Free Republic

A California gym coach who was looking for ways to drum up motivation for the students on his cross-country running team as they went away for the summer break came up with a brilliant idea: pair them with shelter dogs. It was eight years ago when GNN first reported on it, and ever since it has become a mainstay of the training program at St. Joseph High School in Santa Maria, California. It became so much more, however, after a simple video of the kids running with the dogs went viral, causing athletic directors around the country to phone St....

The U.S. Marshals Service recently launched a nationwide effort to recover missing and exploited children. Three major operations rescued over 100 children, many of them from sex traffickers. But a disturbing trend discovered during the operation should launch a nationwide investigation into the American child welfare system. PJ Media reached out to USMS for details on the rescued children and was told that the majority of them came from foster care. This information was ignored in the initial media reports on the operation. Dave Oney, press contact at the USMS, responded via email to questions about the rescued children.

Multiple media sources have said the Roberts had trouble adopting their children. They had made multiple attempts to adopt without success. Married in their 40’s natural birth at that time was virtually impossible. "Lisa Tucker McElroy’s John G. Roberts Jr.: Chief Justice reveals that their adoption experience was “long and difficult.” In the summer of 2000, a birth mother chose the Roberts to adopt her baby. … Another adoption agency had called them. They called back, and the agency offered another baby. Jack and Josie were born just four months apart. The exact circumstances of Roberts’ adoption remain a private...

[Subtitle: “I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests,” Browder writes.]The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways,...

Babies -- Bought, Sold and Traded LONDON, SEPT. 17, 2005 (Zenit.org) Abortion advocates' decades-long push to deny or downplay the humanity of the unborn child is bearing fruit. Unborn children are increasingly being treated like consumer products, if recent news stories are an indication. Last Saturday the London-based Times published a story describing how the Institute for Problems of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in Kharkov, sells baby parts. The list on its Web site offers a variety of cells and other tissues from babies. The institute alleges that the material comes from fetuses...

A woman who helped to bring down a Brazilian faith healer accused of sex abuse has taken her own life in Spain. Sabrina Bittencourt, 38, died at her home in Barcelona just days after accusing John of God - real name Joao Teixeira de Faria - of running a 'sex slave farm'. She claimed young girls were held captive in a farming operation which exported babies on the black market. The women would be murdered after ten years of having babies in the alleged scheme run by the 77-year-old celebrity faith healer, who was arrested last year after hundreds of...

Problematic, in a very big way even if the offer was made.Qatar’s ties to Al Qaeda and ISIS aren’t news. They’ve effectively served as intermediaries in everything from ransom exchanges for hostages to Taliban negotiations. But actually trying to secure terrorist swaps for prisoners on their own behalf would have been a new frontier. Before he was released from a U.S. maximum-security prison last week, a confessed al Qaeda sleeper agent was offered up in a potential prisoner swap that would have freed two Americans held abroad.According to two individuals with direct knowledge of the case, the proposition was...

More than three years after he died in prison, whistle-blowing Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was found guilty of tax evasion by a Moscow court Wednesday. The posthumous trial of Magnitsky was a macabre chapter in a case that ignited a high-emotion dispute between Russia and Washington that has included U.S. sanctions against Russians deemed to be human rights violators, a ban on the adoption of Russian children by U.S. citizens and calls for the closure of Russian non-governmental organizations receiving American funding. Magnitsky was a lawyer for U.S.-born British investor William Browder when he alleged in 2008 that organized criminals...

Radical left-wing icon former California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums was a hired lobbyist for Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. June 9, 2016, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned. Dellums, who represented liberal San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., is a long-time darling of left-wing political activists. He served 13 terms in Congress as an African-American firebrand and proudly called himself a socialist. He retired in 1996. The former congressman is one of several high-profile Democratic partisans who was on Veselnitskaya’s payroll, working to defeat a law that is the hated object of...

A London-based businessman who was investigated last year by the opposition research firm behind the so-called Trump dossier will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, The Daily Caller has learned.Bill Browder says that he will “definitely” be testifying about a complaint he filed with the Justice Department last year in which he accused Fusion GPS, the firm behind the dossier, and a former Soviet intelligence officer named Rinat Akhmetshin of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law requiring agents of foreign governments to disclose their lobbying and consulting work.Founded by former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn...

"""Well Lookie Here=> Russian Lawyer Veselnitskaya is Pictured with Obama Ambassador to Russia – 8 Days After Trump Jr. Mtg."""" More information leaked out today on Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya. Veselnitskaya told NBC News on Monday she was not with the Kremlin as was reported by The New York Times. She confirmed her meeting with Donald Trump Jr. was about Russian adoptions in the US. The law firm where Veselnitskaya is listed as managing partner, Kamerton Consulting, is based in a Moscow suburb and does not even have a website. A staff member at Kamerton told The Associated Press Veselnitskaya...

Shortly before his father was formally nominated for president last summer, Donald Trump Jr. was approached by a Russian lawyer who set up a meeting to discuss a Russian policy, according to interviews with Trump family lawyers. President Trump’s eldest son briefly gathered others for the meeting, including his brother-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as then-presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort for the meeting at Trump Tower in New York City with the lawyer, identified by Trump family lawyers as Natalia Veselnitskaya. Veselnitskaya used the meeting in June 2016 to have a conversation about a U.S. law called the Magnitsky Act...

WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is asking whether a suspected former Russian intelligence officer-turned U.S. lobbyist and the firm behind the unsubstantiated anti-Trump dossier should have registered as foreign agents for their efforts to bring down a U.S. law on behalf of the Kremlin. According to a complaint filed with the Justice Department, Fusion GPS, which was also involved in the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, was involved in the pro-Russia campaign to kill the Global Magnitsky Act around the same time. In 2012, President Obama signed into...

Marriage quality, gay rights and “love is love” are common refrains that the Left uses in order to dismantle traditional marriage as we know it. Heritage Foundation marriage scholar Ryan T. Anderson’s latest book, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, serves as an answer to many of these arguments. Anderson quoted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ oral arguments to make one of his major points, namely that “You’re [gay activists] not seeking to join the institution, you’re seeking to change what the institution is.” Anderson pointed out four harmful consequences of radically changing the definition of...

This year, a Catholic University sociologist published a study of the children of same-sex parents that runs counter to much of the happy talk on the subject emanating from academia. “In the past two decades dozens of studies have concluded that children with same-sex parents fare as well or better than those in opposite-sex families on a wide range of outcomes related to child well-being and emotional health,” . D. Paul Sullins wrote in a study which appeared in January. “So consistent and well-publicized has been this finding of “no differences” that it has been presented as a settled conclusion...

File photo of another meeting between Pope Francis and Bishop Scicluna. The Pope is “shocked” by Malta’s Civil Unions Bill, which will allow gay couples to adopt children, Auxiliary Bishop Charles Scicluna has told The Sunday Times of Malta.Defending his decision to use his Christmas homily to reiterate that a family had to be built around a man and a woman, Mgr Scicluna said he had aired these concerns with Pope Francis when he met him on December 12.“We discussed many aspects...and when I raised the issue that’s worrying me as a bishop [the right for gay couples to...

This past July, Russian president Vladimir Putin ignited outrage among the (primarily Western) pro-homosexual community by signing into law a ban on homosexual adoption. The new law also prohibits adoption by single parent households. Only a few days before, Putin also signed into law broad prohibitions against "gay propaganda," which included provisions that allow "the government to arrest and detain gay (or 'pro-gay') foreigners for up to 14 days before they would then be expelled from Russia" While these latter measures are no doubt draconian, they nonetheless represent a growing realization within Russian society, namely: sexual anarchy has proven devastating...

The Russian president has opposed the adoption of Russian orphans by LGBT foreign couples, and has instructed the government and the Supreme Court to prepare changes to existing law before July 1. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s order will most likely be fulfilled by the Ministry of Education and Science, which is currently dealing with issues concerning orphans and adoptions, Izvestia daily reported. The ministry has not yet commented on the news, saying that Putin’s instructions had not yet reached their office. Tensions over the issue arose in mid-February, after the French National Assembly voted to legalize adoptions by same-sex couples....

Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court on Wednesday voted 5-4 to ban gay couples from adopting children, with judges claiming that a child’s dignity, stability and well-being can only be ensured if raised in a “traditional” family. The vote comes two days after 200,000 religious Christians held a rally against granting same-sex couples any sort of legal rights. As the largest anti-gay rally in the history of the US commonwealth, the gathering portrayed the immense opposition gay couples continue to face in Puerto Rico. Although some lawmakers support granting gay couples with certain legal rights, many public figures remain starkly opposed to...

Like so many parents, Jessie and Cooper Odell spend their days helping their 8-year-old with homework, taking him to the park, playing football or attending church on Sundays. But their journey to becoming a typical family was anything but routine. "Until recently I always felt like I had to look over my back,'' said Jessie Odell, 39, a Palm Beach event planner who has cared for the boy since July and is finally able to adopt him. "God has finally given us what we've been fighting for.''