Free Republic

Full title: Cat sparks $7,500 rescue mission after getting stuck on bridge six days; mission fails, pet gets bored and wanders homeHatty, 5, became trapped on the Royal Albert Bridge, which connects Plymouth and Saltash, on Friday, and firefighters spent around five hours trying to get her down in an ordeal costing $7,500. The train system which operates the bridge even planned to close the tracks to rescue her, while the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) was also present.But when firefighters had decided to give up for the day, vowing to return Thursday, the cat,...

WASHINGTON — With their playbook for pushing government boundaries as a guide, some Silicon Valley investors are nudging election officials toward an innovation that prominent coders and cryptographers warn is downright dangerous for democracy. Voting by phone could be coming soon to an election near you. As seasoned disruptors of the status quo, tech pioneers have proven persuasive in selling the idea, even as the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine specifically warn against any such experiment. The fight over mobile voting pits technologists who warn about the risks of entrusting voting to apps and cellphones against others who...

Mexico's top diplomats are knocking on doors in Washington this week, looking for a compromise to avoid the 5 percent tariffs that President Trump has vowed to impose on their exports beginning next week. Trump said he would impose the tariffs and that they would escalate over time unless Mexico took unspecified steps to curb the immigration crisis at the border. Mexico Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard told reporters in Washington on Monday that the tariffs would be counterproductive in combatting mass migration from Central America, and that the economic fallout could further weaken Mexico's ability to control migration in the...

Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday denied a recent request by the Trump administration for the court to quickly decide if it will hear oral arguments in a protracted legal battle over President Trump's move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which shields hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants from deportation. The one-sentence order by the conservative-leaning court thwarted a request made by the Justice Department late last month and is likely to prolong the nearly two-year court fight over the fate of the Obama-era program — which has been kept alive by several...

Kenneth Copeland defends using three private jets in an Inside Edition interview In 2016 he called flying commercial getting in 'a long tube with demons' The 82-year-old claims he wasn't talking about the people on planes But he said watching someone get dragged off a plane made him want to punch He asked: 'Do you think that's a good environment for a preacher to be?' and said: 'I can't be doing that when I'm getting ready to preach!' Flying commercial meant 'he could no longer do what I was called to do' and hinted a risk he may lose his...

An American couple vacationing in the Dominican Republic died of respiratory failure and pulmonary edema, according to officials. Edward Nathael Holmes, 63, and Cynthia Ann Day, 49, were found dead Thursday in their hotel room in San Pedro de Macorís, on the southeast coast of the country, according to the Dominican Republic National Police. They arrived at the hotel on May 25 and were scheduled to depart on Thursday, police said. Several bottles of medicine used to treat high blood pressure were found in the couple's room, according to authorities. Their cause of death was determined by autopsies performed at...

The US Supreme Court's decision on an Indiana abortion law rankled Planned Parenthood president Leana Wen who found their ruling allowing the disposition of remains provision to stay in force "an affront," while praising their striking down of a provision prohibiting abortions to be undertaken for reasons of the race, sex, or disability of the child "a lucid expansion of Roe v. Wade framework." "It is our position that a woman's right to abort an unwanted child is an unalienable right," Wen said. "This means that no subordinate unit of government has any authority to restrict it in any way....

Following president Donald Trump's threats to hit Mexico with tariff hikes if the country fails to stem the flood of illegal immigrants, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador responded by saying they could be "prepared to reach out the deal." White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney reaffirmed that Trump is "deadly serious" about levying a 5% tariff on Mexican goods if the Mexican government if they don't step up enforcement on the southern side of the border,

"Gillibrand called us the worst org in the country, but when she represented NY20, she wrote us: “I appreciate the work that the NRA does to protect gun owners rights, and I look forward to working with you for many years.” Now that she’s looking to crack 1%, she’ll say anything."

[Catholic Caucus] Who Covered Up McCarrick’s Offenses. The Silences and Words of the Pope In recent days there has come back with a vengeance the case of Theodore E. McCarrick, the American cardinal first stripped of the scarlet and finally expelled from the clerical state last February, after having been found guilty by the congregation for the doctrine of the faith of “solicitation in the Sacrament of Confession, and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and with adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power.”Reigniting attention over his case were two concomitant facts: a few statements by...

... “From 2006 to 2016 North Korea steadily increased the size of the events, from somewhere around 1 kiloton up to around 20 kilotons. The very early events looked like they didn’t work very well, because they were unusually small. And then in one year they jumped up to 250-ish kilotons,” said Thorne Lay, a seismologist at the University of California Santa Cruz and an author of the AGU study. “The scary thing is that this was such a big device.” ...

Tommorow, June 4th marks the 30th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. With sharp trade disputes between the US and China, this year promises sharper public interest in the massacre. In preparation for the Anniversary, San Francisco-based Twitter has shut down 32,000 accounts critical of the Chinese Communist Party, accounts originating both in and outside China. Facebook is also said to have taken similar pre-June 4th action against 40,000 accounts. No explanation has been given. Most accounts of the incident acknowledge hundreds of deaths in Tiananmen Square, but experts claim the actual figure runs into thousands, some even...

While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is urging caution and patience in response to those in her party clamoring for impeachment proceedings against President Trump, her top deputies are signaling it’s only a matter of time before they begin. South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, the third-highest-ranking Democrat in the House, said in an interview Sunday that he believes impeachment proceedings ultimately will be launched against Trump at some point in the future. He suggested Democrats are already laying the groundwork in Congress. “I think we’ve already begun,” Clyburn said on CNN's "State of the Union." “We’ve got all of these committees...

President Trump's state visit to the United Kingdom has the potential to interfere with British politics at a time when the country is particularly divided, according to NBC's Chuck Todd.

As leftists go, there are few more obnoxious than Sadiq Khan of London. His city a festering swamp of stabbings, insanely expensive subway rides, Islamist extremism, and terrorist attacks. Yet somehow finds he still has time to launch lots of attacks against President Trump, the president of another country. He started this one with a bang, declaring he didn't think President Trump deserved a state visit and no one should 'roll out the red carpet' for him. Pay no attention to the longtime special relationship or the countless ways the two countries have cooperated over the years, let alone the...

The Office of Inspector General’s report on the FBI and Justice Department’s handling and mishandling of the investigation of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of an unauthorized, non-secure email server to conduct secret government business as Secretary of State revealed real and damning information on the mainstream media and their tight relationship with the deepest members of the deep state. But for some reason this story has just disappeared into the ether. And with all this talk of collusion you’d think this would be a hot topic. While the FBI was leaking classified information, reporters were funneling bribes...

Over the past half-decade or so it’s become fashionable to claim that millions of Americans, including many families with kids, are mired in “extreme poverty” — they’re not just below the poverty line, and they’re not even in “deep poverty,” defined at half the poverty line; they’re making do on less than $2 per person per day, the kind of threshold we use to measure deprivation in the Third World.I wrote last year about some research led by the American Enterprise Institute’s Bruce Meyer that devastates these claims — research that he and three coauthors have now expanded and updated....

U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes called for the release of “all backup and source information” for the Mueller report on Friday after a newly released transcript of a former Trump lawyer's voicemail message included content that did not appear in a version that was part of the special counsel's Russia investigation findings. “It’s all a fraud,” Nunes wrote on Twitter, referring to the Mueller report, to which the California Republican referred using the hashtag #muellerdossier. Nunes, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, was reacting to the release of a voicemail message that John Dowd, a former lawyer for President Trump,...

Attorney General William Barr’s nearly hour-long interview with CBS News’ Jan Crawford last week was full of fascinating details about the special counsel probe, the debunked Russia collusion theory that roiled Washington for years, and Barr’s investigation into how the FBI and Department of Justice used the “bogus” theory to investigate the Trump campaign.The interview was downplayed by the media, which is implicated in perpetuating the Russia hoax Barr is investigating, and which came in for criticism from Barr for its failure to care about violations of civil liberties. Here are the top 28 take-aways from the interview.1. Mueller ‘Could Have...

NEVER GET IN A TAXI WITH A MUSLIM DRIVER, especially if you’re in India JUNE 2, 2019 BY BARENAKEDISLAM Muslim Taxi Driver in Meerut, India admits to 250 murders of non-Muslims in last four months, which averages out to two murders per day. Hindu Existence (h/t Upananda B) In a shocking confession, a Muslim man arrested on charges of murder has claimed to having killed about 250 people in the past four months, police said on Thursday, adding that the matter was being investigated. The accused, identified only as Salim, is a middle-aged Muslim taxi driver in this Uttar Pradesh...