Free Republic

A Hidden History of Evil Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives? In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains...

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut (AP) -- Sen. Christopher Dodd says Inca artifacts removed from Machu Picchu nearly a century ago and held by Yale University belong to the people of Peru.....

Yale University's acquisition of a Vincent Van Gogh painting that Russia once claimed as its own amounted to acceptance of stolen property and "art laundering," a descendant of an earlier owner alleges. Pierre Konowaloff of France argues in recent court papers that Russian authorities in the 1917 revolution unlawfully confiscated the painting owned by Konowaloff's ancestor and that the United States deemed the theft a violation of international law. "Yale's continued and wrongful detention of the unlawfully confiscated 'The Night Cafe' is prohibited by customary and international treaty law," Konowaloff's attorneys wrote in the filings. "Yale should be held accountable...

JUDGES should interpret the Constitution according to other nations' legal "norms." Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts. The United States constitutes an "axis of disobedience" along with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq. Those are the views of the man on track to become one of the US government's top lawyers: Harold Koh. President Obama has nominated Koh -- until last week the dean of Yale Law School -- to be the State Department's legal adviser. Koh. He's a fan of "transnational legal process," arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish. If Canada, the...

Yale Daily News Published: Friday, February 27, 2009 Yale will fire up to 300 staff By Isaac Arnsdorf and Victor Zapana Staff Reporter, Staff Reporter New projections on staff attrition indicate that as many as 300 employees could be laid off as Yale copes with the economic downturn, though administrators said today that the University will double severance benefits for those who lose their jobs in the next six months. The grim economic outlook has forced the University to cut deeper into staff salaries, slating the equivalent of 500 to 600 positions for elimination. But in a letter to Yale...

We Shall Overeat by: Deborah Lambert, May 06, 2008 THE SKINNY ON FAT STUDIES Academia has latched onto a new and powerful victim group by introducing “Fat Studies” on several American campuses. But . . . does this subject area qualify as a scholarly endeavor—or is it merely a sob-sister counterpart to “Women's Studies?” To author/commentator John Leo, these courses fall into the category of gripe sessions that push “identity politics, the airing of grievances and demands for protection from the oppression of the non-fat world.” Stephen Balch, who heads up the National Association of Scholars, agrees, and was quoted...

Charged With Forging Transcript, Recommendation. With straight A's and a strong recommendation from a Columbia professor, Akash Maharaj had no trouble transferring to Yale. He managed to get through a full year at the university before anyone realized that his application was a fraud. Students had already gone home for the summer when Yale quietly revoked Maharaj's admission last spring and pressed criminal charges. Now living in New York City, the 26-year-old native of Trinidad is charged with forging his Columbia transcript and deceiving Yale to collect $47,000 in financial aid. The unusual story of how a young man faked...

(New Haven-AP) _ New Haven police have arrested three Yale University students and charged them with burning an American flag hanging from the porch of a Chapel Street home. The three are facing charges ranging from reckless endangerment to arson. Police identified the three as 23-year-old Said Hyder Akbar, 19-year-old Nikolaos Angelopoulos and 19-year-old Farhad Anklesaria. They were held in jail early yesterday and later arraigned in New Haven Superior Court. Bond was set at $25,000 for two of the suspects and $15,000 for the third. Anklesaria and Angelopoulos are foreign students while Akbar was born in Pakistan, but is...

new insight into how San Francisco police handled the investigation into a New Year's attack on a Yale University choir. Many are saying it was mishandled. Now the story is getting coverage around the country and the world. We're doing a running tally -- it's been 10 days and 17 hours since police responded to the attack on the Yale students, and they still haven't interviewed the victims. This case is getting city officials the kind of attention they do not want, around the world. Since the I-Team broke the story of the New Year's attack on the Yale singing...

- KGO - Members of a renowned choral group from Yale University were attacked outside a New Year's Eve party in San Francisco, sending several of them to the hospital. Now the police department is coming under fire for its handling of the case. This does not look good for the city. Yale sends its popular singing group, The Baker's Dozen, on a holiday concert tour. And San Francisco sends the young men away bloody, bruised, and several of them seriously injured. Laura Aziz sent her son, Sharyar, off on a concert tour with one of Yale University's singing groups...

Evan Coyne Maloney was kicked off the Yale campus for asking Taliban-related questions. Lux et Veritas, indeed.

The Taliban’s former spokesman, Rahmatullah Hashemi, is now an undergraduate at Yale University, The New York Times reveals in a lengthy cover story by Chip Brown in its Sunday magazine this weekend. The cover line reads, “He was the Taliban’s spin doctor. So what’s he doing at Yale?" In fact, the story shows, Hashemi was at Yale once before—in 2001, appearing at a forum representing the Taliban, a few months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A small clip of Hashemi appears in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” film. “In some ways,” Hashemi, 27, says today, “I’m the luckiest person in the...

LIMA, Peru Peru is preparing a lawsuit against Yale University to retrieve artifacts taken nearly a century ago from the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, a government official said Wednesday. Peru has held discussions in recent years with Yale seeking the return of nearly 5,000 artifacts, including ceramics and human bones that explorer Hiram Bingham dug up during three expeditions to Machu Picchu in 1911, 1912 and 1914. "Yale considers the collection university property, given the amount of time it has been there," said Luis Guillermo Lumbreras, chief of Peru's National Institute of Culture, in an interview with The Associated...

A federal judge in Alabama has announced that he will not consider Yale Law School students for federal clerkships because of the school's decision to deny military recruiters equal access to its campus. The school and the U.S. Department of Defense have been embroiled in a legal fight over the issue, with the school this month announcing that it would return to its nondiscriminatory recruiting policy that will, in effect, limit access to military recruiters who deny enlistment to homosexuals. Not everyone was happy about the school's position. In a recent letter to his alma mater, Senior Judge William M....

A few years ago, I taught a course at Yale. Over dinners, I'd listen to my students talk about their other courses, and in many of these conversations there was one that stood out: Grand Strategy. For many students, this yearlong course was not just a class, but a life-altering event. Somehow students in Grand Strategy were applying Thucydides, Kant and Sun Tzu to modern foreign policy crises. They talked excitedly about seeing the connections between big ideas and big events. Grand Strategy is taught by three great professors - John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill. But when...

At the height of the college admissions season in early April, the director of admission at Princeton and possibly others in his office improperly and repeatedly entered a Web site set up to let Yale applicants know if they had been accepted as students, officials at both Ivy League universities confirmed yesterday. Yale officials filed a complaint yesterday with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Princeton officials apologized for what they called a "serious lapse of judgment" by the director, Stephen E. LeMenager. Princeton placed him on administrative leave pending an investigation of the incident, which was first reported yesterday by...