Free Republic

Cosmetics retail chain Sephora will reportedly close all of its brick-and-mortar U.S. stores, distribution centers and corporate offices Wednesday for a company-wide diversity training program. The closures come after R&B music artist SZA, who is black, said in April she was racially profiled by employees at a Sephora store in Southern California, according to a Reuters report. In a post on Twitter about the incident, SZA said a Sephora employee she identified as “Sandy” called security to watch her and make sure she was not stealing. Sephora spokesperson Emily Shapiro told Reuters that the company-wide closures of Sephora stores is...

The figures are in for New Zealand's 'voluntary' gun 'amnesty' and well, anyone who understands gun ownership shouldn't be surprised. In a nation with 150,000 gun permits and an estimated 1.5 million guns in circulation, the number of actual military-style weapons turned in is ... 530. Obviously, not everyone in New Zealand is onboard with the country's hastily thrown together new law to expropriate weapons in the name of protection from mass shootings. What that utterly miserable '530' figure shows is mass resistance, in response to the complete stupidity of blaming a mass shooting on the gun, not the foreign terrorist using the gun. That's what New...

<p>Beach, Va., Saturday, June 1, 2019. A longtime city employee opened fire at the building Friday before police shot and killed him, authorities said.</p> <p>RICHMOND, Va. (WWBT) - Four days after a gunman opened fire and killed 12 people at a Virginia Beach government building, Gov. Ralph Northam on Tuesday called for a special General Assembly session on gun laws.</p>

Two Smoothie King stores in Charlotte, N.C., have been closed until further notice after racial slurs were allegedly added to customers’ receipts. The incidents reportedly took place at two different Smoothie King stores within hours of each other on Sunday. The first incident allegedly happened around 2:30 pm, according to a photo of the receipt that was shared on social media. In the photo, the N-word is written as the customer name. “I thought it was very disrespectful," Calvin Caldwell, the customer who received the receipt with the racial slur told WSOC-TV. "I thought it was very rude, especially since...

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced on Tuesday that he’ll recall lawmakers to the state Capitol in the coming weeks to take up a package of gun-control legislation, which he said is urgently needed to prevent killings like Friday’s mass shooting in Virginia Beach. Northam said he plans to convene a special legislative session this summer. The Democrat said in an Associated Press interview ahead of his announcement that he wants the Republican-controlled General Assembly to hear from the public about the need for “common-sense” law related to guns and accessories. Republicans have previously rejected Northam’s gun control bills out of...

Trump-hating liberal activists know how to cause trouble. With record low unemployment numbers and a thriving economy, we have seen well organized activists interrupting town halls, blocking traffic in major cities, and using violence. But there is an awful type of activism happening out there, and it affects us all. Even though this activity is underreported, it affects everyone's 401(k) retirement savings. Shareholder activists are taking direct aim at companies — such as oil companies and gun-manufacturers — by abusing rules that publicly traded companies must follow to promote a far-left agenda. Instead of trying to pass gun control laws...

<p>Don’t let HBO’s acclaimed five-part series Chernobyl (HBO, IMDb, Wikipedia) demonize all nuclear power in your mind. It made this kid eager to read Mac MacDowell’s important June 3 article here at American Thinker. In “Rare Earth Minerals and Thorium,” MacDowell explains a different type of nuclear reactor that would do more than just help us produce clean energy. “Global Warmists” would do well to read it.</p>

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Sojourner Truth. Click image (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Sojourner Truth was an early abolitionist and women's right activist who actually held a significant amount of power in pre-Civil War America.Note: Quotes are sometimes paraphrased to make them more adaptable to fit within the Quotefall puzzle structure, particularly with regard to grammar and punctuation. However, I have left this quote verbatim for authentication purposes. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidential...

Joe Biden released a $5 trillion “clean energy revolution” plan Tuesday to combat climate change, which he said is the greatest challenge facing the United States and world. Biden responded aggressively to critics and rival Democratic candidates who predicted he’d be too moderate on climate change, given his pro-union background, with a proposal that he says goes “well beyond” the agenda he undertook in the Obama administration. He vowed to re-enter the Paris Climate Accord that the Obama administration negotiated, and President Trump rejected, on the first day of his presidency, and to commit the U.S. to an even more...

Thousands of people have backed a campaign in Japan calling for the government to ban workplaces from including high heels in their mandatory dress codes for women. The #KuToo movement - which is a play on #MeToo and an amalgam of the Japanese terms for "shoes" and "pain" - was launched by actress and freelance writer Yumi Ishikawa. She said she is required to wear high heels while working at her current part-time job in a funeral parlour. In an online petition, she listed the health issues women face when consistently wearing high-heeled shoes, including bunions, blisters and pain in...

The California Legislative Analyst Office warned that a crash in Silicon Valley stock crash could threaten state solvency with $12 billion in annual capital gains tax losses. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office (LAO) has provided the California Legislature with fiscal analyses and budget advice for 75 years to ensure the “executive branch is implementing legislative policy in a cost efficient and effective manner.” According to the LAO, California personal income tax (PIT) collections are the “single largest source of General Fund revenue.” Key to those collections are capital gains taxes associated with Silicon Valley stock gains. With the tech stock...

I finally got to watch 56-Up, the latest in the Brit Up Series that has followed the lives of 14 Brits born in 1956, starting with Seven Up broadcast on ITV in 1964. The cunning plan of the lefties at Granada TV was to pitch three seven-year-old sweetie-pie working-class lasses against three insufferable upper-class boy snobs, one of whom allowed as how he read the Financial Times. But the whole thing fell apart in later episodes as the working-class girls descended into welfare-state hell and the toffs grew up to be model citizens: Baldrick’s Cunning Plan strikes again. Could it...

Another day, another round of hypocrisy and manufactured outrage by Florida’s political left-wing: In the latest fake upset, a Halloween-coalition of the state’s LGBT lobby and GOP establishment hacks have set their sights on one of the state’s two black Republican legislators. His crime? Laughing off a patently ridiculous proposal by a constituent that he propose legislation criminalizing sodomy. Rep. Mike Hill (YouTube screen grab, cropped)In a sane world, Rep. Mike Hill’s flippant dismissal would be taken to mean that the proposal was so ridiculous he obviously could not and did not take it seriously. In fact, no normal person...

For weeks, the “Jeopardy!” phenomenon James Holzhauer had been unstoppable. He set the record for the most money won in one episode, holds the second spot on the list, and the next 14. Eleven times during his winning streak, he went a whole game without buzzing in incorrectly. For fans, the question was not whether he would surpass the $2.52 million Ken Jennings won during his record 74-game winning streak in 2004, but when. The correct response: What is never? In the prerecorded episode that aired on Monday, Holzhauer’s “Jeopardy!” reign came to an end with his 33rd game, a...

Florida police are hoping to find a woman who twerked as she and her accomplice stole from an area clothing store in April. Surveillance video released on Thursday shows the robbery taking place at a MadRag clothing store in Pembroke Pines on April 26. Footage shows the woman - dressed in yellow pants and a patterned strapless halter top - twerking in the store in an effort to serve as a distraction.

President Donald Trump exchanged formal toasts with Queen Elizabeth II during an elaborate State Banquet at Buckingham Palace on June 3, ending the first day of his state visit to the UK. Trump is spending three days in the UK during his weeklong European trip, which is both ceremonial and official. The centerpiece of the president’s visit will be two days to mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day on June 6, likely the last significant commemoration most veterans of the 1944 battle will see. Apart from visiting the queen and attending D-Day commemoration ceremonies on both sides of the English...

The family of the 18-year-old UC Merced freshman who stabbed four people in 2015 has filed for a restraining order to prevent the release of his manifesto and related reports, according to documents filed in Alameda County Superior Court. A computer science student from Santa Clara, Faisal Mohammad wielded a 10-inch knife on Nov. 4, 2015, before he was shot to death by a campus police officer, according to authorities.

Warning that “we must take drastic action now to address the climate disaster facing the nation and our world,” former Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday unveiled a wide-ranging plan to combat climate change and transform America’s economy. Using the Green New Deal as a framework, the clear front-runner right now in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination announced he’s “calling for a Clean Energy Revolution to confront this crisis and do what America does best – solve big problems with big ideas.” The price tag for the proposal -- named ‘The Biden Plan for a Clean Energy...

Two fishermen who filmed themselves laughing as they cut off an endangered shark's tail have received a huge backlash. Horrific footage taken by the men on board their boat shows them throwing the shark back into the sea. The shark is shown struggling to swim away as it leaves a stream of blood from its painful.

On Sunday, CNN held town hall specials with a trio of presidential candidates -- Seth Moulton, Eric Swalwell and Tim Ryan. We watched it so you wouldn't have to. All three of them are Democratic members of Congress. None is in danger of becoming president anytime soon. So why do we pay attention to what they say? Well, because as they stammer and sweat and pander profusely, they give us a good idea of what the Democratic primary voters believe and what they care about. And of course, the thing they care about most -- a thing they can't stop...