Free Republic

SURFSIDE, Fla. — A 7-year-old daughter of a Miami firefighter was among two additional bodies found overnight in the rubble of the collapsed condo building outside Miami, raising the death toll to 20 with 128 people still missing. "This tragedy has haunted so many of us because so many of us know somebody who was in the building or affected by this tragedy," City of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said Friday at a news conference. "Now, not only do we know someone, but this is someone who is a member of our family, of our fire family." Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella...

Sha’Carri Richardson is speaking out and making no excuses as she’s suspended from Team USA over a positive drug test.

Former President Donald Trump fired off a four-word message to his email followers that asks for the identity of the law enforcement officer who fatally shot a woman during the Capitol Building siege on Jan. 6. “Who shot Ashli Babbitt?” Trump wrote on Thursday afternoon. Babbitt was killed as rioters attempted to gain entry to the House of Representatives chamber. The government has released no word on who shot Babbitt or even what agency the shooter worked for. Trump’s statement comes on the heels of a vote to establish a select committee on the Capitol Riot. The killing has become...

President Biden on Friday celebrated a positive monthly jobs report by declaring that it was “afternoon” in America — a play on Ronald Reagan’s famous pronouncement that it was “morning in America” after a dark stretch. US companies added 850,000 jobs in June — more than anticipated — though the unemployment rate unexpectedly nudged higher to 5.9 percent, according to data released Friday. “Good morning, everyone. It is a good morning,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “As we get prepared to celebrate Independence Day, today’s job news brought us something else to celebrate.” “The last time the economy...

All U.S. forces have been removed from Bagram Airfield, the largest military base in Afghanistan, a senior U.S. official told Fox News Thursday. Bagram Air Base, located just north of Kabul, was the heart of the U.S. operation in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years following the attack on Sept. 11, 2001, by Al Qaeda, which was based in the country... European troops had largely pulled out months ahead of the U.S. departure from what was a stronghold in the war on terrorism. Italy and Germany declared their missions in Afghanistan complete Wednesday. The Bagram Air Base will be taken over...

When Target announced that it was opening a store in Mondawmin, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Baltimore, a city struggling with crime and poverty, it seemed like a ticket to a turnaround. And from the start, it was a practical success and a point of community pride. The store, which opened in 2008, carried groceries, operated a pharmacy and had a Starbucks cafe — the only one in this part of Baltimore’s west side. People came from across the city to shop there, helping to soften the Mondawmin area’s reputation for crime and the looting that followed protests over the...

A few snapshots from the past few years: In 2015, a famous male athlete puts on a dress and make-up. He then declares himself a female. Despite the athlete not having undergone "sex assignment surgery", our cultural overlords immediately announce their agreement: the dress and make-up have indeed made the male a female. Not just a "female in spirit", but an actual female. Time magazine then proclaims the athlete its runner-up "Woman of the Year". Glamour magazine goes all the way and proclaims him its "Woman of the Year". Social media bans anyone who dares refer to the athlete by...

U.S. President Joe Biden hailed Friday’s strong monthly jobs report, saying it was a sign that his economic and pandemic-fighting strategies were working. “This is historic progress, pulling our economy out of the worst crisis in 100 years, driven in part by our dramatic progress in vaccinating our nation and beating back the pandemic as well as other elements of the American Rescue plan,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “To put it simply, our economy is on the move,” Biden said. This is what every mainstream media reported about. But no one mentioned the fact that Biden...

“Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves!” (2 Corinthians 13:5). True believers will see the glory of Christ reflected in their lives when they examine the genuineness of their salvation. Assurance of one’s salvation has been a key issue throughout the history of the church, especially the Reformers’ reaction to the Roman Catholic Church’s assertion that since salvation is a joint effort between man and God, the outcome is in doubt until the end. John Calvin, the leading sixteenth-century Reformer, taught that believers can and should be assured of their salvation. He made the grounds...

ST. PAUL, Ore. (AP) — On his 38th birthday, Sebastian Francisco Perez, an immigrant from Guatemala, played chess with his nephew. The next day, he went to work at a nursery in a rural Oregon town as the thermometer soared well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius). Perez collapsed that day, June 26, as a heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest in all-time, record-high temperatures. The workers had been moving irrigation lines when they noticed Perez wasn’t there and found him. They called his nephew, Pedro Lucas, who arrived to find his uncle unconscious and dying. Paramedics tried to revive...

Army Sergeant Daniel Perry has been indicted on murder charges on Thursday for shooting AK-47-wielding Black Lives Matter “protester” Garrett Foster. Perry shot Foster after his car was surrounded by a mob and Foster allegedly lifted his rifle towards him during the “protest” in downtown Austin a year ago. All evidence points to clear self-defense, however, a newly-elected District Attorney, Jose Garza, has indicted Perry. Garza, to no surprise, is funded by George Soros. After the July 25, 2020 shooting, Perry was released without charges, but D.A. Garza wants to transform Austin into the new St. Louis by criminalizing self-defense....

The spectator whose cardboard sign sent riders tumbling to the road was charged with reckless endangerment and involuntarily causing injuries. A Tour de France spectator on the side of the road held up a sign that hit the German rider Tony Martin. He fell and caused a pileup of dozens of more. [snip] Camille Miansoni, the prosecutor in Brest, France, who had opened an investigation into the case, said that the spectator, a 30-year-old French woman, had been released from police custody pending her trial. She turned herself in on Wednesday. The charges under consideration carry a possible one year...

In late April, after amassing 40,000 troops on the border of eastern Ukraine and another 40,000 in the disputed Crimean peninsula, Russia removed most of its forces and walked back its naval presence in some areas of the surrounding Black Sea where it concentrated. Many Western commentators read this as ‘saber rattling,’ a popular phrase in the press, on behalf of Putin to remind a new U.S. administration of Russia’s strength, part of the routine cycle of provocation and de-escalation Putin uses to conduct diplomacy. The conventional thinking is that these patterns tend to ‘flare up,’ another popular phrase, but...

The 10-member panel on the House Ethics Committee voted Thursday to drop the $5,000 fine issued to Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), who challenged the report by the Capitol that said she failed to complete a security screening before entering the House building. This is the third time a majority of the evenly split bipartisan panel voted in favor of waiving the metal detector fee since the Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol. In May the Capitol Police issued a report that documented an incident where Foxx set off a metal detector in front of a door to the House chamber....

President Joe Biden again snapped at reporters on Friday after delivering remarks to celebrate the substantial employment gains in June. After finishing his remarks, Biden took a few questions from the attendant media, but immediately complained they were too negative. One reporter asked him about the future of Afghanistan and his proposed timeline of withdrawal of troops from the country. U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks about the June jobs report in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on July 02, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Biden defended the withdrawal of troops, noting the...

The audit in Maricopa County, Arizona, is nearing completion. Late on Thursday, audit volunteers prepared the 2020 election ballots and machines to be transported out of The Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. The auditors, volunteers, and other members are leaving the coliseum after completing both the hand recount and paper evaluation of nearly 2.1 million ballots in the massive county.

Nothing underscores this more dramatically than the mega-fiasco surrounding the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. As the world knows now, some 135,000 non-existent votes were somehow magically injected into the system. The winner of this supposed “ranking system” election (it certainly was “rank” in every sense of the world) is naturally suing and we seem headed for a do-ever. This primary was, needless to say, virtually the city’s mayoral election since New York voters these days seem constitutionally allergic to Republicans, or to civic health, for that matter. They already showed their great intelligence electing Bill De Blasio in...

A cargo plane made an emergency landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii early Friday and both people on board have been rescued. The pilots of the Transair Flight 810 had reported engine trouble and were attempting to return to Honolulu when they were forced to land the Boeing 737 cargo aircraft in the water, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

For twenty years after the handover of power from Britain to the People’s Republic, Hong Kong existed as a bastion of relative openness and liberty in China. Now, it’s all crashing down as Beijing aggressively imposes new controls on the territory. One of the latest dominoes to fall is the Apple Daily, a vocal anti-Beijing newspaper. Hong Kong police arrested a senior journalist from the Apple Daily newspaper at the airport Sunday as he attempted to leave the city, four days after the paper’s forced closure, in the latest crackdown by Beijing under the sweeping new national security law. Police...

US forces have left their main military base in Afghanistan - the hub for a 20-year mission against the Taliban and al Qaeda - in the clearest sign yet America's longest war is ending. The sprawling Bagram airfield, about 40 miles north of Kabul, is being handed over to the Afghan security forces in a symbol of the US military's departure from a battlefield that's still raging, amid warnings of a looming civil war. Sponsored link US President Joe Biden said earlier this year all of between 2,500 to 3,500 US troops in Afghanistan would leave by 11 September, the...