Free Republic

Three dominant Chinese map app companies announced recently they’d put a stop to requiring users to share unnecessary personal information primarily around text messages and contact lists, a privacy issue revealed in a 2018 report regarding privacy concerns on mobile map apps. The report, by Shanghai Consumer Council released on July 18, revealed that five map mobile apps, including AutoNavi, Baidu Map and Tencent Map, all seek to solicit sensitive personal data from users considered irrelevant for the apps to perform. In response, the three companies said they’d release new versions that removed requests for collecting users’ irrelevant personal information,...

When Democratic socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders rallied for a left-wing congressional candidate Friday afternoon in Kansas, they insisted their agenda is "mainstream." Sanders, the Vermont senator and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate who spent the afternoon campaigning in Wichita for Democratic congressional candidate James Thompson, boasted that ideas “once considered to be radical” are now part “of the mainstream conversation.” “With allies like Alexandria and James in the Congress, we are going to pass a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program,” Sanders told the crowd. “And please understand that this idea of Medicare for all – this is not a radical idea.”...

We are all susceptible to being lulled into a false sense of security that makes us think all is right with the world, or at least our little corner of it. But if you needed a reminder that these times are anything but normal, you just got it by way of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rulings, and Donald Trump’s nominee to the court: Brett Kavanaugh.The justices delivered an eardrum-splitting, 200-decibel wakeup call in the term that just ended. Their decisions said everything about how central the court is to the lives of everyday Americans. If Kavanaugh is confirmed as...

A Democratic lawmaker posted a video of herself dancing to Drake's recently-released song "In My Feelings" on Twitter Friday, urging the song's mysterious "Keke" to vote in the upcoming November midterms. Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) posted the half-minute video Friday afternoon, writing that the Trump administration's policies had her and other Americans "in my feelings." "I don't know who Keke is but I want her to vote next November because this @WhiteHouse has me and many other Americans "in my feelings". #KekeMustVote #InMyFeelingsChallenge," Beatty wrote in the post accompanying the video, in which she steps out of a white car...

Papa John’s pizza founder John Schnatter resigned Wednesday as chairman of the board after he apologized for using a racial slur during a conference call in May. After news of Schnatter’s use of the N-word during a training call, Major League Baseball indefinitely suspended its Papa Slam promotion with Papa John’s, Yahoo Sports reported.

Congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will travel to Kansas together next week to campaign for a pair of candidates in the state, according to The Washington Post. The pair will start off in Wichita, Kansas on July 20 to campaign for James Thompson in the state’s 4th district. From there they’ll head to outside Kansas City to support former Sanders delegate Brent Welder, who is running for the Democratic nomination in the 3rd congressional district. Sanders told The Post that he and Ocasio-Cortez, a self-identified democratic socialist, organized the trip after realizing they both wanted...

RUSH: Mark in Fort Worth, Texas, is next, and it’s your turn. Hello. CALLER: Hello, Rush. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to make the host look good this afternoon. I wanted to take events of the last 72 hours and dovetail them with what you’ve been preaching to us for about the last two years, and that is that the media’s number one priority is separating Trump voters from Trump. In the last 72 hours, the cacophony from the left and the media has been so outrageous in part because I think the Kavanaugh decision, along...

Authorities arrested a Long Island, New York, man on Friday for threatening to kill supporters of President Trump and Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) at the Republican congressman’s campaign headquarters, police said. Police said Martin Astrof, 75, threatened to kill Zeldin’s campaign worker and other Trump supporters at Zeldin’s Nesconset campaign office in Suffolk County on Friday morning, and almost ran over the worker with his vehicle when he “backed his car up in an aggressive manner,” the New York Post reported.

DNC chairman Tom Perez said Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “represents the future of our party.” DSA chapter chairs have agreed that “communism is good.” One DSA caucus calls its members “revolutionary Marxists.” A far-left group behind rising Democratic star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is rife with Marxists and other far-left radicals. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which includes Ocasio-Cortez, is creeping its way into the mainstream of American politics. Ocasio-Cortez’ shocking primary upset of Democratic New York Rep. Joe Crowley on June 26 elevated both her profile and that of the DSA, which helped boost her to victory....

New Jersey governor Phil Murphy is expected to sign a bill that would dedicate $5 million in government funding to local media projects. The so-called “Civic Info Bill” was passed by the state legislature in June and will create the Civic Information Consortium, a nonprofit organization that gives grants to promote media in “underserved communities, low-income communities and communities of color.” Applicants apply for grants by proposing a “collaboration” between one of five public universities and a community organization, a media outlet, or a member of the state’s technology sector. The proposal must also “offer a clear benefit to communities.”...

Sam Park picks at his lunch at El Torero, a Mexican restaurant in Duluth, a northeastern suburb of Atlanta. It’s a somewhat ironic choice, given that the 32-year-old politician could have picked from dozens of nearby places to emphasize his Korean heritage in a neighborhood where Eastern churches and Asian grocery stores abound. This is home, though. And so the fact that Park knows his tacos as well as his Korean BBQ is kind of the point. Increasingly, the area will be known less as the “Seoul of the South,” than simply the modern iteration of “the South.” Gwinnett County,...

In the battle against litter in the Garden State, plastic bags have been public enemy number one. Several municipalities, mostly along the Shore, have acted on their own to limit plastic bag use either through fees or bans. But for years, efforts for statewide regulation of the bags has failed to gain traction. Now, state lawmakers have decided that it is time to move forward. A new fee on plastic and paper shopping bags is being pushed through the state legislature: The bill cleared budget committees in both the Assembly and Senate on Tuesday and could be passed as early...

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis has criticized the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the Mexican border, saying populism is not the answer to the world’s immigration problems.

Protesters confronted Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen inside a Mexican restaurant Tuesday night, chanting “Shame!” over the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border. In video posted on Twitter, protesters are seen heckling Nielson, sitting just feet away at a table with a guest, surrounded by her security. The protesters loudly called for the end of the controversial policy, and the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is a unit under Homeland Security.

Six new gun-control laws were enacted Wednesday, including smaller ammunition magazine limits and new "red flag" laws designed to take guns from people deemed dangerous. Though New Jersey has among the nation’s most restrictive gun-control systems, most Democrats have been pushing for years to enact more, particularly in response to school shootings. Assembly Majority Leader Louis Greenwald, D-Camden, recalled a Statehouse meeting he had in April 2013 with Connecticut parents whose children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The cut in the maximum ammunition magazine, from 15 to 10 rounds, is one proposal that those parents emphasized. “We made...

A number of gun control activists, including students from Parkland, Fla., showed up at President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida Tuesday for a "die-in" protest. The protest coincided with the second anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting....

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” announced President Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, June 12, 1987. Begun after Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Soviet Union existed from 1922 to 1991. With its motto “Workers of the World, Unite!” the Soviet tactic was to train agitators, community organizers, labor organizers and agent provocateurs – provoking agents. These would organize people with grievances and stir up riots to subvert and “tear down” the existing government. When social chaos caused major domestic disruptions, the public would then willingly accept a new order. Unfortunately, rather than a wonderful utopian society of equality,...

Tampa, United States: Global warming is expected to make vegetables significantly scarcer around the world, unless new growing practices and resilient crop varieties are adopted, researchers warned on Monday. By the end of this century, less water and hotter air will combine to cut average yields of vegetables -- which are crucial to a healthy diet -- by nearly one-third, said the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.A 7.2 Fahrenheit (4 Celsius) increase in temperature, which scientists expect by 2100 if global warming continues on its current trajectory, reduces average yields by 31.5 percent, said the...

Needless to say, you don't need a license to own a gun, just like you don't need a license to engage in any of the other rights that are supposed to be protected under our Constitution, like exercising the Christian religion in public, free speech, freedom of the press or freedom of assembly. Here's just another way that Communist Democrats are attempting to regulate and restrict your God-given right to keep and bear arms. A bill introduced last week in the House by Representative Bobby Rush as H.R. 6024 and in the Senate as S.3002 by Senator Tammy Duckworth would...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on Sunday that he found it strange that President Trump had difficulty getting along with U.S. allies, but comfortable speaking with authoritarian leaders. "I find it very strange that President Trump has such a hard time getting along with the leaders of the world's major democracies but feels very comfortable with despots and authoritarian leaders like Putin, Xi Jinping, Duterte and Mohammad Bin Salman," Sanders said in a tweet. ETC...