Free Republic

The developer of the failed Ground Zero Mosque has nailed down “Sharia-compliant financing” for a new, luxury condominium tower and Islamic cultural museum on the same site, he and his banking partners said Wednesday. The $174 million dollar project features a three-story Islamic cultural museum at 51 Park Place and 48 high-end residential condos in a 43-story tower at 45 Park Place in the Financial District.

A Fake Museum for a Fake Palestine The Palestinian Museum is as empty as its soul. May 20, 2016 Daniel Greenfield    Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. 150 years ago, Mark Twain visited Muslim-occupied Israel and wrote of “unpeopled deserts” and “mounds of barrenness,” of “forlorn” and “untenanted” cities. Palestine is “desolate,” he concluded. “One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings.” The same is true of the Palestinian Museum which opened with much fanfare and one slight problem. While admission is free,...

WASHINGTON - A dream for 100 years, the National Museum of African American History and Culture promises to become an instant favorite when it opens Sept. 24, its soaring spaces and magical views of the Mall a fitting setting for its tale of African-American history and achievement. Museum officials offered a sneak peek last week at the 400,000-square-foot museum, the 19th of the Smithsonian Institution, that’s next to the Washington Monument. President Obama is expected to cut the ribbon on the dramatic space, which features layers of galleries focused on slavery, segregation and the civil rights movement as well as...

(Reuters) – The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Monday offered up to $25,000 as a reward for information on seven Andy Warhol paintings stolen from a Missouri art museum last week. The “Campbell Soup” paintings, part of a set of 10 worth $500,000, were taken from the Springfield Art Museum, in Springfield, after a break-in during the early hours of April 7, the FBI said.

President Obama will pay homage to women's equality Tuesday, according to White House officials, designating the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, a historic house in the District that has housed the National Woman's Party since 1929, as a national monument. The site, to be named the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument, honors both the National Woman's Party benefactor Alva Belmont and Alice Paul, who founded the party and served as its chief strategist. Obama will deliver remarks at the house, which served as the party's fifth headquarters and is on Capitol Hill, on Equal Pay Day, an annual commemoration that aims...

(All Photos: Dylan Thuras)On the second floor of a nondescript warehouse owned by New York City's Sanitation Department in East Harlem is a treasure trove—filled with other people's trash.Most of the building is used as a depot for garbage trucks, but there's a secret collection that takes over an entire floor. The space is populated by a mind-bogglingly wide array of items: a bestiary of Tamagotchis, Furbies; dozens of Pez dispensers; female weight lifting trophies; 8-track tapes; plates, paintings, sporting equipment and much more. This is the Treasures in the Trash collection, created entirely out of objects found by Nelson Molina, a now-retired sanitation...

GETTYSBURG, PA (WHTM/CNN) - Tensions ran high during a Confederate flag rally in Pennsylvania this weekend. A Southern heritage group held what it calls Confederate Flag Day in Gettysburg, PA, but there were plenty of vocal opponents to the event. The flag has 13 stars, three stripes and two very different meanings. The refrain is familiar. Supporters such Mark Landree, executive director of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, says it's about history. Opponents like Christina Hansen only see hate.

Supporters and opponents of use of the Confederate flag clashed verbally in opposing demonstrations at Gettysburg National Military Park, with tensions high at times. [...] The Sons of Confederate Veterans Gettysburg group said its Confederate Flag Day gathering at the park's Eternal Peace Light Monument was intended to honor Southern ancestors. A counter-demonstration was organized by a Gettysburg College associate professor of history and Africana studies, Scott Hancock, who said he wanted to offer a different perspective on the flag's meaning. ...

Not only is the assumption "a fundamental mistake", it, by necessity of logic, transfers that same assumption and guilt to many more organizations and persons than just the one displaying the flag . . .

On the first floor of NRA headquarters, a large glass and steel building that looms over I-66 in the ambivalent suburbs of Fairfax, Virginia, exists the National Firearms Museum. It is free and open to the public. After a brief visit, I highly recommend that instead of ever going to the museum, you do what roughly 19,000 responsible gun owners do each year and shoot yourself. It’d be far less painful. The museum was initially built in 1935 and moved to Fairfax in 1998. Allegedly, it "details and examines the nearly 700-year history of firearms with a special emphasis on...

The National Mall may be the nation's front lawn, but even at holiday time the museums that line it are only lightly decorated with Christmas trees and lights and not with any religious displays. But a new privately-owned museum is going up just a few blocks away - the Museum of the Bible - that only wants to celebrate Scripture.

Man Pleads Guilty to Stealing Human Brains from Medical Museum A 23-year-old Indiana man pleaded guilty on Wednesday to breaking into a medical museum and stealing preserved human brains and other tissue that he then sold online, authorities said. David Charles, of Indianapolis, pleaded guilty to six charges including receiving stolen property, and burglary in a Marion County court where Magistrate Amy Barbar sentenced him to one year of home detention and two years of probation, county prosecutor spokesman Anthony Deer said. Charles on multiple occasions broke into the Indiana Medical History Museum to steal jars of brains and other...

When the Green family, founders of U.S. retail chain Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., purchased their first biblical artifact in November 2009, they never expected to assemble in only a few years what is now one of the world’s largest private collections of rare biblical texts, objects, and artifacts. Known as the Green Collection, the compilation of around 40,000 objects includes some of the rarest and most significant biblical texts and artifacts ever assembled under one roof. NOW THEY WANT TO SHARE THAT WITH ALL AMERICANS, BUILDING A BIBLE MUSEUM JUST IN THE HEART OF OUR NATION. The museum in Washington,...

[Syria] Palmyra [Syria] Mar Elian Monastery [Syria] Apamea [Syria] Dura-europos [Syria] Mari [Iraq] Hatra [Iraq] Nineveh [Iraq] Mosul Museum And Libraries [Iraq] Nimrud [Iraq] Khorsabad [Iraq] Mar Behnam Monastery [Iraq] Mosque Of The Prophet Yunus [Iraq] Imam Dur Mausoleum

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA is offering up wreckage from the Challenger and Columbia for public view after hiding it from the world for decades.

Former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen R. Reed was charged Tuesday with a battery of theft, fraud and bribery charges that, if proven, would stamp corruption in indelible ink on the Reed Era. They would also likely put Reed, who has been out of office since January 2010 and has indicated his intent to fight for vindication, in jail. The 65-year-old Reed was arraigned before Magisterial District Judge William Wenner Tuesday on charges that go right to the heart of his longtime role as benevolent dictator of Pennsylvania's Capital City.

In this June 18, 2015 photo, Zahi Hawass, Egypt's former head of antiquities, stands next to his new book, "The legend of Tutankhamun," as he speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in his office in Cairo. For more than a decade, he was the self-styled Indiana Jones of Egypt, presiding over its antiquities and striding through temples and tombs as the star of TV documentaries that made him an international celebrity. But four years after the 2011 uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak and nearly ended his own career, Hawass can be found in a cramped office, lamenting...

Emma Sulkowicz, known for carrying a mattress around campus for what she claims is a protest of Columbia University's failure to punish her rapist, is hoping to cash in on her alleged art project. Sulkowicz told the New York Times after her graduation on Tuesday — where she carried her mattress across the stage — that she would sell the mattress if offered. "If some sort of museum wants to buy it, then I'm open to that," she said, "but I'm not going to just throw it away." Sulkowicz has for the past year carried her mattress around for course...

t’s a Guggen-crime. The Upper East Side museum banned a Brooklyn high school for life after its students were deemed too rowdy on a recent visit — a move that some call discipline and others discrimination. A group of about 80 kids from Downtown Brooklyn’s Science Skills Center HS were kicked out after just 20 minutes after a student allegedly spat off the museum’s swirling rotunda lobby and another threw a penny off its winding walkway. The coin was rumored to have hit a security guard. It was only a handful of troublemakers, but the whole group of ninth- and...

Russia's Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov has appealed to the Culture Ministry to establish a "full-fledged" museum honoring Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, a news report said. Zyuganov, the head of Communist Party and its parliamentary faction, asked Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky for help in overcoming objections by a "liberal public" to create a museum in honor of Stalin, the Izvestia daily reported Friday, citing a copy of the letter.