Free Republic

The 90-year-old prelate has been shortly detained together with an academic, a barrister, and a singer and LGBT activist with the pretext of his past activity in the now-defunct 612 Fund.May 11 will be remembered as a crucial and terrible day in the history of the CCP’s attack of human rights and religious freedom in Hong Kong. The police arrested, then released on bail, four former trustees of the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund. Established in 2019, the fund provided emergency relief, legal assistance, and psychological counseling to pro-democracy protesters mistreated by the police or arrested. It was compelled to disband...

CNN)President Joe Biden predicted Wednesday that if the Supreme Court officially overturns Roe v. Wade's holding of a federal constitutional right to abortion, the court will next look to strike down other landmark cases guaranteeing Americans' rights, from same-sex marriage to contraception access. "It's not just the brutality of taking away a woman's right to her body ... but it also, if you read the opinion ... basically says there's no such thing as the right to privacy. If that holds ... mark my words: They are going to go after the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage," said Biden,...

Republicans are sounding the alarm after discovering baby formula is being sent to border facilities while American mothers are facing empty shelves amid massive shortages. And President Joe Biden's administration is struggling to respond, unable to reassure parents when there will be more formula on empty grocery store shelves and where they can turn to for help. GOP Representative Kat Cammack tweeted Thursday two images, one showing full shelves of baby formula and food from a processing center at the southern border and another showing empty shelves where baby formula was supposed to be at an American grocery store. 'The...

Cleaner air in United States and Europe is brewing more Atlantic hurricanes, a new U.S. government study found. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study links changes in regionalized air pollution across the globe to storm activity going both up and down. A 50% decrease in pollution particles and droplets in Europe and the U.S. is linked to a 33% increase in Atlantic storm formation in the past couple decades, while the opposite is happening in the Pacific with more pollution and fewer typhoons, according to the study published in Wednesday’s Science Advances.

Shocking video footage captured a woman punching a Philly McDonald's worker who took exception to being called a 'ho' - before the aggressor and her pals stormed the kitchen and attacked staff while shrieking with laughter. The viral video posted to World Star captures the moment the female driver leans over to hand the worker at the drive-thru payment for their order and punches her instead. She and her cronies then marched into the restaurant's kitchen to continue the violence while toting a broom and giant plastic safety cone. Just moments earlier, the driver pulls up to the drive-thru window...

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) director-general is pressing countries to maintain COVID-19 surveillance and share information on its transmission and sequencing, saying reduced testing abroad “makes us increasingly blind to patterns of transmission and evolution.” Speaking on Tuesday during a press conference, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted that while COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to decline, the world needed to welcome the news “with some caution.”

In remarks on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) spoke about why he was blocking a $40 billion Ukraine bill. Video ...

TheHill.com WIRE White House COVID coordinator: US ‘vulnerable’ to coronavirus without new shots BY ZEKE MILLER | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS - 05/12/22 7:42 PM ET SHARE TWEET ... MORE Associated Press/Susan Walsh WASHINGTON (AP) — White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha issued a dire warning Thursday that the U.S. will be increasingly vulnerable to the coronavirus this fall and winter if Congress doesn’t swiftly approve new funding for more vaccines and treatments. In an Associated Press interview, Jha said Americans’ immune protection from the virus is waning, the virus is adapting to be more contagious and booster doses for...

-Ukrainian troops found Russian military documents in Sumy Oblast, officials said on Telegram. -The abandoned military documents suggested that Putin had plans to seize all of Ukraine. -Russian troops retreated from Kyiv in early April and have since focused on taking eastern Ukraine. Fleeing Russian soldiers left behind key military documents that indicated Russian President Vladimir Putin had plans to seize all of Ukraine, the director of Ukraine's State Bureau of Investigation said in a Telegram statement on Wednesday. Ukrainian forces discovered the documents while searching through the northeastern town of Trostyanets in Sumy Oblast, the statement said. Trostyanets,...

,/A>Did Fed Chair Powell just jump straight from ‘denial’ to ‘acceptance’ on his journey through grief at the death of ‘transitory’ inflation? Speaking on MarketPlace Radio this evening, Powell said the central bank has both the tools and resolve to bring down rapid inflation — though he acknowledged that the path to lower price increases could be a painful one. Powell: So you can see that inflation is just way too high here in the United States. And by the way, the same all over the world, really, the global economies all around the world have been hit by a...

"Why are all the grandparents in one bed?" My daughter and I were watching the 1971 classic Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory when she asked the question I'd been asking myself for years: What's up with that four-person bed? I answered her in the simplest way possible: Because they're poor. Confused, my daughter shot back, "But they're white."

Ukraine’s foreign minister said Thursday that everyone involved in the transportation and sales of grain seized by Russia in occupied areas of the country will face legal consequences. “Russia is a criminal three times over: it bombed Syria to ruins, occupied part of Ukraine, and is now selling stolen Ukrainian grain to Syria,” the ministry’s press service cited Dmytro Kuleba as saying. “I want to remind the participants in this deal: what is stolen has never brought happiness to anyone. Everyone involved in the sale, transportation or purchase of stolen grain is an accomplice to the crime,” Kuleba said. “Your...

Senator Rand Paul has blocked a fast-track senate vote on the additional $40 billion funding package created by Joe Biden and House Democrats. Both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell approved a fast-track vote; however, senator Rand Paul (KY) stood defiant against their effort. Despite the high-profile pressure from the two Senate leaders, Rand Paul refused to move and that means the Senate will have to take procedural steps to overcome his objection, which could take several days. “My oath of office is the US constitution not to any foreign nation and no matter how...

More Hypocrisy: Francis Discovers "Richness" of Other ReligionsWhile using Traditionis Custodes to destroy the "richness" of Catholic liturgy, Francis feigns in his May 12 message for the World Day of Migrants that illegal immigrants represent "an immense opportunity for the cultural and spiritual growth of everyone."He hopes for a "fruitful exchange between different visions and traditions” and "a discovery of the richness present in other religions and forms of spirituality unfamiliar to us." His words are hypocritical since Francis actively suppresses such an "exchange" in his own Church.Francis showed what this "exchange" looks like during his Malta trip, when a...

Top House Democrats wrote letters to the chief executives of four major social media platforms on Wednesday, urging them to preserve and archive content related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that could be potential evidence of war crimes. The lawmakers asked Meta, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok to preserve and archive posts related to the conflict “that may provide evidence of war crimes or human rights violations,” establish a mechanism with human rights-specific organizations to share that content and create a way for content depicting a possible war crime to be flagged by the platforms’ users.

“Like the return of the undead, woke math has come back to haunt California’s classrooms and make it even harder for the state’s struggling students to receive a quality education,” Lance Izumi, Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute writes at Townhall.com this week.

Pro-abortion activists are protesting outside the home of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The activists are also planning on protesting at Chief Justice John Roberts’s home in Maryland. Protesters were reportedly seen wearing outfits from the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale in preparation for the protest.

“Liturgical Survival in Gray Areas”: Michael Charlier on Room for Maneuvering without Schism A thoroughly friendly discussion is currently taking place between the blogs Caminante Wanderer (Argentina) and MessaInLatino (Italy) about Pope Francis’s part in the activities against the traditional liturgy. Caminante Wanderer is of the opinion that Francis is, in principle, uninterested in liturgy, that he devotes himself exclusively to the things his neo-Jesuitical thinking considers important and otherwise follows the voices that fit best into his current power calculations. We do not intend to disagree with this, especially since the Wanderer can certainly cite serious arguments in...

Insulting a man for being bald in the workplace amounts to sex harassment in the UK, a panel of balding judges have ruled, according to a report Thursday. Hair loss is far more common among men than women, so using the term is “inherently related to sex” — and equivalent to commenting on the size of a woman’s breasts, the employment tribunal said, according to the UK Telegraph. The finding — made by three judges who lament their own lack of locks in the judgment — came in the case of an electrician, Tony Finn, who sued a small Yorkshire-based...

The Washington Post — a newspaper named Washington — published an editorial calling for a name change at George Washington University.You can’t make this sh*t up.The op-ed, written by a senior currently attending George Washington University, is 800 or so words of the usual-usual, shockingly ignorant moral preening we’ve come to expect from the Woke McCarthyites. So let me sum it up: This university is racist, and George Washington was racist, and while I didn’t find this offensive enough to pass up attending school here, harrumph, harrumph, harrumph, half-truth, half-truth, half-truth, I’m so virtuous, I’m so virtuous, I’m so virtuous…This...