Free Republic

A new report has found that in the top 100 Hollywood films from 2007 through 2018, only 4.5% of all speaking characters were Latino, far out of step with the US population. The study, titled Latinos in Film: Erasure on Screen & Behind the Camera Across 1,200 Popular Movies, found a dearth of Latino representation in Hollywood’s top movies of the last decade, both in front of and behind the camera. Published in association with the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers and Wise Entertainment, the report outlined the prevalence of Latino erasure or misrepresentation...

Ana Kasparian, co-host of 'The Young Turks', said Monday night (snip) "I just want to quickly talk about or answer the question about who would be the best challenger to Donald Trump," Kasparian said in an interview on CNN. ... And Viden (sic) has this habit, and I think you see this with a lot of establishment Democrats, where he thinks he can work with the right-wing and compromise with the right-wing." "I think that establishment that Democrats are really missing the point," she said. "We don't want someone who's going to concede to the right-wing. We want a fighter,...

First piloted as an experiment to reduce dental cavities in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1945, fluoridated drinking water has since been hailed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta as “one of public health’s greatest success stories.” Today, about two-thirds of people in the United States receive fluoridated tap water, as do many people in Australia, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Now, a controversial new study links fluoridation to lower IQ in young children, especially boys whose mothers drank fluoridated water while pregnant. Longtime fluoridation critics are lauding the study, but other...

Democratic presidential hopefuls are pleading with Americans to cough up even a single buck towards their campaigns. While such a small donation won't even buy crosstown bus fare for a campaign worker, it will go toward a more immediate and critical goal: reaching the threshold of 130,000 unique donors to get on the stage in Houston for Democratic National Committee debates scheduled for Sept. 12 and 13. "There's always been donor acquisition costs in campaigns," since in political quests as in business, it takes money to make money, says veteran Democratic political consultant Joe Fuld, president of The Campaign Workshop....

A hierarch of the Cypriot Orthodox Church has found himself in trouble after statements he made in June on the origin of homosexuality became public recently. The Nicosia Police have even launched an investigation into the supposed “hate speech” by request of the attorney general and announced that they will be taking a statement from His Eminence Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, whose statements have caused quite a stir in the media both in Cyprus and internationally. The commotion began after video surfaced in which Met. Neophytos told the story of a young man who gave up his sinful, homosexual lifestyle...

After nearly 50 years, men who wrote contemporary music for Mass have their final concert togetherST. LOUIS (ChurchMilitant.com) - The men responsible for some of the most popular songs sung at Mass are having their final concert in September. Back in the 1970s, five men in formation with the Jesuits in St. Louis, Missouri, began writing songs that they would then sing during Mass — typically with accompaniment on the guitar. The songs that they wrote were simple, folksy and thoroughly modern. They became known as the St. Louis Jesuits. Each man worked independently, but they often helped each other...

CNN’s April Ryan went into the bunker over this incident. Earlier this month, her bodyguard got into a physical altercation with a local New Jersey reporter at an education summit. It’s all caught on video and the bodyguard was slapped with an assault charge. The liberal media speaks all the time about how President Trump bashing the media is dangerous; it’s not. It’s just spoiled, entitled liberal media elitists not liking being trashed so thoroughly on a daily basis for their Democratic Party activism. If you want to do that, fine—just don’t give off this veneer that you’re unbiased. It’s...

The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos who is also the CEO of Amazon, claims in a new editorial that a “rational” national immigration policy would deliver an endless stream of welfare-dependent immigrants to American corporations and businesses. Despite rising wages for America’s blue-collar and working-class thanks to a tightened labor market, the Post editors write that importing low-income foreign workers is “the obvious antidote to chronic and predictable labor deficits.” To date, there remains about 12 million Americans out of the labor market who are unemployed, under-employed, or discouraged by their job prospects but all of whom want...

Bishop Antonio Yao Shun, 54, is a liturgical expert. He taught many years in the national seminary and studied in the USA and in Jerusalem. Some bishops and faithful in China think that the Pope appointed Msgr. Yao long before the agreement. His motto is that of the 2015-2016 Jubilee: "Be merciful as your Father is".Jining (AsiaNews) - Fr. Antonio Yao Shun, a liturgical expert, was ordained as bishop of Jining (diocese also known as Ulanqab, in Inner Mongolia). The ceremony took place this morning in Jining Cathedral. Fr. Yao, 54, was consecrated by Msgr. Paul Meng Qinglu of Hohhot...

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren wove details of her personal history — her father’s heart attack, her mother’s minimum wage job, her commuter college — with calls for a radical remaking of America’s economy and political system, as she spoke in Seattle on Sunday to what her staff called the largest crowd of her 7-month-old campaign. The U.S. senator from Massachusetts described a country that has gone off course. When she was a child and her father got sick, she recalled, her mother was able to take a minimum wage job at Sears that paid the mortgage and put food on...

Advocates for victims of priest sexual abuse were also critical of a recent private meeting between the Illinois attorney general and Cardinal Blase Cupich.Advocates for victims of priest sex abuse called Friday for Attorney General Kwame Raoul to use his power of subpoena to compel the Catholic church in Illinois to hand over evidence in an ongoing probe into clergy sex abuse of minors. Leaders of SNAP and The Archangel Foundation, nonprofit sex abuse survivor advocacy groups, also were critical of a recent private meeting between Raoul and Cardinal Blase Cupich. Larry Antonsen, a leader with SNAP, said the one-on-one...

Local climate activist groups are organizing massive public participation in global climate strikes on two Fridays next month, Sept. 20 and Sept. 27, with demonstrations planned during the week between.

Amazon bishop: Synod document fails to mention area’s huge pedophilia problem, Pentecostalism BELÉM, Brazil, August 26, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) ― A retired bishop who has lived in Brazil for more than 30 years said the working document for the Synod on the Amazon neglects key problems in the region.  Spanish missionary José Luiz Azcona Hermoso, O.A.R., 79, was ordained a bishop in 1987 and served as the ordinary of Brazil’s Territorial Prelature of Marajó until Pope Francis accepted his resignation in 2016.  Azcona told CNA affiliate AC1 Digital that the Instrumentum laboris for the upcoming Synod did not address the...

|Tumbleweeds might look soft and fluffy from a distance, but hit one with your car and you quickly learn how woody, spiky and mean they really are. Just look at what happened when Victorville, California, got buried beneath tumbleweeds in 2018. A new species of giant tumbleweed is now thriving in the US. Salsola ryanii is a hybrid that grows bigger than its parent plants. It can top 6 feet (2 meters) in height, so it's not like those cute little rolling tumbleweeds you see in Western movies. Researchers at University of California Riverside took a closer look at why...

China and the United States traded punches last week in the ongoing trade dispute, after China announced tariff increases on $75 billion of U.S. agricultural and other goods. The Trump administration responded by ending a delay in the imposition of U.S. tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese goods and by tacking on a five percent increase in overall tariffs to boot. But President Trump landed a haymaker on Sunday at the previously scheduled G-7 meeting when he announced that the Japanese would replace China’s broken corn purchase promise with $7 billion of agricultural product purchases. The bilateral deal will also...

Two German bishops endorse book calling for Church blessing for homosexual couples August 26, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Sources in Germany have alerted LifeSiteNews that two German bishops – the Vice-President of the German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Franz-Josef Bode (Osnabrück), and Hamburg’s Archbishop Stefan Hesse – have written a preface for the book With the Blessing of the Church? Same-Sex Partnership in the Focus of Pastoral Care (Mit dem Segen der Kirche? Gleichgeschlechtliche Partnerschaft im Fokus der Pastoral). The book, which has just been published in Germany by the publishing house Herder Verlag, was edited by Dr. Stephan Loos, Dr....

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — In a story Aug. 14 about Rep. Steve King’s comments on banning abortion, The Associated Press, relying on a story by The Des Moines Register, inaccurately quoted King as saying, “It’s not the baby’s fault for the sin of the father, or of the mother.” Referring to House support for a ban on abortions, King actually said, “I’ve got 174 people who say they don’t want exceptions for rape and incest because they understand it is not the baby’s fault, to abort the baby, because of the sin of the father, and maybe sometimes the...

The Washington Post‘s medic critic, Erik Wemple, on Monday scorched the New York Times for its “triggered” reaction to a Breitbart News article that exposed antisemitic and racist tweets from one of its senior editors. Breitbart News reported Thursday that a senior editor at the Times, Tom Wright-Piersanti, had a history of antisemitic and racist tweets, including a tweet from January 1, 2010, that read: “I was going to say ‘Crappy Jew Year,’ but one of my resolutions is to be less anti-Semitic. So… HAPPY Jew Year. You Jews.” The Times at first refused to respond to repeated requests for...

Over the weekend, Elizabeth Warren spoke in front of 15,000 people at a campaign rally in Seattle, Washington. It was, by her campaign's estimates, the single largest crowd the Massachusetts Senator has drawn in her nearly year-long quest to be the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. (The 15,000 number came from Warren's campaign so take it with a grain of slate. But it's clear from the photos there were a WHOLE lot of people there.) And, the Seattle crowd wasn't an anomaly. In St. Paul, Minnesota last week, Warren's campaign estimated 12,000 people turned out to see her. She had an...

A lawyer for former U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman denied on Sunday accusations leveled in a lawsuit that the New York Democrat is a sexual "predator" who violated a teenager at a Boy Scout camp five decades ago. In a suit filed this month in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, Ackerman is accused of abusing a then-17-year-old - identified only as "John Doe" - while Ackerman was a director at the Ten Mile River Camp near Narrowsburg, in upstate New York. Ackerman was 23 at the time. "In over 30 years of public service, there has never been any accusation of...