Free Republic

House Speaker John Boehner sat down with Bret Baier today for an exclusive interview, covering everything from immigration to ObamaCare to Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Boehner charged the administration with antipathy toward Netanyahu, and he sounded off on plans to sue President Barack Obama over his executive action on immigration. […] Baier asked whether this Congress is Boehner’s “last time around” and if he thinks he can bring all Republicans together. He responded with a laugh and said “I’ll be here for a while,” before adding that he sympathizes with the concerns of the more conservative...

A controversial Spanish former magistrate slammed Google in Geneva for handing over emails from Wikileaks staff to the FBI without informing the whistleblowing website. At a press conference in the Swiss city on Monday, Baltasar Garzón, who heads the legal team working for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, accused the American internet search engine of an “attack on journalism” by providing the emails of three Wikileaks journalists to the U.S law enforcement agency. He told the Geneva Press Club that the staff members had only been informed in December that the contents of the accounts had been handed over to federal...

One in three, or 35.2 percent, of people getting federal disability insurance benefits have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to the latest data from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Washington, D.C., the seat of the federal government, ranked in the top-ten list of states where disabled beneficiaries were diagnosed with mental problems. In 2013, the latest data from SSA show there were 10,228,364 disabled beneficiaries, up 139,625 from 2012 when there were 10,088,739 disabled beneficiaries. Disabled beneficiaries have increased 49.7 percent from a decade ago in 2003 when there were 6,830,714 beneficiaries; and the number is up 14.3...

France must repay the EU €1.07 billion ($1.2 billion) in agricultural aid paid to farmers due to fraud and mistakes over a four-year period, the European Commission said on Tuesday. The money, about 2 percent of the €40 billion that France has received from Brussels between 2008 and 2012 under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, must be repaid in three installments up to 2017, a European source said. France was penalized for failing to check farmers’ claims for subsidies, especially on environmental issues and calculating the area of arable land. …

More than 25 years after the Berlin Wall’s fall, Russian lawmakers are mulling a proposal to condemn West Germany’s 1990 “annexation” of East Germany as Moscow’s answer to Western denunciation of its seizure of Crimea. Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of Russian parliament’s lower house, on Wednesday ordered legislators to consider an appeal from a Communist Party deputy to denounce the reunification of Germany as an illegal land grab of East Germany by its western neighbor. The collapse of Socialist rule in East Germany—officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—heralded the end of the Cold War, and was met with jubilation...

British media has long been accused of a strong anti-Israel bias, and even generating anti-Semitism. Those claims have surfaced once again when during an interview with UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis for International Holocaust Memorial Day on Tuesday, a TV anchor with Sky News went as far as to suggest that Israel “fuels anti-Semitism.” The anchor, Adam Boulton, began by asking whether the fact that “people revisit this issue” of anti-Semitism is “because of Israel.” In response, the rabbi explained that anti-Semitism far pre-dates the establishment of the renascent Jewish state, and in fact can be observed from the beginning...

Gen. Jack Keane (Ret.) was on “The Kelly File” tonight following his testimony about terrorism at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. […] “Radical Islam has increased four-fold in five years,” Keane told Megyn Kelly. […] “This administration has been paralyzed by the fear of adverse consequences in the Middle East driven by the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Keane told Kelly. …

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Justice Department has been building a database which tracks vehicles across the United States. The license-plate tracking program reportedly reads plates and tracks cars on major highways across the U.S. The program’s high-tech cameras also reportedly take photos of drivers and passengers that are clear enough to identify people. The database was started in 2008 by the DEA to monitor drug traffickers along the Mexican border. It has since expanded, with more and more law enforcement agencies using it for non-drug-related reasons. Justice Department officials tells Fox News that the feds limit...

An 8-year-old St. Louis boy went to school and told an office worker he had been shot, after his mother exchanged gunfire with a man who tried to force his way into a home, police said Tuesday. Both mother and child were hospitalized in stable condition as police searched for a suspect in the shooting, the latest of several that have plagued St. Louis over the past 13 months. …

On paper, the pitch was simple: A green energy company backed by $217 million in U.S. government loans would convert one of Africa’s poorest countries into the world’s first biomass-driven economy. But the plan to help Liberia collapsed amid questionable business decisions and oversight. The company, Buchanan Renewables, dismissed 600 workers and left the country amid complaints of workplace injuries, environmental harm and, at times, sexual abuse. Backing the company at every stage was the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a federal agency with a global mandate but low profile. The agency approves more than $3 billion a year in financing,...

“I had been living in Switzerland for ten years, and then out of the blue I got a letter from my bank, saying that since I am an American citizen I had to file some extra paperwork,” Jonathan Weiss tells The Local. “Two weeks later, my bank account was frozen.” Weiss was born in the US, but has lived abroad since age ten, in both Asia and Europe. “I was just living in Switzerland, working there, minding my own business,” Weiss recalls. “And then I was caught up this net. I had no idea what to do.” That was his...

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Arutz Sheva on Tuesday in time for International Holocaust Memorial Day that the battle over the Holocaust lives on—and is being waged on the field of public memory. According to Zuroff, aside from the widespread scourge of Holocaust denial, a new phenomenon has reared its head recently in eastern Europe, where there are attempts to minimize the genocidal horrors committed against the Jewish people and revise history. “This phenomenon should worry the state of Israel and the Foreign Ministry,” emphasized Zuroff. “In post-Communist eastern Europe, they’re trying...

The BBC has been accused of “race-baiting” for inviting radical anti-Israel MP George Galloway to appear at a high-profile show hosted in Finchley and Golders Green, which is home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the UK. “Question Time” sees commentators and political figures take part in a panel discussion on hot political topics, as well as fielding questions from members of the audience. Each episode is filmed in different locations around the country to allow different communities to take part. But the decision to invite Galloway of all people to the upcoming showing—which will be based in...

In top-secret talks to settle federal lawsuits against the NYPD for monitoring mosques, the city is weighing a demand that it scrub from its Web site a report on Islamic terrorists, The Post has learned. The groundbreaking, 92-page report, titled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” angers critics who say it promotes “religious profiling” and discrimination against Muslims. But law-enforcement sources say removing the report now would come at the worst time—after mounting terror attacks by Islamic extremists in Paris, Boston, Sydney and Ottawa. …

Boreholes and a reservoir on former president Nelson Mandela’s farm in Qunu in the Eastern Cape have reportedly run dry, affecting livestock and the watering of plants at the family gravesite. The Daily Dispatch spoke to two sources who claimed Mandela’s farm has been without water since early January. Two cows have died in the last two months, and the gardens are no longer tended, including Mandela’s gravesite. There is no water for the plants and flowers next to his grave and these are dying, the sources stated. However, Mandela’s eldest grandson Mandla Mandela denied this, telling the Daily Dispatch...

Government yesterday vowed to grab all farms owned by the remaining white former commercial farmers and ruled out joint ventures involving whites. Addressing chiefs during the handover of A2 (small-scale commercial farm) offer letters to traditional leaders in Mashonaland East province yesterday, Provincial Affairs minister Joel Biggie Matiza said government’s new land policy was set to benefit diplomats, chiefs, war veterans, civil servants and others who missed out at the launch of the land reform program in 2000 because of rampant corruption. Speaking at the same occasion, Lands and Rural Resettlement minister Douglas Mombeshora also said government would not allow...

The historic U.S.-Cuba talks are under way and they may have attracted a new addition to the Havana port. The Russian spy ship Viktor Leonov CCB-175 parked there Tuesday, laden with high-tech software, radar and 30-millimeter cannon and anti-aircraft guns, replacing a cruise ship that had been there the day before. Normally, the surveillance ship travels up and down the American Eastern Seaboard in international waters, with its radars pointed in the direction of the United States. On Tuesday, however, just as the Americans were due to arrive for big talks with Cuban officials—the first such high-level talks held in...

Add Chris Christie to the list of prospective candidates for president now taking donations, a group of Republicans that might ultimately top two dozen.But for all the flurry of activity in the GOP race, set off last month by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and amplified by 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, some of the party’s most sought-after donors appear content to let things shake out a bit before making a commitment to any one candidate. For many of the party’s biggest fundraisers, signing on with a contender is a two-year commitment that usually includes asking friends, family and colleagues for...

President Barack Obama gently nudged India Tuesday to fulfill its constitution’s pledge to uphold the “dignity of the individual,” drawing on his own experience as a minority in the United States as he closed out a three-day visit to New Delhi. Obama said that while he has had extraordinary opportunities, “there were moments in my life where I’ve been treated differently because of the color of my skin.” As he touted the importance of religious tolerance, he noted the persistent false rumors that he is a Muslim, not a Christian. “There have been times where my faith has at times...

Award-winning veteran actor and storyteller Sir Ben Kingsley was among the dignitaries at the first day of the Let My People Live Forum in Prague, and used the opportunity to explain why in his view Europe has failed to fully come to terms with the crimes of the holocaust. […] One of the greatest tragedies, he insisted, was the fact that in his view, “Europe did not grieve in 1945. It moved on. It found another enemy; it found other issues. The first step in healing is for us to collectively grieve—we have missed that crucial step.” As a result,...