Free Republic

Toys R Us, otherwise known as heaven for us kids who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, is closing all 800 of its stores’ doors. One of the nation’s largest and oldest toy retailers, the toy chain made the announcement last week. In its annual filing, the company pointed to online competition like Amazon, as well as traditional retailers like Walmart and Target, as the major reasons for its bankruptcy. But Toys R Us (which also runs Babies R Us) cited another and much more troubling reason for its collapse: sagging birth rates. “Most of our end-customers are newborns...

White House chief of staff John Kelly has urged President Trump to fire embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, whose ethics and judgment are being questioned over a series of decisions he has made involving spending, housing and his management style. Kelly and other White House officials have concluded that Pruitt should leave, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. But Trump is continuing to back Pruitt, viewing him as an effective implementer of his deregulatory agenda by gutting or delaying a number of EPA regulations imposed by the Obama administration. Trump on Friday decried what he views as a media...

Turkey’s intelligence agency has seized at least 80 Turkish nationals from multiple countries as part of its efforts to hunt suspects with alleged links to a 2016 coup attempt, a senior Turkish official said Thursday. Speaking to a private news channel, Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said Turkish agents had launched operations in 18 countries to pursue members of the Gulen movement, which Turkey blames for the attempted coup. He said some of the operations — including in Bulgaria and Malaysia — had been previously reported, but he did not name any other countries. He also did not identify the...

Putting a price on carbon, in the form of a fee or tax on the use of fossil fuels, coupled with returning the generated revenue to the public in one form or another, can be an effective way to curb emissions of greenhouse gases. That’s one of the conclusions of an extensive analysis of several versions of such proposals, carried out by researchers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). What’s more, depending on the exact mechanism chosen, such a tax can also be fair and not hurt low-income households. The analysis was part of a multigroup effort...

Sarah Barrett didn't need a grand study to tell her a bunch of students on Kansas State University's campus had been going without food. As an assistant dean of students, she had heard enough of them talk about choosing books or housing costs over food to know that the university needed to do something to help its hungry students. K-State students are not alone. The problem of college students' inability to afford food is common on campuses across the country. According to a first-of-its-kind survey of two- and four-year private and public schools, 36 percent of students on college campuses...

There are a lot of good arguments for maintaining an American presence in Syria after the fall of the Islamic State, but President Trump doesn’t seem persuaded by any of them. Perhaps he would back off his urge to cut and run if he knew that the United States and its partners control almost all of the oil. And if the United States leaves, that oil will likely fall into the hands of Iran. It’s one feature of a larger U.S. mission in Syria that is really about containing Iranian expansionism, preventing a new refugee crisis, fighting extremism and stopping...

Court documents call him Person A, but descriptions match the officer to Russian intelligence and to Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Buried in a late-night court filing in Robert Mueller’s expansive probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was an explosive claim: An adviser to President Donald Trump’s campaign and transition teams had knowingly been in contact with a former Russian intelligence officer as late as September 2016, prosecutors said. The revelation is the strongest connection to date between Trump’s campaign and Russia’s intelligence services, which U.S. officials say were behind the cyberattacks on Democrats during the election....

<p>A new documentary by CBS News reveals that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student David Hogg, who has become the face of the student body’s push for gun control, was not at the school at the time of the shooting.</p>

Jack Burkman, the leader of the controversial investigation into the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, was shot twice in the back and run over by a man who claimed to have worked as a special agent in the Department of Energy, authorities say. Burkman was attacked in the Rosslyn Marriott hotel parking garage in Washington, D.C. on Mar. 13, lured to the spot by promises of secret documents on the Clintons by an FBI whistleblower.

Of all the theological squabbles that have plagued evangelical Christianity over the years, especially in the West, a particularly profound division centers on the power of the Holy Spirit and the ways in which He is at work today.Charismatics and noncharismatics who spoke with The Christian Post all concurred that steps can be taken toward mending this division, even as differences remain.Those who believe that the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit — such as prophecy, tongues, interpretation of tongues, the working of miracles, and the others listed in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 — have continued to this day,...

Progressives such as Elizabeth Warren resurrect the race-based thinking of the antebellum South: ‘One drop’ and you’re a bona fide minority. Senator Elizabeth Warren has doubled down on her insistence that she is Native American. THE NEW ONE-DROP FIXATION In her past incarnations, she probably used that yarn in hopes of helping her win a law professorship at Harvard, which touted her as the law school’s first indigenous-American professor (and others apparently referenced her as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color”). She has refused to back down (and also refused to take a DNA test), even after Native American genealogists...

The March for Our Lives school walkouts this week certainly garnered plenty of media attention. Of course, the students who favor strict gun control laws received far more media love than the ones who support the Second Amendment and hardening schools as potential targets, but that’s really just another day that ends in a “Y” for most of the media. One of the walkouts, however, missed out on the attention it might have merited. It took place at Harbor Elementary School in New London, Connecticut. If the phrase “elementary school” already caught your attention you’re on the right track. To...

The London nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter has been specifically ascribed to Russia by the United Kingdom prime minister, fully supported by the White House and American officials including at the United Nations. That attack itself – the first attack using weapons of mass destruction on NATO soil – calls for a significant response. But such a response is even more imperative when placed in the context of Russia’s ongoing hybrid warfare against the West and against vulnerable neighbors like Ukraine.In recent years, Russia and its surrogates have engaged in other instances of...

The Trump administration accused Russia on Thursday of engineering a series of cyberattacks that targeted American and European nuclear power plants and water and electric systems, and could have sabotaged or shut power plants off at will. United States officials and private security firms saw the attacks as a signal by Moscow that it could disrupt the West’s critical facilities in the event of a conflict. They said the strikes accelerated in late 2015, at the same time the Russian interference in the American election was underway. The attackers successfully had compromised some operators in North America and Europe by...

(Skip) “Most evangelical Christians like me exclaimed, ‘Who are these people?’” wrote Mark Galli, the editor in chief of Christianity Today, in his essay. “‘I know hardly anyone, let alone any evangelical Christian[s], who voted for Trump.’” In trying to understand Trump-supporting evangelicals, journalists and commentators have often smoothed over the vast diversity within evangelicalism. “Many of us shake our heads at the ‘evangelical leaders’ that the news media anoints for us,” wrote Tom Lin, the president of InterVarsity Fellowship, in his essay. (Skip) Fundamentalism, argued Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, is the driving force behind the...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in an interview broadcast Sunday said she knows who she is when pressed about her claims of Native-American heritage. She was questioned during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" about an editorial in a Massachusetts newspaper, "Warren must resolve debate on heritage, which said a DNA test would "permanently resolve the issue." “Look, I do know. I know who I am. And never used it for anything. Never got any benefit from it anywhere," Warren said.

Charmaine Pruitt wrote the names of 12 churches on a sheet of paper, tore the paper into 12 strips, and dropped them into a Ziploc bag. It was Sunday morning and time to pick which church to attend. This time of the week two years earlier, there would have been no question. Ms. Pruitt, 46, would have been getting ready for her regular Saturday afternoon worship service, at a former grocery store overhauled into a state-of-the-art, 760-seat sanctuary. In the darkened hall, where it would have been hard to tell she was one of the few black people in the...

President Trump tweeted on Thursday morning that the Congress should basically create a national gun registry, as he proposed something along the lines of “comprehensive background checks”, whatever that means. Here’s the tweet: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/966662241977360384 The thing is, this tweet can be interpreted in 2 ways. If you’re a leftist, you may argue that President Trump finally caved on gun control, and in the aftermath of the Florida high-school shooting he’s asking Congress to create a national gun registry and universal background check legislation, a measure pushed and lauded by the anti 2nd amendment left for years. It’s interesting that not...

The stronger economy we’re enjoying now is no accident. Lower taxes, more jobs and fewer regulations are creating a much-needed boost. So why do we still have one foot on the brake? I’m referring to trade. Protectionist measures act as a drag on our progress. Indeed, they threaten to undo much of it. Consider the tariffs and quotas that the Trump administration recently slapped on imports of solar cells and modules, large residential washers, and washer parts. The price? As researcher Tori Whiting notes in a Daily Signal article, we get fewer jobs (roughly 23,000 American jobs this year, according...

They aren’t calling him “Lyin’ Ted” anymore. Sen. Ted Cruz’s stock is rising among members of President Trump’s base who feel double-crossed after the president offered amnesty to illegals in the immigration debate. Some who opposed Mr. Cruz in his 2016 run for the White House are even clamoring for the Texas Republican to mount a primary challenge to Mr. Trump in 2020. The newfound esteem for Mr. Cruz, whom Mr. Trump dubbed “Lyin’ Ted” when they battled for the 2016 Republican nomination, is coming from people who were die-hard supporters of the president. “Ted Cruz has kept his word...