Free Republic

Migrant workers must now wait until they leave the country to receive severance pay. Migrant workers must leave the country when their visas expire, and according to law since 2011, South Korean employers have been obliged to pay their severance before their departure. Government officials claim that the revised law will prevent more illegal migrant workers from staying in the country. “We’ve found that a certain portion of registered workers did not leave the country even after they were paid their severance pay,” an official said. “They had no choice but to become the target of law enforcement authorities as...

Marijuana legalization has a new, influential advocate: the New York Times. ................................................... We can’t always heal injury, but we can acknowledge and compensate for it. Any plan for legalization should come with a plan for reparations for those communities most damaged by our misguided war on marijuana. That doesn’t mean individual payments—the logistics are too difficult—as much as it does policies for affected communities, from job training and educational services to something like My Brother’s Keeper, all funded by a surtax on marijuana sales and distribution.

How does your state compare? With all the NSA paranoia running amuck, sorting out the facts from fiction should slightly reduce the likelihood of coronaries caused by unnecessary worrying. We know Verizon and other telephone service providers retain call logs for our buddies at the NSA, but where exactly do we stand with wiretaps? Have you ever had the suspicion that some “malevolent” third party entity was snooping around that one time your call was “crossed” with somebody else’s? Well, relax buddy, there aren’t that that many wiretaps going around. Although ─ to be fair ─ the states of Nevada,...

Quite unlike six years ago, President Barack Obama has become a liability for his fellow Democrats running for federal office. Surveys have consistently shown that the GOP is well positioned to take back at least three of the six seats they need to regain control over the Senate and reduce Obama’s final two years in office to a series of vetoes. In another five seats, Republican candidates remain competitive. The president is no longer energizing his unique coalition of voters. This year, they are staying home. Democrats are desperate to reawaken those young, single, women, and minority voters and get...

Stealth destroyers, littoral combat ships headed to Pacific, Mabus says With $3.3 billion Zumwalt, Navy trying for smallest blip on radar Sometime next year, the USS Zumwalt will begin testing the Tomahawk missiles, GPS-guided munitions and "total ship" computing systems that will make the $3.3 billion vessel the most advanced destroyer in Navy history. Scope of Navy's LCS program uncertain, despite no clear replacement The lighter, faster surface fleet of the future may get heavier than Navy leaders have planned, as high-ranking skeptics at the Pentagon try to convince lawmakers that the service is relying too much on a new...

On Sunday, President Obama and First Lady Michelle released a statement thanking Muslim Americans for their many “achievements and contributions… to building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy.” The comments were made to mark the celebration of Eid-al-Fitr, a time of spiritual renewal for Muslims which comes at the end of the month-long fast of Ramadan. The Obamas said in their statement that Eid “celebrates the common values that unite us in our humanity” and “welcomed their commitment to giving back to their communities.” The International Business Times reports that during Eid, Muslims...

Thousands attend EID prayer at Toyota Park BY NICK SWEDBERG Correspondent Updated: July 29, 2014 2:08AM Thousands of Muslims filled the field at Bridgeview’s Toyota Park Monday morning for an unusually somber Eid prayer ceremony in the light of heightened hostilities between Israel and Gaza. Volunteers collected signatures for the 5,000 postcards brought to the event. They intend to mail them to President Obama over the latest deaths in recent violence between Israelis and Palestinians. The postcards, which 10 chapters of the American Muslims for Palestine across the country distributed Monday, demand that the White House intervene in the fighting...

President Barack Obama has nominated a new “Religious Freedom Ambassador,” but his nominee opposes protecting the religious freedoms of the owners of Hobby Lobby, who don’t want to be forced to pay for drugs for their employees that cause abortions.Obama announced that he will nominate Rabbi David Nathan Saperstein as Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom at the State Department. Saperstein is a longtime pro-abortion advocate whose group has opposed pro-life legislation.“I am grateful that Rabbi Saperstein has chosen to dedicate his talent to serving the American people at this important time for our country. I look forward to...

In the summer, some affluent kids shoot hoops at a $69 two-hour basketball session with the Harlem Globetrotters, ride Arabian horses for $525 a week or visit Costa Rica for a $3,500 two-week study of sea turtles.

'A quiet woman wearing a flowing, black dress and mysteriously strolling along busy highways in parts of the U.S. Southeast and Midwest has the curious wondering who she is and spurred a social media site to document her trek. She has been dubbed the "Woman in Black," by TV stations, police and followers on the Web, including those on a Facebook page where she has been tracked on a nearly 500-mile journey with a black bag and walking stick in hand that has taken her from Ranger, Georgia, to Athens, Ohio, since July 18. "If you meet this woman, please,...

'In July 2010, amid the gargantuan rebuilding effort at the site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, construction workers halted the backhoes when they uncovered something unexpected just south of where the Twin Towers once stood. At 22 feet (6.7 meters) below today's street level, in a pit that would become an underground security and parking complex, excavators found the mangled skeleton of a long-forgotten wooden ship. Now, a new report finds that tree rings in those waterlogged ribs show the vessel was likely built in 1773, or soon after, in a small shipyard near Philadelphia. What's more,...

I suppose it's natural that the average American believes that the Crash of 2008 was caused by greedy bankers and that the problem with health insurance is insurance company profits. After all, most Americans work for big companies, and they know that at any moment corporate security could appear at their cubicle to escort them to the exit. Employees know the power their bosses have over them; why shouldn't the bosses have the same power to work their will over politicians? Not only that, but politicians pose as the worker's friend. We'll protect you from the ravishings of your lascivious...

Finally, the change in net worth has made the mainstream media. The statistics, as reported in the NY Times, are horrific, as are the implications for the future of the country. Net worth may be the best single measure of a country's well-being. Median net worth is a reasonable marker for the standard of living. Medians (or averages) are not good measures to capture what is happening at the lowest or highest ends. (More about that below.) In the simplest terms, net worth is the value of a person's assets minus his liabilities. If this measure is growing, a person...

Leading political figures in Kosovo face indictment by a special EU court for crimes against humanity, including killings, abductions, sexual violence and other abuses of Serb and Roma minorities, according to the chief prosecutor leading a three-year special investigation. The threat of indictments comes in a progress report published on Tuesday morning in Brussels by Clint Williamson, an American prosecutor appointed by the EU in 2011 to investigate ethnic cleansing committed in Kosovo since the 1999 Nato intervention ended the conflict there. Williamson describes the suspects as "senior officials of the former Kosovo Liberation Army" (KLA), which fought against the...

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that the 17-foot cross beam salvaged from the wreckage of Twin Towers will remain in the National 9/11 Museum, despite the very best efforts of American Atheists Inc. In “American Atheists v. Port Authority of New Jersey and New York” the group asserted that the artifact's positioning in the museum towered "over any other symbols in the vicinity, expressing Christian primacy." It charged that the Latin cross's dominance violated the First Amendment Establishment Clause and the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. The judges found, however, that the...

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, "we don't torture people"? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, "this government does not torture people"? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier. Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it "enhanced interrogation" and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA...

Looks like President Obama snuck 760 illegal immigrants into the State of Tennessee. Gov. Bill Haslam and local elected officials are now wondering: ‘what are we supposed to do with them?’ On Friday, these children landed in the Volunteer State. The governor, however, is claiming no one in his office was even told they were coming and that he learned only after seeing a notice on the Health and Human Services website. This came even after Gov. Haslam had asked the White House to alert him prior to sending to his state any of the estimated 90,000 illegal children who...

Liberals are forever struggling to understand the basic tenets of human nature that most other people just take for granted. You’d think they would have picked something up from the death throes of the Soviet Union, Greece, or Detroit, but as Talleyrand might say, “They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.” Whether that’s some sort of genetic defect liberals are born with, ignorance, or just willful blindness is hard to say, but the results are the same in any case. Since it’s easier for light to escape a black hole than it is for a liberal to entertain a new...

Project Vigil: D-Day 2014, The saluting boy on Omaha beach

Anti-feminist blogs have been getting a lot of attention recently, as all manner of people take to the internet to explain why they just don’t need it. But right now it’s not people who are leading the debate – it’s cats SNIP Women Against Feminism was set up last summer and has gained a lot of attention in the past few weeks. On the Tumblr site [sample content: “The very name ‘feminism’ is discriminatory … To say that only through women can equal rights be claimed is like saying that only through black people can people have rights”], there are...