Free Republic

In the 22 years that Swami Durga Das has managed New York’s River Fund Food Pantry, he has never seen hunger like this. Each Saturday, hundreds of hungry people descend on the pantry’s headquarters, an unassuming house on a residential block. The first people arrive around 2 am, forming a line that will wrap around the block before Das even opens his doors. “Each week there’s new people,” Das told MSNBC.com. “The numbers have just skyrocketed.” The new clients are diverse—working people, seniors, single mothers—but many of them share something in common: they represent the millions of Americans who fell...

The state Senate voted overwhelmingly today to approve a gay marriage bill, shifting the focus of the debate to the state House, where the vote could be closer. The Senate vote was 20 to 4. Sen. Clayton Hee, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary and Labor Committee, framed the vote in the historical context of interracial marriage and Hawaii's decision to legalize abortion. "This is a defining moment in all of our careers and we should embrace it," Hee told his colleagues. Senate Minority Leader Sam Slom, the lone Republican in the Senate, said there was no urgency to hold...

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The White House is pressuring insurance companies not to speak publicly about Obama administration policies that could eliminate the existing health insurance plans of millions of Americans. The administration made “clarifications” to the 2010 Affordable Care Act after it was passed that have already wiped out hundreds of thousands of existing health plans. “Basically, if you speak out, if you’re quoted, you’re going to get a call from the White House, pressure to be quiet,” said CNN investigative reporter Drew Griffin on Anderson Cooper 360 Wednesday night. Insurance companies executives, Griffin said, ask heads of consulting firms not to criticize...

PITTSBURGH, May 16, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Tougher safety regulations passed in the wake of grisly discoveries at Kermit Gosnell’s “house of horrors” abortion facility have resulted in the closure of five Pittsburgh abortion centers since last June.Act 122, which took effect last June, requires abortion facilities to meet the same standards as other outpatient surgical facilities in the state.While some abortion centers have been able to bring their facilities up to par, five facilities in the Pittsburgh area have been shut down. One was closed by the state health department; the others closed voluntarily. There are now only two abortion...

If Access Health CT were a for-profit business, Tuesday might not have looked like a great opening day. Curious and interested people came in to ask questions, pick up some forms, look at the options online. Few actually enrolled, but then again, that wasn't the sole goal on this "soft opening" day. Sign-ups have been slow in the early weeks throughout the country, perhaps because people don't have to make decisions until the end of March, perhaps because of the well-publicized computer glitches, or, as critics believe, because the system isn't what it's cracked up to be. That third reason...

Long Island College Hospital issued layoff notices to some 500 employees, effective Oct. 29. The majority of the workers are members of 1199 SEIU Healthcare Workers East and the New York State Nurses Association. "We are aligning our staffing levels to reflect the greatly reduced patient volume and limited services that are available at the facility," said a spokesman for SUNY Downstate Medical Center, which owns LICH. The unions will likely seek a court injunction to stop the layoffs. About 211 members of 1199 SEIU received the notices, said a union representative. The job titles were across the board. The...

Meanwhile, a Japanese news agency says the NSA asked the Japanese government in 2011 to help it monitor fibre-optic cables carrying personal data through Japan, to the Asia-Pacific region. The reports, carried by the Kyodo news agency, say that this was intended to allow the US to spy on China - but Japan refused, citing legal restrictions and a shortage of personnel. The White House has so far declined to comment on Monday's claims about US spying in Spain, published in the newspapers El Pais and El Mundo. It is alleged that the NSA tracked millions of phone calls, texts...

Michelle Obama and a top executive of the company behind the Healthcare.gov debacle were members of student groups that hosted a pro-terror speaker at Princeton campus while the two were co-eds, according to the Daily Caller. The first lady, back when she was still Michelle Robinson, was a student at Princeton in 1982 with Toni Townes-Whitely (then Toni McCall), the future executive with CGI Federal. Both were were members of the Organization of Black Unity, a black student group, and the Third World Center another student organization, the Daily Caller reported.

Insurers are canceling coverage for thousands of Pennsylvanians who buy their own health insurance and expected to be grandfathered from sweeping changes of the Affordable Care Act. The cancellation notices are providing fodder for critics of the so-called Obamacare law. They say the result is higher premiums for some people, and they point to pledges by President Obama that individuals can keep their existing coverage if they like it. But insurers and supporters of the law say that many of those who are being dropped can buy better and cheaper coverage under Obamacare. Insurers say the law requires them to...

Ghanaian police have arrested 46 foreign nationals from China and India accused of illegally mining gold. They were detained in overnight raids in the country's Central region where they were operating small barges to dredge the bed of the River Offin. More than 4,500 Chinese nationals have been repatriated this year after a series of swoops on illegal goldmines. Officials says since the clampdown began, some illegal miners have been going out at night to avoid detection. Ghana is Africa's biggest gold producer after South Africa. Ghanaian law prevents foreigners from working in small-scale gold mines. The authorities say the...

The US has criticised Germany's economic policies, saying that its export-led growth model is hurting the eurozone and the wider global economy. In its biannual report, the US Treasury said that domestic demand growth in Germany had been "anaemic". It also reiterated its view that the Chinese yuan, continues to remain "significantly undervalued". The report has criticised Chinese policy before, but criticism of German economic policy is rarer. "Germany's anaemic pace of domestic demand growth and dependence on exports have hampered rebalancing at a time when many other euro area countries have been under severe pressure to curb demand and...

Critics charge that Texas’s growth depends on the oil and gas industries and is weighted toward low-wage jobs. But in fact, Texas’s low-tax, light-regulation policies have produced a highly diversified economy that from 2002 to 2011 created nearly one-third of the nation’s highest-paying jobs. In those years, its number of upper- and middle-income jobs grew 24 percent.Where are Americans moving, and why? Timothy Noah, writing in the Washington Monthly, professes to be puzzled. He points out that people have been moving out of states with high per capita incomes -- Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland -- to states with lower...

A senior Russian Orthodox cleric has strongly opposed a populist politician’s suggestion to fight terrorism by imposing birth control in the predominantly Muslim regions. The idea has already caused a major scandal. The head of the Holy Synod’s department for relations between the Church and society, Vsevolod Chaplin, says all peoples must develop freely and have as many children as they consider necessary. “Russia can have a future only as a community of all peoples that created it and that have formed it over many centuries. This is why the people of the Caucasus who play a serious role in...

NATO and Russia announced Wednesday that they have achieved the ability to target and locate bombs planted in large crowds, such as commuter hubs and sporting events. The Stand-off Detection of Explosives and Suicide Bombers system (STANDEX) "could help NATO allies and Russia prevent terrorist attacks such as those carried out on the public transport systems in London, Madrid and Moscow" in the past decade, NATO said in a video news release that included Russian partners. The project took four years and 4.8 million euros (US$6.6 million) of investment, paid for by NATO, Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Turkey, and the...

India is on the verge of implementing an internal email policy for official communications in order to avoid using American-based web services that have been compromised by the National Security Agency. In December, India will unveil a new internal policy devised to avoid major email service providers - such as Gmail, Yahoo! or Outlook.com - that house their servers in the United States. A communications official confirmed Tuesday that the plan is near implementation, The Times of India reported. "Email policy of the government of India, as this policy will be called, is almost ready and we are taking views...

We have Obamacare for one reason and one reason only: For a brief, ghoulish period in recent history, Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. We don't have Obamacare because the public was clamoring for it. We have it because Republicans lost elections. First, Republicans lost their majorities in the House and the Senate in 2006, thanks to George W. Bush's highly effective "Keep the Base at Home on Election Day" campaign, which consisted of pushing amnesty for illegal aliens. Then in 2008, Republicans had the bright idea to run crazy-eyed crypt-keeper John McCain for...

In August of 2009 Sarah Palin, in reference to the pending doom popularly known as Obamacare, called the selected group of people who will be in charge of determining the worthiness of everyone’s healthcare a death panel. Immediately the left went into attack mode. They called Palin a liar and defended Obamacare to the hilt. Palin cited section 1233 of HR 3200 as her reason for coming to this conclusion. The left, of course, derided her for pointing out that the obvious end game would be rationing of care by the panels who are charged with “counseling” people on things...

US intelligence agencies are using Australian embassies throughout Asia to intercept data and gather information across the continent, according to the latest report based on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Data collection facilities operate out of the embassies in Jakarta, Bangkok, Hanoi, Bejing, and Dili, according to Fairfax media. There are also units in the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur, the most populated city in Malaysia, and Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. More intelligence collection occurs at US embassies and consulates, as well as at the diplomatic outposts of other ‘Five Eye’ nations, particularly...