Free Republic

As India’s space agency prepares to make history by landing on the Moon later this week, many of the country’s citizens have been left in stitches after footage of an apparent moonwalk went viral. Just days before India’s lunar mission Chandrayaan-2 touches down on the Moon’s south pole on September 7, Baadal Nanjundaswamy, a famous Indian street artist, stole all the headlines with a wry takedown of the city council in Bengaluru. Nanjundaswamy enlisted the help of theater actor and film star, Poornachandra Mysore, who helped stage a tongue-in-cheek ‘moonwalk’ to highlight the pockmarked pavement plaguing the city’s streets. At...

(CNN) — Tuesday night's CNN/The New York Times debate stage will feature a record 12 candidates. It could be the last debate appearance for up to 33% of them. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke are all in deep danger of not making November's debate. That means Tuesday may be the last chance fo those four to give their campaigns a realistic chance to have a measure of success. Fundraising and polling qualification thresholds have been bumped up once again for November's debate. Jumping...

What could possibly go wrong? “Most dangerous countries in the world 2019 – ranked,” Atlas & Boots, April 29, 2019 — Pakistan comes in as the 11th most dangerous country in the world. “Pakistan: where the daily slaughter of women barely makes the news,” by Mohammed Hanif, Guardian, May 9, 2019 “‘I was raped, starved and kept as a prisoner’: How an Australian woman, 30, travelled to Pakistan to meet the man of her dreams… only for him to lock her up, force Islam upon her and abuse her daily,” by Cait Kelly, Daily Mail Australia, January 24, 2019 How...

Mike Bloomberg has indicated to associates in recent weeks that Joe Biden’s recent struggles are making him rethink his decision to stay out of the 2020 Democratic primary, according to people familiar with the discussions. “Bloomberg is in if Biden is out,” says one source. Biden has not indicated any desire to drop out any time soon. Bloomberg could be in for a showdown with Elizabeth Warren, whether he runs or not, as he has been one of her biggest critics on the Democratic side. “I think it’s something he wants. He has not been shy about that,” one of...

The Republican National Committee should offer to be the official sponsor of a weekly Democratic presidential debate. There would be no better advertisement for President Trump’s re-election. Every time the Democratic presidential contenders gather together, it’s a contest between the merely delusional, the vaguely vindictive and the patently absurd. There are funny moments, like when Andrew Yang risked the ire of the political-correctness police and told us, “I am Asian, so I know a lot of doctors.” There are substantive moments, like when former Vice President Joe Biden reversed himself on China, apparently now agreeing with Mr. Trump that intellectual-property...

The prestigious Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded this week, and Donald Trump has made no secret of his belief that he deserves it. During a press conference last month alongside the prime minister of Pakistan, a reporter said to Trump, “Now, if you can solve this outstanding issue of Kashmir, very likely and definitely you will be deserving a Nobel Prize on that,” Trump responded: “I think I’m going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they give it out fairly, which they don’t.” After Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize less than a...

Gabbard is the only Democrat candidate with the guts, smarts, and skill to break the Democrats’ cone of silence about Warren’s Native American and other false personal and career narratives.

As Elon Musk struggles in acquiring land rights for testing his audacious Hyperloop project in the United States, India has emerged out of nowhere to offer him a helping hand. India is offering Musk's SpaceX a big chunk of land and permission to do the required testing in Pune, a city 118 kilometers away from Mumbai. The country's Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said he made the proposal to Hyperloop's parent company SpaceX during his recent visit to the United States. “I just offered them ... they want some road for experimental purpose. I offered them the westerly bypass of...

Will a hyperloop work in Pennsylvania? That’s the question officials from legislative and executive branches, statewide agencies, organizations and departments, as well as a handful of private business leaders are trying to answer. Fifty people, invited to a workshop at Dixon University in Harrisburg on Wednesday, met to talk about the possibility of building a hyperloop system in the commonwealth. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission has until April 2020 to complete a $2 million state-legislative commissioned study on its viability. Media wasn’t permitted to attend the invitation-only meeting. According to the turnpike’s research, a hyperloop combines a magnetic levitation train and...

Larsen & Toubro Infotech Ltd. an Indian provider of information technology services, discriminates against people who aren’t South Asian when hiring workers at its U.S. facilities, according to a lawsuit filed by two former employees. The ex-employees, both white Americans, allege that the Mumbai-based company’s U.S. workforce of 7,500 is 95% of South Asian decent and is mostly made up of visa holders from India. The complaint filed Wednesday in New York is one of several similar cases accusing India’s big IT firms of hiring bias in the U.S. The first to go to trial ended last year in a...

Many of you dismissed my call for a Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump rematch as lunacy. “Call me crazy,” I wrote. Some of the more polite responses did. But it definitely caught the attention of Donald Trump. How else to explain his out-of-right-field tweet Tuesday after yours truly wrote that Clinton would make a far stronger 2020 opponent than any of the Democrats now running? “I think that Crooked Hillary Clinton should enter the race to try and steal it away from Uber Left Elizabeth Warren,” the president tweeted. “Only one condition. The Crooked one must explain all of her...

California presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris has been campaigning in Iowa and apparently been telling the local poli-sci majors to "learn to code...." The scene is a beauty parlor, so it may well be that she told one of its Millennial denizens upset at her low-skill job after graduating from college with a useless major to learn code if she wants a better-paying job. The problem, of course, is that it's a dismissive sort of advice to throw out to someone who might just be unsuited to learning code and, in any case, clearly had dreams of doing something else......

The upcoming twelve-candidate Democratic presidential primary debate is probably going to be another mess, but one highlight will be the return of Tulsi Gabbard to the stage — good news not just for Michael Brendan Dougherty, but for everyone who wants to see an actual debate. In a series of prime-time meetings that have included a lot of repetitive platitudes and all-too-convenient anecdotes about an American everyman that candidates met on the trail, one of the few genuine bits of drama comes from the question of who Gabbard will go after and why. The Hawaii congresswoman’s debate performances haven’t done...

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hawaii) has seen little evidence that fellow presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) is prepared to be commander in chief, she said on Hill.TV's Rising on Thursday. "I haven't seen much come from her in the way of what kind of leadership and decision-making that she would bring to that most important responsibility of the president has as commander in chief," Gabbard told Rising host Krystal Ball. "And just as a soldier and an American that's very concerning for me."

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) said Wednesday that the partial transcript of President Trump's call with Ukraine's president released by the Trump administration doesn't show a "compelling" case for impeachment. "Most people reading through that transcript are not going to find that extremely compelling cause to throw out a president that won an election in 2016," the Democratic presidential candidate told Hill.TV during an appearance on "Rising."

Prominent GOP consultant Mike Murphy claimed on Wednesday that he was told by a Republican senator that the majority of Republican senators "would vote to impeach" President Donald Trump if they could do so anonymously. "These Senate Republicans, should the Democrats vote impeachment, which is far more likely than not, are going to be pinned down to a yes/no answer," Murphy, who previously advised Republican politicians including Mitt Romney, John McCain and Jeb Bush, said in an interview with MSNBC. "The politics of it will get worse and worse for Trump," the Republican political consultant, who has long been critical...

The latest polling data from Morning Consult show former vice president Joe Biden climbing back into a stable lead in the Democratic presidential primary, after several weeks of running alongside Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. Among Democratic-primary voters surveyed over the past week, 33 percent say they support Biden compared to just 21 percent who support Warren. Still in third place, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders comes in close behind Warren with 19 percent support. When asked who their second choice in the field would be, respondents who selected Sanders as their first choice preferred Biden to Warren as their next best...

Wait long enough, and everything comes around again. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), one of the wokest womyn in the world, has this week blazed bold new trails by calling for the revival of not one, but two tried-and-true practices that have inexplicably fallen into neglect in American politics: Jim Crow segregation laws and the arrest of one’s political opponents. This brave leader said in a Detroit speech that if Trump Cabinet members failed to comply with congressional subpoenas, “they’re trying to figure out, no joke, is it the D.C. police that goes and gets them? We don’t know. Where do...

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a rally of 50,000 Indian Americans in Houston last month, a planned guest appearance by President Donald Trump stole the headlines. But a telling moment arrived when the announcer at the event — called Howdy Modi — began reading a prepared list of members of Congress who had been expected to attend. Among those named was Texas Rep. Al Green, a Democrat. But Green wasn’t there. A day earlier, he had announced in a statement that he was bailing from the event, calling it a “photo op” for Trump. He wasn’t alone. India,...

Frustrated liberals have been asking for the last four years what it’s going to take for President Trump’s supporters to abandon him. Because, like, don’t they know he’s about to be impeached!? New York Times columnist David Brooks attempted to answer the question last week by imagining a conversation with someone he simply referred to as “Flyover Man,” because apparently he didn’t know a single real Trump supporter. It never seems to occur to liberals that perhaps the real problem isn’t that a lot of people continue supporting the president even though he can be strange, vulgar, and sometimes even...