Free Republic

(The Center Square) – A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation that would fast-track a floor vote on Social Security's looming insolvency, using an independent board to draft a starting plan Congress could no longer easily ignore. The Protecting Retirement Opportunities and Maintaining Income Security for Everyone, or PROMISE Act, would direct the Social Security Advisory Board to submit a base bill guaranteeing at least 50 years of solvency. Congress would then be forced to debate, amend and vote on it within 100 hours, bypassing the inaction that has left the retirement trust fund six years from depletion. Eight senators...

HINESVILE, Ga. — A former Georgia housing authority executive director and a Savannah man have been indicted on federal fraud charges stemming from what prosecutors say is a yearslong scheme that allegedly cost a public housing agency more than $2.5 million. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia, Melanie S. Thompson, 55, of Savannah, is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, 19 counts of wire fraud, and two counts of making false, fictitious, or fraudulent claims. Toriono L. Byrd, 52, of Savannah, is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Federal prosecutors say the...

The Democratic Socialists of America this week unveiled a new political platform calling for sweeping changes to the structure of the U.S. government, including replacing the presidency and Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress. The platform, titled "Workers Deserve More!," proposes replacing the presidency and Supreme Court "with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress," a change that would require constitutional amendments and fundamentally reshape the nation's system of separated powers established more than two centuries ago. The proposal is among the most far-reaching reforms included in the platform, which also calls for abolishing the Electoral...

Hundreds of staff members and attorneys at Brooklyn Defender Services may walk off the job on Thursday after their union authorized a potential strike. The public defenders represent thousands of low-income Brooklyn and Queens defendants in court who cannot afford their own attorneys. "The idea of my clients standing in court without me is not something I ever want them to have," Julia Coppelman, a senior staff attorney in criminal defense at Brooklyn Defender Services and strike captain, told NY1. Attorneys, represented by the United Auto Workers Local 2325, authorized a strike to take place at 8 a.m. on Thursday...

For sixty years, the food stamp program has operated under an arrangement no family and no business would ever accept: one level of government runs the program, and another level of government pays for it. States sign people up, calculate benefits, and process the paperwork while federal taxpayers cover the bill. When the people writing the checks and the people doing the work are in different buildings, nobody watches the register. The results are exactly what you’d expect. In fiscal year 2024, the federal government spent roughly $100 billion on SNAP, and at least $10.5 billion of it was lost...

Cincinnati — For Avondale resident Christopher Adams, going to the grocery store was a twice a week trip. After the store closed, that task may become a lot harder. The neighborhood of Avondale’s only sizable grocery store, The Country Meat Co. Marketplace, announced that it’s shutting its doors on Facebook in early July. It opened in February 2025, and when it closed the “now open” banner still hung above the door. Before the store opened, Avondale was considered a “food desert.” Many of its residents lived more than a mile away from a grocery store that could provide nutritious, fresh...

Washington state officials are refusing to investigate daycare providers that reportedly received hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer subsidies after reporters found little evidence that children were being cared for at some locations. According to a report from The Center Square, over the past six months, its reporters visited roughly three dozen daycare providers that had received large state and federal subsidy payments intended to support childcare for lower-income families, but only a small number appeared to have children present. [embedded tweet] In one case, a daycare listed at a West Seattle address received more than $229,000 between July...

President Trump declared Sunday that the Strait of Hormuz is open after the US hit 140 targets in Iran over the latest attack on cargo ships in the critical passage. Trump doubled down on US Central Command’s insistence that the key oil choke point was now open following an intense bombing campaign against Iran overnight, which targeted missile and drone sites, naval assets, ammunition storage facilities, communication networks, and surveillance locations. “Yeah, it’s open. We bombed the hell out of them last night,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” contradicting Tehran’s warnings that the strait remains closed.The president went on...

Seven former and one current Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MTBA) employees have been charged with a federal superseding indictment alleging that they falsified records and reports and then fraudulently collected overtime pay. The MTBA, although it collects fares, is heavily subsidized by tax dollars. According to the Department of Justice, defendants Brian Pfaffinger, Ronald Gamble, Magda Trinh, Jensen Vatel, Nathalie Mendes, Danny Barbosa, and Matthew Leonard have been charged with various crimes, including conspiring to commit wire fraud, falsifying records, and wire fraud. The defendants were all former Red Line Maintenance of Way employees, per the DOJ. Pfaffinger, Gamble, Vatel,...

A Hungarian conservative influencer was arrested in the early hours of Wednesday, July 8th and has since been released after spending several hours in custody, in a case that seems to confirm the new, pro-Brussels Hungarian government’s authoritarian tendencies. István Szakács was taken into custody in the western city of Győr after police searched his home. Eight officers arrived shortly after 6 a.m., carried out a house search, and took him away for questioning. The police said they were investigating Szakács on suspicion of making threats related to a terrorist offence. The allegation stems from a Facebook video in which...

The Maine Democratic Party’s state committee voted Wednesday to hold a nominating convention to select a replacement for U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, according to a party statement and an account of the meeting shared with the Bangor Daily News. More than 100 state committee members attended the meeting and voted in favor of the convention process, the party said in a statement. The convention would include 500 delegates elected proportionally by county committees, along with the entire state committee, according to the account of the meeting.

(The Center Square) - More than $225 million in fraud was reported by state education departments and school districts from 2019 to 2026, according to a new report. Open the Books, a federal spending watchdog, and the State Financial Officers Foundation, analyzed six years’ worth of reports from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General. The report found multi-million dollar fraud schemes in school districts across the country and in American territories. OJ Oleka, CEO of the SFOF, said the fraud schemes happened due to a lack of oversight in education departments and the ability of bad...

Downstate Illinois Democratic state representative Carol Ammons is facing allegations she steered state grants to a family member and lied to the FBI, among other misdeeds. Paris Schutz reports.

The many donors out there to the Graham Platner Senate campaign who might be upset about the incredibly poor vetting that was performed on their candidate might be interested to know about evidence of malfeasance and corruption by one of the primary vetters that has just been revealed by an interesting source.And that source is someone familiar to longtime readers of NewsBusters. None other than Mike Elk (pictured) who earned the reputation as perhaps the most lethargic labor reporter in the world but definitely at Politico where he briefly worked about ten years ago.However, despite his reputation for lethargy, on...

Priest attends brother’s homosexual ‘wedding,’ calls it ‘amazing,’ ‘special’Fr. Rico Passero, the pastor of a Catholic church in Ontario, said that he ‘MC’d the reception’ and praised what he called ‘an EPIC wedding weekend.’A Canadian Catholic priest from Ontario posted on social media that he attended his brother’s homosexual “wedding,” which he described as “amazing” and “EPIC.”Fr. Rico Passero, who is listed as the pastor at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Grimsby, Ontario, made the Facebook post.“What an EPIC wedding weekend last week. It took me some time to finally receive some amazing photos from the Midnight in Eden wedding...

Some of the UK’s top judges are hearing arguments over whether a Trinidad and Tobago court had the legal right to overturn a 2018 ruling to remove colonial-era homophobic laws that criminalise anal sex between consenting men. The country’s “buggery law”, often referred to as its “sodomy” law, was created in 1925 and was written into Trinidad and Tobago’s 1986 Sexual Offences Act. In 2017 a Trinidadian LGBTQ+ rights activist, Jason Jones, challenged the law, and in 2018 a high court ruled that it infringed upon his constitutional right to privacy and equality. Last year a court of appeal quashed...

Teen killer Karmelo Anthony is seeking a new trial and wants a different judge to oversee any future legal proceedings in his conviction for the murder of Austin Metcalf, his defense team has revealed. Just last month, a jury in Collin County, in the suburbs of Dallas, took less than three hours to convict the 19-year-old of murder over the fatal stabbing of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet in April 2025. The same jury sentenced Anthony to 35 years in prison, rejecting his claim that Anthony acted in self-defense.

House Republicans are investigating reports that American Federation of Teachers union dues were used to help produce, promote, and publish union President Randi Weingarten's book, which publisher Penguin Random House called "a manifesto for our time." Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and Rep. Rick Allen, R-Ga., chair of the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, wrote a letter Tuesday to Weingarten. They cited reports that the "AFT expended substantial funds on consultants, legal services, publication-related expenses, fact-checking services, photography, and other activities connected" to her book Why Fascists Fear Teachers:...

The Arizona Supreme Court has weighed in on the conflict between the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and County Recorder Justin Heap. The Supreme Court ended the stay previously put in place by the Arizona Court of Appeals. Heap’s election plan can now be put back into place, the high court ruled. The lower court previously ruled that it was too close to an election to make changes. The board of supervisors said it was disappointed in the ruling. “The Board is disappointed with today’s decision by the Arizona Supreme Court because it reverses the stay order in Heap v....

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) is putting sanctuary priorities ahead of public safety, this time by dangling technology upgrade grants in front of local police agencies—but only if they agree to limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Hochul, speaking in Long Island earlier in the week, explained that $75 million of a total $100 million in grants would be tied directly to compliance with the state’s “Local Cops, Local Crimes Act." The act, passed by the state legislature in May, effectively pressures sheriffs and departments to keep their hands off helping ICE with raids and detentions by ending 287(g)...