Free Republic

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Puerto Rico’s government has lost more than $2.6 million after falling for an email phishing scam, according to a senior official. The finance director of the island’s Industrial Development Company, Rubén Rivera, said in a complaint filed to police Wednesday that the agency sent the money to a fraudulent account. Rivera said the government agency transferred the money on Jan. 17 after receiving an email that alleged a change to a banking account tied to remittance payments, according to a police statement. Manuel Laboy, executive director of the agency, told The Associated Press that...

Hong Kong (CNN)The Chinese province at the center of the novel coronavirus outbreak reported a record spike in deaths Thursday, bringing the total number to more than 1,300 people globally, as experts warned the epidemic could "create havoc" in less prepared countries. Health authorities in Hubei announced an additional 242 deaths and 14,840 cases of the virus, known officially as Covid-19, as of Thursday morning, the largest single-day rise since the epidemic began and almost 10 times the number of cases confirmed the previous day. (Please see full article at the link)

Subtitle: These were her first public remarks since testifying before Congress. Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch said the State Department is "in trouble," with senior leaders who lack "moral clarity" and "policy vision," in her first public remarks since testifying before Congress. Accepting an award for excellence in diplomacy at Georgetown University, Yovanovitch also took an apparent shot at President Donald Trump's foreign policy: "An amoral, keep 'em guessing foreign policy that substitutes threats, fear and confusion for trust, cannot work over the long haul." During her remarks and a question-and-answer session, Yovanovitch never said Trump's name and...

Opinion: How Trump Can Court Puerto Rican Voters The Americas: In the upcoming presidential election, Florida will once again be an important state to win. If Donald Trump appeals to Puerto Rican voters, he could help his chances of securing a key victory. President Trump’s decision to host Venezuelan interim President Juan Guaidó at the State of the Union address last week was a message to Cuba and Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro that the U.S. remains committed to the cause of freedom in the region. It was also a clever political move aimed at energizing Hispanic voters in South Florida,...

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the former National Security Council aide and impeachment witness President Donald Trump fired Friday, was just doing his job, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told students and guests at a Drew University event here Wednesday night. Over a 75-minute speech and Q&A session, Kelly laid out, in the clearest terms yet, his misgivings about Trump’s words and actions regarding North Korea, illegal immigration, military discipline, Ukraine, and the news media. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, said that Vindman is blameless and was simply followed the training he’d received as a soldier; migrants...

Hypocrisy in politics is as old as politics itself. People who preach to others about how things should be or what others should do rarely live up to those standards themselves. What I’ve always found odd about public hypocrisy is how these hypocrites act as though no one will ever pick up on it. Notice who or what they’ve done before doesn’t match with what they’re preaching now. In the past, hypocrisy was easier to get away with. Before the Internet, much of what someone in the public eye said was long-forgotten by the time they’d done their 180, relegated...

Rick Guerino was on his lunch break at work when he received an alert from his Ring doorbell camera showing a FedEx driver at his home. But he wasn't expecting a package. Instead, the driver was captured on video picking up an American flag that had fallen to the ground as the result of windy weather. The driver then folds the flag and places it inside Guerino's front screen door to secure it. "I didn't know what he was doing at first when he was waving it out and everything," Guerino told News 12 New Jersey. "I was like, 'What...

All political parties and candidates have bad days. But the new progressive Democratic Party had four of its worst days in recent memory in a single week in February. On Feb. 3, the Iowa Caucuses imploded for the first time in their history. The new app-driven counting melted down, discrediting the very idea of caucusing in general. The winner -- Pete Buttigieg by two delegates over Bernie Sanders -- was not known for days. The mess was ironic in a number of ways. The Democrats are the party of the Silicon Valley. They pride themselves on being on the cutting...

You know, these Deep State dorks want to be thought of as cunning operators with savage skills, but most of them are more like Barney Fife stumbling on a loaded AK-47 while hopped up on Aunt Bea’s famous hash hush puppies. They tried yet another hack ploy with the Roger Stone sentencing, and found themselves outplayed yet again like Joe Biden going up against Bobby Fischer. All Trump did is follow a basic rule they taught me and every other infantry guy down at Fort Benning. You charge into the ambush. Full bore, no hesitation. When you find yourself in...

Click on link

Turnout for voters supporting President Trump in New Hampshire surpassed the state record for that of any incumbent president over the last 40 years. Trump earned more than 110,000 votes in the state's Republican primary on Tuesday, more than double the previous record set by former President Barack Obama, who received just over 49,000 votes in 2012. The last Republican presidential incumbent, George W. Bush, got 52,962 votes in the New Hampshire primary in 2004.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is vowing to increase the number of refugees resettled in the United States by more than 500 percent if elected president, almost none of whom would likely be resettled in her neighborhood. This year, President Trump lowered the annual refugee resettlement cap to its lowest ever at about 18,000 total admissions. This is merely a numerical limit and not a goal to be reached by the State Department.

Normally when I publish content online, I focus on the world of work. I hope you’ll forgive this brief departure, but I think that those of us on the left need to take a long look in the mirror and have an honest conversation about what’s going on. If you had told me 3 years ago that I would ever attend a Donald Trump rally, I would have laughed while assuring you that was never going to happen. Heck, if you had told me I would do it 3 months ago, I probably would have done the same thing. So,...

“What we are seeing in global warming is the evaporation of our Great Lakes.” That was Illinois Senator Dick Durbin in 2013 when Lake Michigan was at a record low. You can find plenty of claims to the same effect from the time. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore chimed in around then, too, saying climate change was driving Great Lakes levels down by causing evaporation. But that was then and this is now. What’s causing today’s record high levels? Climate change, naturally. So now, citing “catastrophic lakefront erosion” from high water, Chicago just declared a climate emergency. It’s radical, and...

Joe Biden's granddaughter snapped at David Axelrod for his remarks about the former vice president's poor showing in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. "Who would have predicted that @joeBiden and @ewarren would leave N.H. without a single delegate?" Axelrod, a CNN commentator who was a top White House aide and campaign strategist for former President Barack Obama, said in a tweet Tuesday night. **SNIP** "Disingenuous - you’ve been predicting his demise & doubting his resilience since beginning," Naomi Biden tweeted in response to Axelrod. "There’s a difference between being entitled to an opinion & relishing a platform to disparage...

One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts has emphatically argued “there’s no warming” of the earth. Speaking to Sky News on Friday, Mr Roberts said “in Australia, the temperatures in the 1880s and 1890s were not only warmer than they are today, the heatwaves were longer”. Mr Roberts said the Bureau of Meteorology “has never proven that carbon dioxide from human activity affects temperatures” and urged anyone with proof to convince him otherwise. “Empirical evidence states that the temperature is not increasing,” he said. The One Nation senator said the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) acting head of climate at...

2020 presidential long shot Rep. Tulsi Gabbard isn't backing down from her defamation lawsuit against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. **SNIP** "The papers have been served. I think the first court date has been set, and I think it's important to understand that, you know, this is not just another political thing where one person said this - the other person said that," the Hawaii Democrat, who is seeking $50 million in damages, explained. **SNIP** The lawsuit came in response to comments Clinton made during an October podcast when she claimed Gabbard was a "Russian asset" and that the...

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Concerns have been growing that next week’s Nevada caucuses could offer a repeat of the chaos that ensnared the Iowa vote, with Nevada facing many of the same organizational and technical challenges that crippled Iowa’s process. Volunteers who will be leading the Feb. 22 caucuses said key information had yet to be shared. There has been no hands-on training with iPads being deployed to caucus sites on Election Day nor opportunities to try out a new “tool” that will be loaded onto the iPads and used during the caucus process. Adding to the mix is that...

A number of test kits sent out by US health authorities to labs across the country to diagnose the deadly novel coronavirus are faulty, a senior official said Wednesday.

Today’s CG is from The Arkansas Gazette. CFB'K ORABC KEHA YALKEBX FB L TLVV, MFREBX KF KULBOPFUH EK EBKF L CFFU. ---WFWF WMLBAV You can find this little fun word game, to combat early dementia and senility in us baby boomers, in several daily publications. The way it works is a letter stands for another letter. For example: AXYDLBAAXR is LONGFELLOW (does not apply to today's cryptogram). Beware, the game is very addictive. If this is your first time, don't be intimidated. PLEASE DO NOT post the answer in general comments, but DO post your time and any tips you...