Free Republic

The names of the tech workers in this story have been changed.Ten thousand miles from Silicon Valley, in a room near the Black Sea, Yegor Karpenchekov dreams of money. At night, while the rest of Odessa sleeps and cocaine smugglers drift in and out of the port under cover of darkness, Yegor logs onto FaceTime and talks to a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Her name is Sally Faubion, and five months ago she recruited Yegor from the freelancer marketplace UpWork to code her apps. She believes "divine intervention" brought them together; for Yegor, it was likely $20 per hour...

SACRAMENTO — Assemblywoman Nicole Parra and her father traveled to Cuba in early December on what has reportedly become an annual event organized by one of California’s most powerful lobbyists and political fundraisers. Parra, D-Hanford, and other participants said the trip was arranged by Darius Anderson, founder of one of Sacramento’s premiere lobbying firms and a top fundraiser for former Gov. Gray Davis. Since travel to communist Cuba is generally prohibited except under a license from the U.S. government, Anderson’s repeated trips there with lawmakers, business people and others raise a number of questions. Why is a lobbyist arranging religious...

CHARLESTON, SC The brown liquid a man sprayed onto to some of the produce in a Charleston grocery store has been determined to be feces. Pau S. Hang, 41, is accused of spraying a brown liquid from a spray bottle on produce at a Charleston Harris Teeter on Oct. 15. The brown liquid has tested positive for components of fecal matter, according to the Charleston Police Department. Hang was originally charged with damage to personal property. An additional charge of tampering with human drug product or food item has been filed against Hang, according to public information officer Charles Francis....

The 2016 year saw an explosion in “hate crime” accounts that turned out to be hoaxes. Many of those accounts were attributed to supporters of Donald Trump. ...

Where's Sharpton, where's Jackson, and for that matter, where's Obama and Holder? What am I talking about? I'm talking about the vicious beating a young white transgendered "woman" suffered at the hands of two black girls, one of whom was only 14 years old. Pursuant to Obama-Holder, will they treat this as they have the case involving the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, i.e., if you ain't black it don't matter? I should here state in the strongest possible terms my condemnation of homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. But just as my objection to sexual perversion is based upon biblical...

The vote in the Senate to defund ACORN has taken this story in a new direction. This was an amendment first introduced yesterday by Nebraska Senator Mike Johannes. It was voted on last evening and voted favorably overwhelmingly 83-7. (Ironically, both my senators, Dick Durbin and Roland Burris, were in the minority) This still has to move through the House but the Senate is supposed to be the deliberative body. Yet, it moved from introduction to vote in less than twenty four hours.

This report is 88 pages but here is the full ACORN report.

This was passed along to me by member of the ACORN 8. When it was first revealed that Dale Rathke embezzled from ACORN, through CCI, members of the board began taking a much closer look at the operation. During the course of their investigation, the came up with these 31 questions that they have found critical.

BELGRADE, Serbia - The Balkans, a hotbed of crime and violence during the Yugoslav wars and the chaotic transition from communism, has become one of the safest areas in Europe to live, according to a U.N. report released Thursday. ADVERTISEMENT The report concluded that nine Balkan countries — including Bosnia and Croatia, which saw vicious ethnic bloodletting in the 1990s — now boast lower levels of homicide, robbery and rape than Western Europe. "Surprising as it may be, the Balkan region is one of the safest in Europe," the report said. "The Balkans is departing from an era when demagogues,...

  Murdered by sex beast ... Naomi befriended her killer   Murdered by human rights By MICHAEL LEA Political Correspondent A MOTHER was murdered by a serial sex beast freed from a “life” sentence to protect HIS human rights, a damning report revealed yesterday.  Watchdogs found that Anthony Rice, 49, was “too dangerous to be released in the first place”.But lawyers won his freedom on human rights grounds — then got release terms relaxed with the same tactic.It left him able to stab and strangle 40-year-old Naomi Bryant in a “truly hideous crime” nine months later.The report also found “substantial...

How to spend $3 billion for stem cell research is proving to be a monumental and sometimes divisive task for California's Institute for Regenerative Medicine. What's the low hanging fruit in stem cell research that could move the science forward? Should funding priority be given to research that could help the largest number of people, or should it be directed to orphan diseases that affect a small segment of society and aren't of interest to big pharmaceutical companies? How much money should be spent inventing tools that could help scientists involved in stem cell research? As the stem cell institute...

MOSCOW, January 13 (RIA Novosti) - The seizure by Ukrainian officials of the Russian Black Sea Fleet's lighthouse in Yalta, in Ukraine's Crimea, cannot fail to harm Russian-Ukrainian relations, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Friday. The incident is "all the more disappointing in the light of the constructive meetings in Astana between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents," ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said. The head of the Yalta lighthouse and two of its workers were prevented from working Friday morning on the grounds that the staff's documents enabling them to enter the port had allegedly expired, Russian officials said. Ukraine has...

Testosterone has a bad reputation. The public image of it is closely linked to the idea of dumb aggression, to the caveman. But this is a far from complete image. In recent years new research is starting to show that it would be more accurate to associate this much maligned hormone with Newton, Da Vinci, Einstein and Edison than the rough and brutal Neanderthal. Testosterone, it seems, could be the true driver of our civilisations. Satoshi Kanazawa at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, studied the biographies of 280 scientists and plotted their intellectual achievements against their ages. He discovered...

Across Ocala Avenue from Meyer Elementary School in San Jose, in a small house flanked by palm trees, lives Ismael Otero, a 44-year-old convicted child molester classified at high risk of attacking again. Parents at Meyer have raised no outcry about Otero, for the simplest of reasons: They don't know he's there. And it's not because school officials are keeping quiet. They didn't know either.