Free Republic

Aaron Persky, the California judge who drew national attention in 2016 when he sentenced a Stanford student to just six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, was recalled on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. He is the first judge recalled in California in more than 80 years. Judge Persky, 56, had served on the Santa Clara County Superior Court since 2003, and he began his most recent six-year term in June 2016. In March 2016, a jury found Brock Turner, then 20, guilty on all three felony charges against him: sexual penetration with a foreign object...

John David Rice-Cameron can trace his conservative roots to his middle school years. Back then, his father would often have talk radio on during rides home from school or tennis practice. “Sometimes my dad would listen to Rush Limbaugh and he would kind of argue with him,” recalls Rice-Cameron, 20, a sophomore at Stanford University. “I just found myself agreeing with basically everything Rush Limbaugh was saying.” Rice-Cameron’s parents are Democrats. His mother, Susan Rice, served in the Obama administration, first as U.N. ambassador, then as National Security Advisor. But despite his parents’ political leanings, “they believe extensively in debate...

The origin of the Obama administration’s investigation of imaginary Trump-Russia collusion remains murky, but this much is clear: John Brennan, Obama’s Trump-hating CIA director, stands at the center of it. Brennan pushed for a multi-agency investigation of the Trump campaign, using as his pretext alleged intelligence from an unnamed Baltic state. That “intelligence” was supplied at the very moment Baltic officials had their own political motivation to smear Trump. “Last April, the CIA director was shown intelligence that worried him. It was – allegedly – a tape recording of a conversation about money from the Kremlin going into the US...

"Dr. Thomas Sowell (Economist and Author) joins Dave [Rubin] to discuss his new book “Discrimination & Disparities.” They dive into Dr. Sowell’s Marxist past, free speech on college campuses, the role of government, minimum wage laws, his experience as a black conservative, debunking systemic racism, and more."

A Syriac scholar at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, Dr. Kessel was sitting in the library of the manuscript's owner, a wealthy collector of rare scientific material in Baltimore. At that moment, Dr. Kessel realized that just three weeks earlier, in a library at Harvard University, he had seen a single orphaned page that was too similar to these pages to be coincidence. The manuscript he held contained a hidden translation of an ancient, influential medical text by Galen of Pergamon, a Greco-Roman physician and philosopher who died in 200 A.D. It was missing pages and Dr. Kessel was suddenly...

As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially it was ignored. But over time Ehrlich’s tract would sell millions of copies and turn its author into a celebrity. It would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century—and one of the most heatedly attacked. The first sentence set the tone: “The battle...

Department of Justice U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Massachusetts FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, March 1, 2018 Massachusetts Man Arrested for Mailing Threatening Letters Containing Suspicious White Powder BOSTON – A Beverly, Mass., man was arrested today in connection with mailing five threatening letters containing suspicious white powder to high-profile individuals around the country. Daniel Frisiello, 24, was charged in a criminal complaint with five counts of mailing a threat to injure the person of another and five counts of false information and hoaxes. Frisiello was arrested this morning and will appear in federal court in Worcester later this afternoon. As...

It’s always amusing to see which traditional liberals have been pushed too far by leftists. Not that this is the first time Alan Dershowitz has strayed (see Alan Dershowitz Throws Down on Idiots Who Blame Terrorism on Poverty… and WATCH: Alan Dershowitz Face-Stomps Obama Over Anti-Israel Resolution). It is, however, the most blunt he’s been about it. I’m not worried about a few dozen people with swastikas who want to replace the Jews, because they’re our past. They have no resonance on university campuses today. But the hard, hard left? Anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity, intolerance for speech. It’s the future. These are...

Injecting minute amounts of two immune-stimulating agents directly into solid tumors in mice can eliminate all traces of cancer in the animals, including distant, untreated metastases, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The approach works for many different types of cancers, including those that arise spontaneously, the study found.

A century-old tradition at Stanford University — in which upperclassmen track down freshman students and kiss them — is being toned down this year in the wake of the #MeToo and “Time’s Up” movements, according to organizers. Several changes have been made to the annual “Full Moon on the Quad” event, which is sanctioned by the school and scheduled to take place on campus Wednesday night. Instead of kissing, officials asked students to exchange white roses and “gratitude cards” — along with phone numbers for a possible first date, The Stanford Daily reports.

Progressive pedagogues do have high standards…when you attack them. When they’re on offense it's a different playbook. Stanford Professor David Palumbo Liu took to the pages of The Stanford Daily to denounce the editorial staff at the alternative newspaper on campus, The Stanford Review. He claimed the Review's treatment of his group--the Campus Antifascist Network--lumped it together with the more egregious acts of Antifa. For example, he takes issue with this characterization of himself which appeared in the Review: "their organization is undeniably a chapter of a terrorist group, championing the same kinds of violent resistance that have muzzled free...

Organizers have collected nearly 100,000 signatures to recall Judge Aaron Persky from his position in June over what critics say was a a lenient sentencing of Stanford University student Brock Turner, who sexually assaulted an intoxicated female student in 2015. Turner was hit with a six-month county jail sentence, of which he served three months due to a state law aimed at reducing jail overcrowding.

Humanities professors say organization evading moral, professional duties Dozens of humanities scholars cancelled their membership with their field's leading professional academic organization ahead of its annual convention, in retaliation for the group refusing to impose boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. The defecting professors wrote to the Modern Language Association—published in the days leading up to the conference being held this week in New York City—that they will not be renewing their membership, due to the organization "disgracefully" voting in June against BDS and in favor of a statement denouncing academic boycotts. Timothy Reiss, a professor emeritus of comparative literature...

Fellowship grants were used to rank students according to their value to the schoolHalf the students at Stanford University’s elite, $70,000-per-year business school receive fellowship grants. For years, the school has made it clear that the money goes to those who might otherwise be unable to attend, or who might be forced — against school recommendations — to work part-time during the Master of Business Administration program. ”All fellowships are need-based,” says promotional material from the Graduate School of Business. “It’s important to understand that we do not negotiate fellowship amounts or eligibility.” But now, thanks to a huge breach...

In the summer of 2015, Phoebe Barghouty was 23 years old and had a new master’s degree in journalism from Stanford—but little other experience—when she landed what most of her peers would consider a dream job: associate producer at Vice’s Los Angeles bureau. Though her job hadn’t technically started yet, her boss, then-Editor in Chief Jason Mojica, invited her to join the team at the L.A. Press Club Awards. After accepting an award for public service in journalism, the team from Vice—including Mojica and Kaj Larsen, the bureau chief who had hired Barghouty—celebrated with drinks. By the end of the...

After the E. coli samples arrive at the ISS, the experiment will examine how microgravity affects the bacteria's ability to thrive while exposed to antibiotics. Since humans started using antibiotics in the mid-20th century, pathogens like E. coli have evolved new genes that make them increasingly resistant to antibiotics. ... The NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer at the International Space Station will send the bacteria on their way, and the experiment will be conducted autonomously inside the cubesat.  Both naturally occurring and mutant strains of E. coli will be exposed to different concentrations of antibiotics. "The overall purpose of this is to...

...Few seemed concerned. So to call attention to the privacy risks, he decided to show that it was possible to use facial recognition analysis to detect something intimate, something “people should have full rights to keep private.” After considering atheism, he settled on sexual orientation. ... Presented with photos of gay men and straight men, a computer program was able to determine which of the two was gay with 81 percent accuracy, according to Dr. Kosinski and co-author Yilun Wang’s paper. The backlash has been fierce.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ended a day in Bay Area at Stanford University. She addressed a crowd of about 500 people as part of a launch event for Stanford's new Global Digital Policy Incubator. On the topic of digital technology, Clinton focused her remarks on Russia's interference in the 2016 election. She called the hacking of a U.S. election by a foreign adversary "the darker side of technology."

While the National Rifle Association (NRA) has long insisted that allowing Americans to carry guns make communities safer, an analysis of nearly 40 years’ worth of data has found that is not necessarily true. A Stanford Law School professor, John Donohue, and his team analyzed crime data from 1977 to 2014 and didn’t find evidence that areas where more Americans carry guns enjoy enhanced public safety or less crime. On the contrary, the researchers discovered that states that have enacted so-called right-to-carry (RTC) concealed handgun laws have experienced higher rates of violent crime than states that did not adopt those...

Here’s a question that Stanford climatologist Noah Diffenbaugh gets asked a lot lately: “Why did California receive so much rain lately if we’re supposed to be in the middle of a record-setting drought?” When answering, he will often refer the questioner to a Discover magazine story published in 1988, when Diffenbaugh was still in middle school. The article, written by veteran science writer Andrew Revkin, detailed how a persistent rise in global temperatures would affect California’s water system. It predicted that as California warmed, more precipitation would fall as rain rather than snow, and more of the snow that did...