Free Republic

Eighty years ago, on February 4, 1945, the Yalta Conference opened, at which the leaders of the victorious countries of World War II – the USSR, the US and UK – defined the contours of the post-war world. Despite ideological differences, they agreed to finally eradicate German Nazism and Japanese militarism. The agreements reached in Crimea were confirmed and developed during the Potsdam Peace Conference in July 1945. One of the results of the negotiations was the creation of the UN and approval of the UN Charter, which remains the main source of international law to this day. The goals...

Revelations have emerged that the Biden regime has been operating secret charter flights to transport illegal immigrants from foreign airports to various U.S. cities. This covert operation has been ongoing amidst an unprecedented influx of illegal aliens across the southern border. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency under Alejandro Mayorka’s Department of Homeland Security, has been at the forefront of these operations, which have remained undisclosed to the public. In a recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, lawyers for CBP refused to reveal details about the program, citing potential national security vulnerabilities, according to Daily Mail. The Center...

A new report shows that charter schools have made significant gains over the past four years. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) last month revealed new data analysis over the past four years titled "Believing in Public Education: A Demographic and State-level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends." The report showed an uptick in charter school enrollment from 2019 to 2023. More recently, charter school enrollment grew 2% while district enrollment plateaued. More precisely, charter school enrollment increased by 72,241 students while public school enrollment increased by only 7,458 students nationwide. To explain...

In the summer of 2014, the cable and satellite bundle peaked. One hundred million households were subscribed to ESPN, the most successful channel in the history of cable, and the apex of the greatest business in the history of media had been reached. But no one knew it. Cable, satellite, and media executives were all blissfully unaware of what was coming. Fox Sports FS1 had launched the prior year — yours truly appeared on the very first show in the history of the network, a 2013 college football preview show. In the summer of 2014 the SEC Network would make...

<p>OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A group of parents, faith leaders and a public education nonprofit sued Monday to stop Oklahoma from establishing and funding what would be the nation’s first religious public charter school.</p><p>The lawsuit filed in Oklahoma County District Court seeks to stop taxpayer funds from going to the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The Statewide Virtual Charter School Board voted 3-2 last month to approve the application by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City to establish the school, and the board and its members are among those listed as defendants.</p>

Another piece of charter school legislation was vetoed by Gov. Roy Cooper late Friday afternoon. The bill would have lessened the caps on enrollment growth. The Charter School Omnibus bill, as it is known, would also allow county commissioners to give property tax proceeds for capital projects. Cooper, a second-term Democrat, previously vetoed the Charter School Review Board legislation. The latest veto by Cooper is his 89th since taking office in January 2017 and 14th this session. Eight of those have already been reversed by successful override challenges, and more are expected. Cooper’s statement on the veto, in full, said,...

The Federal Court will not hear challenges against the federal government’s vaccine mandate for air travel after dismissing them as moot. On Thursday, Associate Chief Justice Jocelyne Gagné granted the federal government’s application to dismiss the case, 10 days before it was scheduled to be argued before the Federal Court. The court was going to hear challenges filed by several applicants, including former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford, People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier, and private citizens who were unable to travel by rail or air when the federal vaccine mandate was in effect. The Trudeau government imposed the mandate...

The speaker is exactly half the ex president’s age but his speech is the full Trump. “Joe Biden has turned the southern border into the world’s capital of drug trafficking,” says JD Vance, celebrity author of Hillbilly Elegy and Trump-endorsed Senate candidate for Ohio. To cheers from a capacity crowd in Youngstown, 1,500 miles from the Mexico frontier, he adds: “We do not have to allow the poison and the sex trafficking that’s flowing into our state thanks to the open border to continue to do so. We can shut that border, we can build the wall, and we can...

WASHINGTON — New rules proposed by the Education Department to govern a federal grant program for charter schools are drawing bipartisan backlash and angering parents, who say the Biden administration is seeking to stymie schools that have fallen out of favor with many Democrats but maintain strong support among Black and Latino families. The proposal would add requirements to the application process for grants from the federal Charter Schools Program, which has doled out billions of dollars over nearly 30 years to help open new charter schools or expand existing ones. It sets tighter restrictions on the schools’ relationships with...

Record charter rate highlights extreme vessel shortage — a major negative for cargo shippersIn a sign of just how frenzied the container market has become, a freight forwarder is reportedly paying $135,000 per day for a short-term charter of the S Santiago, a 15-year-old container ship with a capacity of 5,060 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs). “Charter rates for short employment … have gone out of control,” said Alphaliner in its new weekly report. “Depending on the sources, the ship would have obtained anything between $100,000 and $145,000 per day, an absolute historic high. The name of the charterer has not...

An elementary school with the most astounding student success rates in all of Florida sits in one of the state’s most unusual locations: a condominium clubhouse in Miramar. The A-rated Somerset Academy Miramar South, which is next to a swimming pool in the Bahia Miramar residential community, is a school most people don’t even know exists, and many parents think their kids actually attend a different school. The school was the only one in the state where 100 percent of students passed state English and math exams last spring. The test results also showed about 70 percent of students in...

It appears Charter is blocking Free Republic in SC. I am able to connect via my Cellphone. My final solution for a good fix: I installed SetupVPN extension in Firefox. Very easy to use, I now have access to Free Republic again. My outage started yesterday around 5 PM, still out. I had this happen once before about 5 years ago., the issue went away after a day.

The most widely mocked presidential campaign of this cycle may not land Big Apple Mayor Bill de Blasio in the White House, but at least, in theory, it could put him on the unemployment line. This weekend the New York Post brought up the rather inconvenient fact that Hizzoner has effectively absconded from the city and is spending pretty much all of his time on the campaign trail. So how is he managing to run the most populous city in the nation while he’s out on the road? The answer is that he’s not, which means that he’s not doing...

FULL TITLE: Meet the students learning how to become millionaires in a school district where many parents don’t have bank accounts ************ To enter . . . Olney Charter School, you have to walk through a metal detector. Once inside, you can’t go many feet without encountering yet another security guard. But also inside? You’ll find one of the most innovative financial literacy programs in any high school in the country. *********** Students who sign up for Olney’s program take three personal finance classes and have the option to work as few or as many hours as they’d like within...

< Snip >Shares in Charter Communications (CHTR) plunged after the cable TV firm reported first quarter earnings and lost more video subscribers than expected, also sparking a sell-off in Comcast (CMCSA) and Altice USA (ATUS). Charter plummeted 11.7% to 263.33 on the stock market today. Comcast fell 4.6% to 31.81. Altice dropped 9.3% to 17.59.

Kids who attend New York City's Success Academy charter schools do remarkably well. "We are No. 1 in student achievement in the state," says founder Eva Moskowitz, "outperforming all the wealthy suburbs." They do. Although they teach mostly poor kids, 95 percent pass the state math test, and 84 percent pass the English test. Pass rates at government run schools are 38 and 41 percent. How does Success Academy do it? For one thing, she keeps kids in class longer. Middle schoolers stay until 4:30 p.m. Is that too much stress for kids, I ask? "China and India are not...

STAMFORD — Governor Malloy announced Tuesday that the second largest cable operator in the country, Charter Communications, is planning to build a 500,000 square foot, 15 story headquarter building in Stamford, and plans to add 1,100 new jobs. It follows the company’s commitment to create and retain 400 jobs under the stat’s First Five program back in 2012, which was created to invest in companies with incentives to get them to invest back in the state. Charter now has committed to create an additional 1,100 new corporate headquarters jobs, and has agreed to a $100 million in planned capital expenditures...

On Friday night, the City of College Park, Maryland reversed its city council decision that allowed non-citizens of the U.S., including illegal aliens, the right to vote. This was due to council conveniently forgetting that such massive changes to the College Park City Charter require the vote of a supermajority on council as opposed to a simple majority. Ironically, the law that mandated a supermajority to pass changes to the city charter was enacted just this summer while the proposal to allow illegals and other non-citizens to vote, and was passed 4-3, was voted on only a few months later...

The television screen went dark a month ago as Daniel Fitzgerald watched “American Pickers” on the History Channel. Perplexed, he grabbed the remote and surfed through CNN, Disney, Comedy Central and the rest of the standard cable lineup. Many of them were gone, too. In their place was a black background with a small block of text advising him that his subscription no longer provided those channels. “I thought, ‘What the hell? I just paid the cable bill,’” Fitzgerald recalled last week in the tiny Lexington [Kentucky] apartment he shares with his disabled 16-year-old son. Fitzgerald called Spectrum, the subsidiary...

Anti-fascist activists had a difficult time pushing back against James O’Keefe’s investigative reporting during a planned press conference Thursday. They got kicked out of a food court, but not before showing pornography to a reporter. The DC Antifascist Coalition had booked a room at the National Press Club to hold a press conference in which they would unveil damaging information about O’Keefe and his group Project Veritas. In the lead-up to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Project Veritas released videos which resulted in the arrest of a member of DisruptJ20 and foiled a plot to use stink bombs at an inauguration...