Free Republic

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) have remained silent after the Palestinian Authority banned LGBT activity in the West Bank. These members of "The Squad" have supported legislation praising the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and voted against legislation condemning it. PJ Media reached out to them for comment on the move, and they have remained silent. Early Monday morning, The Jerusalem Post reported that the PA and Palestine Police had outlawed LGBT activity in the West Bank and threatened to arrest members of the LGBT group Al-Qaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian...

On Tuesday, the markets bid higher following a statement from the U.S. Trade Representative’s office that tariffs will commence on September 1st, but that some products will be delayed until December 15th. To wit: “…some tariffs will take effect on Sept. 1 as planned, ‘certain products are being removed from the tariff list based on health, safety, national security and other factors and will not face additional tariffs of 10 percent. Further, as part of USTR’s public comment and hearing process, it was determined that the tariff should be delayed to December 15 for certain articles.” The only part the...

President Trump recently promised that "America will never be a socialist country" -- at least not while he's in office. But some members of his administration didn't get the memo. The Department of Health and Human Services still plans to impose socialist, European-style price controls on advanced drugs administered through Medicare. The proposal would tie Medicare's drug reimbursement rates to the average prices paid by governments that impose price controls on medicines. HHS officials hope their scheme will reduce pharmaceutical spending here in America -- and force other developed nations to foot more of the bill for drug research and...

Stacey Abrams defended her refusal to concede last year’s Georgia gubernatorial election on Monday, arguing that adhering to the democratic norm of conceding to a victorious opponent would make her “complicit” in a “rigged” system. Abrams has consistently refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Republican Brian Kemp’s November gubernatorial victory and cites the dynamics of her loss as the motivating factor behind the launch of her national voting-rights-advocacy group Fair Fight 2020. During a Monday appearance on CBS This Morning, Abrams pushed back on the suggestion that her denial of the election result’s legitimacy resembles President Trump’s 2016 flirtation with...

A Democratic state senator from Illinois came under fire over the weekend after pictures were posted online showing his supporters at a fundraising event performing a mock assassination of a faux President Trump. “The tolerant left,” wrote a Facebook user in response to the incident. Photos posted by a woman who witnessed the mock assassination on Friday night show supporters of Sen. Martin Sandoval, who represents Illinois’ 11th District — which includes parts of Chicago — acting out in front of guests, according to WCIA. One of them can be seen pointing a fake machine gun at a man wearing...

Colin Kaepernick. Remember him? Below-average quarterback. Above-average poseur. Not “activist,” not really. Activists actually say stuff. Kaepernick almost never says anything. He’s like the Queen or most popes — you have to read the deep-background musings of supposed members of his inner circle to get a clue as to what he might be thinking. Kaepernick hasn’t played in the NFL since 2016, when anyway he was merely the disappointing starter on its worst team, and given that dozens of quarterbacks have entered the league since then and that he’s been gathering rust like the Tin Woodman for three years, he...

President Donald Trump is calling on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by at least a full percentage point "over a fairly short period of time," saying that such an action would make the U.S. economy even better and would also "greatly and quickly" enhance the global economy. In two tweets Monday, Trump kept up his pressure on the Fed and its chairman Jerome Powell, saying the U.S. economy was strong "despite the horrendous lack of vision by Jay Powell and the Fed." Powell is Trump's hand-picked choice for the top Fed job. He said Democrats were trying to...

An influential medical journal published a study Monday that links fluoride consumption during pregnancy with lower childhood IQs—a finding that could undermine decades of public-health messaging, fire up conspiracy theorists, and alarm mothers-to-be. The research was expected to be so controversial that JAMA Pediatrics included an editor’s note saying the decision to publish it was not easy and that it was subjected to “additional scrutiny.” “It is the only editor’s note I’ve ever written,” Dimitri Christakis, editor in chief of JAMA Pediatrics and a pediatrician, told The Daily Beast. “There was concern on the journal’s editorial team about how this...

The U.S. Marine Corps announced that the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle is officially ready to deploy, one year ahead of schedule. Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Combat Development and Integration said on Monday that the JLTV program had reached "initial operational capability," making the vehicles ready for use worldwide, on Aug. 2. The four-wheeled vehicle, developed with the U.S. Army, will fully replace the Marines' aging fleet of High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles. The new transports offer different variants with multiple mission package configurations, including packages for personnel, heavy guns and close combat weapons. "The warfighting capabilities the JLTV provides...

U.S. tech giants and an array of their trade groups slammed France over its new digital taxes law during a public hearing on Monday, arguing the legislation unfairly targets U.S. technology companies and could hobble their operations. Representatives from Google, Facebook, and Amazon testified before a group of government officials investigating the digital services tax, laying out their arguments to a largely sympathetic panel that referred to the French law as unprecedented. The United States Trade Representative (USTR) launched a probe into France's digital taxes last month, using the same aggressive process that previously resulted in the Trump administration's implementation...

Full title: Judicial Watch Files Complaint With Rhode Island Supreme Court Against U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse For Unauthorized Practice of Law Alleges Whitehouse filed a brief with U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of four clients while maintaining inactive status and that the brief was nothing more than an attack on the federal judiciary and an open threat to the U.S. Supreme Court (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a complaint with the Unauthorized Practice of Law Committee of the Rhode Island Supreme Court against U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who is a member of the Rhode...

At Wednesday's El Cenizo City Council meeting, commissioners unanimously voted to have a meeting with an organization that was started through a crowdfunding webpage to build privately funded sections of President Donald Trump's proposed border wall. El Cenizo City Commissioner Salvador Hernandez posted an agenda item to have a meeting with the organization We Build The Wall to discuss future planning to construct a barrier on the end of the riverbank picnic area in the city. "(We Build the Wall) will be in charge of putting up the barrier, cleaning the area, putting cameras and making it safe for the...

Mexican authorities have rescued 65 migrants from South Asia who were found starving and severely dehydrated. Once their nationalities are identified and confirmed they will be sent back to their countries. SNIP Federal police have found 65 severely dehydrated and starving migrants from Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka on a highway in the coastal state of Veracruz. Mexico's Public Safety Department said on Thursday that the migrants endured a long and difficult journey in an attempt to reach the US border. "It is very rare to find migrants of this type of nationalities, they are regularly Central American and even...

Twenty-eight individuals were shot, five fatally, over the weekend in Democrat-controlled Chicago. NBC Chicago reports the first of the weekend’s fatalities was a double murder that occurred in a shooting around 4 pm Friday. The fatality occurred Sunday evening, when a 41-year-old man was shot twice and killed on South Crilly. Earlier Sunday a 46-year-old woman was shot and killed while “driving southbound in the 5100 block of South Prairie.” The other shooting fatality occurred around 4 am Saturday, when a 45-year-old man driving a car was shot by a man who was standing on the sidewalk.

A group known as The Climate Mobilization, which has called for a World War II-style mobilization to combat “climate change” and is aligned with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders, is criticizing American media outlets for allowing “climate deniers” to express their views. As such, the group wants media to ban them in an effort to silence all opposition to “climate change” rhetoric. “Some media outlets are sacrificing the future of our planet for the sake of appearing objective,” Margaret Klein Salamon, founder and executive director of The Climate Mobilization, said in a news release Saturday. “This idea...

Kids are great tools for big money and major powers lurking in the shadows, attempting to enact a political agenda. The latest instance, and it's a doozy, is young Greta Thunberg, the Swedish child climate activist who's coming to the states (with a big carbon footprint, according to today's piece by Thomas Lifson) to persuade us all to jump in on the global warming cavalcade of green laws to restrict our own freedoms — which, as it happens, will just coincidentally make the green elites even richer. No wonder they're the shadowy forces bankrolling her peregrinations. According to a report...

An ancients village dating back to before the Pyramids era was discovered by a team from Canadian Ph.D. students. CTV reports that a team of students from the University of Victoria’s archeology department has uncovered the oldest settlement in North America.

C.S. Lewis once said that courage is the “form of every virtue at its testing point.” It is easy to forget that figures such as Lewis, Tolkien, and even Chesterton, did not write during a time of Christian ascendancy. Lewis was denied a chair (a full professorship) at Oxford for years precisely because of his embarrassingly public profession of faith. To the “learned” sceptics around him, it made him seem “less than serious.” Tolkien was a devout, practicing Catholic, but was never as public as Lewis. Lewis wrote popular books on the topic and gave radio addresses. All of that...

Catholics to US Bishops: Restore Eucharistic Belief Through Tradition, Orthodoxy WASHINGTON (ChurchMilitant.com) - Catholics and even non-Catholics are telling the U.S. bishops that only by restoring reverence toward the Blessed Sacrament will they restore belief in the Real Presence. The bishops, however, are offering catechetical booklets. Following a poll showing 7 out of 10 baptized Catholics do not believe that the Eucharist is Christ, U.S. bishops are asking the public for a solution. On Friday, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops posted the following question on its official Facebook page: "A recent PEW study revealed that only 1/3 of Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the...

NYPD fires Officer Daniel Pantaleo in chokehold death of Eric Garner NYPD cop Daniel Panatelo has been fired for causing the chokehold death of Eric Garner, Police Commissioner James O’Neill announced Monday. O’Neill’s widely expected decision to fire the embattled cop endorsed the recommendation of a deputy commissioner who presided over Pantaleo’s departmental trial earlier this year. It also came after Mayor Bill de Blasio proclaimed that Garner’s family was “going to get justice…in the next 30 days” during a Democratic presidential primary debate on July 31.