Free Republic

LOS ANGELES – An illegal alien from Mexico has been charged in a federal criminal complaint with orchestrating a phony kidnapping – which she blamed on federal agents or people working with federal agents – to generate public sympathy and solicit donations, the Justice Department announced today. Yuriana Julia Pelaez Calderon, 41, of South Los Angeles, is charged with conspiracy and making false statements to federal officers. Calderon, who is now U.S. immigration custody, is expected to make her initial appearance in the coming weeks in United States District Court in downtown Los Angeles. “Dangerous rhetoric that ICE agents are...

President Trump’s claim that some of the Epstein files are ‘made up’ by Democrats and the FBI makes a lot more sense now. When President Trump first started ranting, really out of nowhere, about the so-called “Epstein files” being “made up” by his Democrat predecessors, as well as former F.B.I. Director James Comey, it was bizarre and suspiciously defensive. It’s now a lot less weird and a lot less suspicious. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a “leather-bound book” containing, among other things, a doodle of a naked woman’s body framing an odd “typewritten” note, both supposedly penned by...

Los Angeles Democratic Mayor Karen Bass, a critic of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, is being mocked for pushing a story about an LA woman being kidnapped by ICE that ended up allegedly being an elaborate hoax. The Department of Homeland Security posted on its official X account on Friday, "Mayor, you pushed a HOAX. There is still time to delete this." This comes after Yuriana Julia Pelaez Calderon, a 41-year-old Mexican illegal alien living in Los Angeles, was charged with conspiracy and making false statements to federal officers, according to the DOJ. On July 1, Bass posted a link...

An illegal immigrant and mother was arrested for staging a fake “kidnapping” — where bounty hunters took her at gunpoint and tried forcing her to self-deport at a fast-food restaurant — to scam people and “smear federal law enforcement.” Yuriana Julia “Juli” Pelaez Calderon, 41, was charged with conspiracy and making false statements to federal officers over the elaborate scheme on Thursday, according to the Department of Justice. “Dangerous rhetoric that ICE agents are ‘kidnapping’ illegal immigrants is being recklessly peddled by politicians and echoed in the media to inflame the public and discredit our courageous federal agents,” US Attorney...

The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday announced charges against a 41-year-old undocumented mother from South Los Angeles, accusing her of orchestrating a fake kidnapping by federal immigration agents to generate sympathy and solicit donations. Yuriana Julia “Juli” Pelaez Calderon is charged with conspiracy and making false statements to federal officers. On June 30, Calderon’s family and attorney held a news conference claiming she had been taken from a fast-food restaurant parking lot in downtown Los Angeles, driven to the U.S.-Mexico border, and told to self-deport. At the same time, her daughter launched a GoFundMe campaign, and federal agents began...

Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that GHISLANE MAXWELL was sentenced today in Manhattan federal court by United States Circuit Judge Alison J. Nathan to 240 months in prison for her role in a scheme to sexual exploit and abuse multiple minor girls with Jeffrey Epstein over the course of a decade. MAXWELL was previously found guilty on December 29, 2021, following a one-month jury trial, of conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors to participate in illegal sex acts, transporting a minor...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (KTRK) -- A man who alleged a hate crime at his property in 2023 has been detained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Agents with the FBI and the Texas Department of Public Safety arrested Mario Roberson Thursday morning. Roberson is facing twelve charges linked to a June 2023 deadly arson at his rental property in Huntsville, and could possibly spend his life in prison. ABC13 first reported on Roberson in May 2023 after he claimed racist graffiti had been spray-painted on the home. He implied alleged racism in the neighborhood's HOA was to blame for the incident,...

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley announced Thursday that the Department of Energy (DOE) is canceling its Grain Belt Express project. Hawley’s X post announcing the DOE’s decision to cancel the project followed a conversation with President Donald Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The post also called the Grain Belt Express a “green scam” that is “costing taxpayers BILLIONS.” ... The Grain Belt Express was a $11 billion transmission line project designed to carry electricity from wind farms in Kansas across Missouri and Illinois to Indiana. “Energy demand is growing – our grid needs an upgrade,” the project’s website states,...

A new Rasmussen poll to be published Monday morning shows a majority of Democrats still believe the Russia collusion hoax, even though it has been debunked repeatedly. Astonishingly, 60% of Democratic voters still think “the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election”, according to the poll of 1,014 Likely Voters conducted on July 6-7. A whopping 69 percent of liberal voters still cling to the Russia collusion hoax, compared to 27 percent of conservatives, and 45 percent of moderates. Among all voters, more believe it unlikely (49 percent) than likely (42 percent). The fact that...

The climate science establishment is fond of lecturing us about the dangers of rising temperatures. With the return of Donald Trump as US President, however, it is rising scrutiny, not the rising heat, that has them most alarmed. In May, President Trump signed an executive order titled "Restoring Gold Standard Science," requiring federally funded agencies to ensure their work is accountable, reproducible, and subject to open debate. It was unremarkable in tone, bordering on mundane. Yet the reaction was swift and bitter. The clause insisting that scientists consider dissenting views and protect employees from retaliation for expressing them cuts across...

When the world’s top climate diplomats gathered in Bonn earlier this year to prepare for COP29, one issue cut through the noise, not just the usual challenges of finance and emissions, but something more intangible and potentially more corrosive: the rise of targeted misinformation and disinformation in the climate space. In 2024, the World Economic Forum identified misinformation and disinformation as the world’s top short-term risk. Disinformation doesn’t just delay climate action; it destabilizes the institutions, policies, and coalitions needed to deliver it. Dr. Fredrik Bertley president and chief executive officer of COSI, the Center of Science and Industry (COSI)...

The quintessential ice cream flavour is under threat, and many other dessert staples along with it, according to climate change researchers at the University of Costa Rica and Belgium's KU Leuven university. Increasing climate extremes are changing the habitats of wild vanilla species — primarily found in the tropical regions of Central America — and their mainly animal pollinators, the researchers say. This, in turn, is putting global production of vanilla at risk. In some regions, the plants may find more favourable conditions, but the insects that pollinate them may no longer find suitable habitats, according to the study published...

The Founding Fathers who gathered in Philadelphia to adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 picked a nice day to do their work. It was a Thursday, and the temperature at 6:00 a.m. was 68°F, going up to a warmish but still pleasant 76°F at 1:00 p.m., according to daily records kept by Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson. The planetary metabolism at the time was set more for such balmy days than it was for the increasingly suffocating summers we experience in the 21st century. It was in 1867 that scientists would first define the epoch that includes the late...

A new rite published by the Vatican on Thursday will allow priests to celebrate a Mass to exhort Catholics to exercise care for the Earth, in the latest push by the 1.4-billion-member global Church to address global climate change. For centuries, Catholic priests have been able to celebrate special Masses to pray for their country, give thanks after a harvest or ask God to end a natural disaster. The new "Mass for the care of creation," prepared by two Vatican offices, allows priests to pray that Catholics will "lovingly care" for creation and "learn to live in harmony with all...

A group of Environmental Protection Agency employees on Monday published a declaration of dissent from the agency’s policies under the Trump administration, saying they “undermine the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” More than 170 EPA employees put their names to the document, with about 100 more signing anonymously out of fear of retaliation, according to Jeremy Berg, a former editor-in-chief of Science magazine who was among non-EPA scientists or academics to also sign. The latter figure includes 20 Nobel laureates. The letter represents rare public criticism from agency employees who could face blowback for speaking out...

Southern Europeans braced Saturday for the first heatwave of the northern hemisphere summer, as climate change pushes thermometers on the world's fastest-warming continent increasingly into the red. Temperatures are set to rise to 37 degrees Celsius (99 Fahrenheit) in Rome, driving the Eternal City's many tourists and Catholic pilgrims to the Vatican alike towards the Italian capital's 2,500 public fountains for refreshment. Scientists have long warned that humanity's burning of fossil fuels is heating up the world with disastrous consequences for the environment, with Europe's ever-hotter and increasingly common blistering summer heatwaves a direct result of that warming.

Joe Rogan had a big chat with Senator Bernie Sanders about climate change, and it got pretty spicy! Bernie told Joe that climate change is real and switching to things like wind and solar power could make lots of jobs. But Joe wasn’t having it. He pointed out that the Earth’s temperature has always gone up and down. There have been ice ages and hot times before.Joe even mentioned an article from The Washington Post saying that we might be in a cooling period now, contradicting Bernie’s idea that the last ten years were the hottest ever.Joe backed it up...

The education news outlet Chalkbeat recently highlighted a Denver, Colo. elementary school that’s teaching students as young as age 3 about environmental damage. Mental-health professionals praise their efforts, saying the lessons can help prevent “eco-anxiety,” a “chronic fear of environmental doom.” The mental-health industry’s logic is self-serving: Introduce kids to the idea of Earth’s demise, then step in to manage their worry. Climate catastrophism has come to the classroom — and, as one educator put it, it’s “scaring the kids to death.” Human beings aren’t born aware of our supposed environmental crisis. The fear of climate change — and therapists’...

Issues & Insights "Carbon dioxide, we’ve been told over and again, is the enemy that must be subdued if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming. It is, however, a faulty premise. Physics, not politics, tells us that man’s CO2 emissions will not cause catastrophic climate change nor an increase in extreme weather. “The common belief that CO2 is the main driver of climate change and the EPA Endangerment Finding assertion that ‘elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated’ to endanger the public health and welfare are scientifically false,” conclude the authors of a new...

.. Meanwhile, recent reports describe the discovery of four mysterious black sarcophagi beneath Antarctica’s. These artifacts, unearthed by an international team of scientists from the United States, Russia, China, and India, have sparked widespread intrigue and speculation due to their unknown origins and design. According to Baku.ws, the discovery of the black sarcophagi is unlike any other found in Antarctica. These objects were not just typical archaeological artifacts; they appeared to have an advanced design, one that did not fit with any known human history. Upon opening one of the sarcophagi, the scientists encountered an even more puzzling find. Inside...