Free Republic

Two Calgary women say they’ll never take another Associated Cab again after an incident Friday night with a driver in the Southland area. Mya McDonald first shared her outrage over Facebook after she wrote the man told her group that her friend “Brit” was too large to sit in the back seat. “He told my friend to sit in the back because she was smaller and the other bigger girl should sit in the front so that we could all fit in the back because (hand movements) she’s… y’know, fatter than all of you,” McDonald wrote.

... Scientists and science advocates say climatologists inside and outside the government are facing unprecedented intimidation from the Trump administration, conservative groups, and internet trolls. Jon Foley, a climate scientist said he’s more worried about the future of his profession than any time in his 20-year career. “The ebbing and flowing of political currents effects science—it always has—but this is different,” he said. “This is much worse than anything we’ve ever seen before.” Climate scientists working directly for the Trump administration are the most affected. A report by the Union of Concerned Scientists describes a “culture of fear” as government...

The Trump administration told a U.S. appeals court that federal law does not ban discrimination against gay employees, a sharp reversal of the position former President Barack Obama took on a key civil rights issue. The U.S. Department of Justice, in a friend of the court brief, told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan on Wednesday that Congress never intended Title VII, which bans sex discrimination in the workplace, to apply to gay workers. The department also said the court owed no deference to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency that enforces Title VII...

The American Civil Liberties Union has uncovered memos that show the National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI “violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama administration by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts,” as reported by The Hill on Tuesday. The memos, which The Hill was able to review, were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the ACLU. They cover compliance with privacy rules between 2009 and 2016. Equivalent assessments of the Trump administration’s first year will not be prepared until next spring. NSA spokesman Michael Halbig...

SEATTLE—The posters on display at the entrance to her Capitol Hill store say it all: “You are safe here.” “Black Lives Matter.” “Resist Trump: keep America great.” “I was raised on the most progressive politics,” says Jon (pronounced “Joan”) Milazzo, who co-owns Retrofit Home, a furniture shop on a busy corner of downtown Seattle. A native Vermonter who moved west about 30 years ago, Ms. Milazzo is all for the idea that employees – especially those at the bottom of the pay scale – receive a fair wage for their work. But she is straining to reconcile her principles with...

A California deputy attorney general has been charged in San Diego with possession of child pornography. Raymond Joseph Liddy, 53, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday, was released on $100,000 bond and placed on house arrest with GPS monitoring. An investigation into Liddy was launched after an electronic service provider sent a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in January that a user had uploaded an image that appeared to be child porn.

In March the Department of Education and Formation of the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales published a guideline for teachers called “Learning to Love” about Catholic relationship and sex education. Deacon Nick Donnelly points out on Twitter (July 26) that the document “equates homosexual ‘love’ with heterosexual love”. The document writes about high forms of love emphasising that bonds of love "exist just as powerfully in relationships between people of the same sex as it does in heterosexual relationships.” The bishops “applaud the great progress that has been made in countering all forms of discrimination against homosexuality”.

The United States is warning travelers to Mexico about tainted or counterfeit alcohol following the death of a Wisconsin woman. ... The death of Abbey Connor, 20, is just one of many incidents of travelers becoming sick after drinking alcohol at Mexican resorts, the paper reported. Connor, 20, was pulled from a pool at an Iberostar resort near Playa del Carmen in January, according to the paper. After the story, the paper received numerous reports from others who said they got sick and experienced blackouts at resorts in Cancun and Playa del Carmen.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, led by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, delayed a vote to confirm several Trump administration appointees on Thursday after she was criticized by a Cabinet member over her health care vote.

Shortened title. Full title: Transgender Navy SEAL slams Trump for banning servicemembers: 'Let's meet face to face and you tell me I'm not worthy' A transgender former Navy SEAL has spoken out against President Trump’s ban on transgender military members, saying he is preventing soldiers from doing their service. “Let's meet face to face and you tell me I'm not worthy,” Kristin Beck, a retired SEAL Team 6 member who has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, told Business Insider.

A recent article in L’Osservatore Romano by an Italian priest who teaches biblical theology is yet another example of the way the present papacy seems to look at priests and bishops who do not join in lockstep with the pope. I’ve never heard of this priest, Giulio Cirignano, but, evidently, he has some standing with the present regime. The good father is clearly echoing an attitude that is prominent among the closest members of the papal entourage when he says: “The clergy is holding the people back, who instead should be accompanied in this extraordinary moment. . . .The main...

Astronomers first spotted an asteroid about as long as a 737 passenger jet on Sunday and analyzed its path to determine it had made a close pass by our planet three days earlier. In other words, the big space rock slipped right by us without being detected and was only seen in our cosmic rear-view mirror. While the asteroid, now named 2017 001, flew right on by without incident, it was a relatively close pass. It came within about one-third the distance between Earth and the moon, roughly 76,448 miles (123,031 km). With an estimated size of between 82 and...

Trump is Making America Great Again more every day! Just over six months in office, and with the obstructionist democrats and their crazy conspiracy theories, they still can't stop the Trump Train!

The European Union on Wednesday moved ahead with legal action against Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic for refusing to comply with a controversial E.U. scheme to redistribute refugees and migrants for resettlement across the bloc. Hungary’s conservative government has labeled it the “George Soros plan” after the Hungarian-American financier who last year pledged to invest $500 million in support of European migrant resettlement. The E.U.’s executive Commission announced it was moving to the next stage of its “infringement procedure” — the three eastern European countries have a month to respond to a formal request to comply and if their...

Mr. President, please cut it out. Tweet to your heart’s content, but stop the wildly inappropriate attacks on the attorney general. An honorable man whom I have known since his days as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, Jeff Sessions has recently become your piñata in one of the most outrageous — and profoundly misguided — courses of presidential conduct I have witnessed in five decades in and around the nation’s capital. What you are doing is harmful to your presidency and inimical to our foundational commitment as a free people to the rule of law. The attorney general is not...

A Marxist student group at Swarthmore College disbanded itself earlier this year after realizing that its members were too rich and too white to be real commies. According to screenshots confidentially provided to Campus Reform by an individual with access to the group’s private Facebook page, the demise of the Swarthmore Anti-Capitalist Collective (SACC) came in the wake of a farewell letter from a member who had decided the group could never be an effective proponent of “unproblematized anticapitalist politics” due to its “history of abuse, racism, and even classism.”

As of July 3, there were just 124 concealed handgun permit holders in Washington, D.C. But, after a two-to-one federal Circuit court decision on Tuesday morning striking down D.C. ’s current concealed handgun law, the district has a chance to become like the 42 states with right-to-carry laws. If it were on par with those states, D.C. would have about 48,000 permits. Right now, poor people in particular have no real hope of being able to get a permit in D.C. Over 16.3 million Americans currently have concealed handgun permits. All fifty states issue permits, but eight of them are...

According to news reports, during the 2016 presidential election, “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump” and did so by “disseminating documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter…” Ukrainian officials also reportedly “helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.” At the center of this plan was Alexandra Chalupa, described by reports as a Ukrainian-American operative “who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee” and reportedly met with Ukrainian officials during the presidential election for the express purpose of exposing alleged ties between then-candidate Donald...

When Microsoft unveiled the first Surface tablet five years ago, it was a spectacular failure. At the time, the Apple iPhone was well on its way to conquering the technology industry, and the iPad appeared set to lead an even more devastating invasion of Microsoft’s office-worker kingdom. Microsoft conceived of Surface, an innovative laptop-tablet hybrid, as a way to show off the versatility of its software. Windows machines, it argued, could work as phones, personal computers and tablets. And didn’t everyone love Windows? Nope. Microsoft soon took a $900 million write-off for unsold Surfaces. Another effort to break into the...

A survey by George Gallup Jr. revealed a startling trend in our culture. According to Gallup, the evidence seems to indicate that there are no clear behavioral patterns that distinguish Christians from non-Christians in our society. We all seem to be marching to the same drummer, looking to the shifting standards of contemporary culture for the basis of what is acceptable conduct. What everybody else is doing seems to be our only ethical norm. This pattern can emerge only in a society or a church wherein the law of God is eclipsed. The very word law seems to have an...