Free Republic

A federal appeals court on Friday found unconstitutional a key component of the Affordable Care Act that grants a health task force the effective authority to require that insurers both cover an array of preventive health interventions and screenings and refrain from imposing out-of-pocket costs for them. The lawsuit centered on the objections of a coalition of small businesses in Texas to the requirement that they cover a drug for HIV prevention, known as PrEP, in their employee health plans. The appeals court did not, however, overturn the related ACA pillar; the practical, immediate impacts of its ruling apply narrowly...

CTV News Surveillance videos shows a brazen porch pirate stealing a package right in front of a FedEx delivery driver. Heather Butts reports.

Philadelphia ranks No. 1 among U.S. cities for new sexually transmitted infections—STIs—according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is up from fifth place in 2023 and puts Philadelphia ahead of four cities that had previously rated higher: Memphis, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; New Orleans and St. Louis. Among 15- to 24-year-olds in Philadelphia, syphilis cases have shot up 30% since 2019, while cases of gonorrhea increased 18%. Chlamydia cases are down 13% from pre-pandemic numbers among this age group, but remain high.

Delegates from United Methodist churches that voted to leave the denomination but have been blocked from disaffiliating spoke up in frustration on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. A group of 44 churches that wanted to disaffiliate had sued the conference and appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court, which ruled it is a matter that must be decided by the church, not secular courts.

Mainers are going to decide in November whether to adopt a new flag, but the state needs to settle on a design first. Anyone can submit a design proposal as long as it's based on the state's original flag, which featured a simple pine tree and blue star against an off-white background. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows announced the flag contest Friday. The deadline is July 19.

After five seasons and 155 episodes of macabre twists and turns, the original run of the CBS anthology The Twilight Zone concluded with an uncharacteristically happy ending. First screened 60 years ago, “The Bewitchin’ Pool” centers on Sport (Mary Badham) and Jeb (Jeffrey Byron) Sharewood, two affluent young siblings seemingly unperturbed when a straw-hatted boy suddenly emerges from their swimming pool, the latter poetically described by creator and narrator Rod Serling as “a structure built of tile and cement and money, a backyard toy for the affluent, wet entertainment for the well-to-do.” The pair subsequently accept his invitation to follow...

All STIs and STDs are passed sexually, right? Wrong. In addition to transmission through sexual intercourse, there are other ways in which infections can be passed which you should be aware of. Whether an STI is passed sexually or non-sexually, it will have the same consequences if left untreated.

Bogus Russian dossier peddler and Democrat Party problem fixer Marc Elias has again injected himself into a key election integrity case to “defend the broken status quo.” Swing-state Nevada’s dirty voter rolls include hundreds of suspect addresses, at bars, strip clubs, empty parking lots, and other commercial addresses, according to an investigation by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Doing so is clearly against the law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned a lower court ruling that had dismissed a lawsuit challenging Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt’s anti-trans birth certificate policy, which categorically prohibits transgender people from correcting the gender marker on their birth certificates to match their gender identity. All three members of the panel agreed that the lawsuit stated a valid claim of unconstitutional discrimination against transgender people and that the government’s justifications for this discrimination were irrational.

Before the 1960s, it was really hard to get divorced in America. Typically, the only way to do it was to convince a judge that your spouse had committed some form of wrongdoing, like adultery, abandonment, or “cruelty” (that is, abuse). This could be difficult: “Even if you could prove you had been hit, that didn’t necessarily mean it rose to the level of cruelty that justified a divorce,” said Marcia Zug, a family law professor at the University of South Carolina. Then came a revolution: In 1969, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan of California (who was himself divorced) signed the nation’s...

With a goal of reducing and tracking the stigmas that act as a barrier to HIV prevention, treatment and care—as well as a hindrance to better overall health outcomes—AIDSVu recently added a new online feature, the JHU Stigma Dashboard that offers visualized stigma-related data. Currently, the dashboard tracks sexual behavior stigma in Georgia, New York and Maryland. Specifically, it includes data on men who have sex with men in those states. Additional data and geographic areas will be added to the dashboard in future phases.

SPOKANE, WA — Police arrested local man Thomas Macey this week after an officer caught him urinating on the Pride flag painted on a urinal. "Once again, the gay community is under attack," said LGBTQ activist Charity Plunge. "This man literally urinated on the symbol of gay pride, which we painted on the urinal. Is there no end to the hatred and bigotry?" The LGBTQ community has declared Macey's act of urination the worst hate crime since someone called Caitlyn Jenner "sir" on live TV. "This is our 9/11," said Plunge to reporters. "We are literally being murdered in airport...

NBC 5 learned more about how leaders at the state's largest power grid think it will perform during upcoming hot Texas summers. ERCOT and Public Utility Commission leaders updated lawmakers in Austin Wednesday morning after a striking new report issued by the grid operator. They've long known that ERCOT, the state's largest power grid, is most vulnerable on hot late-summer nights as the sun goes down. That's when the big chunk of energy generated by solar power goes offline. It gets worse if the wind goes down as well, and wind generators don't run. According to a report delivered to...

The Supreme Court is about to drown us in a deluge of explosive and massively consequential decisions involving some of the most controversial issues of the day. Right now, the justices are scrambling to complete blockbusters involving abortion, guns, homelessness, unions, social media, online disinformation, pollution, the administrative state—and, oh yes, hundreds of Jan. 6 prosecutions, including Donald Trump’s. Yet at the moment, there’s a logjam: The court, which likes to wrap up decisions by the end of June, is way behind schedule, releasing just a trickle of minor cases several weeks in a row. Even if it stretches into...

The Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) has come under fire for yielding to the forces of political correctness, issuing an apology for using the term “cervix” in its health guidelines aimed at LGBTQ+ community members who are biologically female, according to a report by True North. This move reflects a concerning trend of medical institutions caving to the pressures of ‘woke’ culture, sacrificing clarity and accuracy in health communications for the sake of political correctness.

DALLAS - Four people were injured in a shooting in Deep Ellum on Sunday morning. Dallas police said patrol officers heard shots near Elm and N. Crowdus streets around 3 a.m. Four victims, ages 17, 26, 28, and 35, were taken to the hospital. The 17-year-old was last listed in critical condition. The other three are expected to arrive.

HARARE, ZIMBABWE — Leaders of the United Methodist Church expressed regret over last week's decision by the branch in Ivory Coast to leave the union following the church's decision to repeal a long-standing ban on LGBTQ+ clergy but pledged to accept it. … On May 28, Ivory Coast's church voted to split from the United Methodists. With over 1.2 million members, the West African country's church has one of the denomination's largest overseas followers. The United Methodist Church has about 5.4 million members in the United States, and about 4.6 million in Africa, Europe and the Philippines, according to church...

Florida’s highest court on Thursday rejected an effort by a suspended state attorney to get reinstated after she was removed from office last year by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in his second suspension of a Democratic prosecutor. Supreme Court justices voted 6-1 to deny a petition from suspended State Attorney Monique Worrell of the 9th Judicial Circuit, which serves metro Orlando. The majority of justices said they disagreed with her arguments that DeSantis’ reasons for suspending her were too vague or that the suspension infringed on her lawful exercise of prosecutorial discretion. DeSantis claimed Worrell failed to prosecute crimes committed...

In new guidelines released Tuesday, U.S. health officials now recommend that certain people take the antibiotic doxycycline as a morning-after pill to lower the risk of some sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The latest recommendations only apply to gay and bisexual men and transgender women who have had an STD in the past year and are at high risk of getting infected again. While past research has shown that doxycycline works for those populations, there's not enough evidence to recommend the preventive treatment, known as doxy PEP, for all American adults, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted.

When Naomi Goldberg began working for the Movement Advancement Project, same-sex couples were unable to legally marry in more than half of states — including her home state of California — and LGBTQ Americans were barred from serving openly in the military. Now the nonprofit think tank’s executive director, Goldberg is fighting to protect LGBTQ rights secured over the last decade and prevent the nation from backsliding as anti-LGBTQ policies gain ground in state legislatures.