Free Republic

SEATTLE – A 23-year-old DREAMer in Washington state is accused of brutally raping a 19-year-old woman in her apartment complex's gym and leaving her with severe facial injuries -- including a broken jaw and dangling ear. The woman ended up stumbling home with missing teeth, a bloody head and wearing only a black tank top, according to court documents obtained by Fox News. She was working out in the gym in Burien, a Seattle suburb, before the June 25 assault and did not know her attacker, police said. Salvador Diaz-Garcia, an illegal immigrant who is a recipient of Deferred Action...

Every year, thousands of Indian farmers commit suicide. Now one researcher thinks it may have something to do with climate change. Tamma Carleton, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, compared almost five decades worth of suicide and climate data and concluded that temperature variations in India may have “a strong influence” on suicide rates during the growing season. In her study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Carleton estimates that more than 59,000 farmer suicides over the past 30 years can be linked to global warming. Carleton’s findings are particularly...

Marco Rubio gave a televised address broadcast throughout Venezuela on Globovisión on Monday to express solidarity with the Venezuelan people following a sham election designed to tighten socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro’s grip on power. “In this struggle, know neither we nor you are alone. Since last night’s fraudulent exercise, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico and other nations from across the world have joined in announcing they do not recognize this constituent assembly,” he said in his Spanish-language address. “Ultimately, the way out of the tragedy before you is not violence or armed conflict. Venezuela is only a free...

Four years after Dunkirk, the Allied armies landed on the beaches at Normandy. They had learned from their Dunkirk. Will Democrats learn from theirs? The currently-running 2017 movie version of the World War II events surrounding Dunkirk did not address how Allied forces ended up surrounded by the Germans in late May 1940. Here’s one explanation: Britain and France expected a static war with Germany patterned after World War I, but Germany’s army was mobile and flexible. Two different sets of war rules were at play.

Top health insurance companies in numerous states are looking to hike premiums by double-digits – some by roughly 30 percent or more – for ObamaCare plans in 2018, according to newly released figures that could light a fire under stalled efforts on Capitol Hill to fix the program. “A lot of us have lost focus on the fact that the system we have doesn’t work,” White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday, referring to the proposed premium hikes. The Wall Street Journal reported that major insurers in Idaho, West Virginia, South Carolina, Iowa and Wyoming...

President Trump on Wednesday signed a bill imposing sanctions on Russia, after the legislation overwhelmingly passed the House and Senate. The stiff financial sanctions were championed by lawmakers in both parties, and Trump's signature could escalate tensions with Moscow -- which already has ordered a reduction in the number of U.S. diplomats in Russia. The bill itself targets Iran and North Korea as well as Russia. But a cornerstone of the legislation was a provision barring Trump from easing or waiving the additional penalties on Russia unless Congress agrees. The provisions were included to assuage concerns among lawmakers that the...

On Wednesday the global environmentalist movement commemorated “Earth Overshoot Day,” which marks the moment when the world population has supposedly consumed all the earth’s resources allocated for the year—fruit and vegetables, meat and fish, water and wood—and so began to “overexploit” the planet. Each year, an environmental advocacy group called the Global Footprint Network (GFN) calculates the day when the year’s available resources run out and mankind begins overconsuming nature. In the year 2000, “Earth Overshoot Day” was celebrated at the end of September, in 2016 it struck on August 8, and now, in 2017, it has moved six days...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Tuesday that it will use its authority under a George W. Bush-era law to bypass environmental rules in order to construct a section of President Trump's promised border wall. The announcement underscores the commitment from DHS -- now without a permanent leader after John Kelly's ascended to become White House chief of staff -- and theTrump administration more broadly making good on the president's signature campaign promise, despite not yet having a plan for the wall in place nor funding for its construction approved by Congress (though that is in the pipeline)....

Authorities said a teenage boy travelling alone opened an emergency door after his plane landed, slid down the wing and jumped onto a tarmac at San Francisco before shocked passengers could do anything to stop him. Some passengers flying on Copa Airlines Flight 208 from Panama City, Panama, said that by the time they realized the door had been removed, the boy was already on the ground, running. San Francisco Airport spokesman Doug Yakel said the 17-year-old removed the door as the plane was heading to a gate on Tuesday. Yakel says an airfield construction crew held him until police...

A sudden, even shocking announcement came from President Trump's Twitter account on July 26. The government "will not accept or allow ... Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity" in the military due to "the tremendous medical costs and disruption" that entails. Whether you favor it or oppose it, and regardless of how this abrupt declaration blindsided the Pentagon brass, it's indisputable that the liberal media could not and would not approach this subject with anything resembling objectivity. Never mind that military men and women -- and that's all we should care about -- cheered the announcement. The press...

It became harder Monday night for President Donald Trump to help engineer the collapse of the Affordable Care Act. A federal court ruled that attorneys general in 17 states and the District of Columbia would be allowed to intervene in a case over crucial subsidies known as cost-sharing-reduction payments. ... In 2016 a judge ruled in favor of the House, saying the CSR payments were illegal because Congress did not appropriate them. ... But on Monday, the court ruled that the 17 states and DC could intervene and ... said ending the payments would be damaging to the states' citizens.

Police in Blackpool say they have arrested a 51-year-old man in connection with the 14-year-old murder case of reported child grooming gang victim Charlene Downes whose body was believed to have been chopped up and put into kebab meat. Charlene Downes, 14 at the time of her disappearance, was last seen in Blackpool in 2003 and is believed to have been not only murdered but that her killers disposed of her body by putting it into kebab meat at a local seaside kebab shop. Fourteen years later, authorities now say they have arrested a 51-year-old man in connection with her...

Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) introduced legislation Monday aimed at nullifying state-level gun controls that exceed gun controls put in place by the federal government. New York’s SAFE Act (2013) is a prime example of the kind of gun control Collins hopes to erase. WKBW reports Collins’ bill is titled the Second Amendment Guarantee Act (SAGA), and its language explicitly “[limits] the authority of states to regulate conduct, or impose penalties or taxes in relation to rifles or shotguns.” It is designed to catch laws that go beyond federal statutes and render them void. According to the Buffalo News, Collins described SAGA,...

The European Court of Human Rights on Wednesday blocked Germany’s planned deportation of a Russian 18-year-old, who had been deemed a potentially “dangerous” Islamist. The young man had already been on the way to Frankfurt airport on Tuesday when the court decision was made, forcing the driver to turn around, according to media reports. The European court’s ruling to block the deportation was not a final decision on the case itself, but rather was a way to ensure that the procedure would run properly as the court begins to consider the case, explained a court spokeswoman. Germany’s own Constitutional Court...

The Washington Post’s shiny new story about the possibility of Donald Trump having mislead the American people by stage-managing the whole response to the “Russian Lawyer” meeting of Don Jr. is as inventive a piece of fiction as they can legally get away with. The use of “Anonymous sources” YET AGAIN, is becoming ludicrous. It lacks evidence, and in fact is easier to poke holes in then a pair of fishnet stockings. The “Scandal” comes from the assertion that when news broke of Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a “Russian Lawyer, the President himself stepped in and stage-managed the whole...

London Mayor Sadiq Khan banned advertisements that promote "unrealistic expectations of women's body image and health". Now Berlin is planning to ban images in which women are portrayed as "beautiful but weak, hysterical, dumb, crazy, naive, or ruled by their emotions". Tagesspiegel's Harald Martenstein said the policy "could have been adopted from the Taliban manifesto". The irony is that this wave of morality and "virtue" is coming from cities governed by uninhibited leftist politicians, who for years campaigned for sexual liberation. It is now a "feminist" talking point to advocate sharia policy.[snip]Paris has said au revoir to "sexist" ads on...

In powering his home, Al Gore still greatly outpaces most Americans in energy consumption. The findings were shocking: • The past year, Gore's home energy use averaged 19,241 kilowatt hours (kWh) every month, compared to the U.S. household average of 901 kWh per month. • Gore guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years. • In September of 2016, Gore's home consumed 30,993 kWh in just one month – as much energy as a typical American family burns in 34 months. • During the last 12 months, Gore devoured 66,159 kWh of electricity...

Deeds, not words, are the best defense. Donald Trump campaigned on the promise to “drain the swamp” ––the D.C. establishment made up of most Congressmen from both parties, employees of executive agencies and bureaus, the political appointees who head up those agencies, and the hordes of lobbyists, fundraisers, Congressional staffers, “consultants,” “journalists,” and pundits. These are the “Beltway insiders” or the “political establishment” whose natural habitat is the swamp. These are the alligators Trump needs to get rid of. Of course, many of these D.C. denizens of the establishment are permanent dwellers in the swamp, beyond the reach of the...

President Donald Trump won the November 8, 2016 election in an electoral landslide. President Trump captured several states that have not voted Republican in decades. Riding on his coattails the Republican Party also won back the House of Representatives and won a majority in the US Senate. In December 2016 Speaker Paul Ryan spoke about how he would help the new president push through his agenda. The new Republican president wanted to pass tax cuts, repeal Obamacare and build a border wall.

The highlight of CNN’s primetime lineup Tuesday was The Climate Crisis town hall where they teamed up with former Vice President and climate alarmist Al Gore to push his propaganda. “Consensus in the scientific community is clear. Sea levels are rising. The oceans are warming,” moderator Anderson Cooper declared as he started the program. The event became even more ridiculous when Gore equated getting people to believe him was like the Civil Rights movement, in that “it's just really a question of right and wrong.” Gore’s shameful self-aggrandizing came after Cooper teed him up to push for more U.S. resources...