Free Republic

Brazil has been in crisis for some time now. The country’s economy shrunk -3.8% last year, and its President, Dilma Rousseff, is holding on for dear life. Once chairman of Petrobras, the state-run oil giant currently engulfed in a colossal political scandal, she is now being threatened with impeachment just 15 months into her second four-year yerm. Her approval remains at an all-time low of just 11%. The currency has halved in value since 2011, and the country’s credit has been downgraded to junk status. However, as VisualCapitalist's Jeff Desjardins explains, it’s not only the economic and political spheres that...

Maryland's Democratic Senate race remains very much up for grabs three weeks before the primary, with voters sharply divided along racial lines, according to a new poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland. The rare open Senate seat, being vacated by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski after 30 years, has sparked a heated and expensive battle between Reps. Donna Edwards and Chris Van Hollen. . . . likely black voters favor Edwards by a nearly 3-to-1 margin. More than twice as many white voters support Van Hollen as back Edwards. . . . "It would be nice if...

Based on current delegate counts and poll numbers Ted Cruz will be mathematically unable to reach the delegate count required for him to win the Republican Presidential nomination.  By the end April it will be clear that Ted Cruz has no chance of reaching the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination.Actually in only 3 weeks, on April 26th, it will be clear that Ted Cruz cannot win. (chart from Google) Currently Cruz has only 463 delegates. Even if Cruz wins Wisconsin, which is a state whose delegates are winner take most (WTM), he still will not have enough delegates to...

Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award-winning Broadway musical, has faced criticism for an open casting call seeking only “non-white” actors. The hip-hop musical, which has been praised by Michelle Obama and which won a Grammy, features a diverse cast that reimagines the origin story of founding father Alexander Hamilton. The majority of the cast is multiethnic as well: African Americans play Aaron Burr, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, while a Chinese American portrays Hamilton’s wife, Eliza. Miranda, the show’s creator, is of Puerto Rican ancestry.

Downtown, sprawling factories are constant reminders of this city’s past life. A few decades ago these massive buildings were owned by tobacco companies and bustling with blue-collar workers. After the tobacco business contracted in the second half of the 20th century, and factory jobs disappeared or were relocated, the buildings—and much of Durham’s downtown—were abandoned.

Asha Richards was excited when she was admitted to a sought-after high school communication arts program, but she said it has been discouraging to see how few other black students have been in her classes during the past three years. “I didn’t feel I could connect with my peers,” she said. “It was kind of a struggle for me. I would often be quiet in class. I didn’t voice my opinion.”

"Let's do the right thing and make sure Clinton is in that f—ing office and taking care of us," said the show's co-creator at the Human Rights Campaign Gala. Empire co-creator Lee Daniels appears to think it's time for people to start taking Donald Trump seriously. "I'm not afraid of anything," Daniels said. "I've dodged bullets — real bullets before — but now I'm afraid because these motherf—ers are coming for us, y'all." Speaking at the Human Rights Campaign Gala in L.A. on Saturday night, Daniels pressed the audience "to do the right thing" and vote for Hillary Clinton. While...

Al Sharpton's 1992 Off The Pigs Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZ0RwtvZmk

The New York Times found what it called an “unlikely melting pot” when its reporters descended on a Donald Trump campaign office in Tampa, Fla. “For a campaign frequently depicted as offering a rallying point for the white working class, the people volunteering to help Mr. Trump here are noteworthy for their ethnic diversity,” reported the Times on Sunday. “They include a young woman who recently arrived from Peru; an immigrant from the Philippines; a 70-year-old Lakota Indian; a teenage son of Russian immigrants; a Mexican-American.” The Times article included anecdotes from several campaign workers, and drew some common themes.

Another Cambridge University ball has attracted controversy, after students complained the Japanese theme was “enforcing stereotypes”. A number of students have reportedly complained about the ‘Tokyo to Kyoto’-themed May ball, being organised by the university’s Trinity Hall college for later in the year. The ball committee themselves say they chose the Japanese theme to “celebrate the diversity of world culture”.

Meet Amber Romero. The North Carolina student, 18, allegedly summoned her inner Mike Tyson and bit off a “large portion” of a fellow student’s earlobe during a brawl on a school bus, police charge. According to an arrest warrant, Romero tangled last Friday with Emiyah Lane Brown, 16, as they were traveling home from East Wake High School in Wendell, a town 20 miles west of Raleigh. The fight began after the younger student threw her lunch bag at Romero. As the young scholars subsequently exchanged slaps and pulled each other’s hair, Romero inflicted a “serious bodily injury” upon Brown...

President Obama used the race card during a tense debate over the future of the Middle East with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Obama recently agreed to an extensive interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg for its April issue. The piece, titled “The Obama Doctrine,” highlights the president’s growing disillusionment with long-time allies. Obama even disclosed how he linked obstacles with Netanyahu to condescension instead of an ideological divide. “In one of Netanyahu’s meetings with the president, the Israeli prime minister launched into something of a lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives, and Obama...

A request to establish a multicultural student government at Kansas University — which proponents said would be unprecedented among U.S. universities — was approved after intense debate Wednesday night. The KU Student Senate voted on allocating a list of required student fees for the upcoming school year, including a $2 fee increase to fund the newly created Multicultural Student Government. The fee would generate about $90,000 annually and be disseminated through KU’s Office of Multicultural Affairs. While many senators agreed with the concept of the new governing body, others expressed concern that more detailed logistics had yet to be established...

Officer in dash cam video: ‘He shot me. I’m not hit’ Dash cam video shows driver shoot at Battle Creek Police Department officer Barton Deiters and 24 Hour News 8 web staff Published: March 7, 2016, 6:40 pm BATTLE CREEK, Mich. (WOOD) — Demonstrating the way a seemingly routine action can turn into a life-threatening encounter for police officers, dash cam video shows a driver open fire on a Battle Creek officer during a traffic stop on Saturday. Monday, 21-year-old Darriyone Zamone Clark-Brown was arraigned on several charges including attempted murder in the incident. Dash cam video of the shooting,...

As the #BlackLivesMatter campus protests have swept across some 60 colleges nationwide, American students, especially the most liberal ones, are being criticized for their intolerance of free speech. Recent data show that 43% of incoming freshmen in 2015 thought it should be a college’s right to ban extreme speakers; 71% supported prohibitions against racist and sexist speech.

t's the film fans have been waiting decades for. And today, the first trailer for the hotly-anticipated Ghostbusters re-boot was finally released. But while many praised the hilarious clip, showing Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones battling New York's supernatural nasties, some have complained that the film is falling back on racial stereotypes. That's because, while the white leads, McCarthy, Wiig and McKinnon, play brilliant engineers, professors and scientists, Jones' character is a simple NYC subway worker.

On Wednesday's CNN Tonight, W. Kamau Bell claimed that white supremacy is the new ideology of the Republican Party: "If the Republican Party is a gumbo...the roux of that gumbo is white supremacy, and the core of that is the Ku Klux Klan." Bell later asserted that the Obama birther issue was when white supremacy supposedly became dominant in the GOP: "It came from the first four years of Barack Obama's presidency...where they allowed Donald Trump to demand the President show his birth certificate — and they just stood by and went, maybe he's not born here." [video below] Host...

The allegation set social media ablaze, sowing shock and outrage as it went: Three black students at the University at Albany had been attacked on a city bus by a group of white men who used racial slurs as other passengers and the driver sat silently by.

Predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Chicago have seen poverty rise and services diminish even as the nation's third largest city has become less racially segregated, according to a study released on Wednesday. While Chicago has become more racially balanced over the decades with more neighborhoods showing no majority populations, black areas are seeing economic stagnation or decline, according to the study by the Chicago Urban League, which promotes progress for blacks. "This is not a situation that's getting better. This is a situation that's getting worse," said Stephanie Bechteler, director of research and evaluation for the Chicago Urban League. "We must...

ALBANY — The allegation set social media ablaze, sowing shock and outrage as it went: Three black students at the University at Albany had been attacked on a city bus by a group of white men who used racial slurs as other passengers and the driver sat silently by. The Jan. 30 episode, reported to the police, would draw hundreds of people to a campus rally against racism; an emotional response from the university’s president; and even the attention of Hillary Clinton, who condemned the attack on Twitter.