Free Republic

FOX LAKE, WI — Dairy farmers across Wisconsin are celebrating new federal legislation that will bring whole milk back to school cafeterias nationwide, marking a significant shift in both nutrition policy and agricultural economics. The Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, supported by the Trump administration, reverses longstanding federal restrictions that have limited schools to serving only low-fat and skim milk options. The change comes as new federal dietary guidelines released this week encourage Americans to consume more whole milk, departing from recommendations that have discouraged it since 1990. Katie Schultz, who operates Tri-Fecta Farms in Fox Lake with her...

A Minnesota judge issued a ruling Friday barring federal officers from detaining or deploying tear gasb against peaceful protesters who are not obstructing authorities while participating in Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. The order from U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez restricting the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and federal agents comes amid ongoing protests and heightened tension in Minneapolis after an ICE agent fatally shot Minnesota resident Renee Good earlier this month. The ruling prohibits officers from retaliating against anyone peacefully protesting or observing the actions of immigration officers, adding that federal agents must show probable cause or...

In a victory for the Trump administration, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read announced last week that the state will resume “routine cleanup” of outdated voter registration records, a process dormant since 2017. The effort could ultimately cancel up to 800,000 inactive registrations, roughly 20% of the Beaver State's total voter rolls. This long-overdue cleanup comes only after the Department of Justice sued Oregon and other states to enforce basic voter-roll maintenance standards. For years, Oregon’s political class treated voter roll maintenance as a nuisance at best and a moral failing at worst. The state paused its cleanup mechanisms in...

Racket readers know Gabe Kaminsky, who as a Washington Examiner reporter wrote a groundbreaking series called “Disinformation, Inc.” exposing funding of media blacklisting organizations by the Global Engagement Center, a wing of the State Department, since shut down in significant part thanks to his reporting. Gabe’s new article describes concerns within the conservative world that Trump is becoming what he campaigned against. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance promised to go after the “generous tax treatment” of “radical left lunatics” they say have fomented violence. If such investigations have to be launched by the IRS, any probe weighted toward the...

Sen. John Cornyn stood in the shadow of the U.S.-Mexico border wall for a campaign event, but the Texas Republican didn’t offer the kind of diatribe about illegal immigration that stokes his party’s core and fueled Donald Trump’s rise to the White House. Instead, Cornyn, in his courtly Houston drawl, politely thanked Trump for billions in federal dollars to reimburse Texans for work on the wall, praising “the president of the United States, to whom I am very grateful.” Cornyn’s characteristic calm and measured comments betrayed the urgency of the moment for the four-term senator. He’s facing the political fight...

While Brussels lectures and dithers, Prague acts: Babiš’s transactional diplomacy shows how a mid-sized nation can thrive by aligning interests in a Trump-era world. The Czech Republic is showing the rest of Europe how to prosper in an America First world. The new government is seizing opportunities created by President Trump’s assertive diplomacy. The latest example is the initiative of Czech Prime Minister Babiš to reestablish a diplomatic presence and trade relations with Venezuela. The announcement was made today by the government at a press conference in the Chamber of Deputies. Prime Minister Andrej Babiš stated that, following the recent...

🇺🇸Pray For The Peace of Jerusalem 🇮🇱(1/17/26)[Prayer]A New Study For A New Year: PersonalitiesGenesis 12:1-812 Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: 2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: 3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. 4 So Abram...

Preseason polls aged like dead fish in the Miami sunshine. Every August, the NCAA preseason football poll arrives like a back-to-school catalog: glossy, overconfident, and bearing no resemblance to the reality that will unfold by late September, if not sooner. In this age of the transfer portal and Name Image and Likeness (NIL) how could it not? It remains the perfect spark that ignites greatness or the business end of a rifle aimed squarely at your hopes. Not convinced … ask any Penn State fan. The poll is a tradition as old as that annual donation to the Nittany Lion...

Two people have been charged in connection with a shooting that occurred at Ballenger Fieldhouse on the campus of Mott Community College in Flint. The incident took place Saturday, Jan. 10. Malik Zamir Henderson, 23, of Flint, faces three felony charges: gang membership, which carries up to 20 years in prison; assault with intent to rob while unarmed, a 15-year felony; and assault with intent to do great bodily harm, less than murder or by strangulation, a 10-year felony. Christopher Gill, 23, also from Flint, is charged with carrying a concealed handgun in a sports arena. This is a civil...

Daily Readings from the USCCBMemorial of Saint Anthony, AbbotSome scribes who were Pharisees saw that Jesus was eating with sinners and tax collectors and said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus heard this and said to them, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” Mark 2:16–17Today’s Gospel presents very good news: Jesus “did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” None of us is righteous; we are all sinners. From the divine perspective, each of us...

NUUK, Greenland — Native Greenlander Amarok Peterson was 27 years old when she learned the gut-wrenching truth about why she couldn’t have children — and that Denmark was to blame. At 13, she became one of thousands of Greenlandic girls subjected to forced sterilization by Danish doctors who implanted an IUD in her womb without her knowledge. “The Danes don’t see us as humans,” Petersen told The Post in a local Inuit restaurant overlooking Nuuk’s famous fjords. “They think we’re too expensive, too small a population. But they take our land, our children, our lives and expect thanks.” While the...

This is the mentality of the Cheka, the Red Guards, and the Khmer Rouge. t seems that Minneapolis lefties have started patrolling the streets for drivers who happen to be behind the wheel of the same make of SUV as used by ICE and interrogating – not to say threatening – them. This video shows a gaggle of people’s tribunes who have brought an SUV to a stop (the video doesn’t show how) and forced the driver out to explain himself. They surround him, demand that he open the hatch to show them what he has inside, and then commence...

A newly introduced bill that would bar former Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from working in state and local law enforcement in Illinois is sparking intense debate, with supporters calling it a necessary accountability measure and critics warning it could worsen police shortages and undermine public safety. State Sen. Laura Fine, D-Glenview, who is also running for Congress, announced the legislation in a social media video this week, saying it was prompted by recent immigration enforcement actions she described as violent and intimidating.

Archaeologists in Turkey have discovered a third-century mural depicting Jesus as the good shepherd. The mural, which remains in relatively good condition, is the centerpiece of a number of frescoes in an underground tomb in the Hisardere necropolis near the town of Iznik. While Iznik might not be a familiar name to many, its ancient name, Nicaea, may be better known to Christians.

The first members of what would later become Iran’s fearsome revolutionary guards were trained in a quiet village outside Paris. Those close to the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was in exile in Neauphle-le-Château, secretly began recruiting Iranian revolutionaries in the West to establish a “people’s army”. One of the group’s founders, Mohsen Sazegara, has told The Telegraph that the aim in 1978 was to gather loyalists prepared to confront the Shah’s regime head-on in Iran. The recruits first studied the theory of guerrilla warfare before being dispatched to Beirut and Damascus for military training. There, they learnt...

If you’ve never watched this, it takes less than two minutes, and it’s a nice piece of framework: In her much-discussed essay a few months ago, Helen Andrews argued that American institutions have been feminized. Talking about tendencies and averages — “feminine patterns of behavior” — rather than all men and all women, Andrews argued that a transition from masculine control to feminine control produces radical changes in our shared culture:Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition….Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order...

IRBIL, Iraq (AP) — An Iranian Kurdish separatist group in Iraq said it has launched attacks on Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in recent days in retaliation for Tehran’s violent crackdown on protests. Members of the National Army of Kurdistan, the armed wing of the Kurdistan Freedom Party, or PAK, have “played a role in the protests through both financial support and armed operations to defend protesters when needed,” Jwansher Rafati, a PAK representative, told The Associated Press on Thursday. Iranian media has previously accused the group and other Kurdish factions of attacking security forces.…. (More)

…The US has accused the Marinera of breaking its sanctions by carrying oil for Venezuela, Russia and Iran. The ship, previously known as Bella 1, was boarded while south of Iceland last week and is now in the Moray Firth while a US Coast Guard ship involved in the operation is berthed in Aberdeen. US administration sources said the tanker would be subject to a judicial forfeiture process when it arrives in the US and any individuals involved in its attempts to flee face federal prosecution.… …But Moscow denounced the seizure, demanding that the US treat Russians aboard properly and...

Germany turned away a Russian-linked oil tanker from entering its territorial waters in the Baltic Sea this week, marking the first known instance of a European country blocking a vessel in Moscow's shadow fleet, Bloomberg reported Jan. 16. The Aframax-class tanker, identified by the name Arcusat, abruptly changed course earlier this week as it neared German waters, instead rerouting north toward Russia's Arctic coast,… … Shipping records indicate the tanker was delivered last year from a Chinese shipyard, though databases disagree on the flag it is sailing under, with some listing Tanzania and others Cameroon. The vessel also reportedly appeared...

A 34-year-old lawyer was sentenced on Friday, Jan. 9 to one year in jail and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service for a DUI crash that killed a United States Postal Service driver in Garden Grove. Lotfullah Sohaib Latif faced a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, according to a news release issued after his conviction in October by the Orange County District Attorney’s office. Latif was driving nearly 90 mph on the 22 Freeway, near the 405 freeway and Valley View Street, seconds before “veering off the highway and colliding with the guard rail,” around 3:55...