Free Republic

It wasn't a matter of "if," but "when" and "how" big tech would target Donald Trump's social media platform, Truth Social.Truth Social was recently barred from the Google Play Store, which is a digital distribution service for applications meant for Android phones.Currently, there are more than 130 million Android smartphone users in the United States.Axios reported the following statement from Alphabet, which owns Google.On Aug. 19, we notified Truth Social of several violations of standard policies in their current app submission and reiterated that having effective systems for moderating user-generated content is a condition of our terms of service for...

CHICAGO - A 17-year-old boy is accused of carjacking 11 victims at gunpoint over the last two weeks. Nine of the carjackings occurred on the same day. The teen faces 11 felony counts of aggravated vehicular hijacking with a firearm and two felony counts of criminal damage. The teen was arrested Tuesday after he was identified by Chicago police as one of the offenders who carjacked multiple victims while armed with a gun. The incidents occurred at the following locations and times: Aug. 30 — 8700 block of South Vincennes Avenue; 49-year-old woman Aug. 20 — 8000 block of South...

Well, the left has got one. On Twitter and beyond, you've never heard such crowing.According to Politico:Democrat Mary Peltola has defeated Republican Sarah Palin in the special election for Alaska's vacant House seat, a big upset over the former governor in the state's first election under ranked-choice voting.Peltola, a former state legislator who will become Alaska's first indigenous member of Congress, defeated a special election field that included Palin and another Republican, Nick Begich III. The Democrat finished first in the initial tally and then won enough second-choice votes from Begich's supporters to see off Palin, who had former President...

Nicole Kramaritsch of Roxbury, New Jersey, has 46 bags just sitting in her garage. Brian Otto has 101 of them, so many that he’s considering sewing them into blackout curtains for his baby’s bedroom. (So far, that idea has gone nowhere.) Lili Mannuzza in Whippany has 74. “I don’t know what to do with all these bags,” she said. The mountains of bags are an unintended consequence of New Jersey’s strict new bag ban in supermarkets. It went into effect in May and prohibits not only plastic bags but paper bags as well. The well-intentioned law seeks to cut down...

A pregnant Texas woman who claimed she was entitled to drive in a high occupancy vehicle lane because of her unborn child received another ticket for the same offense, authorities said Tuesday. Brandy Bottone, a 32-year-old Plano resident, became an unlikely focal point of the nation's post-Roe debate after she was pulled over in a carpool lane June 29. A sheriff's deputy cited her for driving alone in the HOV lane that requires drivers to have at least one other person in the car — and Bottone claimed that the one other person was the unborn child in her womb....

President Joe Biden this week pushed for a ban on military-style weapons as an answer to the nation’s rise in gun violence. But critics say little evidence supports the notion that such a ban, in force for a decade from 1994 to 2004, would reduce the crime rates gripping most cities in America. And some jurisdictions are struggling to enforce gun laws already on the books, raising questions about how they would find the resources to enforce even stricter ones. “The vast majority of gun murder in the United States involves handguns and has for a very long time,” Stephen...

GROVETON NEAR GAINESVILLE, Aug. 30, 1862. To Major-Gen. Halleck, General-in-Chief, Washington, D.C.: We fought a terrific battle here yesterday, with the combined forces of the enemy, which lasted with continuous fury from daylight until after dark, by which time the enemy was driven from the field, which we now occupy. Our troops are too much exhausted to push matters, but I shall do so in the course of the morning, as soon as FITZ-JOHN PORTER's corps come up from Manassas. The enemy is still in our front, but badly used up. We have lost not less than eight thousand men...

In an order that illustrates the bizarre views of controversial Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a federal court has turned down Benson’s motion to throw out a lawsuit filed against her for refusing to remove almost 26,000 dead voters from Michigan voters rolls. In mid-September 2020, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (of which I am a board member) sent Benson a list of all of the deceased registrants who remained on the state’s voter rolls less than two months before the presidential election. Of those nearly 26,000 Michigan residents, 23,663 had been dead for at least five years, 17,479...

A porpoise found stranded on a Swedish beach in June died of bird flu, the first time the virus has been detected in a porpoise, Sweden's National Veterinary Institute said Wednesday. "As far as we know this is the first confirmed case in the world of bird flu in a porpoise," veterinarian Elina Thorsson said in a statement. "It is likely that the porpoise somehow came into contact with infected birds," she said. The young male was found stranded, alive, on a beach in western Sweden in late June. Despite efforts from the public to get it to swim out...

“They were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). One of Jesus’ main motives for ministry was the knowledge of man’s lost condition. He saw the people He lived among in the reality of their need. He was moved by their diseases and sickness, and He healed every one of them (v. 35). But He was moved even more deeply by the deepest need that most of the multitude did not even know they had—to be freed from their bondage to sin. He saw their hearts, and He knew that inwardly “they were distressed and dispirited.” Jesus...

Chicago received the latest bus of migrants courtesy of the Lone Star State. On Wednesday evening, a bus carrying 80 to 100 individuals, largely from Venezuela, pulled into the Windy City’s Union Station. The migrants originally crossed the southern border from Mexico into Texas.The move is part of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s program to show so-called sanctuary cities the strain of Joe Biden’s border crisis. The governor called upon Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot to make good on her promise to accept the new arrivals, regardless of immigration status, and give overrun border towns some much needed relief. Lightfoot bashed the...

Of all 150 psalms, Psalm 34 is my absolute favorite. It is all about our Lord’s faithfulness to deliver his children from great trials and crises. In it, King David declares, “I sought the Lord, and He heard me, and delivered me from all my fears. …The angel of the Lord encamps all around those who fear him, and delivers them. …The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles. …Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all” (Psalm 34:4, 7,17,19). When did David do...

[Catholic Caucus] From Vatican II to Pregnant Men: Bounding Down the Path of Diabolical InsanityOne can imagine a world in which life simply became progressively worse without also becoming increasingly absurd, but such is not the world in which we live today. Our Church and world have gotten astonishingly worse since Francis introduced us to his blasphemous Pachamama in October 2019, and every single wicked development has also involved an aspect of phenomenal absurdity. We do not necessarily hear the demons laughing uproariously, but surely they are.Insanity did not originate with the Second Vatican Council, but there is a clear...

Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press. Police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company. Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC,...

SHENZHEN, China, Sept 1 (Reuters) - The southwestern Chinese metropolis of Chengdu announced a lockdown of its 21.2 million residents as it launched four days of citywide COVID-19 testing, as some of the country's most populous and economically important cities battle outbreaks. Residents of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, were ordered to stay home from 6 p.m. on Thursday, with households allowed to send one person per day to shop for necessities, the city government said in a statement. Chengdu, which reported 157 domestically transmitted infections on Wednesday, is the largest Chinese city to be locked down since Shanghai...

The United States has determined that Russia is suffering "severe manpower shortages" in its six-month-old war with Ukraine and has become more desperate in its efforts to find new troops to send to the front lines, according to a new American intelligence finding disclosed Wednesday. Russia is looking to address the shortage of troops in part by compelling soldiers wounded earlier in the war to return to combat, recruiting personnel from private security companies and even recruiting from prisons, according to a U.S. official who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity to discuss the downgraded intelligence finding....

After squaring off in a bruising Republican primary battle in Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick will appear alongside each other next week outside of Pittsburgh. The former rivals will be part of a panel focused on national security and foreign policy issues, hosted by Morgan Ortagus, the former State Department spokesperson during the Trump administration and her national security group Polaris. For Oz, the Republican Senate nominee and McCormick, who lost to him by fewer than 1,000 votes, the appearance is a political detente after one of the most brutal and expensive primary races this year. McCormick conceded...

Twitter has suspended the Libs of TikTok account, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn says that only further highlights the social media platform’s double standard. “Time and again, we’ve witnessed Big Tech’s double standard against conservatives,” Blackburn, R-Tenn., told The Daily Signal in an email Tuesday. “The Ayatollah is allowed on Twitter without question, but conservatives who hold up a mirror to the left’s agenda get suspended for ‘misinformation.’” Libs of TikTok has gained international attention for sharing the radical left’s videos posted on the social media platform TikTok. The posts often highlight the radical nature of the left’s view on issues...

22,000 people lost control of temperatures in their homes for hours Tuesday.. DENVER — During the dog days of summer, it's important to keep your home cool. But when thousands of Xcel customers in Colorado tried adjusting their thermostats Tuesday, they learned they had no control over the temperatures in their own homes. ... Xcel confirmed to Contact Denver7 that 22,000 customers who had signed up for the Colorado AC Rewards program were locked out of their smart thermostats for hours on Tuesday. "It's a voluntary program. Let's remember that this is something that customers choose to be a part...

Since 2018, hate crimes against Jews in New York City have resulted in only one perpetrator spending just a single day in jail, according to a report. An in-depth Sunday piece in the Jewish-centric online magazine Tablet mentioned a report by the group Americans Against Antisemitism that, as the publication put it, “found that of the 118 adults arrested for anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City since 2018, only one has been convicted and sent to prison.” Year after year, among religious groups, Jews are the leading target of hate crimes annually in the United States, according to the...