Free Republic

More than 30 people are now without jobs after the sudden closure of all three remaining OCF Coffee House locations throughout Philadelphia. Workers said they announced a plan to form a union a week earlier.

Whether you’re just looking for your morning coffee fix before work or a remote workplace with lots of ambiance, chances are you have far better options than Starbucks.Starbucks made headlines last week when the coffee chain threatened to take down its Facebook page over “negative” comments on its posts promoting Black Lives Matter, LGBT ideology, and other leftist causes. It’s an oddly thin-skinned move for a mega-corporation, although I wouldn’t mind seeing the woke giants of Facebook and Starbucks go head-to-head.Regardless, you shouldn’t care because you shouldn’t be buying Starbucks coffee anyway. Whether you’re just looking for your morning coffee...

Here, life has felt incredibly normal. It's also revealed how abnormal the lifestyle I followed in Virginia really was.OCALA, Fla. — Last Sunday I plopped a steaming hashbrown casserole and a bowl of freshly sliced oranges down on one of a row of endless folding tables covered in those flimsy plastic tablecloths you get at the dollar store. The casseroles were outnumbered only by the pans of homemade cinnamon rolls, and the fruit section was meager: it was a good Southern Baptist potluck. Church ladies buzzed around, removing tin foil from tin pans and putting serving spoons in each dish,...

Homeland Security: President Obama promised lobbyists wouldn't run his White House. They're just doing it from across the street — at a Shariah-compliant coffee chain tied to a radical jihadist group. That's right: According to the New York Times, prominent K Street lobbyists are buttonholing Obama officials at a Caribou Coffee shop on Pennsylvania Avenue, raising far more than just ethics questions. What the Times story neglects to mention is that Caribou Coffee is a Shariah-compliant firm owned by an Islamic bank based in Bahrain. One of its founders and a current adviser are leaders in the radical Muslim Brotherhood....

Iran Clamps Down on Coffee Shops October 25, 2007 The Guardian Robert Tait in Tehran They have become a haven for modern bookworms everywhere - a place to combine a love of the written word with the pleasures of cafe society. But now the trend of opening coffee shops inside bookstores has fallen foul of the authorities amid a general clampdown on social and intellectual freedoms. Four bookshops in Tehran this week closed their coffee shops after receiving a 72-hour ultimatum from Amaken-e Omoomi, a state body governing the retail trade. The order has led to the closure of the...

As someone who was a staunch non-smoker for most of my life, and tried pot for the first time as a fully mature adult (and who took notes on the experience), I have a pretty unique perspective on the matter. Everyone else I met at the Cannabis Cup had either been smoking pot for many years, often decades, or had started as a teenager (or both). Either way, everyone else had been smoking pot for a pretty long time. Actually, I found it surprisingly easy to learn to smoke pot, although in retrospect, it makes sense. As a life-long asthma...

Dutch cannabis policy challenged The Dutch have long been famous for their tolerant attitude to cannabis. But now they are re-examining their approach, because millions of European "drugs tourists" are heading to the Netherlands to do what they cannot do at home, the BBC's Mike Donkin reports. They flood in across the border from Germany and Belgium, along with the international criminal gangs who operate the drug supply lines. Maastricht's citizens want an end to this, the city's Mayor Gerd Leers says. So he has called for the Dutch and the rest of Europe to adopt a common "pragmatic approach"...