Free Republic

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum claimed to be in the business of buying and selling real estate, but he really bought and sold human kidneys for transplant, according to a federal complaint filed Thursday. The 58-year-old Brooklyn man was accused of trafficking in human organs, after a sting by an undercover FBI agent who agreed to pay $160,000 for a kidney from a live Israeli donor for her sick New Jersey "uncle." Investigators said Rosenbaum bragged about doing "quite a lot" of transplants over the last 10 years. "I am what you call a matchmaker," the complaint said the man, also known...

In 1985, Harold Washington issued an executive order that relaxed federal immigration laws under then-President Ronald Reagan, whose administration “aggressively used [the] detention of Central Americans as a device to deter migration from that region, where violent civil wars had caused tens of thousands to flee,” according to University of California Davis law professor Kevin Davis. Since Aug. 31, 2022, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has bussed or flown to Chicago nearly 40,000 individuals seeking asylum in an effort to use the welcoming aspects of Washington’s executive order as a political cudgel. On April 14, Mayor Johnson called out the...

The 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was found deceased at the University of California, Berkeley, on Tuesday. His grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, confirmed the devastating news in a Facebook post. The student, identified as Marco Troper, was discovered unresponsive in his dorm at the Clark Kerr Campus, a student housing complex, around 4:23 p.m. local time. Despite immediate life-saving attempts by the Berkeley Fire Department, Troper was pronounced dead at the scene. The University of California Police Department (UCPD) stated that there were no signs of foul play discovered, according to the New York Post. The heartbroken grandmother...

A tenured professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has long been accused of fabricating her Native American heritage, will be allowed to retire with full benefits and her title intact. Ethnic Studies Professor Andrea Smith will reportedly be allowed to keep her current position through August of 2024. She will be allowed to teach classes until then. The separation agreement comes in the wake of a recent complaint by more than a dozen faculty members, who accused her of violating academic integrity by lying about her Native American lineage. The agreement is unusual both in that it will...

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — The University of California, Santa Cruz has received two separate reports of incidents of antisemitism and hate. In a statement, they say one happened on campus and the other to a student in downtown Santa Cruz.

Robert Reich, who served as Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration and is currently a Professor of Public Policy at University of California, Berkley, expressed interest on Tuesday in making the last name of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis an official synonym for "fascist." Reich is not the first left-wing person to dub the governor a fascist. It has become a more common occurrence as DeSantis has increased his national profile, some think with an eye toward running for the presidency in 2024. "The View's" Sunny Hostin previously called DeSantis a "fascist and a bigot," MSNBC host Joy Reid call...

Johnathan Perkins, director for Race and Equity at University of California, Los Angeles, tweeted his wish for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to die after news broke that Thomas was hospitalized for an infection. "This whole rule we’re not to wish ill on people is silly," he said. Perkins added "Uncle Thomas is a sexist token who’s committed himself to making us all share in he and his treasonous wife’s misery" and "I’m over it. He is bad. He’s LITERALLY endangered lives of countless of this country’s vulnerable populations." Perkins further said he did not believe Thomas was not actually...

Dong Jingwei, who has been rumored to be a high-ranking defector to the United States, attended a meeting in Beijing on June 23, according to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS). The MPS announced on its website that Dong participated in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) security meeting in Beijing on Wednesday, as a member of the China team which was led by Zhao Kezhi, China’s public security minister. In the announcement, the ministry released a photo, in which Dong was sitting at the right end of the table. This is the first time that the Chinese regime has...

Researchers with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) found and extracted a mammoth tusk deep under the ocean. According to MBARI, their team spotted the tusk 185 miles offshore and 10,000 feet deep on top of a seamount in 2019. They returned on July 2021 to bring the tusk to the surface. "The researchers have confirmed that the tusk—about one meter (just over three feet) in length—is from a Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi)," reported the institute. They believe it could be the oldest well-preserved mammoth tusk recovered from this area of North America. The Columbian mammoth went extinct around 11,500...

Millions of people who have refused to get an experimental mRNA vaccine may soon be forced to consume the gene therapy in their food. Researchers at the University of California were awarded a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation developing technology that infuses experimental mRNA Covid-19 vaccines into spinach, lettuce and other edible plants. The team of nanobiotechnology experts is currently working on successfully delivering DNA containing mRNA BioNTech technology into chloroplasts, the part of the plants that instruct its cells’ DNA to replicate the vaccine material. The researchers are tasked with demonstrating the genetically modified plants can produce...

Dear profs X, Y, Z I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field. In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them. In the extended links and...

The University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral program in second language acquisition recently held a virtual lecture on “Undoing White Supremacy in the Language Disciplines.” Professor Mary Bucholtz from the University of California-Santa Barbara spoke as a guest at the virtual lecture. Bucholtz identified herself as being “racist” because she is “a White American.”

... [A] task force of the faculty senate at the University of California, of all places, is resisting the movement to ban test scores in admissions. The 227-page report, completed in late January, recommends that the UC system keep standardized tests like the ACT and SAT as admissions requirements, and it demolishes the logic of the politically motivated anti-testing movement. The report dispatches the myth that standardized math and reading tests are useless for predicting college performance. Based on data from tens of thousands of students in the UC system, the report concludes that “test scores are currently better predictors...

A mathematics professor at the University of California, Davis, has faced significant pushback for criticizing university-mandated “diversity statements,” testimonies that purportedly help determine the degree to which job applicants will be able to advance and promote diversity on campus.

The University of California, Los Angeles recently published an interview with a professor who claims that mass shootings motivated by racism have only been a problem since Trump’s election. In addition to Trump’s “hate speech,” the professor blames American “gun culture” for the gun violence epidemic. He insists that a solution includes “qualifications” to both the First and Second Amendments, which he says are not “absolute.”

A University of California-Los Angeles professor is calling not only for gun control but also “qualifications” to freedom of speech in order to combat mass shootings fueled by racism, a phenomenon he says has only come to light since President Donald Trump’s election. UCLA professor Douglas Kellner states that until just two years ago, “all of the previous shootings were rather divorced from sociopolitical factors,” claiming that while mass shootings occurred in the past, they were the results of “individual crises of young men,” having to do with things such as family life or school trouble, in an interview published...

Recently, the University of Vermont Medical Center was accused of forcing a nurse to assist with an abortion against her will, a violation of federal conscience rights laws. According to Vice, the fact that a pro-life nurse objected to performing an abortion “shows we need to be more discerning about who is worthy of serving the public.” So much for the right to choose. Instead, author Monica R. McLemore, a registered nurse and associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco, wants the Vermont nurse “to wrestle with why her discomfort with abortion kept her from empathizing with the...

Astronomers have discovered that the planet Uranus has a blue ring - only the second found in the Solar System. Like the blue ring of Saturn, it probably owes its existence to an accompanying small moon. Scientists suspect subtle forces acting on dust in the rings allow smaller particles to persist while larger ones are recaptured by the moon. Smaller particles reflect blue light, giving the ring its distinctive colour, the US team reports in Science. All other rings - those around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - are made up of both large and small particles, making the...

University of California-Berkeley officials say that campus police have reopened an investigation into the assault on a conservative activist who was manning a recruitment table on campus. Earlier this week, officials said the investigation had ended and police were seeking a felony arrest warrant from the Alameda County District Attorney Office. The new announcement, which offered no details, was the latest in a series of delays and cryptic messages from authorities relating to the Feb. 19 attack, which was captured on video and clearly shows the face of the apparent attacker. The new delay in the case drew the ire...

A federal court gave final approval Thursday to the redrawn Virginia House of Delegates map that a court-appointed expert created to resolve the state’s long-running racial gerrymandering case. In a 2-1 opinion, judges for the Richmond-based Eastern District of Virginia ordered the state to adopt the map created by University of California-Irvine political science professor Bernard Grofman. The map could boost Democrats’ chances of taking control of the House later this year by tilting six GOP-held districts toward Democrats and imperiling the re-election campaigns of two top Republicans. Republicans had called Grofman’s map “legally indefensible,” saying it “attempts to give...