Free Republic

Restrictions, harassment, and intimidation towards people who practice their religion increased in every major region of the world in 2012 except the Americas, with Christians the major target, says a new report by the Pew Research Center. “Muslims and Jews experienced six-year highs in the number of countries in which they were harassed by national, provincial or local governments,” the study found, but Christians continue to be the world’s most oppressed religious group, with persecution against them reported in 110 countries. A recent report by the Christian group Open Doors noted that “North Korea remains the world’s most restrictive nation...

"The children belong to all of us," Paul Reville, an education professor at Harvard and former Massachusetts secretary of Education, said Friday in explaining why states should adopt the Common Core State Standards Initiative. "What we're doing at the national level ... is what a lot of our states thought made sense individually. Why should some towns in cities or states have no standards or low standards and others have extremely high standards when the children belong to all of us and would move. And the same logic applies to the nation," he said, making the case for national standards....

The data breach that struck our company spotlighted the sophistication of criminal hacker networks operating across the globe. We know the attack created significant concerns for millions of customers. We will learn from this incident and we will work to make Target, and the wider business community, more secure in the future. One step American businesses could now take that would dramatically improve the security of all credit and debit cards: adoption of chip-enabled smartcards. The technology is already widely used throughout the world. For many reasons, the United States has been slow to embrace the technology at home. We...

HOLLYWOOD, CA, January 30, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Hollywood loves an underdog – unless, it seems, that underdog is a Christian. That's the reaction of one Christian film expert to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' decision to strip the family-friendly motion picture Alone Yet Not Alone of its Oscar nomination for best song. “It's hazing,” Dr. Ted Baehr, the founder and publisher of the pro-family Movieguide and chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, told LifeSiteNews.com. Alone Yet Not Alone is based on a true story about how a family's Christian faith helped them survive after being...

Liberals only enforce laws they support. Check it out: In what appears to be the latest example in a trend of attorneys general refusing to defend laws passed by legislatures and voters, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring announced Thursday that he will no longer defend his state’s constitutional amendment defining marriage solely as the union of one man and one woman. But a leading traditional marriage advocate is blasting Herring for casting aside the duties of his office to pursue a partisan agenda. As a member of the state senate, Herring voted for the 2006 state constitutional amendment that defines...

Police would be able to tap into private video camera recordings from San Jose residents who agree to provide access to authorities under a new proposal that would expand investigators' watchful eye over the city but already is raising big brother-type privacy concerns.

Ford's Global VP/Marketing and Sales, Jim Farley, said something both sinister and obvious during a panel discussion about data privacy today at CES, the big electronics trade show in Las Vegas. Because of the GPS units installed in Ford vehicles, Ford knows when its drivers are speeding, and where they are while they're doing it. Farley was trying to describe how much data Ford has on its customers, and illustrate the fact that the company uses very little of it in order to avoid raising privacy concerns: "We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it....

Parents are threatening legal action against a Southern California school district after their six-year-old son was told he could not pass out candy canes with religious messages taped to them because "Jesus is not allowed in school." Isaiah Martinez, a six-year-old student at Merced Elementary School in West Covina, Calif., arrived to school on Dec. 13, planning to pass out candy canes with religious messages to his fellow students in celebration of the upcoming Christmas season. After the boy's teacher consulted with the school principal, he reportedly told the student that he could not pass out the religious messages because...

by John Urban | Top Right News Religious freedom advocates are calling on the West Covina Unified School District to adopt policy changes and issue a formal apology after an alleged incident involving bullying against a Christian student.Advocates for Faith & Freedom, an Irvine-based nonprofit law firm, issued a letter Monday on behalf of Isaiah Martinez, a first grader at Merced Elementary School who took traditional candy canes as Christmas gifts for his teacher, Valerie Lu, and classmates on Dec. 13, 2013, according to attorney Robert Tyler. Each candy cane came with a message attached that recited the history...

“[A security camera] doesn’t respond to complaint, threats, or insults. Instead, it just watches you in a forbidding manner. Today, the surveillance state is so deeply enmeshed in our data devices that we don’t even scream back because technology companies have convinced us that we need to be connected to them to be happy.” — Pratap Chatterjee, journalist What is most striking about the American police state is not the mega-corporations running amok in the halls of Congress, the militarized police crashing through doors and shooting unarmed citizens, or the invasive surveillance regime which has come to dominate every aspect...

A church is in a clash with Nevada County after being told to take down a sign with an American flag and a message to support the troops. Simple Truth Church put up the sign to cover an old, rundown billboard. However the “Support Our Troops” sign is becoming quite controversial. If the church doesn’t remove the sign, it could be fined.

Don’t say Christmas. That’s the message that was conveyed to a group of soldiers at Camp Shelby by an equal opportunity officer from the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, according to a soldier who attended a recent briefing. “It’s unbelievable that the Army would ban ‘Christmas’ like it’s a bad word,” said Michael Berry, an attorney with the Liberty Institute, a legal firm representing the unidentified soldier. Two weeks ago, a routine meeting was held at the Mississippi base with various leaders of the 158th Infantry Brigade. During the meeting, they discussed an upcoming Christmas football tournament. The equal opportunity...

Christian baker in Colorado refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. A judge is now ordering him to do so or face financial penalties. Surely there are plenty of bakers who would bake a cake for David Mullins and Charlie Craig, the gay men who wanted the cake. But they went to Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver, CO. When Phillips declined because of his religious beliefs, Mullins and Craig went to the ACLU, which in turn complained to the state that Phillips was discriminating. There will be no accommodation between gay rights activists and those seeking...

It happened Dec. 2, 2013, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. LifeSiteNews.com broke the story with the headline: “Violent mob of topless pro-abort feminists attacks praying men defending cathedral.” The raw footage is disturbing to the extreme (warning: viewer discretion advised for nudity, lesbian lewdness, and violence. A censored version is available in this WND story.) Both the video and the story have since gone viral. WND summarizes the attacks as follows: “Chanting, ‘Get your rosaries out of our ovaries,’ a mob of pro-abortion feminists – many of whom were topless with Nazi swastikas on their chests and foreheads – attacked and...

Imagine if an activist group blanketed a major city with 55 billboards urging that illegal aliens go back to their own country. Or that homosexuality is a crime against nature. Or that Muslims are responsible for most of the world’s terrorist attacks. The mainstream media would be all over the story. Organizations – like La Raza, like GLAAD, like CAIR – would organize protests. President Obama would publicly condemn the billboards (while defending illegals, homosexuals and Islam). And the sponsors of the billboards would be branded a “hate group.” Yet, there has been little outrage over the 55 billboards that...

And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.(2 Thess 2:11-12)And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence...

In an article on CNN.com’s Belief Blog, CNN writer John Blake says that, while famous pastors “preach in states where crosses and church steeples dot the skyline,” they do nothing about “the poor who can’t get the health insurance they would receive if they lived elsewhere.” That refers, in turn, to the decision of twenty-five states not to participate in Obamacare’s expanded Medicaid funding. The states were allowed to opt out following last year’s controversial Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, which upheld the law as a whole but struck down the mandatory state participation in Medicaid expansion, citing the protection...

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has done the nation a service by laying out the grand design underlying the secret plan to force the United States into a single payer system, with the government deciding who gets care and who is left to languish untreated and eventually die. It is the modern statist's dream, whereby the state becomes almighty, holding in its grasp the health of all its subjects (the term "citizens" becomes archaic at this point). Writing with precision, McCarthy lays out what he and other prosecutors of fraud mean by a scheme, and why it applies to Obamacare:...

That is the Obamacare scheme. It is a Fabian plan to move an unwilling nation, rooted in free enterprise, into Washington-controlled, fully socialized medicine. As its tentacles spread over time, the scheme (a) pushes all Americans into government markets (a metastasizing blend of Medicare, Medicaid, and “exchanges” run by state and federal agencies); (b) dictates the content of the “private” insurance product; (c) sets the price; (d) micromanages the patient access, business practices, and fees of doctors; and (e) rations medical care. Concurrently, the scheme purposely sows a financing crisis into the system, designed to explode after Leviathan has so...

Parents were ordered to send their children to a workshop on Islam or have them labelled as racist for the rest of their school career. They were sent a letter warning that the primary school pupils would have a ‘racial discrimination note’ put on their records if they did not go. Families were told to pay £5 per child for the Explore Islam trip next Wednesday to Staffordshire University, which would involve Year 4 and Year 6 children being shown Islamic artefacts. Mothers and fathers were warned: ‘Refusal to allow your child to attend will result in a Racial Discrimination...