Free Republic

One international student after another told the University of Central Missouri this summer that they couldn’t get a visa, and many struggled to even land an interview for one. Even though demand was just as high as ever, half as many new international graduate students showed up for fall classes compared to last year. The decline represents a hit to the bottom line for Central Missouri, a small public university that operates close to its margins with an endowment of only $65 million. International students typically account for nearly a quarter of its tuition revenue. “We aren’t able to subsidize...

Republicans in Congress are facing mounting pressure from both sides of the aisle about whether to extend additional Obamacare premium tax credit subsidies as part of legislation to avoid a government shutdown this fall. The popularity of the added Obamacare marketplace subsidies, which former President Joe Biden and Democrats passed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as a temporary measure, could make it difficult for Republicans to let them expire by January without facing blowback during the 2026 midterm elections. But conservatives argued that there is systemic fraud in the Obamacare insurance marketplace through the extended subsidies and are...

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Friday that $679 million in federal funding has been withdrawn for 12 “doomed” offshore wind projects – including three in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The scrapped funding includes $10.5 million for Connecticut’s Bridgeport Port Authority Operations and Maintenance Wind Port project, $20.5 million for New Jersey’s Wind Port at Paulsboro and $48 million for Staten Island’s Arthur Kill Terminal. The Trump administration plans to spend the withdrawn funds on “real infrastructure” and “restoring American maritime dominance.” “Wasteful, wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go towards revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” Duffy said...

Run Time 54 m. / " started noticing something was off in home appraisals,” says Mitch Vexler, whistleblower and expert on property valuations. He tells Daniela Cambone: “They were inflating property values to jack up taxes, and that was feeding into trillions in school bond debt that I believe will spiral.” On the scope of the problem, Vexler is blunt: “We’re talking about $5.1 trillion in school bonds that are based on these inflated appraisals. That’s massive—this is a ticking time bomb for local governments and taxpayers alike.” He warns of consequences for the bond market: “School districts are relying...

California “First Partner” Jennifer Siebel Newsom making bank off her husband’s position is outrageous — and fresh proof that American politicians have gotten far too comfortable with the dirty dealing that pervades politics. ...Siebel Newsom’s nonprofit, Representation Project, pays her a hefty $150,000 — while raking in donations from companies that have an interest in winning the favor of her husband, California Gov. Gavin Newsom. AT&T, which has spent upward of $2 million to lobby the state on landline phone rules so far this year, forked over up to $25,000 for Representation Project’s “Flip the Script” gala. Comcast, AT&T’s competitor,...

The California High-Speed Rail Authority on Thursday announced a plan to accelerate the process of laying the first tracks on the state’s beleaguered infrastructure project. The materials will be used to install the first miles of electrified track along the California High-Speed Rail route, the first high-speed rail track to be laid in the U.S. The Authority states that the process is being accelerated and will result in track being laid in 2026. Aerial view of the Cedar Viaduct crossing in Fresno which was completed in April 2023. (California High-Speed Rail Authority) U.S. manufacturers will be able to bid in...

This is my very first solo post after years on Free Republic. Please forgive me and let me know if I got some of the "must haves" wrong. I Just received this email from a family memberand it's content absolutely terrifies me. I can't believe that real US citizens believe this poop, nor that our military gives up their time and freedoms and put themselves in harms way to defend such opinions. When elections are stolen, history shows crowds flood the streets. Trump plans to crush the protests before they even begin… Monday night, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker came right...

If transgenderism is a naturally occurring biological phenomenon, it should be evenly distributed across the population, instead the latest demographic report from a UCLA sexuality institute that uses CDC numbers shows that more than half of the ‘transgender’ population is under 24. The Williams Institute at UCLA law school broke down transgender demographics to find that 54% of the ‘transgender’ population was under 24 years old. Even more revealingly, the percentages fall sharply as ages rise and rise even more intensely as ages drop. After 25, transgenderism falls off a cliff, nearly disappears after 35 (and hardly exists for those...

...A private entity constructed by the Biden administration to perform semiconductor research and chock full of Biden administration members is being terminated.... ...“The Biden Administration had no authority to manipulate legislation in a way that would allow them to establish, staff, and govern a corporation to act as a government agency. ... ...Natcast was created to provide soft landings for Biden administration employees, Lutnick said.... ... a semiconductor slush fund that did nothing but line the pockets of Biden loyalists with American tax dollars,

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has been an instrumental figure in dismantling the climate science regime during the second Trump administration, including major funding cuts in partnership with the Department of Government Efficiency. Now, nearly half of the states' attorneys general have called on Zeldin to strike at the head of another climate institution: the Environmental Law Institute. Headed by Attorney General Austin Knudsen of Montana and signed by 22 other state AGs, the letter calls on Zeldin to cut funding grants for the Environmental Law Institute, which operates the Climate Judiciary Project. The letter says...

Autism claims rose from $3 million to $400 million. The $250 million ‘Feeding Our Future’ free food fraud in which Somali groups stole a quarter of a billion dollars while claiming to feed hundreds of thousands of children who never existed seemed like the biggest case of welfare fraud in Minnesota, but it may be just the beginning. Somali autism fraud, partly linked to the ‘Feeding Our Future’ scam, may be even bigger and after the FBI raids of autism clinics last December, the scale of it is still being put together. The pattern in both Somali meals for children...

The Republican National Committee was dealt a blow by a unanimous decision of the Third Circuit Appeals Court in the RNC's effort to discard undated and misdated ballots in Pennsylvania. The three-judge panel said in the 55-page ruling that the affected ballots needed to be counted and failing to do so was unconstitutional. Pennsylvania voters are required to write the date on the envelope for their mail-in ballots. "The date requirement imposes a burden on Pennsylvanians' constitutional right to vote," the court ruling reads. "And it culminates in county election boards discarding thousands of ballots each time an election is...

Speaking from the Oval Office Monday morning, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller gave additional details about how the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department was cooking the books on data in order to make the argument crime was "going down." "When we share the results, it will stun you," Miller said. "There are even accusations that murders and homicides were reported as accidents not murders. This is how severe the manipulation of the crime data has been in this city. It will all be uncovered and it will all be brought to light." The Department of Justice launched an investigation...

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller told reporters Monday that the Trump administration has uncovered a “massive scandal” in Washington D.C. involving the doctoring of crime statistics. He said the alleged corruption is currently under investigation and said details of the corruption will soon be brought to light. “The results will stun you,” he said. Miller made the remarks in the Oval Office after President Trump signed a slew of new executive orders to end cashless bail throughout the United States and in the District of Columbia, prosecute the burning of the...

President Trump fired Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook Monday over allegations that she committed mortgage fraud. “Pursuant to my authority under Article Il of the Constitution of the United States and the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, as amended, you are hereby removed from your position on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, effective immediately,” Trump wrote in a letter addressed to Cook, which he posted on Truth Social. Cook, however, argued that Trump has “no authority” to fire her and indicated that she’s not leaving her post, in a statement. “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for...

Fraudsters in Ghana are deliberately targeting British women in online scams as retribution for colonialism, a report has claimed. Accra, Ghana’s capital, is a hub for gangs of cyber criminals, known as Sakawa Boys, who pose as white men on Facebook to manipulate affluent Western women into entering a relationship.

If you thought the Trump Administration was finished making cuts to government spending, think again. No other institution on earth can spend money like the U.S. government—the effort by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to get spending under control and cut waste has never happened on this level before. On Sunday, the DOGE team announced another round of major cuts, nearly $2B worth: Contracts Update!Over the last 5 days, agencies terminated 163 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $1.9B and savings of $647M, including, a $35M USAID contract to “acquire contractor support to establish and manage a flexible,...

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick canceled an Biden administration agreement Monday to distribute billions of dollars for semiconductor research through a nonprofit set up and staffed by former political appointees, according to a letter obtained by The Post. The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act provided for $11 billion in semiconductor research and development funding to be given out by the Commerce Department’s National Semiconductor Technology Center. “Rather than establishing these operations within the Department, however, Biden Administration officials spent significant time, effort, and resources creating an unaccountable, outside entity–Natcast–to administer taxpayer funds,” Lutnick wrote Natcast CEO Deirdre Hanford. Four days before...

We analyze discrepancies in Kauaʻi’s 2024 general election vote count, which the Elections Commission says were a big deal and the Elections Office says were not... . ... accounts of just how great that discrepancy was vary — a lot. The numbers range from 25 according to the state’s chief elections officer to 39 according to the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court to 661 according to an Elections Commission permitted interaction group and up to 3,772 based on the initial Kauaʻi County ballot envelope count....the state counted more ballots than the county said it delivered. ...

Daily Mirror publishes photo of three-year-old allegedly starved by Israel; IDF publishes documents proving child suffers from rare genetic illness which cause his condition.