Free Republic

The Department of Justice is no longer negotiating to settle lawsuits from migrant families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under a Trump Administration policy, the American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday, after the Biden Administration drew criticism for reportedly weighing $450,000 payments. The DOJ has cut off settlement talks with parents and children who say they faced severe trauma after immigration officials separated them at the southern border, and now plans to litigate any family separation suits, ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told Forbes (the ACLU represents plaintiffs in one family separation lawsuit). The DOJ did not immediately respond to a...

The Senate parliamentarian has said a Democratic effort to let millions of immigrants remain temporarily in the U.S. should be dropped from the party’s expansive social and environment bill, people informed of the decision said Thursday, dealing another blow to a long-time priority of Democrats, migrant advocates and progressives. The opinion by Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate’s nonpartisan arbiter of its rules, all but certainly means Democrats will ultimately have to drop the proposal from their 10-year, roughly $2 trillion package of health care, family services and climate change initiatives championed by President Joe Biden.

MADISON, Wis. (WMTV) - A Jefferson Middle School teacher was placed on administrative leave after a planned reenactment of the Boston Tea Party was determined to be offensive. According to the Madison Metropolitan School District, the school principal stopped the history lesson from happening after determining it was “not consistent with the district’s vision, commitment to equity, cultural responsiveness, and was outside the scope of the district curriculum.” In a statement, MMSD explained the teacher, whose name was not released, was placed on administrative leave, as per district policy, until officials complete an internal review of the incident. Administrators also...

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Even though there have been practically no cases of clinical infection, wastewater samples show that the new omicron variant is now the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the Florida county that is home to the nation's largest theme park resorts, officials said this week. The omicron variant has quickly surpassed the delta variant in collections taken from wastewater sampling sites in Orange County, officials said.

Typically, a case like Kevin Clinesmith's would end in disbarment, but not this time. Kevin Clinesmith, the former senior FBI lawyer who was placed on probation as a convicted felon for falsifying a surveillance document during the Trump-Russia investigation, has been returned to "good standing" as a member of the D.C. Bar Association. In August of 2020, Clinesmith pleaded guilty to doctoring an email that was then used to justify a surveillance warrant that targeted former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. As a result, Clinesmith was sentenced in January to 12 months probation, though the D.C. bar did not seek...

South Korea’s largest dairy producer has faced furious backlash after its latest advertisement featured a man secretly filming a group of women — who were then depicted as cows. In the ad for Seoul Milk, a man is seen walking through the countryside with a camera and hiding in a bush. The women are then startled and turn into cows when the interloper steps on a twig. The ad ends with the words “Clean water, organic feed, 100 percent pure Seoul Milk. Organic milk from an organic ranch in the pleasant nature of Cheongyang.”

James “Jimmy” Stewart was one of America’s most beloved actors over the course of decades. He was also a fierce American patriot who was not afraid to make sacrifices for the country he loved so much. The Early Years of Jimmy Stewart Like so many actors of his generation, James Maitland Stewart, was born in 1908 to parents of modest means. His father ran J.M. Stewart and Company Hardware Store, which he hoped his son would take over one day after graduating from Princeton, which was a family tradition. His mother was a homemaker. Stewart’s father was a deeply religious...

Speech and guns: two of the most contentious issues in America today, with controversies fueled not only by personal passions and identity politics but by competing interpretations of the Constitution. Perhaps more than any other parts of the Constitution, the First and Second Amendments inspire religious-like fervor in many Americans, with accordingly irrational results. As legal texts go, neither of the two amendments is a model of clarity or precision. More important, both are deeply flawed in their respective conceptualizations of some of the most important rights of a democratic society: the freedom of expression and religion and the right...

Dramatic video posted by Red Bull shows the 36-year-old accomplishing the death-defying feat late last month at Villarrica, a volcano in Chile that the indigenous Mapuche have dubbed “the Devil’s House.” The thrill-seeker jumped out of the chopper at an altitude of almost 2.2 miles and reached speeds of about 180 mph as he flew into and out of the 656-foot-wide crater of the dangerous volcano. It took Álvarez more than a year to prepare for the stunt, which required 500 practice jumps to perfect the technique of flaring to achieve the proper vertical and horizontal speeds to make it...

LGBTQ lobby has already triumphed at the SynodThe wrestling match over a link to an American LGBTQ organisation on the Synod website - put, removed, put back - reveals just how influential the gay lobby is today at the top of the Church. It amounts to the official recognition of a group disavowed by the American bishops, condemned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 22 years ago, but now promoted by Pope Francis.A link is worth more than a hundred theological and magisterial documents. This is the lesson that was taught recently by the Synod on Synodality,...

14-yr-old son of Philly pizza shop owner reportedly pulls gun, shoots robber in the face as mom is attacked The 14-year-old son of a Philadelphia pizza shop owner was caught on surveillance video pulling a gun and shooting a robbery suspect in the face as he attacked his mother who was behind the cash register. The shooting took place at approximately 9:30 p.m. on Dec. 9 at Bolds Pizza on Spring Garden Street, according to WPVI-TV. It happened after one of three men who had just allegedly attempted to rob a CVS pharmacy came into the pizza shop which was...

Lithuania said Wednesday that it has closed its embassy in Beijing and pulled its last diplomat out of the Chinese capital, a move that came amid a spat over the European Union nation allowing Taiwan to open a representative office in its capital, Vilnius. The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the Baltic country would carry out its diplomatic activities in China, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory and does not give diplomatic recognition to nations that treat the island as a separate state. The ministry said it had recalled Lithuania's charge d'affaires — the deputy...

Breaking news this evening, as we are learning that the Sante Fe Police Department has obtained a search warrant for disgraced actor Alec Baldwin’s cell phone records. This of course, comes as Baldwin faces more and more questions over the fatal movie set shooting that took the life of cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins. Alec claims he didn’t pull the trigger. Based on the mechanics of a firearm, we’re not quite sure how that’s possible.

Security researchers at Google’s Project Zero have picked apart one of the most notorious in-the-wild iPhone exploits and found a never-before-seen hacking roadmap that included a PDF file pretending to be a GIF image with a custom-coded virtual CPU built out of boolean pixel operations. If that makes you scratch your head, that was exactly the reaction from Google’s premier security research team after disassembling the so-called FORCEDENTRY iMessage zero-click exploit used to plant NSO Group’s Pegasus surveillance tool on iPhones. “We assess this to be one of the most technically sophisticated exploits we've ever seen,” Google’s Ian Beer and...

Most Americans should be given the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines instead of the Johnson & Johnson shot that can cause rare but serious blood clots, U.S. health advisers recommended Thursday. The strange clotting problem has caused nine confirmed deaths after J&J vaccinations — while the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines don’t come with that risk and also appear more effective, advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. It’s an unusual move and the CDC’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, must decide whether to accept the panel’s advice. Until now the U.S. has treated all three COVID-19 vaccines available to...

A total of six state governors have challenged the Defense Department’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate as it pertains to their respective state’s National Guard. On Tuesday, Republican governors from five states, Alaska, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska and Wyoming, published a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin requesting exemptions for National Guard personnel from federal COVID-19 vaccination mandates. Their letter is the latest salvo in the battle between states and the federal government over inoculating those in uniform. In November, Oklahoma made headlines when the commanding general of the state’s National Guard issued a memo exempting Oklahoma Guardsmen from getting the COVID-19 vaccine....

Archbishop Viganò defends Cardinal Müller and his Great Reset critiqueVigano comments on those considered by the 'globalist Sanhedrin' to be heretics, 'unworthy to ask questions about the new dogmas of the health religion defined ex cathedra by the experts in the pay of BigPharma.' (LifeSiteNews) – After Cardinal Gerhard Müller gave Catholic activist Alexander Tschugguel a thoughtful and good interview concerning the coronavirus lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and especially the dangerous and anti-democratic agenda of the Great Reset, he came under strong attacks in Germany. Both state and faith leaders rebuked him for purportedly spreading “conspiracy theories” and even “anti-semitic codes,”...

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Explanation: Fireflies flash along a moonlit countryside in this scene taken on the night of December 13/14 from southern Uruguay, planet Earth. On that night meteors fell in the partly cloudy skies above during the annual Geminid meteor shower. Frames recorded over a period of 1.5 hours are aligned in the composite image made with the camera facing south. That direction was opposite the shower's radiant toward the north and so the Geminid meteor...

Dr. Peter McCullough Tells Joe Rogan That Covid-19 was a Premeditated Attack on Civilization Video...

A homeless man will spent six years in prison for stabbing an 84-year-old Portland man after the elderly man, who had given him cash and tried to get him a job for a year, refused to give him more money.