Free Republic

Protesters gathered outside a Los Angeles bar Saturday night after a video surfaced on social media of two transgender women being forcibly and violently removed from the venue by bar staff and security after allegedly being the target of a hate crime by other patrons. A group of volunteers and staff members from Bienestar Human Services, a local nonprofit organization, had just finished attending and speaking at DTLA Proud, an annual two-day event that celebrates the LGBTQ community, when they were aggressively approached by a heterosexual couple at Las Perlas bar, according to a press release from Bienestar. "My friend...

During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea. Now for a more rigorous scientific explanation of why this would not be an effective hurricane modification technique. The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy...

Bank of America Corp.’s CEO Brian Moynihan says he doesn’t see a recession in the offing because the U.S. consumer remains healthy. . . . “Look, when the yield curve moved around the pundit-ocracy got going, saying, ‘Here, this means a recessions coming,’” Moynihan told CNBC. However, the bank boss said this time the recessionary gauge may be influenced by a global market swirling in some $15 trillion in negative interest rates.

A man has been charged in the murder of a 22-year-old transgender woman he was dating who was found dead last month, according to Houston police. The body of Tracy Williams, also known as Tracy Single, was found on July 30 about 3:30 a.m. in a parking lot on Interstate 10 in Houston, officials from the Houston Police Department said in a press release. She had sustained a "puncture wound" and severe lacerations, police said. Joshua Dominic Bourgeois, 25, was considered a suspect after investigators learned he had been in a "dating relationship" with Williams, police said. He was arrested...

A 6-month-old girl is fighting for her life in a Texas hospital after she and her father illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with a group of migrants, federal officials said. The baby is being treated at Driscoll Children's Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, where she is in critical condition, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said in a statement. "Our thoughts and prayers are with the young girl and her father during this difficult time," CBP officials said in their statement. U.S. Border Patrol agents came upon the infant and her father at 1:30 a.m. on Thursday, about three miles...

A shooting that broke out over an argument at a 2-year-old's birthday party in Maryland sent seven people to the hospital on Saturday night. The shooting took place outside of an apartment complex in Camp Springs, where about 12 people were in attendance at the party. An individual approached the group of party-goers where allegedly "words were exchanged" and shots were fired into the group, according to Prince George’s County Police Chief Hank Stawinski. Of the seven shot, three are "more serious” and four are "less serious," Stawinski said. All were transported to the hospital and are expected to survive.

The California sheriff's deputy who launched an expensive, citywide manhunt for the sniper who shot him in his own station's parking lot made up the entire incident, police said late Saturday. Angel Reinosa, who is still a trainee with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Lancaster station, said he had been shot in the shoulder of his bulletproof vest while making his way to his car Wednesday. He announced over his radio in dramatic fashion he had been shot by someone in the apartment building next to the parking lot. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department immediately mobilized a large-scale...

Joe Arpaio announced Sunday night that he plans to run for sheriff of Maricopa County in 2020 after losing his most recent reelection bid. Arpaio served as the county’s sheriff for 1993 until 2016, with his 24 years in office making him the longest-serving sheriff in the county’s history. "The last four years have proven to be a time of lost opportunities to continue the kind of tough policing this county needs," Arpaio wrote in a statement posted on Twitter. "Once back in office, I will use my position to restore pride to our law enforcement ranks, not only here,...

The New York Times has, several days after Breitbart News first exposed politics editor Tom Wright-Piersanti’s racist and antisemitic comments on Twitter, admitted the comments were in fact racist and antisemitic. A piece the New York Times released on Sunday, which described a broader operation of loosely organized supporters of President Donald Trump fighting back against the media with aggressive new tactics, was the first time the newspaper in its own pages addressed the scandal regarding Wright-Piersanti. In the piece, the Times reveals that it considers the tweets racist and antisemitic. Before this piece, the Times had only described the...

For the second time since classes resumed at public schools in St. Louis this month, grief counselors will be on hand at an elementary school on Monday to comfort friends of 8-year-old Jurnee Thompson, a third-grader gunned down while standing in front of a restaurant with relatives following a football game. Since April, nine children under the age of 17 have been killed by gun violence in the city of St. Louis, and authorities say no one has been charged in any of the slayings. "We are all at risk," a frustrated St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson said at a...

The majority of Americans said they are angry at the political establishment, which they say benefits the well-connected class, according to a new poll. Seventy percent of Americans said they feel angry because the political system seems to only be working for insiders with money and power, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday. The poll found 43 percent of Americans said the statement described them “very well” and 27 percent said it described them “somewhat.” It is statistically equivalent to the number of Americans who felt the same way four years ago, ahead of President Trump’s 2016...

Something we’ve known for a while about The Eternals is that it’ll introduce the MCU’s first ever openly gay hero. We’re not sure which of the movie’s starry ensemble will take that role, but Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has now shared some fresh details about the mystery character, saying the following: “The Eternals will feature Marvel’s first openly gay character. He’s married and has a family and it’s part of who he is.” The full ensemble for The Eternals was revealed at D23 yesterday and we now know that Angelina Jolie is Thena, Richard Madden is Ikaris, Salma Hayek...

The epicenter of 2018’s version of conservatism, and of American Trumpism, isn’t Washington, DC. It’s California. Breitbart News was founded in Los Angeles, and its headquarters remains in the city’s Brentwood Heights neighborhood. Its founder, Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012, met former White House adviser Steve Bannon in LA. Ben Shapiro, whom Breitbart mentored and who worked at his eponymous publication, now runs his own conservative media empire, DailyWire.com, out of a nondescript office building in LA. The Claremont Colleges, located on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, were the birthplace of intellectual Trumpism and the “Flight 93...

As Europe marks 80 years of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which carved up eastern Europe between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Russia is trying to defend the agreement again. There is no political benefit to doing this. President Vladimir Putin needs to abandon his Stalinist inheritance of a foreign policy based solely on national interest. If Moscow needed any reminder that many in eastern Europe still hold the treaty against it and still consider it a threat, plenty came on the anniversary. The governments of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania – the countries directly affected by the pact’s secret...

Football is brutal. How does Brady do it? Young Andrew Luck retired, at 29.

In the 1950's, companies were given generous tax breaks for investing their incomes within the country, but not outside the country. I'm just wondering if we shouldn't return to that model. I'm not arguing about the 90% tax rate, because that's a load of hooey and I'd rather have companies stay in the country. However, I think it is a fair question as to whether a company should receive tax breaks for sending their money overseas to develop other countries?

The Fake News Media is reporting that President Trump suggested dropping nuclear bombs into hurricanes to stop them from hitting the United States. IIRC, President Clinton also discussed dropping cylinders into hurricanes to help destroy them. Fidel Castro was opposed to it, thinking that they were a spying mechanism for when hurricanes were over Cuba. I worked for the Govt. of Puerto Rico during Hurricanes Floyd, Mitch & Georges in the late 1990s. This idea from the White House floated in our office. I'm pretty sure that the US govt. has probably 'purged' all this cylinder documentation from the Clinton...

French police have seized ten Chinese-owned wine châteaux in Bordeaux on suspicion of tax fraud and money laundering, a police source said on Friday. The châteaux, worth nearly £25 million, are owned by the Haichang Group, controlled by one of China’s richest men, Qu Naijie, 57, an oil billionaire. The group owns 24 estates in Bordeaux, including Château Chenu Lafitte, which it bought for nearly £9 million in 2011. The largest of the many Chinese investors who have bought Bordeaux wineries over the past decade, Haichang has invested nearly £50 million in the French wine industry. For the past four...

It’s time for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s sputtering presidential campaign to call it quits, a friend of hers and two former aides told The Post. “It would be best if she decided that this was not her time,” said one longtime Gillibrand fundraiser, who claimed the Democratic contender’s well-heeled supporters want her to remain in the US Senate. “Most people that I talk to are very happy with her as their senator and don’t want her to give up her Senate seat and don’t see any realistic traction for her.”

The Likud began a campaign on Sunday portraying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “in another league” from his competition. As part of the campaign, the party hung massive posters from its 15-story headquarters in Tel Aviv featuring Netanyahu with US President Donald Trump, Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on three sides of the building. A Likud spokeswoman said that there would be no poster on the fourth side “for now.”