Free Republic

NASHVILLE— Kathleen Ervin moved here 12 years ago from the Northeast, drawn to the relaxed atmosphere, green parks and relatively low cost of living. But in the past five years, her commute time from her 1950s ranch house in the Glendale neighborhood to her job about 12 miles away has tripled on some days to 45 minutes because of increased traffic. Developers are buying nearby properties, tearing them down and building “tall skinnies”—multistory homes geared toward wealthier home buyers. “We hear all this talk about how Nashville doesn’t want to become Houston, Nashville doesn’t want to become Atlanta,” said the...

Frankfurt am Main (AFP) - Audi chief executive Rupert Stadler was arrested Monday in connection with parent company Volkswagen's "dieselgate" emissions cheating scandal, with prosecutors saying they feared he might try to suppress evidence. The dramatic development comes a week after Munich prosecutors raided Stadler's home after charging him with fraud and falsifying documents that allowed diesel vehicles equipped with cheating software to be sold to European customers. Four police officers detained the Audi boss at his home at between 6 and 7 am, a spokesman for Munich prosecutors told AFP, saying that the arrest was justified as he is...

President Trump...is increasingly putting his finger on the scale to help once-iconic industries that are declining as a share of the American economy, at the expense of some of the country’s fastest-growing sectors. The president’s attempts to boost domestic steel manufacturing and coal mining have come largely through policies that limit foreign competition, like tariffs, and proposals to prevent coal-fired power plants from closing. Those efforts have produced only modest job gains so far in two blue-collar sectors that Mr. Trump championed in his run to the White House. But they have injected uncertainty into a host of other growing...

It’s no secret—conservatives have fallen behind on environmental issues for the past decade. In issues like clean energy and conservation, we have lost sight of the legacy of environmental stewardship left to us by conservative trailblazers like Ronald Reagan. A report from Duke University in 2014 detailed why many conservatives ignore the issue: solution aversion. Solution aversion is the notion that if someone does not like the solution to a problem, they will ignore the problem completely. This can be seen firsthand with conservatives and the environment. Conservatives see green policies as curtailing the rights and values they care about...

Any Montgomery County voter looking for traffic relief will not get much hope from the transportation manifestos of Montgomery County’s “progressive” Democrats this primary season. Collectively, they all try to outdo each other in their opposition to anything involving spending for roads. Instead of supporting projects that will reduce travel times, they propose diverting more money to public transit. They push a strategy of “planned gridlock” that is intended to drive motorists from their cars. If alleging “planned gridlock” seems harsh, consider the Montgomery County Council legislation designed to slow traffic flow by significantly narrowing travel lane widths on some...

Satisfaction with the direction the country is going is higher today than it's been since 2005, according to the most recent Gallup survey. Thirty-eight percent of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States today, similar to last month's 37% satisfaction rate but marking the numerical high since a 39% reading in September 2005. The satisfaction rate, which Gallup has measured at least monthly since 2001, has now topped 35% three times this year – a level reached only three times in the previous 12 years (once each in 2006, 2009 and 2016). Satisfaction with the nation...

Here are two recent events you might have missed: In March, House speaker Paul Ryan was widely quoted as saying, “The last thing we want to do is pass historic tax relief and then undo that, so we are not going to raise gas taxes.”The next month, in California, Republicans submitted 54 percent more than the required signatures to put on the November ballot a measure that would repeal the 2017 state law increasing gasoline and diesel taxes. Meanwhile, roads in Los Angeles are in such bad shape that it costs the average driver $892 a year in additional vehicle...

A new Cline Avenue Bridge is rising in East Chicago, with more than a third of 29 piers in place that will carry traffic 100 feet above the Indiana Harbor Ship Canal, and with the casting of surface segments well underway in a building erected for that purpose at the bridge's Riley Road headquarters. The privately owned toll-bridge is scheduled to open to traffic in January 2020. "The project is moving along — it's on schedule," said Terry Velligan, the bridge's general manager of operations, on Tuesday. Normally 168 workers are on-site each day, he said. Velligan works for United...

Nord Stream-2 includes construction of two lines of a gas pipeline with a total capacity of 55 bln cubic meters of gas per year from the Russian coast through the Baltic Sea to Germany. The gas pipeline will bypass the transit states - Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and other Eastern European and Baltic countries - through the exclusive economic zones and territorial waters of five states - Russia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project is purely commercial, not political, and attempts to counter its implementation violate the rules of free competition, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said...

Russian gas giant Gazprom has resumed talks with South Korea over a decade-old idea to build a gas pipeline from Russia’s Far East to South Korea through North Korea, Vitaly Markelov, Deputy Chairman of Gazprom’s Management Committee, said on Friday. “To date, the political situation has been somewhat different, and the South Korean side has asked Gazprom to resume the project, and a series of talks has been held on this issue, and these talks are continuing." “The ideas behind the pipeline look very difficult to implement, especially given the complex political-military context continuing on the Korean peninsula, and the...

Walking along Michigan Avenue the other day, my 8-year-old nephew who is visiting from Georgia noticed the shiny glass building towering over the Chicago River. “Look, it says Trump!” he shouted. “What do you know about Trump?” I asked. “Do you like him?” “Yeah,” he answered without hesitation. “He’s our president. He keeps us safe.” Granted, my nephew comes from a small town in a red state that gave Donald Trump 50 percent of the vote against Hillary Clinton’s 45 percent. It is quite possible that he has managed to escape much of the Trump disdain that is displayed so...

Don’t believe the hype that “Amazon killed the Seattle head tax,” the new levy that the city recently passed on businesses to fund an affordable-housing initiative. The truth behind the city council’s stunning reversal—repealing the tax by a 7-2 vote, just four weeks after passing it 9-0—is that Seattle citizens have erupted in frustration against the city’s tax-and-spend political class that has failed to address the homelessness crisis, despite record new revenues. As recently as a few years ago, it seemed as if Seattle voters largely viewed our hyper-progressive city council as a harmless oddity in an otherwise tolerant, thriving,...

Police in Arizona thought they were busting an ordinary case of a fraudulent return this week until some digging discovered the same 23-year-old man has perpetrated the scheme at thousands of Walmart stores across the country. Police in Yuma, Arizona, said they responded to a case of a fraudulent return on Wednesday afternoon in which a person bringing a computer back to Walmart had allegedly removed parts of the computer before putting it back in the box and taking it back to the store. Upon investigation, the Yuma Police Department found out the same man had pulled the same scheme...

A troubling trend has occurred for ranchers in NE Washington ... cattle are experiencing breeding issues since the migration of wolves to the area... the rate of female cows .. that didn’t become pregnant has increased from five percent to about 20 percent. A cow must raise a calf every summer for the rancher to recoup costs ... Diamond M also has a winter range to cut costs, but when wolves came into the area about a decade ago, they’ve seen their cattle attacked ... Texas A&M University agreed with the open cow side effect from wolves, and an Eastern...

The Illinois tollway contends its no-bid process that uses a selection committee to makes recommendations to the board on expensive engineering contracts is independent and transparent. But when asked to provide meeting minutes, the agency blacked out the names of committee members in a majority of cases, making it impossible to see who is voting -- a response criticized by attorney and public access expert Don Craven as improper under Illinois open records law. When the names did surface they included tollway board Director Corey Brooks, who like all directors is appointed by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, countering claims the...

The Illinois Tollway board on Wednesday approved a deal with a Canadian railway to allow highway ramps over train tracks just west of O’Hare International Airport, which will make possible long-anticipated western highway access to and from the airport. By a 6-0 vote, the Tollway board approved a “letter of intent” with Canadian Pacific Railway at a special meeting. Under the terms of the letter, both parties agree to withdraw litigation against each other and to allow construction to go forward. The letter also permits negotiations to proceed on issues like air rights and right-of-way. “This is an agreement that’s...

MEMBERS OF a Bronx biker gang, one sporting a skull tattoo, kidnapped a friend and robbed him of nearly $2 million in cryptocurrency, Manhattan prosecutors charged Tuesday. Cesar (Fuego) Guzman, 38, a paraprofessional with the Department of Education, Allan (Joker) Nunez, 36, and Darrell (Bishop) Colon, 37, joined Louis Meza, 35, to lure the cyber-millionaire victim into a minivan posing as a livery car on Nov. 4, 2017. Nunez drove the victim around for two hours at gunpoint until he coughed up the location of his 24-word passphrase. Meza, who was caught on surveillance camera, and Guzman, whose head is...

With unemployment at 3.8 percent, its lowest level in many years, the labor market seems healthy. But that number hides a perplexing anomaly: The percentage of men who are neither working nor looking for work has risen substantially over the past several decades. The issue, in economist’s jargon, is labor force participation. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys households, every adult is put into one of three categories. Those who have a job are employed. Those who are not working but are searching for a job are unemployed. Those who are neither working nor looking for work are counted...

To modernise North Korea’s economy, outside aid and investment – a great deal of it – will be needed from governments, multilateral agencies and private investors. . Will North Korea become the next big thing for investors now that the Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un summit has ended with handshakes and a “walkabout” (rather than a walkout) by the two leaders? The question is not premature, even if denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula is some way off. The general verdict on the Singapore summit is that there is still a long way to go before we can say Trump’s “art...

Federal prosecutors indicted Elizabeth Holmes on criminal fraud charges for allegedly defrauding investors, doctors and the public as the head of the once-heralded blood-testing startup Theranos. Federal prosecutors also brought charges against the company's former second-in-command. Holmes, who was once considered a wunderkind of Silicon Valley, and her former Chief Operating Officer Ramesh Balwani, are charged with two counts conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud each, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California said late Friday. If convicted, they could face prison sentences that would keep them behind bars for the rest...