Free Republic

MINNEAPOLIS – When Meredith Aby met with members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in 2006, she asked what it would take to get them to stop fighting. Jess Sundin did the same during her trip to Colombia 11 years ago. They returned and openly wrote and spoke about their experiences, while criticizing the U.S. government’s involvement in that country. FBI documents recently found by the anti-war activists suggest the trips may have started an investigation into apparent connections between local activists and radical groups in Colombia and the Middle East. One document says the probe expanded to include...

Last week, I posted a Q&A with Jodi Kantor, author of The Obamas, a new book about the First Couple. In the interview, which was a continuation of the edited transcript that ran in the January issue of Chicago, the New York Times reporter told me about her encounters with the First Family and what Laura Bush said to Michelle Obama during her tour of the White House. Below is the final part of the conversation, in which Kantor discusses key Chicago figures such as Valerie Jarrett and Desirée Rogers, Barack's time at Columbia University, and Michelle's secret trips to...

New York University is no longer the only school offering OWS classes. The notion of competition seems so… capitalist… but there it is nonetheless: Columbia University is offering a new course on Occupy Wall Street next semester — sending upperclassmen and grad students into the field for full course credit. The class is taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, who boasts about her nights camped out in Zuccotti Park.

Hmm. I don't seem to recall news that an Ivy League University offered a course about the Tea Party, but I’m sure I must have just missed it. The Internet is a vast and cavernous space, after all. Nevertheless, it's true: Columbia University plans to offer a new class all about the Occupy movement — taught by Hannah Apel, an Occupy veteran. CBS New York reports: The course begins next semester and will be divided between class work at Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus and fieldwork that will require students to become involved with the Occupy movement outside of the classroom.The...

A woman and her baby die in Orito, southwest of Bogota, in a bomb attack that targeted a police station. A bomb has exploded at a police station in southern Colombia, killing two people and injuring at least seven others, the authorities said. Police General Rodofo Palomino said the blast killed the wife of the regional police commander and their eight-month old son. The commander, along with his two-year old son and four other people, were seriously wounded and flown to a Bogota hospital for emergency treatment. Palomino blamed rebels with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for the attack, and...

SNIPPET - quote: Dissemination *_is_* collection I always get a kick out of people who tell me I give away intelligence for free. What I do is watch how information moves. Keep in mind that the subject covered on this site are pretty darn esoteric by most standards. What kind of people, for example, even know who Oussama Salhab is? Answers include: Oussama Salhab, his family, friends, associates in and out of Hizballah, people he does business with, spies of various nations, etc. Yep. The barn is free, and so is the food.

American drug warriors cite Colombia as an example of victory in the battle against drug-trafficking criminal networks. Colombians know better. In a Dec. 1 letter to U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Enrique Gomez Hurtado, a Conservative Party member and a former president of the Colombian senate, and Rafael Nieto Navia, a former justice at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and a former magistrate for the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia and Rwanda, warn that the relative peace Colombia has achieved in recent years is not secure.

Found this pic after reading an article about a friend of mine from Columbia. She is in the U.S. by political asylum due to death threats for her reporting about the cartels in Columbia.

Labor Raid: The FBI raids the Chicago home of a local union leader looking for terrorist connections as the union's former chief is investigated for corruption. Why are we not surprised? Thuggery and corruption are not quite synonyms for unionism, but it gets very close when you consider the Service Employees International Union, formerly led by Andy Stern. From being involved in fraudulent voter registration in Texas to beating up Tea Party activists outside town hall meetings in Missouri, SEIU's reputation is well-established. Now we can possibly add a linkage to terrorism. On Friday, the FBI searched eight addresses in...

LISTEN TO "MY" SPIRIT ROAR FOR YOU \o/\o/\o/ ! ! ! Listen to "MY" spirit roar for you my children to do and to walk in MY fullness and not your own for it is in MY righteousness you are saved and walk even now . So go in MY all for you and Listen to the whisper of "MY" spirit for soon it shall become a roar as it did for Daniel in the lions den and I shall quench all the firery darts of the enemy for you as well , for you are MY CHOSEN called and...

This essay was written by Obama when he was an undergraduate at Columbia before he went on to Harvard Law. Since it was written in March 1983 this was late in his senior year. As we all know no one has found anything from his years at Harvard on the Law Review that would justify his heading up the law review when he was there. I don't have the time to compare them to his two books, but from what I can see they don't track at all. Since it's a PDF file on that page I can't post it...

Supernatural things are coming your way , The stuff dreams are made of but won't fade away \o/ , The supernatural exposed in and through you , Watch now as "I" come into view ! The Ancient of Days The I AM That "IS ONE" ! A Fullness , a Gladness , My Entire Kingdom , For when ever "I" show My Face , There in the midst you shall find "My" Grace , Abounding , Abiding , Sweet and True , The "ALL of ME " all over you ! Genesis 28:10-19 Amplified Bible (AMP) 10And Jacob left Beersheba...

(Columbia SC) Update 1:00pm: The flip has been made. 100.1 WXBT is now simulcasting 560 WVOC. Original Report 11:45am: Clear Channel Urban “100.1 The Beat” WXBT will begin simulcasting sistern News/Talk 560 WVOC, bringing the AM’s News/Talk lineup to the FM band. The station’s website has begun to make the necessary modifications, showing off the new 100.1 WVOC logo shown above. In the recently released Summer book, WXBT ranked 6th in the market overall with a 5.0 share putting it well ahead of Inner City Broadcasting “Hot 103.9” WHXT’s 3.9. However, this move will help the more profitable WVOC with...

Why did the White House cancel a Rose Garden bill-signing for the Free Trade Agreements, opting instead for a behind-closed-doors event? On Tuesday, the White House issued a press release announcing that “On Friday, October 21st, President Obama will sign the Korea, Panama and Colombia Free Trade Agreements and the renewal of Trade Adjustment Assistance for workers in the Oval Office before making remarks in the Rose Garden. In his remarks, President Obama will underscore that these trade agreements will significantly boost American exports, support tens of thousands of American jobs and protect labor rights, the environment and intellectual property....

Congress approved free trade agreements Wednesday with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, ending a four-year drought in the forming of new trade partnerships and giving the White House and Capitol Hill the opportunity to show they can work together to stimulate the economy and put people back to work. Republicans criticized Obama for taking several years to send the agreements, all signed in the President George W. Bush administration, to Congress for final approval. Many among Obama's core supporters, including organized labor and Democrats from areas hit hard by foreign competition, were unhappy that the White House was espousing the...

New York State already outspends the rest of the nation on education, and a group of education experts at Teachers College at Columbia University is calling for it to spend even more. At a conference on Tuesday, the Campaign for Educational Equity, an institute of the college, will make the case that the state, which spends an average of $18,126 annually per student, should also pay for an array of support services outside the classroom that would cost an additional $4,750 annually for every poor student, or millions more every year. “This is not going the cheap way,” said Michael...

I Am going to move My sphere of authority into place now upon My Foundation and "TRUTH" shall be its Robe ! Zechariah 4:9 9The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundations of this house; his hands shall also finish it. Then you shall know (recognize and understand) that the Lord of hosts has sent me [His messenger] to you. The unction of My Spirit is something to be followed not ignored ! My blessings flow through My Spirit and Guiding counselor of My very Heart ! So understand this ; To reject My Spirit is to deny Me ,...

Columbia University students will dine with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday in what has become an annual debate on liberalism and terror. University president Lee Bollinger made it clear he will not join the students, following an incorrect report in Fox News, which later issued a correction. Before Fox News corrected the report, the Israel Law Center (Shurat HaDin) sent a warning letter to the university, stating that “Columbia's plan to host a banquet for visiting Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad runs afoul of U.S. anti-terror laws and will subject the university and its officials to both criminal prosecution and...

Law enforcement officers arrested the owner of BoCoMo Bay yesterday after firearms and a large amount of synthetic marijuana were found at his south Columbia home, they said. Approximately 100 firearms along with a large amount of substances believed to be synthetic marijuana were discovered at the home of Kevin E. Bay, 47, at 400 E. Old Plank Road, according to a Boone County Sheriff’s Department news release. Bay operates BoCoMo Bay at 1122 Wilkes Blvd. ***** Bay was arrested on the outstanding warrant from Stoddard County that charges him with six counts of delivery or imitation of a synthetic...

President Barack Obama said yesterday in Decorah, Iowa, that he absorbs more political criticism than Abraham Lincoln, the assassinated 16th U.S. president, attracted from his Civil War critics. The comment came during a question-and-answer session where one invited audience member asked Obama how he deals with his congressional critics in the GOP. “The Congress doesn’t seem to be a good partner. You said so yourself, they’re more interested in seeing you lose than [seeing] the country win,” the questioner lamented. “Democracy is always a messy business in a big country like this,” Obama responded. “When you listen to what the...

Who says women shouldn’t use sex to get what they want? In the far-away Colombian town of Barbacoas, female residents are making international headlines by withholding sex until the government provides a safe passageway from their village to other towns in the province. The “crossed legs movement” has been going on for the better part of the summer. Barbacoas’ roads in and out of the town are not paved, making travel hazardous, access to medical care difficult, and commodities prices five or six times higher than other areas of the country.

A piece of the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia has surfaced in eastern Texas, where a severe drought has dried up a lake and exposed debris from the 2003 accident, NASA said Tuesday. The globe-shaped object that turned up in Lake Nacogdoches, north of Houston, was one of 18 tanks on Columbia that helped power the shuttle, said NASA spokeswoman Lisa Malone. Member of NASA's Columbia Reconstruction Team is pictured at the Kennedy Space Center in 2003 "Late last week, we were contacted by the Nacogdoches sheriff's office letting us know that they had found an item of what they thought...

The state's worst drought since the 1950s has led to the recovery in East Texas of a large piece of debris from space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated over there nearly a decade ago. Officials in Nacogdoches made the discovery Friday as waters in Lake Nacogdoches receded during a relentless drought that began last October. “The lower water level has exposed a larger than normal area on the northern side of the lake,” said Nacogdoches Police Department Sgt. Greg Sowell. The Nacogdoches officials sent photos to NASA and the space agency confirmed the debris on Tuesday as a fuel tank that...

Washington, Oregon, federal government struggle to determine how to pay for project (Vancouver, WA) Knock aside the steel beams and concrete, and there’s just one thing that the Columbia River Crossing will be built upon: money. And one of the largest public works projects in the Pacific Northwest has an unusual plan to get that money — one that relies on the federal government, two states and local tolls to pay the estimated $2.63 billion to $3.76 billion price tag. The CRC is coming of age in an era where paying for big infrastructure projects is growing increasingly difficult, so...

Accuracy in Academia’s sister organization, Accuracy in Media, has covered one-quarter of the faculty at the Columbia University School of Journalism and found them wanting. Indeed, it is interesting to compare Columbia’s descriptions of some of these with AIM’s findings: In 2005, AIM editor Cliff Kincaid noted that “Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation and now chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times under the headline, ‘Objectivity is Highly Overrated.’ He argued for more “opinion journalism” from the media.” It should be noted that Weather Underground leader Todd Gitlin also hangs his hat...

This is a very interesting article! Obama: Where are his girl friends????? Where are his girl friends? Strange that none have popped up!!!! Strange to the point of being down right WEIRD! OK.. this is past the ‘birthers’ questions…this is just plain old common sense, no political agendas for either side. Just common knowledge for citizens of a country, especially American citizens, who even know that Andrew Jackson’s wife smoked a corn cob pipe and was accused of adultery, or that Lincoln never went to school or Kennedy wore a back brace or Truman played the piano. We are Americans!...

...It’s wonderful to see Colombia continuing to make strides in stopping union violence and improving the overall labor situation, but this is something the country has been doing for quite sometime now. Since 2002, homicides of union members have gone down by 90 percent. Additionally, the International Labor Organization has found Colombia to be in compliance with international labor standards. This issue is just another in a long list of excuses Obama has put forth as reasons to stall pending trade agreements. The fact is, stalling the Colombia FTA is doing more harm to the very workers Obama is purportedly...

Senator Obama, an Illinois Democrat now seeking the presidency, suggests in his book that his years in New York were a pivotal period: He ran three miles a day, buckled down to work and “stopped getting high,” which he says he had started doing in high school. Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years. “He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman. Mr. Obama has, of...

Here, at Obama, you can pay $5 for Ethanol Gasoline. We also take EBT for all purchases! Here at Obama in Detroit, you can have a senic view of Democratic policies in action while you pay an arm and a leg for gas, again caused by us trying to protect the "environment"

Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism will bestow its highest honor to Al Jazeera English, the university announced Wednesday. The Columbia Journalism Award is given annually during the school's commencement to recognize an individual or organization for "singular journalism in the public interest," according to a press release. It will mark only the second time that the award is being given to an organization. "Al Jazeera English has performed a great service in bringing the English-speaking world in-depth coverage of the turmoil in the Middle East," said Dean Nicholas Lemann. "We salute its determination to get to the heart of...

BATON ROUGE, LA (AP) - The LSU Police Department said it is looking for a 23-year-old student accused of burning the American flag and stealing the LSU flag that fly at the LSU War Memorial. An arrest warrant names Isaac Eslava, who holds both US and Colombian citizenship, as a suspect in the case. [Picture of suspect Isaac Eslava

On Thursday, four Columbian nationals were arrested in a pair of traffic stops carried out by a multi-agency task force in Houston. The suspects have been on the run since allegedly fatally wounding a jewelry salesman on April 17. Fernando Rodriguez-Amaya, 50, Luis Garcia-Campos, 30, Oscar Ruiz Garcia, 38, and Maria Silva, 30, have all been charged with murder and theft and are currently being held in the Walker County Jail. Immigration holds have also been placed on each of the suspects. On the night of April 17, Arif Sayed, 59, was eating his meal at a McDonalds in Huntsville,...

Colombia is the centre of the world's cocaine trade, and traffickers are always seeking new ways to avoid detection - including going underwater. Nowhere is this more evident than at Colombia's Bahia Malaga naval base, on the Pacific coast. The main pier is packed with captured fishing trawlers and high-speed cigarette boats once favoured by traffickers. But there are also a handful of enclosed vessels with pipes and snorkels sticking out at odd angles. Don't let the unconventional design fool you. These so-called semi-submersibles were built to transport tons of cocaine.

I’ve had a document for a while now that I have neither disclosed, or provided to Wikileaks. But now that the Donald seems on the verge of spilling the beans, I’ve decided it’s time to go public, so I can scoop, or “Trump” him (ha ha…). I can’t know for sure whether this is genuine, but in light of the rest of the history that is slowly being revealed, (e.g., by Stanley Kurtz), these Columbia transcripts that the president has refused to release look quite plausible.

Donald Trump is upping the ante against President Barack Obama's legitimacy, raising questions on Monday night about how the president was admitted to two Ivy League schools. Trump openly questioned how Obama, who he said had been a "terrible student," got accepted into Columbia University for undergraduate studies and then Harvard Law School.

Manhattan real estate mogul Donald Trump suggested in an interview Monday that President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended. Trump, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, offered no proof for his claim but said he would continue to press the matter as he has the legitimacy of the president's birth certificate. "I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I'm...

In Obama's speech today on his tax plan, he mentioned that he would not be here without his scholarship. Does anyone know what scholarship he received and for which college? This is the first I heard of it.

MEXICO CITY – The most fearsome weapons wielded by Mexico’s drug cartels enter the country from Central America, not the United States, according to U.S. diplomatic cables disseminated by WikiLeaks and published on Tuesday by La Jornada newspaper. Items such as grenades and rocket-launchers are stolen from Central American armies and smuggled into Mexico via neighboring Guatemala, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City reported to Washington. The assertions appear in embassy cables written after three bilateral conferences on arms trafficking that took place between March 2009 and January 2010 in Cuernavaca, Mexico; Phoenix; and Tapachula, Mexico, respectively. The cables’ authors...

A writer who publicly mocked the victim of a sex assault has resigned from his post at the London School of Economics after only two days. Nir Rosen, 33, stepped down from his role as a visiting fellow after the university was criticised for employing him. He got the job at LSE just weeks after resigning in disgrace from New York University for making fun of Lara Logan, a CBS correspondent who was attacked and sexually assaulted by a mob while covering protest in Egypt. He wrote a series of comments about the reporter on his Twitter page and said...

MIAMI (AP) — Federal prosecutors say four family members with ties to Colombia have been charged in Miami with illegally attempting to export 22 engines for jet fighters to Iran.

Not so surprisingly, the Columbia Journalism Review has weighed in on the WikiLeaks controversy. Somewhat surprisingly, the article that the magazine published by the Journalism School at Columbia University ran on WikiLeaks is a bit more nuanced than its full-throated endorsement of Al-Jazeera. Perhaps that is because an outside contributor—Goucher College President Sanford J. Ungar—penned the analysis of WikiLeaks that appeared in the March/April 2011 issue of the CJR while its editorial boosting Al-Jazeera was an inside job. “As it happens, the WikiLeaks drama unfolds as we approach the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and it...

Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi is well known now for the abuses he has inflicted on his own people during more than four decades of brutal rule in Libya, but few remember the vast campaign of carnage and terrorism he orchestrated across West Africa and Europe when he was at the height of his powers. Nor are his more recent alliance with Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and his long-standing relationship with Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua -- both of whom are busy trampling their constitutions and moving toward dictatorship -- well understood. And the fact that all three governments support the Revolutionary Armed...

Columbia University officials have been considering reinstating ROTC chapters, lifting a ban against the program since 1969. The faculty, with less courage than a Wisconsin Democrat, decided to poll the opinion of the students to see if they would accept a ROTC detachment to pollute their denizen of liberal indoctrination. During a campus town hall meeting students were permitted to express their opinion about allowing ROTC to return to Columbia. Anthony Maschek, a freshmen addressed the crowd and told them some truths that never seems to make it pass the Ivy façade called higher education. He was for the reinstatement...

Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus. "Racist!" some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran. Maschek, 28, had bravely stepped up to the mike Tuesday at the meeting to issue an impassioned challenge to fellow students on their perceptions of the military. "It doesn't matter how you feel about the war. It doesn't matter how you...

21st Century SocialismThe attempt to destroy democracy in Latin America.  The Obama administration started out on the wrong foot in world affairs. It used techniques better suited for domestic political campaigns — popularity contests — in its foreign policy. In our own hemisphere, the result was confusion for our allies and our enemies alike. The overriding objective of U.S. policy — in Latin America and elsewhere — should be to advance U.S. national interests, not to curry favor with foreign leaders. If we can be liked while advancing our interests, so much the better. But when we try to befriend...

CAMAS, WA--New details show the owner of a barge leaking oil into the Columbia River near Camas has had a history of being cited for violations dating back to 1998. Currently, the U.S. Coast Guard and the EPA have launched two separate federal investigations into Brett Simpson. The Coast Guard has paid $2.1 million so far in the cleanup effort of the barge spill. A bill they say they were forced to pay ever since Simpson disappeared. "For the past 13 days he's not been part of this removal effort," said Capt. Danny LeBlanc from the Coast Guard. "We've not...

February 1, 2003 - Explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia. As memorable as the 9/11 tragedy, so was the explosion and destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia over Louisiana, February 1st, 2003. History has given special notice to Space Shuttle Challenger's destruction 25 years ago, but why hasn't the disintegration of Columbia been as noteworthy? Maybe, it has something to do with Political Correctness and the EPA, proving again how our daily lives are excessively affected by by Political Correctness and the EPA. We have seen the deadly effects of the enviromentally obsessed: The banning of DDT which has promoted...

I’m pretty sure Jared Lee Laughner was ranting about the X-37B in the flag burning video under YouTube channel Starhitshnoz. Jared: “There's a new bird on my right shoulder. The beak is two feet and lime green. The rarest bird on earth, there's no feathers, but small grey scales all over the body. It's with one large red eye with a light blue iris. The bird feet are the same as a woodpecker. This new bird and there's only one, the gender is not female or male. The wings of this bird are beautiful; 3 feet wide with the shape...

 Despite having a rare neurodegenerative disease called Niemann-Pick Type C, the two oldest Hadley children, Peyton and Kayla, enjoy staying active and participating in events with their family at their Catholic parish in Medford, Ore. (Photos by Jared Cruce) Born three years apart, Peyton and Kayla Hadley began their lives as normal, healthy children. For their first seven years, both progressed normally as they began elementary school, scoring high on tests with excellent reading skills. Then, when Peyton turned 8, things began to change.  One of the first signs that something wasn't right began with Peyton's tendency to cock his...

    Knights Ronald Coco and Richard Bosse worked to obtain a new ultrasound machine for the Women’s New Life Center in Metairie, La., where Angela Thomas (right) is the executive director. (Photo by Mary Lou Uttermohlen)Faith was alone in a foreign land. She felt frightened, confused, angry and violated. Not knowing where to turn, she went to a local pregnancy center conveniently located near the university she attended. There, a positive pregnancy test confirmed her fears. An international college student studying for her master's degree, Faith didn't know how she could possibly continue her pregnancy and thought she had...