Free Republic

Minnesota health officials said the exposures occurred April 13 at a McDonald’s on Main Street in Winona and April 16 at the Freeborn County Co-op gas station on Margaretha Avenue in Albert Lea. In Wisconsin, the La Crosse and Trempealeau county health departments listed the following times and places where exposure occurred: the evening of April 13 at Beedle’s Bar and Restaurant in Galesville, April 13-16 at the Comfort Inn in Onalaska, April 14 at the Dollar Tree in Onalaska, the evening of April 14 at Fairfield Inn & Suites in La Crosse, 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on April...

Planned Parenthood’s latest lawsuit betrays the lie that it cares first and foremost about providing healthcare for women... The nation’s largest abortion provider is 'suing to keep information from the government and to block safety inspections at its clinics'... The ACLU, on behalf of Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, has filed a lawsuit against the state of Indiana to block a new law that requires two basic things:... Each clinic would need to undergo an annual safety inspection by the Department of Health, and each clinic would need to report any “abortion complications” experienced by its patients to the...

Twenty Republican-led states are seeking to temporarily invalidate former President Barack Obama’s health care law while their larger lawsuit against it proceeds. In a February suit, Texas and Wisconsin led a coalition arguing that the Affordable Care Act is no longer constitutional after the Republican-backed tax overhaul eliminated fines for not having health care coverage. Sixteen states with Democratic governors later sought to intervene. …

According to a report from Foreign Policy, the 'Communist Party' of China has set up 'party cells' on American college campuses. The report noted that in mid-2017, a group of nine students 'and faculty' from Huazhong University of Science and Technology formed 'a Chinese Communist Party branch' in a dorm while at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during a summer program.... During that program, they held meetings to "strengthen ideological guidance." a November 2017 report in the party-aligned Global Times newspaper states. “Overseas party cells are also responsible for promoting party and government policies.” What's happening at UIUC is...

< snip of beginning> Goldberg’s answer is so simple it seems too easy, and yet so difficult it seems unachievable. We need to teach and experience gratitude for what we have been given, which means reacquainting ourselves with the philosophical and scientific roots of the Miracle and then passing them on to our posterity. So much is arrayed against this effort, and yet we Americans, we tribal Americans, do long to belong to the American tribe. In his pathbreaking book, Goldberg makes it clear all we need do to find our place is to understand that we are the beneficiaries...

House Speaker Paul Ryan has forced out the House chaplain, Reverend Patrick Conroy. Conroy had served as the chamber’s chaplain since 2011 but offered his resignation last week at Ryan’s urging. Conroy’s resignation letter said he was offering to step down at Ryan’s request, calling his seven years of House service “one of the great privileges of my life.” Ryan spokeswoman Ashlee Strong would not reveal the speaker’s reasons for forcing Conroy out. A top Democrat, Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, said he believes it was because of a prayer Conroy gave during last fall’s tax debate urging that...

It turns out Oregonians are good at growing cannabis—too good. In February, state officials announced that 1.1 million pounds of cannabis flower were logged in the state's database. If a million pounds sounds like a lot of pot, that's because it is: Last year, Oregonians smoked, vaped or otherwise consumed just under 340,000 pounds of legal bud. This month, WW spoke to two dozen people across Oregon's cannabis industry. They describe a bleak scene: Small businesses laying off employees and shrinking operations. Farms shuttering. People losing their life's savings are unable to declare bankruptcy because marijuana is still a federally...

Germany has the second-highest tax burden for single earners among high-income countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Thursday. The news has come amid a large budget surplus in Germany and no plans under the new coalition government to drastically change personal income taxes. […] In its “Taxing Wages” report, the OECD calculated the “net personal average tax rate” (NPATR) to determine a country’s tax burden. The NPATR equals the sum of personal income tax plus social security contributions minus cash benefits as a percentage of gross earnings. Single earners in Germany who have no children...

A curious dualism emerges in New York Times reporter Amy Chozick’s book Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling. As I noted yesterday, Chozick makes it clear that she was rooting for Clinton. But she also thinks Clinton hates her. Chozick shouldn’t take things so personally: Clinton hates everyone. You can’t relate to people you despise. Her inability to master the basics of being a politician inspired one of the great underreported witticisms of the 2016 campaign, when Donald Trump was asked about his comparatively loose debate preparations. “I don’t need to rehearse being human,”...

The United States is supposed to be the "land of the free," a country where individualism and private property are sacrosanct. Yet it's difficult to maintain this belief while watching Courtney Moorehead Balaker's newly released movie, "Little Pink House." The film portrays the real-life story of the determined families who fought to protect their homes in New London, Connecticut, during and after city officials' shameful attempts to evict them starting in 1998. Shockingly, in 2005, it was the Supreme Court that inflicted the ultimate defeat to the homeowners, who lost everything in the process. Depressing, right? Actually, the movie turns...

In the United States, the systems are in use on New York's Roosevelt Island and in Portland, Ore., where a cable car carries commuters between a waterfront neighborhood and a university. The craggy topography of Elysian Park has long presented a challenge to transportation planners and Dodgers fans alike. But those hills are perfect for a gondola line, which could easily scale inclines that defeat buses and light-rail lines, supporters say. The gondola line, which could ferry passengers above the traffic-choked 110 Freeway, is one of several major infrastructure investments proposed in Los Angeles County that would not be built...

Per Daren Jonescu: The British government, eager to prove its merit as a proper socialist state, has made a cottage industry of delineating the conditions of collective ownership of the individual in the starkest terms. Last year, their poster child for the principle of the individual as dispensable cell of the socialist collective was named Charlie Gard. This year, he is known as Baby Alfie. In both cases, the parents are outright denied the freedom to seek further treatment for a child the State has decided is not worth trying to save. In both cases, the further treatment in question...

When you are under a highway overpass like the one above, it is hard to believe there are 6 lanes of traffic overhead like the one below. When you are driving on the highway, it seems very wide and you don't even realize when you are going over a bridge (overpass). But if you were to go under the overpass and look up, you would be surprised how narrow tha strip actually is.

Linda Vester had a reputation for covering tough stories. As a war correspondent for NBC News in the ’90s, she spent three tours of duty in the Middle East and took two assignments in Africa. But as it turned out, her biggest battle at work wasn’t in the field. She says it was as a victim of sexual harassment by Tom Brokaw, the legendary newsman who manned the anchor desk for “NBC Nightly News” for 22 years and hosted “Today” and “Meet the Press.” In a series of interviews with Variety conducted over several months, Vester alleged that Brokaw physically...

As long as the world's fastest-growing religious-political system -- now encompassing one-fifth of the world's population – considers digital currency haram, or forbidden, it is unlikely that such a system would gain widespread global acceptance. But what if cyrptocurrencies now considered haram by Muslim leaders could be made halal, or acceptable, under Sharia law? And what if I told you efforts are underway to do exactly that?

Diamond and Silk Destroy Rep. Johnson at Media Hearing in Washington April 26, 2018 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kPLIfZ1hpG8&ebc=ANyPxKqgbpzQDoFL1REFEIvEQh1f7mKu8SwWyG3ci6Fo9vnJkhNlj_jigfI8zfjcIBI4cB1WTLQcC8DmWZXhoc-Pq5s7-Fh2yg

Yawkey Way is no more. On Thursday, Boston’s Public Improvement Commission unanimously approved Boston Red Sox owner John Henry’s request to change the name of Yawkey Way, according to the Boston Globe. The street will now be known as Jersey Street, its original name.

This is at the DMZ right now.  The North Korean Dictator is about to cross over into South Korea at the DMZ.https://twitter.com/i/events/971974473560674305

South Korean President Moon Jae-in has arrived in the border village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone for his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will be accompanied by his sister and confidante, Kim Yo-jong, and the 90-year-old nominal head of the North Korean state, Kim Yong-nam, as well as foreign and defense ministers in the historic inter-Korean summit at the border village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone on Friday.Panmunjom, the world's last Cold War frontier, was designated as the venue of meeting for officials from the North and South after the...

Since we've been writing about defensive gun uses within the context of the broader debate over gun restrictions lately, this story caught my attention. It also seems particularly relevant in light of the horrible shooting at a Tennessee Waffle House a few days ago, which was interrupted by the heroics of an unarmed man (for whom strangers have now raised more than $170,000). Some on the anti-gun Left decided that it would be a useful argument to highlight the incredible case of James Shaw, Jr. as a means of rebutting the 'good guy with a gun' argument from supporters of...