Free Republic

Dubai: Fewer young people now believe that the Arab Spring has brought about positive changes to the Arab world, the 7th annual Arab Youth Survey reported. The ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey for 2015, which was conducted on 3,500 young people, aged 18 to 24, from 16 Arab countries found that faith in the Arabic Springs has been diminishing over the years. In 2015, only 38 per cent agreed that the Arab world was better off following the Arab Spring. This is a significant drop compared with 54 per cent in 2014, 70 per cent in 2013, and 72 per...

VORRA, Germany — Even as European officials struggle with an unrelenting tide of migrants trying to enter the Continent, tranquil villages like this one in a picture-book valley in northern Bavaria are coping with the legions who have already arrived. It is here, as much as on the choppy seas of the Mediterranean, that Europe’s latest migration crisis is playing out. With the federal authorities expecting a flood of newcomers — an estimated 300,000 will apply for asylum in Germany this year, after 200,000 in 2014 — places like Vorra, population 1,000, are struggling to make room for those who...

BOUNTIFUL — A former Davis High School teacher admitted Wednesday that she had sex with three of her students. In a plea deal, Brianne Land Altice, 35, pleaded guilty to three counts of forcible sexual abuse, a second-degree felony. In exchange for her plea, 11 other felony charges were dropped against the former English teacher. Altice had been facing four trials and 14 felony charges — including rape, forcible sodomy, forcible sexual abuse, unlawful sexual activity with a minor and dealing in materials harmful to a minor — stemming from sexual relationships with three former Davis High students who were...

Carly Fiorina may not be an official presidential candidate yet, but her Iowa itinerary seems to indicate that she’s all in. Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, is in the midst of a five day, 13-stop tour of Iowa that included stops in all of the state’s major media markets. On Wednesday evening, Fiorina traveled to Marshalltown for a campaign event at Legends Bar & Grille. Marshalltown is about 50 miles northeast of Des Moines and 40 miles east of Ames. Fiorina might not be a household name like Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, or as known to Iowans as...

The Texas Young Republican Federation (TYRF) conducted a straw poll during February and March, and among potential 2016 Republican presidential candidates, the results show strongest support for Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), followed by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Governor Scott Walker (R-Wisconsin).The poll presented respondents with a list of eighteen potential presidential candidates and asked them to indicate each of the candidates they would like to see as the Republican nominee. Respondents were allowed to select multiple candidates they would support. The TYRF received 504 responses from Texas Republicans age 40 or under, of which 101 were active dues-paying TYRF...

St. George who was a martyr and one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers has a feast day on April 23rd, the anniversary of his death by beheading. In 1969, Saint George's feast was reduced to an optional memorial in the Roman Catholic calendar so the solemnity of his commemoration depends purely on local observance. However, St. George Day is celebrated by several nations and cities of which Saint George is patron saint. These include, England, Portugal, Georgia, Bulgaria, Bosnia and the Republic of Macedonia, and the cities of Moscow in Russia, Genova in Italy and Beirut in Lebanon. In Palestine...

Would the Civil Rights movement have taken place if Abraham Lincoln survived the assassin’s bullet by John Wilkes Booth? Allen Guelzo, a civil war era professor at Gettysburg College, posed this question in a recent lecture at Hillsdale’s Kirby Center. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, failed to bring the Union together after the end of the Civil War and “barely survived impeachment” from his own Republican Party. Guelzo wondered, “Could Lincoln have found…some practical system” to reconcile the South and North when the war ended. Lincoln had already tried at least one Reconstruction proposal in 1863, which was “bitterly criticized” by...

Israel has a right to use its military to defend itself against regional threats, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday as he continued his diplomatic battle to stop Russian-made arms from flowing into the hands of Israel’s enemies. “The meaning of independence, in my view, is, first of all, the ability to defend yourself,” Netanyahu before he met with the IDF General Staff. “To the growing threats around us we have a response, which is found in this room. I rely on you, chief-of-staff, and I rely on the IDF. The people of Israel rely on you.” Publicly, Netanyahu...

The number of Americans seeking first-time unemployment benefits rose slightly last week, but remained consistent with an economy steadily adding jobs. Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs across the U.S. economy, increased by 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 295,000 in the week ended April 18, the Labor Department said Thursday. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected 290,000 claims. Claims for the prior week were not revised. The claims reading had been volatile in recent months, but the figures are settling back near the lowest levels of the economic expansion. The four-week moving average of claims, which smooths...

He boosts fundraising while stressing traditional values and support for Israel. Ted Cruz loves Orthodox Jews — and they love him back.It’s a dynamic that allows the hard-line conservative presidential contender — a practicing Southern Baptist himself — to tap Orthodox donors more aggressively than any other 2016 candidate, as he zeros in on a small but potentially winnable slice of an otherwise deeply Democratic demographic.Leaders in the Orthodox community point approvingly to his vigorous opposition to the administration’s negotiations with Iran, his comfort level with religious references and, most important, his passionate support for Israel, a theme he touched...

Darwin's Robots: When Evolutionary Materialists Admit that Their Own Worldview Fails Nancy Pearcey April 23, 2015 3:02 AM | Permalink A materialist philosophy reduces humans to machines -- complex robots determined by material forces. It denies the reality of free will, the power to make decisions. Yet all civilizations throughout history have recognized that humans are moral agents capable of making responsible choices. There is no society without some moral code. The testimony of universal human experience is that humans are personal beings capable of willing and choosing -- which means their origin must be a personal Being, not the...

There was a small political earthquake Wednesday on the right side of the political spectrum, as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), who has had some nice things said about him by some very rich people, said something on immigration that likely displeased those same people. On Glenn Beck’s radio show, Walker said the following: >>>In terms of legal immigration, how we need to approach that going forward is saying: the next president and the next Congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, protecting American workers and American wages, because the more...

Puerto Rico's top finance officials said the government of the US territory will most likely shut down in three months because of a looming liquidity crisis, and they warned of a devastating impact on the island's economy. In a letter to leading lawmakers, including Gov. Alejandro Padilla, the officials said a financing deal that could potentially salvage the government's finances looked unlikely to succeed. It warned of laying off government employees and reducing public services. "A government shutdown is very probable in the next three months due to the absence of liquidity to operate," the officials said. "The likelihood of...

…By continuing to reduce the noxious emissions of state government: Ok, Scott. You have my attention. –> Scott Walker celebrates Earth Day by firing 57 environmental agency employees http://t.co/uopOpPZooI No seriously — if you’re going to make the environmentalist catch-22 argument as Democrats John Kerry and Claire McCaskill have, that a shrinking economy is good for the environment because of less carbon emissions, then you have to agree that the same holds true for shrinking the government as well. Radical environmentalism isn’t my religion, but the Book of Saul demands that its practitioners stay faithful to their own tenets....

For what if some did not believe? Shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? (Rom. 3:3) Message and Witness What is the Bible? Is it a book like any other intended for any occasional reader, who is expected to grasp at once its proper meaning? Rather, it is a sacred book addressed primarily to believers. Of course, a sacred book can be read by anyone as well, just 'as literature.' But this is rather irrelevant to our immediate purpose. We are concerned now not with the letter but with the message. St. Hilary put it emphatically: Scriptura...

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — A Michigan woman has been sentenced to three to seven years in prison for opening fire at a McDonald's restaurant after workers twice failed to put bacon on her burgers. Authorities say 30-year-old Shaneka Torres became angry in February 2014 when the first burger she ordered at the restaurant's drive-up station was missing bacon. She was offered a free meal, but bacon also wasn't added to a second burger order.

David Brooks shares a stage with pundits during a panel discussion, “2012: The Path to the Presidency”, at the University of Chicago on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)Dear David Brooks:We have never met, and I do not regularly follow your work. Because you are a public intellectual of Jewish origin, though, your spiritual peregrinations are of broader interest. It may be chutzpah for me to offer you advice, but I could not help thinking of the case of Franz Rosenzweig while reading a post at Aletaia claiming that you may convert to Christianity. Rosenzweig, one of the...

Republicans will lose the 2016 presidential election if they nominate an "establishment" GOP candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz told Newsmax TV on Wednesday. In a candid and wide-ranging interview at Newsmax headquarters in Florida, Cruz predicted that a candidate in the mold of a Mitt Romney, John McCain, or Bob Dole will nearly guarantee that Democrat Hillary Clinton wins the White House. "It will, in effect, be a third term for Barack Obama,&qquot; the Texas Republican said in an exclusive interview with "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner. Cruz, who in March became the first major Republican to declare his candidacy, said that...

The Obama administration’s lawyer, Benjamin Mizer, the acting assistant attorney general of the Civil Division at the Justice Department, did not have an easy time in his argument last Friday before a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in the immigration lawsuit filed by 26 states. He was questioned about all of the claims being made by the government, from the administration’s argument that the states don’t have standing to file a lawsuit to the assertion that everything President Obama has done is within the administration’s prosecutorial discretion. The substantive merits of district court Judge Andrew Hanen’s...

A former Auschwitz guard being tried on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder has testified that it was clear to him Jews were not expected to leave the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland alive. "I couldn't imagine that" happening, former SS Sgt. Oskar Groening told the Lueneburg state court on Thursday during the third day of his trial, the DPA news agency reported. The 93-year-old's answer came in response to a question from attorneys representing Auschwitz survivors who have joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, as allowed under German law...