Free Republic

A new California pro-LGBTQ bill that would ban the sale or distribution of materials related to “conversion therapy” easily passed the state’s assembly on Thursday.CBS News affiliate KOVR reported the final tally was 50-14. Assembly Bill 2943 now heads to the Democrat-controlled Senate.The bill would make it an unlawful business practice to engage in any “transaction intended to result or that results in the sale or lease of goods or services to any consumer” aimed at “sexual orientation change efforts with an individual.” Goods would include any books or written materials, while services would encompass counseling individuals seeking to address same-sex...

The first migrants from a caravan that sparked the ire of President Donald Trump have started arriving at the US-Mexico border and asking for asylum, advocates say. About 50 Central Americans have arrived in Tijuana, Mexico, according to Juventud 2000, an organization that assists migrants in that border city. Of those, about 10 have turned themselves in to US authorities at the border. Others are waiting for a larger contingent from the caravan to arrive before they head north, Juventud 2000 Director Jose Maria Garcia Lara said.

The Democratic Party has never been more reliant on the support of upper-middle-class voters than it is today. And the economic fortunes of affluent Americans - and those of the typical working-class household - have rarely been more disparate. These twin developments have inspired much commentary about the class tensions beneath Team Blue’s “big tent”. There is little doubt that it would be easier to advance radical economic reform in an America where politics was sharply polarized along class lines, and working people of all races were concentrated in a single partisan coalition. It is absolutely true that a liberal...

Notorious street-gang MS-13 has reportedly ordered its members to “take out” police officers in New York; hoping to send a strong message to authorities following a serious crackdown on the group throughout the region. According to the New York Post, the NYPD is on high-alert after a confidential informant told police that gang members were given a green light to murder local police officers; particularly in the nearby town of Hempstead on Long Island. “The police have been making too many arrests and it’s time to take the streets back and take out (shoot) a cop like we do in...

A Fresno State professor who called the late Barbara Bush “racist” soon after her death Tuesday, and said she was glad “the witch is dead,” continues to face fallout as donors mull ceasing donations to the institution. Randa Jarrar, an English professor at the school (also known as California State University at Fresno), sparked outrage Tuesday just hours after the former first lady died at age 92, writing a number of tweets attacking Bush and the family. “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. F*** outta here with...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — New Mexico ranked as the nation’s fastest-growing state for wind-energy construction last year, according to a new report from the American Wind Energy Association. The state added enough new turbines to produce 571 megawatts of electricity, growing installed capacity by 51 percent to 1.68 gigawatts, according to the association’s 2017 annual market report, released this morning in Santa Fe. That’s enough electricity to power about 422,000 average U.S. homes every year. And New Mexico could maintain front-running status for another couple of years, with 1.7 GW of new wind construction projects now in the pipelines for installation...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The boom in New Mexico’s oil patch is pumping up state revenue and economic development in Lea and Eddy counties, but it’s also raising many red flags for environmental organizations. Activists say the unprecedented level of investment and activity flooding into southeastern New Mexico, which elevated the state last year to third-largest oil producer in the nation, foreshadows long-term environmental problems unless balanced development plans and firm regulations are in place to protect natural resources. That includes better control of methane emissions, plus efforts to protect water, vegetation and wildlife against overzealous development and industrial accidents such...

Hundreds of small, independent producers might soon be swallowed up by today’s unprecedented oil and gas boom in southeastern New Mexico. As industry titans like ExxonMobil and Concho Resources pump billions of dollars into previously untapped sections of New Mexico’s century-old oil patch, the state’s small- and medium-sized producers are struggling on the margins to keep running aging wells based on outdated technology. Those companies, which have flourished for decades in New Mexico’s side of the Permian Basin, don’t have the resources to invest in the modern drilling technology needed to dig into the oil-rich, hard shale-rock formations where the...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Many were horrified on Tuesday upon learning an Albuquerque woman was killed after being partially pulled out of a plane when a nearby window was smashed by debris from an exploding engine. “Two words: extremely rare,” said Alan Diehl, a former air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Air Force, of incidents involving passengers being pulled from planes in flight. But on Nov. 3, 1973, a similar scenario unfolded on a flight over southwest New Mexico heading from Houston to Las Vegas, Nev. Then, a Texas man died after he...

A cowboy and a firefighter were among the heroes who pulled a New Mexico mom back into their airplane after an explosion tore a hole in the cabin and sucked the woman partway out, according to reports. The Boeing 737 carrying Southwest Airlines’ Flight 1380 suffered the catastrophic engine failure at about 32,000 feet up, an hour into its LaGuardia-to-Dallas trip, forcing an emergency landing at Philadelphia International Airport. Mother-of-two Jennifer Riordan was pulled partway out of the plane when shrapnel shattered her window and the cabin began to depressurize, sucking her partway out of the plane. That’s when a...

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted 3-1 to support the Trump administration’s lawsuit against California over laws that the state passed last year to limit its role in immigration enforcement. The county will file an amicus brief at the first available opportunity, likely on appeal, said Kristin Gaspar, supervisor for District 3 and chairwoman of the board. “We’re talking about people who are crossing the border illegally, coming into this county and committing a crime and them being let loose probably to commit another crime,” said Dianne Jacobs, supervisor for District 2. “That creates a public safety issue...

From criticizing President Donald Trump for congratulating Vladimir Putin on his re-election in March, to saying earlier this month that Trump’s comments about withdrawing from Syria “emboldened” Bashar al-Assad, Arizona Senator John McCain in recent weeks has continued to uphold his reputation as one of the Republican Party’s most vocal critics of the president. But what was perhaps McCain’s most dramatic gesture of dissent against President Trump to date came at 1:30 a.m. on July 28, 2017. In the opening scene from the new FRONTLINE documentary McCain, which traces the Republican Party’s evolution across McCain’s political career, and how President...

PHILADELPHIA — A Southwest Airlines jet apparently blew an engine at about 30,000 feet and got hit by shrapnel that smashed a window and damaged the fuselage Tuesday, killing a passenger and injuring seven others, authorities said. The plane, a twin-engine Boeing 737 bound from New York to Dallas with 149 people aboard, made an emergency landing in Philadelphia just before noon as passengers breathing through oxygen masks that dropped from the ceiling said their prayers and braced for impact. "I just remember holding my husband's hand, and we just prayed and prayed and prayed," said passenger Amanda Bourman, of...

TAOS, New Mexico - The U.S. city of Albuquerque passed measures on Monday that make it harder for federal officials to deport illegal immigrants, a week after a federal judge blocked a Trump administration effort to withhold funding from cities that took such steps. Albuquerque’s majority-Democratic council voted 6-3 in favor of a measure to prevent federal immigration officials from entering city-operated areas, including a prisoner transport center, without a warrant. In a televised meeting, the council also barred city workers, including police, from collecting information on peoples’ immigration status and prohibited local tax dollars from being spent on federal...

California has rejected the federal government’s initial plans for National Guard troops to the border because the work is considered too closely tied to immigration enforcement, two U.S. officials told The Associated Press. The state informed federal officials it will not allow its troops to fix and repair vehicles, operate remotely-controlled surveillance cameras to report suspicious activity to the Border Patrol, operate radios and provide “mission support,” which can include clerical work, buying gas and handling payroll, according to officials with knowledge of the talks who spoke condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Talks...

A federal judge in Los Angeles this week struck down the Trump administration’s policy of denying certain Department of Justice law enforcement grants to cities that adopt “sanctuary” policies and refuse to cooperate with immigration enforcement. The Los Angeles Times reports: U.S. District Judge Manuel Real issued a permanent, nationwide ban against a Justice Department policy that gave an edge to obliging police departments applying for a community policing grant program. In doing so, Real dealt a legal setback to the Trump administration in its aggressive campaign to crack down on illegal immigration and to force compliance from law enforcement...

Accountability is sorely lacking in the administrative state. Unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats make decisions significantly affecting our daily lives with too little involvement from our elected officials. The Congressional Review Act was intended to restore at least some degree of democratic accountability to the administrative process. It requires agencies to submit to Congress every rule they wish to impose on you, giving the people you elected an opportunity to oversee what federal bureaucrats are up to. That’s the theory, at least. In practice, agencies have failed to comply with their obligations under the statute, withholding rules from Congress and thereby avoiding...

The demographic-inevitability thesis is less credible than ever. Last week, one of the most powerful men in America, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, endorsed as a “great read” a Medium article entitled “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War.” The article, by Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira, is one entry in a lengthy four-part series called “California Is the Future,” and it posits that there is “no bipartisan path forward for America.” Leyden and Teixeira believe that there are two competing economic systems, classes, and cultures, and that one has to win while the other has to lose....

House Speaker Paul Ryan will push his open borders agenda during his last months in Congress, telling the media that he is interested in passing an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens who are enrolled and eligible for the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Ryan announced this week that he will leave Congress after his current term is up, but now he says he will continue pushing for a DACA amnesty despite his exit. In a comment to Fox News’s Chad Pergram, Ryan said he would “certainly” be interested in passing a DACA amnesty before his...

Enzymatic liquid membrane design and mechanism of carbon dioxide capture and separation. The Sandia/University of New Mexico membrane is fabricated by formation of 8-nanometer diameter mesopores. Using atomic layer deposition and oxygen plasma processing, the silica mesopores are engineered to be hydrophobic except for an 18-nm-deep region at the pore surface which is hydrophilic. Through capillary condensation, carbonic anhydrase enzymes and water spontaneously fill the hydrophilic mesopores to form an array of stabilized enzymes with an effective concentration greater than 10 times of that achievable in solution. These catalyze the capture and dissolution of carbon dioxide at the upstream surface...