Free Republic

HAVANA — Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro delivered a valedictory speech Tuesday to the Communist Party that he put in power a half-century ago, telling party members he will soon die and exhorting them to help his ideas survive. “I’ll be 90 years old soon,” Castro said in his most extensive public appearance in years. “Soon I’ll be like all the others. The time will come for all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban Communists will remain as proof on this planet that if they are worked at with fervor and dignity, they can produce the material and...

Weeks after President Barack Obama’s historic trip to Cuba, officials from the Communist island have ramped up their attacks on the U.S. On Monday, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez called Obama's visit "an attack on the foundation of our history, our culture and our symbols." "Obama came here to dazzle the non-state sector, as if he wasn't the representative of big corporations but the defender of hot dog vendors, of small businesses in the United States, which he isn't," Rodriguez said. The foreign minister’s response came days after Cuba President Raul Castro said that the United States is "the enemy" and...

Breitbart News’ Matthew Boyle, Jen Lawrence, Dustin Stockton and Lee Stranahan embedded with the protesters as they took Grand Central Station and the MetLife building in New York City on Thursday night. Here is a series of photographs of the protesters throughout the evening, taken by Stockton. More pictures and videos are coming.

Bowie Resources Partners’ purchase of Peabody Energy Corp.‘s Twentymile Mine in Routt County has fallen through, and Peabody has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Peabody, the world’s largest privately owned producer of coal, joins other major coal companies including Arch Coal, owner of the West Elk Mine in the North Fork Valley, in going bankrupt. Arch Coal also is in Chapter 11 reorganization. Bowie, owner of the Bowie No. 2 Mine near Paonia, had agreed to buy Twentymile and two mine properties in New Mexico for $358 million. But Peabody previously had said Bowie was still trying to find...

A powerful new documentary takes a fresh look at the global “green” agenda, often marketed under the misleading label “sustainable development,” and exposes it for the dangerous assault on human freedom that it is. Beyond that, the film shows how the so-called “sustainability” movement of today is little more than a poorly re-packaged version of the murderous “red” communist agenda that supposedly fell along with the Soviet Union — after killing hundreds of millions of people along the way. The film, It’s Easy Being Green When You Have No Choice: Sustainable Development and the End of History, provides a great...

The New York City Council Monday honored Ethel Rosenberg, the convicted Soviet spy who was executed for treason at the height of the Cold War. The proclamation honors Rosenberg on her 100th birthday for leading a 1935 strike against the National New York Packing and Supply Co. Eighteen years after the strike, Rosenberg, husband Julius, and her brother David Greenglass were indicted by the federal government for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. “Ethel Rosenberg was wrongfully executed in 1953 which resulted in her two young children becoming orphans,” said NYC Council Member Daniel Dromm said. “Although nothing can...

In a 2010 interview with Catholic World Report , Cardinal Joseph Zen, S.D.B., the emeritus bishop of Hong Kong, wondered aloud about the Catholic Church’s reticence to acknowledge those who had been martyred by Chinese communists during the Maoists’ rise to power, and thereafter. “Why should we not publicize . . . those martyrs?” Cardinal Zen asked. The truth demands it. Self-respect requires it. Today’s Chinese Catholics, especially those who are persecuted for the fidelity to the Bishop of Rome, would be strengthened by the example of brave witnesses who held firm until the end, Zen suggested. I think Cardinal...

02-24-2002Pastor's Message From the desk of Fr. Joseph McLafferty..... The lead article in this month's Maryknoll magazine is about Bishop Francis Xavier Ford, M.M., a Maryknoll missionary who served in China for almost 40 years.  This past Thursday, February 21st, marked the 50th anniversary of his death in a Chinese prison. Francis Xavier Ford was born in Brooklyn on January 11, 1892, the son of Austin and Elizabeth Rellihan Ford.  Ford attended St. Francis Preparatory School in Brooklyn and Cathedral College in Manhattan.  In 1912 he was the first student to apply to the seminary of the recently established...

CHRISTIAN communities in China have been left horrified after the government started tearing down thousands of crucifixes in a crude bid to eradicate the faith in the country. More than two thousand crosses have now been forcefully removed from churches as part of a government campaign to regulate "excessive religious sites". ... Several members of the public have since been arrested for attempting to halt the government's crude attempt to suppress the Christian faith. Among the arrested was prominent human rights lawyer Zhang Kai, who was detained after he mounted a legal campaign to challenge the removal of the crosses....

In 2011, as the presidential race was gearing up and many were predicting defeat for President Obama, I reminded a reporter, in judging potential opponents, just how exacting the process of running for president can be. "Presidential campaigns are like MRIs for the soul," I said. Whoever you are, the process will reveal you. And the deeper you go in the campaign, the more this is true. Candidates for President of the United States are auditioning for the toughest job on the planet. Every issue that comes to that desk in the Oval Office is fraught and consequential. Every comment...

Superdelegates supporting Hilary Clinton are getting angry, abusive phone calls and emails from Bernie Sanders' backers demanding they switch sides. The pressure is intense, say Clinton superdelgates from states won by Sanders. Superdelegates are not "pledged" to the state victor and can vote whichever way they want. That's leading to a torrent of unpleasantness. . . . "I have friends around the country that are being tormented, not violently, but verbally assaulted and I know Bernie Sanders would not countenance that," Warner said. "I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't make some sort of statement to his supporters to stop...

Let’s begin with two news items. First, in June the Walt Disney Co. will open a new, $5.5 billion theme park in Shanghai, China. China is a great place to make money, but it’s also the land of systematic human-rights abuses, forced abortions, state churches, labor camps, and brutal crackdowns. Disney — undeterred, and with its eyes firmly fixed on the financial prize — actually permits the Chinese government to co-own the park. Meanwhile, back in the United States — the land of political and religious freedom — Disney is threatening to scale back its operations in the state of...

“Do not applaud when Barack Obama enters and do not wear caps or hats,” are some of the verbal warnings that accompany the entry tickets that are being distributed for the baseball game between the Cuban team and the Tampa Bay Rays on 22 March at the Latin American Stadium in Havana. The National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation (INDER) has announced that the game will be by invitation only. The tickets are being handed out to members of the Communist Party, the Young Communists Union and trusted officials, according to information from several sources. Military training schools...

Sen. Ted Cruz said Sunday that President Obama's trip to Cuba indicates that the world has abandoned political prisoners held under the country's communist regime. Cruz, a Cuban-American and an original critic of the United States' detente with the island nation, wrote in a Politico op-ed that the media spectacle of the president's visit will cast a shadow over the reality of humanitarian conditions there. "[P]olitical prisoners languishing in dungeons across the island will hear this message: Nobody has your back. You're alone with your tormentors. The world has forgotten about you," Cruz wrote. "They will not be on TV,...

Journalist Jane Mayer issued another twisted attack on her own Enemy No. 1, the libertarian industrialist Koch brothers, from her New Yorker magazine perch. “Who Sponsored The Hate?”, posted March 15, left no doubt as to who she thinks is responsible for the current Trumpian climate of political vituperation. Mayer recently released Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, which focuses on the Koch brothers. For years she has issued dark, often conspiratorial threats about the Midwestern oil and chemical industrialists, guilty of trying to convince voters of the rightness of their...

“Don’t be fooled” by the numerous supposed grass-roots groups plotting to protest Donald Trump across the nation, declares Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter Aaron Klein in a radio interview on Friday. Klein says the var­i­ous sup­posed anti-Trump orga­ni­za­tions are really a “witches brew” of radical-left “pro­fes­sional agi­ta­tors” seek­ing the “down­fall of the U.S. cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem” and its replace­ment with a so-called social­ist utopia.“These are all dif­fer­ent arms of the rad­i­cal left octo­pus,” Klein told Bre­it­bart News Daily, the radio pro­gram hosted by Bre­it­bart News Exec­u­tive Chair­man Stephen K. Ban­non. Klein was refer­ring to the anti-Trump protest...

With little fanfare and almost no news media attention, some of the same radical groups involved in shutting down Donald Trump’s Chicago rally last week are plotting a mass civil disobedience movement to begin next month. They intend to march across the East Coast in order to spark a “fire that transforms the political climate in America.” The operation, calling itself Democracy Spring, is threatening “drama in Washington” with the “largest civil disobedience action of the century.” The radicals believe this will result in the arrest of thousands of their own activists. “We will demand that Congress listen to the...

An American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Board Member in Colorado has resigned after making national news headlines for urging people to kill Donald Trump supporters. Loring Wirbel of Colorado Springs, posted on Facebook, “The thing is, we have to really reach out to those who might consider voting for Trump and say, ‘This is Goebbels. This is the final solution. If you are voting for him I will have to shoot you before Election Day.’ They’re not going to listen to reason, so when justice is gone, there’s always force…”

VANITY-My thoughts after the Bernie Sanders supporters fueled riot

Tyler DurdenMarch 8, 2016 Last Thursday, in a speech delivered at the University of Utah, Mitt Romney blindsided Donald Trump in what amounted to a scathing indictment of the billionaire’s ability to lead the country. "If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished," Romney said, in an apparent effort to play party elder. "If Donald Trump’s plans were ever implemented, the country would sink into prolonged recession," Romney continues, hitting Trump on the economy. "A few examples. His proposed 35 percent tariff-like penalties would instigate a trade war...