Free Republic

It was a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. But what the parents saw as a moment of independence for their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, they say authorities viewed much differently. Danielle and Alexander Meitiv say they are being investigated for neglect for the Dec. 20 trek — in a case they say reflects a clash of ideas about how safe the world is and whether parents are free to make their own choices about raising their children. “We wouldn’t have let them do it if we didn’t think they...

The Daily Mail is reporting that, "Street children as young as five are being caged in brutal detention centres alongside adult criminals in a cynical drive to smarten up the Philippines capital ahead of a visit by Pope Francis this week. Hundreds of boys and girls have been rounded up from doorways and roadsides by police and officials and put behind bars in recent weeks to make the poverty-racked city more presentable when Pope Francis arrives tomorrow, a MailOnline investigation has found. In a blatant abuse of the country's own child protection laws, the terrified children are locked up in...

Two Northern California women accused of chaining up their 8-year-old adopted daughter to prevent her from getting food will face trial on more than a dozen child abuse-related counts. The Monterey County Herald reported Thursday that 33-year-old Eraca Dawn Craig and 44-year-old Christian Jessica DeAnda each face charges including child abuse, child endangerment, false imprisonment and torture.

Nine months from now, Republican candidates for president will meet on the stage of the Reagan Presidential Library (with the old Air Force One providing great visuals) for the first debate of the 2016 race. It seems likely that among those in attendance will be at least four -- Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush -- who support (or once supported) the Common Core. Republicans are about to find out what's been percolating among the grassroots. Properly undertaken, a debate about Common Core could be healthy for the party and the country. Or it could be an...

A New York requirement that all children attending public school be vaccinated has been upheld by a federal court. On Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a regulation by New York City health and education officials. The rule was being challenged on grounds that the law was discriminatory and that its local applications violated freedom of religion. The court also upheld a regulation that allows school officials to prevent non-immunized children from going to school during an outbreak of vaccine-preventable diseases. The state statute was being challenged by three New York City plaintiffs,...

Adults are awful. Is there anything adults don’t eventually ruin? The economy was ruined by adults, the national debt was rung up by adults. Wars, famine, you name anything and somewhere there’s an adult somewhere on the verge of ruining it. The ruining of things was generally reserved for adulthood, making things more expensive or illegal for adults to engage in. But kids, well, they’d been left largely alone to be kids. Over the last few decades the line of fun ruining has been creeping down, younger and younger, to the point now that kids have gone from being kids...

School closures ordered by the Islamic State militant group have resulted in an estimated 670,000 children in Syria being deprived of an education ... The Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot that has seized territory in Syria and Iraq, began shutting schools in areas in eastern Syria in November. The closures were ordered pending a religious revision of the curriculum. ... Between 1.3 million and 1.6 million Syrian children have been prevented from attending school as a result of the now five-year civil war, which has killed more than 200,000 and displaced half the country’s population ... In September, students...

That children have a right to grow up with their biological mother and father should be uncontroversial, but unfortunately it isn’t. The International Children’s Rights Institute was recently founded in order to defend this important right. Below are three practices which it thinks often involve gross and depressingly-common violations of children’s rights.

**SNIP** The children, most of them less than 7 years old, were ferried to the city's police stations, where they had to spend the night. At one crowded city beach, 35 children were handed in, according to authorities. South African's reacted with shock on social media. "I am battling to understand, how do you lose a child on a beach? And you still go home? It is sad," tweeted one Cape Town resident with the Twitter handle WaMputhi. "If I travelled with a child, I will not leave without him/her even if it means no sleep searching," he added in...

<p>A deadly influenza strain has the U.S. in the grip of what could develop into a "severe" flu season, with widespread cases already reported in 36 states, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expert said Tuesday.</p> <p>The H3N2 strain, the most common flu virus this season, began mutating shortly after U.S. health experts created this year's vaccine -- rendering it less effective compared to past flu vaccines, Dr. Michael Jhung, a medical officer with the CDC's influenza division, told FoxNews.com.</p>

ROGERS, Ark. – The garbage cans are becoming morbidly obese at Rogers High School.“We’re feeding trash cans a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables,” Robin Kinder, president of the Arkansas School Nutrition Association and assistant child nutrition director for Springdale Public Schools, tells NWAonline.com.In addition to changing the lunch menu to make it “healthier,” the school sends students back into the line if they fail to take the required fruits and vegetables mandated by the overhaul of the National School Lunch Program.“It would just go straight to the trash sometimes,” Estefany Corleto, a junior at Rogers High School, says of...

Britain remains the world's leading recruiting ground for al-Qaeda. ... British school teachers are afraid to teach their students about Christianity out of fear of offending Muslims. — Roger Bolton, BBC Radio 4's Feedback program. Rather than taking steps to protect British children, police, social workers, teachers... and the media deliberately played down the severity of the crimes [of Muslim sexual grooming gangs] in order to avoid being accused of "Islamophobia" or racism. — From the report "Easy Meat: Multiculturalism, Islam and Child Sex Slavery." ... The problem of honor-based violence and forced marriages in England is "worse than people...

The source who sent me this picture called it "Gun Culture Day Care".   There is at least one other child that is not caught in the frame.  The younger children are depriming brass, a fairly safe activity if the hands are washed after the reloading session.  The children are taught responsibility and gain a sense of actually doing something productive. This sort of activity was found everywhere in the world until fairly modern times.   It was only in the last hundred years that the most productive societies on earth were able ignore the productive capacity of children.  Nearly all...

I received an update from the Maryland mom of two who was contacted by Montgomery Country Child Welfare Service in November after she let her kids, ages 6 and 10, play at the park two blocks from home by themselves. She was cited for allowing a child under age 8 "to be locked or confined in a dwelling, building, enclosure, or motor vehicle while the person charged is absent." The CPS worker decided "confined in a dwelling" was the same thing as "outside in a park."The higher ups at child services agreed that this was insane, and the case was closed—until this...

A few days ago, I reported that the Ebola air ambulance (one of them) was en route to the Canary islands. Today, we find that the plane somehow jumped over to Portugal without filing a flight plan, and is now scheduled to arrive at Joint Base Andrews. The plane’s twin, N173PA, has also visited the same airport in Portugal in recent weeks.

How’s this for an explanation of Santa Claus: Santa and Mrs. Claus have a twelve-thousand square foot mansion at the North Pole, heated by geothermal power.  The North Pole complex boasts an electrical generation system which directly extracts unlimited electricity from the Earth’s magnetic field for lights and equipment.  Santa’s workshop maintains two million square feet of warehouse space (reaching 30 stories underground with a cubic volume well exceeding Amazon.com’s North American 17 million square foot capacity) and an advanced production facility that combines robotics with elf-based manufacturing. The entire facility is hidden beneath the Arctic Ocean, under almost 14,000...

Got shocking e-mail from our school's director just an hour ago that one of my son's classmate's mother died yesterday! Please pray to God for help and blessings!

Only eight days prior to the horrendous slaughter of children and school staff in Pakistan, Barack Obama released Pakistani Taliban leader, the second in command of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This is the exact group claiming responsibility for today’s massacre in Peshawar, leaving 141 dead.

" Even bad people love their children".  But do they? Its not so much, "are they capable of love", as, "do they know what love is"? It's parallel to "what is freedom"? The ability to do whatever you want? Or the ability to do what is right? Love is preferring the good of the other for the other's sake. It can be explained to a five-year-old, as simply as Rapunzel and Flynn Rider's mutual, self-sacrificial love.  (Rapunzel is willing to remain the false-mother's slave, to save Flynn Rider's life. Flynn is willing to die so that Rapunzel can become free. Self-sacrificial love that perfects their...

House and Senate conferees negotiating a package to fund the Department of Defense through September 2015 have protected commissary operations by restoring 90 percent of a planned $100 million cut. Once again lawmakers thwarted a cost-saving initiative targeting military compensation and endorsed by the Joint Chiefs as a way to dampen personnel costs so more dollars can be spent on training, weapon buys and other readiness accounts being victimized by arbitrary “sequestration” cuts. Only last week House and Senate conferees on a different bill, the 2015 defense authorization act, unveiled a deal to lower the Defense Commissary Agency annual $1.3...