Free Republic

Jihadis in prisons in Syria could face execution without trial after President Bashar al-Assad said he was setting up special terror courts, where the prisoners will be subjected to 'Syrian law'. Membership of ISIS is a hanging offence in Syria and Assad has now said foreign members of IS in the country will be brought to justice. Thousands of prisoners have been secretly executed inside the infamous Saydnaya Prison near Damascus, according to Amnesty International. Thousands more are said to have died there through torture and starvation. Inmates are regularly beaten while crammed inside tyres, electrocuted and sexually assaulted. Some...

Queen Elizabeth II is apparently considering retiring in about 18 months so her son, Prince Charles, can assume the throne, reports in the UK said Wednesday. The 93-year-old monarch is weighing stepping down around her 95th birthday, the same age that her husband, Prince Philip, withdrew from his royal duties, sources told the UK’s Express. “Her Majesty is mindful of her age and wants to make sure when the time comes, the transition of the Crown is seamless,” a former senior member of the royal household told the outlet.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has arrested 90 additional foreign-born students in recent months in a sting operation at a fake Michigan university designed to draw in students who are trying to stay in the U.S. illegally, according to a new report. The University of Farmington advertised a "dynamic business administration and STEM curriculum” program, but the students, mostly from India, "knew that they would not attend any actual classes, earn credits or make academic progress towards an actual degree,” according to a January indictment. A total of about 250 students have been arrested since the school opened in...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., pulled in what is being described as an unprecedented fundraising haul in the third quarter of this year, outraising top Democrats in the House of Representatives as party leaders move forward with a controversial impeachment inquiry. With $1.42 million in the bank, the progressive star raised more for her re-election campaign than any other House Democrat, with the vast majority ($1.1 million) of individual donations totaling less than $200. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., fell behind the freshman congresswoman, the New York Post reported Tuesday.

As the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry into President Trump deepens, a spotlight has been cast on Hunter Biden ventures abroad not only in Ukraine but in China, where he set about investing while his dad served as vice president. The questions come as Republicans are demanding that Hunter Biden – the 49-year-old son of Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden – appear before Congress to testify on his work. For almost six years, the firm connected to Hunter Biden in China has moved more than $2.5 billion into various automotive, technology, energy, and mining endeavors.

For the past several weeks a deposition transcript has been floating around implicating Ilhan Omar as a Qatari asset. Bona fide news outlets have hesitated to report on the allegations without some confirmation. Now the Jerusalem Post has stepped forward to serve up the story without confirmation. Al Arabiya English does likewise here. A spokesman for Omar has dignified the story with an outright denial that is included by the Post in its account. When Omar is unable to deal with the facts, she instructs her spokesman to avoid the question on her behalf. That is how she handled the...

The old cliché is true: Politics is the art of the possible. That's why the Democrats need to abandon their quest to remove President Trump from office by way of impeachment — because doing so is going to be impossible. It was always going to be the longest of long shots. In all of American history, a president has never been removed through impeachment — let alone when the president's own party has held the majority in the Senate, where the impeachment trial takes place and conviction and removal requires an incredibly steep two-thirds majority vote. Add in the extreme...

The U.S. fertility rate declined in 2018 for the fourth consecutive year, reaching a record low 59.1 births for every 1,000 women able to bear children, the National Center for Health Statistics announced on Wednesday. The fertility rate has been on the decline since the 2008 recession, with a slight rebound in 2014. Typically, economic crises lead to a decline in fertility rates, but the current decline has not reversed even as the economy has recovered. “It is hard for me to believe that the birthrate just keeps going down,” University of New Hampshire demographer Kenneth Johnson told to the...

On Monday night, France’s counter-terror stalemate in the Sahel struck a new low. Manoeuvring to engage militants on the ground, an attack helicopter collided mid-air with a troop transport chopper. Thirteen French personnel perished – the heaviest toll of a single incident in a generation. The tragedy is, for many, emblematic of France’s faltering West African mission, which, six years in, looks no closer to success.

The president’s critics thought his presidency was illegitimate to begin with. His Cabinet members changed frequently. Mainly based on policy disagreements, members of Congress demanded his ouster. Some lawmakers were willing to toss out constitutional norms based on what they said was the president’s “ignorance of the interest and true policy of this Government, and want of qualification for the discharge of the important duties” of his office. But we’re talking 1843, not 2019. In the midst of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry targeting President Donald Trump, many pundits make comparisons to the impeachments of Presidents Andrew Johnson in 1868 and...

Update: Dan Bongino further accused Matt Drudge of abandoning his readers in a tweet linking to this article Wednesday. Dan Bongino ✔ @dbongino Drudge has abandoned you. I NEVER will. 🚨👇🏻👇🏻🚨 Dan Bongino Teases Drudge Report Competitor ‘Bongino Report’ https://dailycaller.com/2019/11/27/dan-bongino-drudge-reporter-competitor/ … Fox News contributor Dan Bongino teased an apparent competitor to the famous Drudge Report in a Twitter post Wednesday. “Drudge has abandoned you. I NEVER will,” he wrote. Original story: Conservative commentator and Fox News contributor Dan Bongino teased an apparent competitor to the famous Drudge Report in a Twitter post Wednesday. “Tired of Drudge? Get ready, the Bongino...

READING, Pa. — Pennsylvania overhauled its child sexual abuse laws Tuesday more than a year after a grand jury report showed the cover-up of hundreds of cases of abuse in most of Pennsylvania’s Roman Catholic dioceses over the last seven decades. The central bill signed by Gov. Tom Wolf gives future victims of child sex abuse more time to file lawsuits and to end time limits for police to file criminal charges. The grand jury report spurred several states to change their laws and other states to begin similar investigations.

Bill Cosby is speaking out from prison. Over a year after he was first incarcerated for the sexual assault of Andrea Constand, the disgraced actor and comedian — who is serving three to 10 years — has given his first interview. In it, the 82-year-old maintained his innocence from his Pennsylvania correctional institution, Phoenix, which is located outside Philadelphia, and, because of that, he expects to serve the entire sentence. Cosby also called his trial a “set up” and the jurors “imposters.” “I have eight years and nine months left,” Cosby told National Newspaper Publishers Association's BlackPressUSA.com, clearly not believing...

Pete Buttigieg’s high-flying presidential campaign said Wednesday it would refund the donations it received from two lawyers who represented Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his contentious Senate confirmation hearings. His campaign made the move after reporters from Britain’s The Guardian raised questions about the contributions from attorneys Alexandra Walsh and Beth Wilkinson, who are law partners. The two donated a combined $10,000 from the pair, $3,150 of which had already been returned because it exceeded contribution limits. “With nearly 700,000 donors, a contribution we would otherwise refuse sometimes gets through,” the campaign told the publication in a statement. “We...

A document with the Texas Republican Party’s strategy for the 2020 election was emailed to Democrats, showing a plan over the next 12 months to push back on the narrative that the GOP lacks diversity and counteract Donald Trump's potential negative impact on the race. The document, which apparently began appearing in the inboxes of Democrats this week, lays out concerns about the "polarising nature" of Mr Trump's presidency, as well as ways to counteract the "narrative driven by Democrats" that the GOP lacks diversity in a state where a quickly growing Hispanic population has sowed considerable concern that the...

As every contemporary school child knows, the first Thanksgiving took place in 1621, when our Pilgrim forefathers took a break from slaughtering Indigenous Peoples to invite them to dinner and infect them with smallpox, before embarking on their mission to fry the planet so that the world would end on Jan. 22, 2031. (Copyright: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) Consider this description of the Pilgrims' treatment of the Indigenous Peoples: "They were the worst of conquerors. Inordinate pride, the lust of blood and dominion, were the mainsprings of their warfare; and their victories were strained with every excess of savage passion." You've probably...

Video footage from the Massachusetts State Police shows a Boston Dynamics robot dog working for the unit's bomb squad. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) immediately began firing shots, stating that the use of a general purpose robot in a police force setting is potentially dangerous. As per usual, the internet went crazy with hot takes and memes on the latest robo-cop, which the police force leased for 90 days

While CNN devoted all this to one news story about a top political figure’s [Trump] unannounced doctor visit, corporate media outlets in general have been busy sending the opposite messaging about a litany of health difficulties for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The 86-year-old Ginsburg was admitted to the hospital on Friday with “chills and fever.” The Supreme Court’s oldest justice went home Sunday, according to CBS’s Jan Crawford. The reports on her illness from CNN, USA Today, Bloomberg, and The New York Times were routine writeups of the press statements Crawford posted. Instead of 2,000 words of probing...

`Please go to @ChickfilA and give them a piece of your chicken-pluckin' mind. It's claimed their "followers" dropped by 10%, or 110,000 over the past 4 weeks. (I think in general, stats about Twitter followers are highly manipulable and highly suspect, but let's just go with that.) Anyhow, I have been sending them lots of messages about how bad they are for selling out to the bullies in the LGBT activist organizations. They are getting beat up by angryy conservative (ex)customers, especially for dropping Salvation Army, an act of foul treachery. As of now, I think their customer comment tweets...

We’re still doing this, huh? Still writing to women who have degrees in meteorology and telling them to “STOP WEARING PATTERNS.” Still contacting grown professionals about their butts. (“VERY wide.”) Still watching morning news like we’re Us Weekly’s Fashion Police, armed with salty insults and not afraid to hurl them. Tuesday morning, WGN Morning News anchors Morgan Kolkmeyer, Lauren Jiggetts and Sarah Jindra read aloud some of the feedback they get from viewers about their bodies and their wardrobe choices during their pregnancies. Kolkmeyer is due to give birth in eight weeks. Jiggetts and Jindra both had babies within the...