130 people dead. According to a NBC News report, citing an unnamed military official, the terrorists stormed the Army Public school in Peshawar, in north-west Pakistan, and committed the horrific act as well as detonating a suicide bomb which killed a number of students. "They burnt a teacher in front of the students in a classroom," the unnamed military source told the US TV network. "They literally set the teacher on fire with gasoline and made the kids...

An unsettling video has emerged purporting to show Islamic State fighters bartering over Yazidi women at a slave girl 'market'. The terror organisation recently boasted of enslaving women from the Iraqi ethnic minority, and the men appearing in the clip explain it is 'slave market day'. The clip shows the men negotiating the price of the women, with blue and green-eyed young girls fetching a higher price. t starts with one man saying to the camera: 'Today is the slave market day. Today is the day where this verse applies: 'Except with their wives and the (captives) whom their right...

THE VIDEO of a British jihadist beheading an American hostage was probably staged, with the actual murder taking place off-camera, according to forensic analysis. Footage of James Foley’s death at the hands of a man with a London accent provided a powerful propaganda tool for Islamic State when it was uploaded on to the internet and broadcast around the world last week. Now it has emerged that the Briton might be a frontman and not the killer. His identity has almost certainly been established by the security services, but they have yet to act for fear of endangering the lives...

Apparently, bears do a lot of things in the woods, including walking upright like a human. A home video showing a black bear on its hind legs has been viewed on YouTube than 52,000 times. The New Jersey black bear strolls across a street, peeks into a trash can and generally just ambles along in a Jefferson Township neighborhood. A woman who answered the phone after hours at the Jefferson police department, but declined to giver her name, laughed when the Daily News called for comment. “We’ve all seen it here in the office,” she said of the video. Asked...

Glenys and Royston Smith, 88 and 91, fell to their deaths in December Both suffered from an array of medical conditions, including osteoporosis They had said days before they were afraid of burdening their family Investigators found the note written in pen on their kitchen whiteboard An inquest today in Bournemouth, Dorset, ruled the deaths were suicides The great-grandparents who had been married 67 years, had said just days before they felt unable to go on, and were afraid of burdening their family. Cindy Hoyle, the building's caretaker who found the couple, said Mr Smith had told her days before...

UPDATED: A family brawl among 10 people at Ellingsrud in northeast Oslo left a two-year-old girl dead, one critically injured and three others wounded on Friday night. Police arrested several people at the scene of what was described as a massive knife fight. The fight was reported shortly before 5pm, police told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK). Details were sketchy in initial reports from the scene, with one person reported dead and three persons said to be critically injured. It wasn’t until later that police confirmed that the victim of the deadly brawl that shocked the Ellingsrud neighbourhood was the two-year-old daughter...

At least three people were killed in a shooting in central Brussels at the city's Jewish museum on Saturday, local media reported, quoting a fire brigade official. The suspect is still at large. At least four people, three men and a woman, were caught up in the attack, Brussels mayor Yvan Mayeur told RTBF, a Belgian broadcasting company, from the scene. A number of ambulances were at the scene. According to the reports, at least one man came out of a car parked near the entrance to the museum and started shooting, and then fled the scence. An eye witness...