Free Republic

Charlotte activist Jibril Hough was among two dozen people escorted out of a Donald Trump rally after protesting remarks the presidential candidate has made about Muslims. Hough, a Muslim who is spokesperson for the Islamic Center of Charlotte, has been a mainstay in Charlotte protests in the last few years, including a series of protests connected to the racially charged shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer. Hough said he purchased the tickets for the Aiken, S.C., rally weeks in advance on the Trump website. In videos that show Hough being escorted out, he’s wearing a...

SouthPark mall made a mistake when it chose to replace its traditional Christmas tree with a faux glacier, the company’s president said Sunday, and the controversial display will be removed sometime Monday. “It was a mistake, and we had to correct,” Simon Mall President David Contis said Sunday. “If we lose money, so be it.” Indianapolis-based Simon Malls owns SouthPark as well as Charlotte Premium Outlets and Concord Mills. SouthPark Mall shoppers did not take kindly to the mall replacing its traditional Christmas tree with the controversial glacier as part of its Santa display, so the shopping center announced this...

Researchers have created an artificial neural network that identifies the activities in a user’s average day through a catalogue of images. New research in neural networks may let computers identify our daily actions more accurately than the apps on the market that track things like GPS location and heart rate. A new computer model has achieved about 83 percent accuracy in identifying the activities it sees in real-life images—and with just a bit of training it could do this for any user it encounters. Led by Georgia Tech graduate students Daniel Castro and Steven Hickson, researchers have created an artificial...

Who was Jesus really? For the past few weeks I’ve been discussing this question with my high school theology class. Although most of my students have been brought up in the church, I know they’re going to face challenges to their faith when they go off to college. Many will hear jarring claims from classmates and professors about the “real” Jesus—claims contradictory to the church’s confession of Jesus as the risen Son of God. So I want my students to be prepared. I want them to know these claims have been around for a long time, as have Christian responses....

When Russia started bombing in Syria last week, it said it was targeting ISIS — a claim it's stuck to pretty consistently in the past week. But this map of Russian airstrikes in Syria so far, put together by the Levantine Group, tells a very different story. The Levantine Group's analysts used a proprietary network of sources, cross-checked with open-source media and information released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, to determine the locations hit by Russian planes. This map shows those strikes overlaid on territory controlled by Bashar al-Assad's regime, by anti-Assad rebels, by ISIS, and by Kurdish forces....

Beijing’s efforts to defend both stocks and the currency are severely straining its finances. China, the Financial Times noted Friday, could exhaust its foreign exchange reserves within a year as it defends the value of its plunging currency, the renminbi. The paper’s arithmetic is correct of course, but the projection, which at first sounds alarming, is actually optimistic. Beijing might be broke in months—and maybe by the end of this year—despite now holding the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves. At the same time, the Chinese central government has been supporting stock valuations through various means, especially the direct purchases of...

WINTER HAVEN | Police are looking for a man who angrily launched himself head-first into the doors of a bus in Winter Haven on Saturday morning. Video from Winter Haven police shows a man exiting the bus at the Winter Haven bus terminal, 555 Ave. E. NW, after it made its regular stop about 11:35 a.m. The man wanted to travel to a new destination, and the bus driver told him he'd have to pay an additional $2 before he could go anywhere else, police spokeswoman Jamie Brown said. Brown said the passenger became extremely agitated when he realized he...

While President Barack Obama during his Pentagon visit on Monday explained his approach to fighting and defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) with the statement that “Ideologies are not defeated by guns; they’re defeated with better ideas,” Israeli political officials and their security commanders announced their own plans for a specially trained brigade. According to an Israeli source, Geoff Gotfield, a former member of a police counterterrorism team, the new unit – created and trained in secret – was also formed to deal with the threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, despite Obama and Secretary of State...

I spent much of this spring obsessed with a question: Could the United States and Russia stumble into war, perhaps even nuclear war? It was a concern I'd first heard in late 2014, shortly after Russia's covert invasion of eastern Ukraine and its military harassment of neighboring NATO member states, which the United States is treaty-bound to defend. As I spoke to analysts and policymakers, I found a growing and increasingly alarmed community, in the US and Western Europe as well as in Russia, warning that war has once again become a real possibility. They compare Europe of today to...

For those Americans who hoped the culture wars would finally end, the month of June reminded us they’re just getting started. Within hours of the Supreme Court’s resolution of the battle over same-sex marriage—the triumph of a generation of gay-rights activists—some were already calling for further steps to take tax exemptions away from churches, use anti-discrimination laws to target religious non-profits, and crack down on religious schools’ access to voucher programs. We learned media entities would no longer publish the views of those opposed to gay marriage or treat it as an issue with two sides, and the American Civil...

Concord pediatrician Hal Levin has notified patients he is “going through a gender transition” and, after taking some time off, he will return to work March 23 as Dr. Laura Levin. In a letter dated Feb. 4, Levin, who has worked at Piedmont Pediatrics for 20 years, said the change will mean he can “begin living my life more authentically as Laura Levin, a transgender woman.” Carolinas HealthCare System, which owns the Concord practice, also sent letters to patients explaining the change and expressing support for Levin, the group’s medical director. “We can assure you that Dr. Levin will continue...

A Charlotte mother is expressing concern after a class assignment she considers offense was given to high school students, some say it has racial undertones. “I was completely stunned,” the mother said. “This is not appropriate language at all for the children in the school.” The question was from a test on genetics. "LaShamanda has a heterozygous big bootie, the dominant trait. Her man Fontavius has a small bootie which is recessive. They get married and have a baby named LaPrincess," the biology assignment prompts students. The assignment then continues to ask "What is the probability that LaPrincess will inherit...

Former NBA star Charles Barkley recently drew national attention with his candid comments referring to the envy between “successful blacks” and “non-intelligent blacks” as being like “crabs in a barrel”. Mr. Barkley was referring to an African proverb -- “Put one crab in a pot and it will escape. Put two crabs in a pot and neither will escape.” The point of this proverb is that envy destroys everyone. Whatever your reaction to Barkley’s perception of an issue in his community, envy and covetousness are actually national problems. Americans have difficulty remembering, much less keeping, the 10th Commandment: Thou Shalt...

The idea that the Bible declares hell a real and literal place is no more valid than the toxic lie that the Bible condemns homosexuality. Yet the idea that hell is real persists. Why? Because over the centuries those in positions of power within the institutions of Christianity have methodically, relentlessly, and with great art used the doctrine of hell to exploit the innate fear of death that is harbored by one and all. Show me a Christian terrified of hell, and I’ll show you a Christian ready to pay good money for the assurance that he is not going...

In a sign of the precarious state of Presbyterian-Jewish relations, the rabbi who heads the largest branch of Judaism in North America will appeal directly to the Presbyterian Church (USA) to step back from a series of critical resolutions aimed at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Invited to address the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in Detroit, which begins next week, Rabbi Rick Jacobs said the Presbyterians have the choice of making things worse, or better. “It’s a critical moment,” said Jacobs, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, representing about 1.9 million Jews. “Much is at stake.” At issue...

Sitting at a lunch table, my co-worker mentioned she had been up all night with her daughter who was teething. A few minutes later, the conversation around the lunch table turned to a team project. I noticed the group was excluding my co-worker from the discussion, assuming she was too tired to contribute. That was the first time I realized it was a bad idea for women to talk about their kids and home life at the office. Career blogger Penelope Trunk believes being your true self at work means taking risks and letting people in the workplace see you...

Lakeland Police SWAT team officers looking for stolen motorcycles tried out their newest technologies Friday evening while serving a search warrant on a house in South Lakeland. Police said detectives have been investigating motorcycle thefts in Polk, Hillsborough and Orange counties. After conducting surveillance and gathering information for a judge to sign a search warrant, LPD called in its SWAT team to execute the warrant at a house on Empress Way in the neighborhood near Kelly Recreation Center, Sgt. Mike Lewis said. "We did not know if anyone was inside and we had information that the persons involved were armed,"...

Calling her "a parent's worst nightmare," a judge sentenced former Hillsborough County schoolteacher Ethel Anderson to 38 years in prison Monday for performing oral sex and other lewd acts on a 12-year-old boy she tutored on weekends. Circuit Judge Chet Tharpe's severe punishment of Anderson seemed designed to send a message in a county that has attracted disproportionate attention for sex scandals involving female educators. The most notorious of them, Debra Lafave, managed to avoid incarceration completely after pleading guilty to sex with a 14-year-old boy. "There are those that believe that nothing's wrong if the defendant is a woman...

Over the years, pediatricians and others in North Carolina have worried about children supposedly being educated at home who end up missing, dead or abused. The latest case: An 11-year-old Union County boy found handcuffed to his front porch with a dead chicken tied to his neck. Wanda Sue Larson, who had custody of the boy and four adopted children living in the home, had filed last year to home-school the children. Larson has been charged with child abuse, and investigators say they found signs the boy was frequently handcuffed inside. Home schooling is booming in North Carolina. The number...

Many people smoke after they've eaten. Lindell Harvey smokes because he hasn't. "You smoke out of anxiety because you don't have the food you need," said Harvey, 54, who lives alone in Crum Lynne, Pa. He receives disability checks from the Navy that keep him $2,000 below the poverty line. Harvey relies on his Newports to see him through his hard days. "In my mind, the smoking becomes a comfort as I try to create ways to get food."