Free Republic

The United States will no longer fly the Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 after an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed Sunday shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. President Trump said he was grounding them flights from both models - 'effective immediately' - on Wednesday afternoon. Any plane that is currently in the air will be allowed to land and then they will be grounded until further notice, he said. Trump said he made the decision after following a with Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary, after new information emerged on the tragic crash.

Shares of Boeing tumbled Wednesday after President Donald Trump said he is grounding all Boeing 737 Max jets, following the second major crash within five months. “Boeing is an incredible company. They are working very, very hard right now,” Trump told reporters in Washington on Wednesday.

Before Paul Manafort’s sentence-o-rama tour through the courts last week, he faced a potential for consecutive sentences running into decades in prison. By this afternoon, Manafort appeared to have gotten off lightly not once but twice. Judge Amy Berman Jackson added a 43-month prison term to the 47 months Judge T.S. Ellis handed down, with enough overlap that Manafort faces 81 months in federal prison altogether.That may not be good news, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been: WATCH: NBC News Special Report: With judge's second sentence, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is receiving 90...

Martina Markota of The Rebel.media exposes the transphobic and racists blog posts of a Media Matters VP attempting to ruin Tucker Carlson.

"Captain Marvel" star and hardcore feminist Brie Larson has been a leader in Hollywood talks concerning the anti-sexual harassment and sexism campaign known as "Time's Up," which piggybacked off the #MeToo movement. Since fall 2017, Larson has led discussions about sound guys putting on actors' mics in the context of the movement and said she now mics herself up and advises all other actress to do the same. "In the fall of 2017, in the weeks after the first Harvey Weinstein stories broke, Larson and her female acting peers began texting one another and having conversations about workplace concerns, from...

Over 80 percent of American voters support the Green New Deal (GND), or so claim its backers citing a recent survey by a group of academic pollsters. Furthermore, this public endorsement is supposedly bipartisan, with 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans indicating that they either strongly or somewhat support the Far Left package to reshape the entire American economy around “green energy” in the course of the next decade.A very different story lurks beneath the surface of these impressive-looking statistics. Although the survey was conducted by a team of professors at George Mason University in Virginia and...

A thing that occurs to you if you attend an elite college or university, as I did, is that most of the professors teaching you are more or less the same beleaguered time-servers who would be teaching you at any other school. I well remember the sad, unshaven schlump in corduroys who taught one of my introductory English courses: He was fine. He knew his stuff. But so did the people who taught me English at my public high school. Sure, at name-brand colleges you can attend huge lectures given by name-brand professors who appear on television and the op-ed...

In the April print edition of The Atlantic, David Frum has an article about immigration. His basic take is simple: because progressives have gone crazy and stopped exercising responsible management of immigration, fascists (his word, not mine) have taken over.The solution, Frum suggests, is to cut immigration by even more than the Trump administration suggests. We can reasonably debate the correct amount of immigration. Americans are about evenly divided between people who want more, less, or about current levels of immigration, so I wonÂ’t try to solve that debate here. ItÂ’s far from clear how Frum thinks his argument...

Sen. Ted Cruz offered support for Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday after her ads were taken off Facebook. The 2020 Democratic presidential contender had called for the breakup of big tech companies, including Facebook, in the ads.

The indictments of actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman on charges of offering bribes to enhance their children’s chances of getting into top colleges may come as a surprise to “Full House” and “Desperate Housewives” fans. But the news of a complicated cheating scandal involving privileged parents is not surprising to education consultants who spoke to NBC News. “Parents are willing to do pretty much anything to get their kids into good schools,” said Robert Schwartz, founder of Your Best College Essay, a business aimed at coaching students to write the perfect college admissions essay. “They are hiring consultants to...

Reflections on the free market, at Chicago’s McCormick Place I like trade shows and conferences. I’ve attended a lot of them - and I’ve given speeches at a few - and I have always found them to be a wonderful microcosm of both society and the economy. No matter how troubled a city or state may be, the trade show is a place to be re-invigorated about the potential in our own American economy and even in the world at large. This week, for example, walking through the Housewares Show at Chicago’s McCormick Place, I was reminded of a number...

Mayor Bill de Blasio has taken the concept of a Nanny State to a whole new level — instructing New Yorkers about what they can and cannot flush down their toilets. “New York City: There are only FOUR things that should go in your toilet,” the mayor’s office tweeted from its official account Tuesday. NYC Mayor's Office ‏ Verified account @NYCMayorsOffice Follow Follow @NYCMayorsOffice More New York City: There are only FOUR things that should go in your toilet 🚽 💩 poop 💦 pee 🤢 puke 👋 toilet paper Everything else causes FATBERGS! What are Fatbergs? Well, you gotta click...

Do you pay enough taxes? What is enough? When asked on "60 Minutes," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn't seem to have a specific tax rate in mind, but then she said, "back in the '60s ... you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent." Suddenly, 70 percent tax rates are a progressive plan, although Rep. Ilhan Omar added, "We've had it as high as 90 percent." She's right. That was the top tax rate when I was a kid, and today, many Democrats say if we'd just raise rates on rich people, government would have plenty of money...

Maybe we do need to make America great — to live in — again. Global consulting firm Mercer has released its quality-of-living rankings, and, for a 10th year in a row, Vienna took the No. 1 spot. It was followed by Zurich, with Auckland, Munich and Vancouver tying for third place. The company ranks hundreds of global cities based on a number of factors, including recreation, housing, economy, public services and transport, political and social environment, education, medical and health considerations, and the natural environment.

The BBC reported Monday that “eleven men have been charged with child sex offences in Sheffield.” The names of those charged make it clear that this was yet another Muslim rape gang – one of a seemingly endless stream. No one in Britain will dare to acknowledge it as such, but this dispiritingly recurring featuring of modern life in the United Kingdom is yet another product of the cultural hegemony of the Left. Of course, the immediate culprit is Islamic teaching. One survivor of a Muslim rape gang in the UK said that her rapists would quote Quran to her,...

AOC accuses Wells Fargo CEO of financing the 'caging' of children at the border and questions why the bank invests in projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilled Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan during a House Financial Services Committee hearing about the bank's practices on Tuesday She asked the executive why the bank invested in private prisons linked to immigration detention on the border Sloan replied that Wells Fargo was severing ties with two private prison firms Ocasio-Cortez then addressed the bank's financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline, asking if it should pay for environmental clean-up if...

E15 fuel has been certified for sale in the United States and is slowly beginning to show up at filling stations. Here's a quick rundown of what you need to know about this new fuel option. What is E15 and why should I care? E15 is shorthand for gasoline blended with 15 percent ethanol. The reason it's a big deal is that ethanol is fairly corrosive to rubber and certain metals, so it can cause damage to vital components. Ethanol also attracts and bonds with water from the air, and that water can separate out inside the tank due to...

A college entrance exam policy that was meant to help students with disabilities was exploited to enable cheating in an explosive school admission scandal. At least 50 people - including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin - were charged with cheating on admission tests and bribing coaches in what's being described as the biggest school admissions scandal ever prosecuted by federal authorities. In the scandal parents had their children 'purport to having learning disabilities' so they could get medical documentation for it and take advantage of the College Board's special accommodations for students with disabilities. With medical proof, those students...

Iowa taxpayers will be forced to fund gender reassignment surgery through Medicaid after the state Supreme Court ruled that such procedures are “medically necessary” for transgender individuals. On Friday, Iowa’s Supreme Court ruled that transgender people can now use Medicaid for “gender-affirming surgeries,” overturning the state’s previously held administrative code regarding Medicaid, which classifies transition-related surgeries as "cosmetic, reconstructive or plastic surgery" and explicitly bans "surgeries for the purpose of sex reassignment,” the Des Moines Register reports. The justices agreed with a district judge's ruling that the rules contradicted protections in the Iowa Civil Rights Act, which added gender identity...

Dr. Douglas Kwazneski was helping a Pittsburgh surgeon remove an appendix when something jarring happened. The surgical stapler meant to cut and seal the tissue around the appendix locked up. Kwazneski later turned to the Food and Drug Administration’s public database that tracks medical device failures and “there was nothing,” he said. Yet when he surveyed leading surgeons on the matter, he discovered that more than two-thirds had experienced a stapler malfunction, or knew a peer who did. Such failures can have deadly consequences. Kwazneski had no idea the FDA had quietly granted the makers of surgical staplers a special...