Free Republic

As President Joe Biden jets off to Europe to meet with allies, some of the United States' closest partners are still wondering if America is truly "back" as Biden proclaimed earlier this year. Cautious about Biden's domestic standing, and smarting from his lack of coordination on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, they are concerned whether his presidency truly represents a break from the isolationist, confrontational foreign policies of his predecessor, President Donald Trump, according to U.S. foreign policy experts. Biden's second trip abroad as president will take him to Rome and Scotland, where he'll attend international summits aimed at tackling the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. immigration authorities will no longer make routine arrests at schools, hospitals or a range of other “protected” areas, under new guidelines released Wednesday by the Department of Homeland Security. As part of a further effort to make immigration more targeted, agents and officers are being directed to consider the impact of enforcement actions on communities as well as “broader societal interests,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in announcing the new guidelines. “We can accomplish our law enforcement mission without denying individuals access to needed medical care, children access to their schools, the displaced access to food...

HUIXTLA, Mexico (AP) — A growing migrant caravan set out early Wednesday after a day of rest on its trek across southern Mexico. About 2,000 migrants had walked out of the southern city of Tapachula near the Guatemala border on Saturday. While the multitude is challenging to count, it appeared significantly larger Wednesday and its leaders estimated its size at 4,000. “The caravan is like a magnet, it goes sucking up people, migrants who had been in the towns (of coastal Chiapas) are joining,” said Irineo Mújica, an immigration activist with the organization People without Borders. One of them was...

NEW YORK (AP) — The Treasury Department has hired a former JPMorgan Chase executive to head a new government program aimed at combatting racial inequality issues in banking and other financial-services industries. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Monday that Janis Bowdler will be the department’s first counselor for racial equity, part of a multi-pronged strategy by the Biden administration to deal with systemic racism found in many parts of the economy. Banking and finance have long had issues with racial inequity, from the lack of representation of Blacks and other minorities at the highest levels of companies to ongoing issues...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Thursday tied his legislative priorities on voting rights, police reform and climate change to Martin Luther King Jr.’s push for racial justice as he marked the 10th anniversary of the opening of the civil rights leader’s memorial on the National Mall. Biden, introduced by Vice President Kamala Harris, sought to reassure his supporters that he wouldn’t let up the fight as he works to muscle his massive social spending bill through a divided Congress. Invoking King, Biden said the country was still working to live up to its ideals as a nation and...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Earth’s warming and resulting natural disasters are creating a more dangerous world of desperate leaders and peoples, the Biden administration said Thursday in the federal government’s starkest assessments yet of security and migration challenges facing the United States as the climate worsens. The Defense Department for years has called climate change a threat to U.S. national security. But Thursday’s reports by the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, National Security Council and Director of National Intelligence provide one of the government’s deepest looks yet at the vast rippling effects on the world’s stability and resulting heightened...

Power shortages are turning out streetlights and shutting down factories in China. The poor in Brazil are choosing between paying for food or electricity. German corn and wheat farmers can’t find fertilizer, made using natural gas. And fears are rising that Europe will have to ration electricity if it’s a cold winter. The world is gripped by an energy crunch — a fierce squeeze on some of the key markets for natural gas, oil and other fuels that keep the global economy running and the lights and heat on in homes. Heading into winter, that has meant higher utility bills,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Framed by the Capitol, President Joe Biden paid tribute Saturday to fallen law enforcement officers and honored those who fought off the Jan. 6 insurrection at that very site by declaring “because of you, democracy survived.” Biden spoke at the 40th Annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service to remember the 491 law enforcement officers who died in the line of duty in 2019 and 2020. Standing where the violent mob tried to block his own ascension to the presidency, Biden singled out the 150 officers who were injured and the five who died in the attack’s aftermath....

NEW YORK (AP) — Get ready to pay sharply higher bills for heating this winter, along with seemingly everything else. With prices surging worldwide for heating oil, natural gas and other fuels, the U.S. government said Wednesday it expects households to see their heating bills jump as much as 54% compared to last winter. Nearly half the homes in the U.S. use natural gas for heat, and they could pay an average $746 this winter, 30% more than a year ago. Those in the Midwest could get particularly pinched, with bills up an estimated 49%, and this could be the...

Angry by officials’ efforts to have a “F- — Biden” sign removed from a local resident’s property, a caravan drove through parts of Kokomo and in front of Mayor Tyler Moore’s house in protest Saturday. The caravan, organized by Evansville politician Gabe Whitley, was a dozen vehicles long. Participants also drove past the house belonging to Greg Sheline, executive director of the Kokomo-Howard County Plan Commission, in protest of the commission and city’s efforts to fine Brandon Adams if he doesn’t remove the flag from his property. “The government has no right to fine and intimidate and send government officials...

PARIS (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Tuesday on the world’s most developed countries to take on and counter widening gaps between the rich and poor. He told the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris that the coronavirus and climate change have exacerbated inequality between and within nations and that action must be taken to reverse the trend. In addition to tackling those two threats, he told an OECD conference on climate and security that curbing corporate tax avoidance and ending discrimination against women and minorities are critical to improving global living conditions. Blinken said...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rejecting the recommendation of prosecutors, a federal judge sentenced a Jan. 6 rioter to probation on Friday and suggested that the Justice Department was being too hard on those who broke into the Capitol compared to the people arrested during anti-racism protests following George Floyd’s murder. U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden questioned why federal prosecutors had not brought more cases against those accused in 2020 summertime protests, reading out statistics on riot cases in the nation’s capital that were not prosecuted. “I think the U.S. attorney would have more credibility if it was even-handed in its...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A bitterly divided Senate late Thursday approved President Joe Biden’s choice to oversee vast government-owned lands in the West, despite Republican complaints that she is an “eco-terrorist.″ Tracy Stone-Manning, Biden’s choice to lead the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management, was approved, 50-45, on a party-line vote. Five Republican senators missed the vote. Republicans sharply criticized her nomination during an often acrimonious Senate debate, with several holding up a metal spike similar to one used in a 1989 environmental sabotage case. Democrats defended Stone-Manning, noting she was never charged with a crime and in fact testified against...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Facing bipartisan criticism over its approach to immigration, the Biden administration on Thursday announced new rules that require authorities to only pursue migrants who recently crossed into the country without permission or are deemed to pose a threat to public safety. The new guidelines replace interim rules issued in February that were initially blocked by a federal judge in August as part of a lawsuit brought by Texas and Louisiana. They break from a more aggressive approach to immigration enforcement under former President Donald Trump, who early in his presidency directed authorities to apprehend anyone who was...

WASHINGTON — As President Joe Biden visited one disaster site after another this summer — from California wildfires to hurricane-induced flooding in Louisiana and New York — he said climate change is “everybody’s crisis” and America must get serious about the “code red” danger posed by global warming. In many ways, the president is making up for lost time. “This is a ‘Code Red’ moment, but Democrats are answering the call,” said Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Florida, chairwoman of a special House committee on climate change. Included in the massive legislation is a nationwide clean-electricity program that is intended to eliminate...

DEL RIO, Texas (Reuters) -An impromptu border camp that roiled U.S. politics was emptied of thousands of Haitian migrants by Friday, with most remaining in the United States for now and others expelled on deportation flights or returned to Mexico. Reuters witnesses said the shanty town-like jumble of makeshift shelters and tents had all but disappeared from Del Rio, Texas, with workers clearing the last debris from the banks of the Rio Grande bordering Mexico. Texas State Troopers lined the river bank to discourage new crossings. U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said nearly 30,000 migrants had been...

PHOENIX (AP) — A draft report of the election review in Arizona’s largest county by supporters of former President Donald Trump found that President Joe Biden did indeed win the 2020 presidential contest there, an embarrassing end to a bizarre quest to find evidence supporting Trump’s false claim that he lost because of fraud. The final report was scheduled to be released Friday afternoon, the result of a months-long partisan review funded in part by taxpayers. The draft document began to circulate Thursday night showing the results of the review’s chaotic hand count of all 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa...

The Arizona audit report will be released today during an Arizona Senate Hearing scheduled at 1 p.m.The Gateway Pundit broke this story last week.Today, we will finally see the long-awaited results from the Arizona Senate’s historic full forensic audit of the 2020 Maricopa County election.Maricopa County officials and Steve Chucri continue to claim that this was the most secure election in history and that no fraud occurred.The Gateway Pundit has been dropping nukes on this fake narrative after obtaining secret audio recordings of Steve Chucri, where he confirms almost everything that we have been reporting for months.Steve Chucri resigned from...

PHOENIX (AP) — Ten months after Donald Trump lost his 2020 reelection bid in Arizona, supporters hired by Arizona Senate Republicans were preparing to deliver the results of an unprecedented partisan election review that is the climax of a bizarre quest to find evidence supporting the former president’s false claim that he lost because of fraud. Nearly every allegation made by the review team so far has crumbled under scrutiny. Election officials in Arizona and around the country expect more of the same Friday from the review team they say is biased, incompetent and chasing absurd or disproven conspiracy theories....

CIUDAD ACUÑA, Mexico (AP) — A camp where almost 15,000 migrants had waited along the Texas border just days ago was dramatically smaller Thursday, while across the river in Mexico, Haitian migrants in a growing camp awoke surrounded by security forces as a helicopter thundered overhead. As of Thursday, about 4,000 migrants remained under the bridge between Del Rio and Mexico, Department of Homeland Security officials said. The number peaked sharply on Saturday, as migrants driven by confusion over the Biden administration’s policies and misinformation on social media converged at the crossing. Food, shelter and medical care was being provided...