Free Republic

Democrats and much of the media are pushing to make permanent the extraordinary, pandemic-driven measures to relax voting rules during the 2020 elections – warning anew of racist voter “suppression” otherwise. Yet democracies in Europe and elsewhere tell a different story – of the benefits of stricter voter ID requirements after hard lessons learned. A database on voting rules worldwide compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, shows that election integrity measures are widely accepted globally, and have often been adopted by countries after they've experienced fraud under looser voting regimes. Britain is Europe's outlier in generally...

Cuba Protesters Warn Americans Who Like Che Guevara: ‘He Was a F****ng Terrorist’ Protesters gathered outside of the White House on Thursday evening to urge President Joe Biden to act in support of the protests ongoing in Cuba this week told Breitbart News the mainstreaming of Castro regime mass murder Ernesto “Che” Guevara in America undermines the suffering of those he killed. Guevara, a wealthy Irish-Argentine communist who participated in Fidel Castro’s seizure of the island nation in 1959, presided over the organization of firing squads to eliminate people who disagreed with Castro and pioneered the use of concentration camps...

England lifted nearly all legal Covid-19 restrictions after one of the longest lockdowns in the world. Only hours before “Freedom Day,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to isolate after the country’s health secretary tested positive for the virus.

It was shocking to my husband and me that our children canceled us for being who and what we are. It happened that, as I was thinking about writing about my husband and me being canceled by our own children six months ago — we have been agonizing about not being able to talk to them or see our grandson for all that time — a thought popped into my mind: blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Weeks ago, while struggling with how to understand what has happened, I picked up a copy of Saul Alinsky's...

What if you found out your child was being taught in school that the police should be “reformed, transformed or abolished”? That Georgia’s new election laws that seek to restore election fairness and prevent fraud instead “restrict and suppress voting across the state”? Or that states must out of fairness allow transgender males to compete in girls and women’s sports? What if your four-year-old daughter was reading books suggesting that she may actually be a lesbian? These are just some of the “lesson plans” in an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) program called “No Place for Hate” (NPFH) that is being taught...

The Asian carp is getting a new name from wildlife agencies who think the title is offensive — but some critics say the move is a solution fishing for a problem. The US Fish and Wildlife Service rebranded the freshwater fish wreaking havoc in the Midwest as “invasive carp” in April. “We wanted to move away from any terms that cast Asian culture and people in a negative light,” Charlie Wooley, director of the Great Lakes Regional Office for the service, told The Associated Press.

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Some Chinese counties will begin barring unvaccinated people from schools, hospitals, supermarkets, and other public places by late July or early August. Local counties in at least 12 of China's total 22 provinces announced new measures that will ramp up surveillance and restrictions on unvaccinated residents whenever they try to enter dozens of common areas. Other restricted places include gyms, hotels, internet cafes, gas stations, and banks, though the exact list varies from county to county. Getting vaccinated is the "duty and obligation" of every citizen, said one notice. It also pointed to a "severe and complicated" pandemic situation overseas....

Hundreds of people gathered outside Versailles Restaurant in Little Havana Sunday afternoon in solidarity with the demonstrations in Cuba protesting against the communist regime. Cuban flags, music by Willy Chirino, and T-shirts with the phrase “Patria y Vida” - Spanish for “Homeland and life” - were the common denominator during the demonstration. Protesters shouted “freedom” in unison as cars with flags drove along 8th Street, honking their horns. **SNIP** “The real intervention is what the Cuban people are doing: to get up in the streets, it is what the Cuban exile is doing to stay on their feet,” Omni said....

Noem charged into Iowa on Friday singing a battle hymn and armed with barbed comments for her fellow GOP governors. At a conservative gathering in Des Moines, she told the crowd she “really hates this America” under President Joe Biden’s leadership, then led them in singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But Noem didn’t just take aim at political foes. She also unleashed sharp-edged comments on those within her own party, accusing fellow GOP governors of “rewriting history” by claiming they kept their states open during the pandemic. “To pretend that they didn’t take actions that they had no...

A Muslim couple is suing a Chicago-area school and alleging that a former history teacher helped convert their daughter to Christianity. According to the Daily Herald newspaper, the federal lawsuit against Community Unit District 300 in Algonquin, Ill., alleges violations of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The suit by Yosuf Chaudhry and Amena Alvi alleges that a former Jacobs High School teacher, Pierre Thorsen, gave their daughter a New International Version Study Bible and introduced her to other Christians. "It's derailed our whole life," Alvi said of the daughter's conversion....

...No group of spiritual refugees is more organized, perhaps, than the Ex-Muslims of North America. Founded in 2013 as a nonprofit, EXMNA raises and spends funds to better understand its members’ experiences. Three years ago the group surveyed its membership, and the results offer a fascinating glimpse into not only the factors that make it more likely someone will leave Islam, but the challenges those leavers face. ...According to the survey of these people, defection from Islam happens at a very young age for many. When asked “How old were you when you left the faith?,” 16% of the sample...

The European Union's top court has ruled that Muslim women can now be banned from wearing hijabs in the workplace. The case was brought forward by two Muslim women in Germany, who were suspended from their positions for wearing head coverings. Both women - one of whom is a special needs carer at a childcare centre in Hamburg, and the other a cashier at a pharmacy chain - did not wear hijabs when they first started their jobs. However, court documents state that after deciding to do so when they returned from parental leave, they were told it was not...

Astronomers have observed record-breaking photons that strain classical theories of accelerationA little before sunrise on July 4, A.D. 1054, imperial astronomers of the Song Dynasty in China spotted an unknown star lighting up the eastern sky. “It’s as bright as Venus, with pointed rays in all four directions and a reddish-white color,” they wrote in notes delivered to the emperor. The glow, which remained visible to the naked eye during the day for almost a month, was from an explosion caused by the spectacular death of a star located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation of Taurus. Its relics are...

The International Olympic Committee has cleared a transgender athlete to compete in the upcoming Tokyo games. The IOC ruled Saturday that Laurel Hubbard, 43, who is a biological man, can compete for New Zealand in the women’s weightlifting super-heavyweight category and that her inclusion does not violate the current rules on the books. She is on track to be the first transgender athlete to ever compete in the games. “The rules for qualification have been established by the International Weightlifting Federation before the qualifications started,” IOC boss Thomas Bach said during a new conference Reuters reported. “These rules apply, and...

Many observers are forecasting that the world’s transition to electric cars will take place much sooner than expected. Now, BBC is also joining the fray. “What makes the end of the internal combustion engine inevitable is a technological revolution. And technological revolutions tend to happen very quickly … [and] this revolution will be electric,” reports BBC‘s Justin Rowlett. Rowlett points to the late ’90s internet revolution as an example. “For those who hadn’t yet logged on [to the internet] it all seemed exciting and interesting but irrelevant — how useful could communicating by computer be? After all, we’ve got phones!...

TikTok has become a hotbed for anti-Semitism, a new study revealed, with an alarming 912% spike in anti-Semitic content shared on the popular video-sharing platform over the past year. The study, led by Dr. Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communication at the University of Haifa, in conjunction with Natalie Masri, a research assistant at the IDC Herzliya’s Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), discovered what they described as “a seismic increase” in anti-Semitic tropes, images and rhetoric compared to their 2020 study. At the end of a four-month systematic content analysis of videos, comments and usernames on the platform, researchers found a...

July 18 , 2021 Cathedral of St. Vincent De Paul, Tunis, Tunisia Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: Green First readingJeremiah 23:1-6 ©I will gather together the remnant of my flock and raise up shepherds for them‘Doom for the shepherds who allow the flock of my pasture to be destroyed and scattered – it is the Lord who speaks! This, therefore, is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says about the shepherds in charge of my people: You have let my flock be scattered and go wandering and have not taken care of them. Right, I will take care of you...

Vietnam recorded 2,807 new local Covid-19 cases Sunday evening, pushing the day's tally to an all-time high of 5,887. Among the night's tally, Ho Chi Minh City, the epicenter of the ongoing fourth coronavirus wave, recorded 2,310 cases. It was followed by the southern provinces of Dong Nai and Binh Duong with 65 and 64 cases, respectively. The remaining cases were recorded in 23 other provinces and cities. Of the new cases, 2,108 were contained within quarantine centers or lockdown areas. The rest either had contact with previously confirmed cases or are being contact traced. Vietnam saw the biggest daily...