Free Republic

President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it. The meeting was also attended by his campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner only recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times. The Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews,...

The General Synod of the Church of England has voted to ‘welcome transgender people’ by considering preparing a church service as a way to “mark a person’s gender transition”. The official church of the United Kingdom voted four to one in favour amongst the Clergy and more than two to one amongst the Laity (members who are not Clergy) at the four-day Synod, the motion reading: “That this Synod, recognising the need for transgender people to be welcomed and affirmed in their parish church, call on the House of Bishops to consider whether some nationally commended liturgical materials might be...

A new, unpublished study by John Donohue, Abhay Aneja, and Kyle Weber has received a lot of attention for supposedly finding some evidence that right-to-carry laws increase overall violent crime rates. It has been covered in Newsweek, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, Vice, Snopes, and many newspapers such as Newsday and the Salt Lake City Tribune. As is typical of Donohue’s work, there is no attempt to mention or respond to prior criticisms, and he just repeats the same, seriously biased methods and errors. Publications such as Time and Newsweek would always interview critics when they ran stories on Lott’s original research....

According to Breanna Edwards of The Root.com, CNN is facing a growing racial discrimination lawsuit that according to The Hollywood Reporter “may grow exponentially.” CNN’s ongoing lawsuit is explained in an April 5, 2017 piece titled “CNN Facing Racial-Discrimination Lawsuit Claiming African Americans Receive Lower Performance Ratings in Evaluations”: Another major news network is facing allegations in a racial-discrimination lawsuit, stemming from a proposed class action in Georgia federal court. In the lawsuit, plaintiffs claim that at CNN and other Time Warner units, African Americans receive lower performance ratings in evaluations, that there are huge discrepancies in pay between employees...

TEL AVIV – Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke on Friday flipped his middle finger at a group of pro-Palestinian protesters at a gig in Glasgow, Scotland who were calling for the band to cancel its upcoming gig in Tel Aviv. Activists from Glasgow Palestine Action, Glasgow Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Radiohead Fans for Palestine demonstrated outside the festival prior to the band’s performance. During the performance itself, Palestinian flags were waved from the crowd, prompting Yorke to exclaim no less than four times the phrase “some f**king people!” into the microphone before reportedly flipping off the flag wavers. Radiohead has come...

For the record: Francis first, always We bring you, dear readers, this disturbing but not surprising anecdote simply to record it forever on this blog. But let's be honest: This pontificate, since the beginning, has put itself before Christ, before His Church's tradition, before His inerrant Word and, now, before His Mass.  From the great Marco Tosatti, via First Things: The first step of Müller’s Calvary was a disconcerting episode in the middle of 2013. The cardinal was celebrating Mass in the church attached to the congregation palace, for a group of German students and scholars. His secretary joined him...

In common with many other countries, the Catholic Church in America today is closely intertwined with the major party on the left. In my religious congregation, for example, the U.S. Province is 60 to 80 percent Democrat. This is also the case in other religious orders and many whole dioceses. People caught up in this mixing of worlds have to flip back and forth between Catholic concepts and Democrat ideology as they go through the day. Unfortunately, many bishops do not show them anything better.

The head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit in charge of deportations has directed his officers to take action against all undocumented immigrants they may cross paths with, regardless of criminal histories. The guidance appears to go beyond the Trump administration’s publicly stated aims, and some advocates say may explain a marked increase in immigration arrests. In a February memo, Matthew Albence, a career official who heads the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of ICE, informed his 5,700 deportation officers that, “effective immediately, ERO officers will take enforcement action against all removable aliens encountered in the course of their...

THE proportion of Scots who say they have no religion has reached a new high, a survey shows. The latest Scottish Social Attitudes survey found that nearly six in 10 (58%) describe themselves as having no religion, up from 40% in 1999. The survey, carried out by ScotCen, revealed that those aged 18-34 were the least likely to be religious, at 74% compared to 34% of those over 65. The Church of Scotland has been hardest hit by the drop in religious affiliation, with just 18% saying they belong to the Kirk compared to 35% in 1999. The proportion of...

Each month brings a fresh headline containing Hollywood's favourite new buzzphrase, "franchise fatigue." As big-budget sequels from The Mummy to Transformers: The Last Knight stutter to a halt, the consensus reached by news coverage suggests a collective, audible yawn from audiences, as they grow weary and tired of recycled and repackaged films. But is franchise fatigue really a pressing issue for movie studios to address, or is it nothing more than a buzzphrase, a product of anti-franchise bias? The full story of #boxoffice trends is complex and impossible to define in two words alone (lucky for you, this article has...

Synod calls for government to ban practice aiming to change sexual orientation after hearing experiences of ‘spiritual abuse’ in emotional debateThe Church of England has called on the government to ban conversion therapy and has condemned the practice, which aims to change sexual orientation, as unethical and potentially harmful. At the end of an emotional debate in which two members of the C of E synod described their experiences as spiritual abuse, the church’s governing body overwhelmingly backed a motion saying the practice had “no place in the modern world”. Conversion therapy is usually described as an attempt to change...

A Muslim religious leader in Ireland has called for a debate around the recognition of polygamous families after a court refused to recognise the second wife of a Lebanese refugee who has become a naturalised citizen. Dr Ali Selim of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland said families fleeing warzones are “disintegrating” because of laws in this country that don’t exist at home. “Now is not yesterday’s situation,” he told i. “People are forced to leave their country, where they used to live in accordance with the legislation of that country.” “This raises questions we have not faced before.” The...

'The Church’s social teaching must also be applied to the way employees are treated here in the Vatican,' the cardinal saidCardinal Müller has criticised the manner in which Pope Francis dismissed him as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (CDF), calling it “unacceptable”. In an interview with German newspaper Passauer Neue Presse, the cardinal said that on the last working day of his five-year term as a prefect of the Congregation for the Faith, Pope Francis informed him “within a minute” of the decision not to extend his mandate. “He did not give a reason,” the 69-year-old...

A professor at University of Kansas went on a racist tweeting tirade last month, commenting that the only people who believe in President Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” are those deeply invested in white supremacy and the killing of black and brown people. This gem of anti-white racism came out of Subini Annamma, an assistant professor in the university’s special education department, along with an eclectic collection of declarations sure to earn her high regards at today’s anti-white institutions of higher education.

  Our Troops Rock!  Thank you for all you do!   For the freedom you enjoyed yesterday... Thank the Veterans who served in The United States Armed Forces.   Looking forward to tomorrow's freedom? Support The United States Armed Forces Today!     ~ Hall of Heroes ~ Daniel Inouye Info from here.             Daniel Ken "Dan" Inouye (September 7, 1924 – December 17, 2012) was a Medal of Honor recipient and a United States Senator from Hawaii, a member of the Democratic Party, and the President pro tempore of the United States Senate from 2010...

Mark my words – the wind is turning. Donald and Melania Trump are leaders – persistent, consistent, from the heart. Some expected this, many did not. But underestimating these two would be a profound mistake. The first clear turn signal was the Inauguration speech. It was concise, incisive, blunt and uncompromising. No more blah-blah and calculated pampering, national self-derision or happy talk for the sake of media approval. No more pretending personal differences and sincere opinions were bad, individual character and national sacrifice irrelevant, honor and history no longer material. To those who wished America would again be proud of...

He claimed she has no answers about her daughter Caylee's death because she 'blacked it out' from her memory Mason said the 31-year-old went into 'Casey world' and 'shut out' what happened He maintained she did not kill the two-year-old who she 'loved very much'

"Offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ" (1 Pet. 2:5). Every faculty you have is to be used for God’s glory. In Romans 12:1 Paul pleads with believers to present their bodies to God as a living and holy sacrifice, which is an appropriate and acceptable act of worship. But as someone has rightly said, the problem with living sacrifices is they tend to crawl off the altar. That's because sacrificial living demands spiritual discipline and constant dependence on the Holy Spirit. We as Christians aren't always willing to do that. According to Paul, the motivation and...

“These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, in order that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). The apostle John presents eleven objective and subjective tests for assurance of salvation. The New Testament epistles are filled with enough material on assurance to fill volumes of commentaries. Yet there is one small epistle, 1 John, that was written to deal exclusively with the issue of assurance. The apostle John states his reason for writing this letter in our verse for today: “These things I have written to...