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On January 13, Robert González Nieves, archbishop of San Juan, revealed Pope Francis’ role in Barack Obama’s pardon of terrorist mastermind Oscar Lopez-Rivera. Speaking from the Cathedral of San Juan, Nieves announced that although the Holy Father made no public statement of his involvement, he had indeed worked behind the curtain on behalf of the unrepentant, bloody-handed Lopez-Rivera. The archbishop was pleased to say: “I know that there have been efforts made through diplomatic channels. The pope is very aware. We are grateful to the Holy Father for his support.” Papal complicity in this politically charged act received little notice...

The data for the graphic above was taken from the Guardian, a leftwing publication in England. Firearm ownership rates are from the Small Arms Survey in 2007, so it is a bit dated. The per capita ownership in the United States has gone up considerably since then.It is now about 120 firearms per 100 people. U.S. citizens purchased 94 million firearms during the Obama presidency. They have likely purchased another 6 million in the first 8 months of 2017.The firearms homicide rate fell from 4.19 in 2007 to 3.45 in 2014, but bumped up to 4.13 in 2015. (numbers from...

Stuart Varney interviews Economist John Lott who says optimism over tax reform is boosting the markets.

LIVE Stream: President Trump Holds a Press Conference with President of Romania 6/9/17

We’ve already seen that repealing Obamacare is politically perilous. Now there’s a new complication: It may also violate international law. The United Nations has contacted the Trump administration as part of an investigation into whether repealing the Affordable Care Act without an adequate substitute for the millions who would lose health coverage would be a violation of several international conventions that bind the United States. It turns out that the notion that “health care is a right” is more than just a Democratic talking point. A confidential, five-page “urgent appeal” from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner on Human...

A majority, 52 percent, identify as "pro-choice," according to  a new pollconducted by Marist College and sponsored by the Knights of Columbus. But an even larger majority, 83 percent oppose subsidizing international abortion. The polling comes on the heels of President Trump's decision to reinstate the Mexico City policy. That executive order prohibits taxpayer dollars from funding any organization working to provide abortion abroad.

Since we’re apparently going to be examining every other aspect of immigration policy over the course of this election, we may as well toss this log on the fire as well. The Washington Post examines a specific class of US residents who don’t get very much attention in this debate, and while it doesn’t apply to a huge swath of the population, it’s causing some problems all the same. We’re talking about people who were born in other nations but adopted by American parents. If their new family doesn’t take care of all the paperwork to make them citizens as...

With the rules on country-by-country reporting, the EU has created a framework where businesses in the extractive and logging industries have to publish their payments to governments relating to the exploitation of natural resources. This will assist populations of resource-rich countries to hold their governments accountable for these proceeds. In addition, a country-by-country reporting is also required from EU credit institutions (banks). This will ensure that trust in the financial sector is regained. On 12 April 2016, the Commission adopted a proposal for a Directive which imposes on EU and non-EU multinational groups the publication of a yearly report on...

Venezuela's Supreme Court on Wednesday banned media from publishing videos of lynchings, saying they create "anxiety and uncertainty" in a country ravaged by violent crime and an economic crisis. The OPEC nation's society is in upheaval amid triple-digit inflation, a deep recession and brutal shortages of food and medicine. As Venezuelans have grown increasingly angry at frequent thefts, hold-ups and homicides, mob beatings and lynchings have increased in the country, which is already one of the world's most violent. Gory videos of mob justice or photos of bloody corpses sometimes make the rounds on social media. President Nicolas Maduro's socialist...

Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer slammed the international community for its “lazy moral equivalency” regarding the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on Thursday’s “Sean Hannity Show.”

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump declared “I love the fact that ISIS is being hit by Russia” in an interview broadcast on Wednesday’s “CNN Tonight.” Trump stated that Russia doesn’t respect the US or President Obama, but “At the same time, if they want to hit ISIS, that’s okay with me.

WASHINGTON—Hillary Clinton, in her last months as secretary of state, helped open the door to a dramatic shift in U.S. policy toward Iran: an acceptance that Tehran would maintain at least some capacity to produce nuclear fuel, according to current and former U.S. officials. In July 2012, Mrs. Clinton’s closest foreign-policy aide, Jake Sullivan, met in secret with Iranian diplomats in Oman, but made no progress in ending the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. In a string of high-level meetings here over the next six months, the secretary of state and White House concluded that they might have to let...

VIDEO: You won't believe it until you see it. The video that proves Amnesty International is lying about Israel.

In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory and downlinked the video on Nov. 18, just hours before she, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency departed in their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft for a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan. The tour includes scenes of each of the station's modules and research facilities with a running narrative by Williams of the work that has taken place and which is ongoing aboard the orbital outpost.

Dubai airport has soared ahead of London's Heathrow, riding a boom in long-haul flights between Asia and the West to become the world's top international travel hub, it said Tuesday. Traffic at the airport increased 6.1 percent last year to 70.47 million passengers, Dubai Airports said, adding that it expected a further surge in traveller numbers in 2015. Dubai International is home to Emirates, the Middle East's largest carrier, which along with Abu Dhabi's Etihad and Qatar Airways has seized a significant portion of travel between the West, Asia and Australasia.

As many as 13,000 people in Britain are being held in conditions of slavery, four times the number previously thought, it has been revealed. In what is said to be the first scientific estimate of the scale of modern slavery in the UK, the Home Office has said the number of victims last year was between 10,000 and 13,000. They include women forced into prostitution, domestic staff and workers in fields, factories and fishing boats.

Ambassadors from five major European Union (EU) member states met with the Foreign Ministry's senior diplomat Alon Ushpiz in Jerusalem on Thursday, where they voiced opposition to the demolition of the homes of Arab terrorists. Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain were the five countries whose consul generals argued that such demolitions, which are meant as a deterrent for future terrorists and a punishment for heinous crimes, are "counterproductive." The ambassadors also denounced the attack on a Jerusalem synagogue this Tuesday in which four Jews and a Druze police officer were murdered by two Arab terrorists, reports Haaretz citing Israeli...

The above chart was created from UNODC data. Many comparisons have been made between the homicide rates of the the United States and various European countries.  They have been made between members of the G-8, or among "developed" or "advanced" countries, or "economically developed" countries, though all of these comparisons suffer from various unstated assumptions, typically that "economic" development is the prime predictor of homicide rates., which clearly is not correct. Here is a comparison of homicide rates among new world countries where the official language is English.   This creates an interesting set of common characteristics.   All of these...

Obama seriously needs to be impeached. Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get worse – it just did! He has attempted to block Russia from the world economy as a whole removing them from the SWIFT system entirely! He is totally insane and this would warrant World War III and quite frankly one could not blame Russia. Someone has to do something about Obama. He has gone too far and his conspirator Christine LaGarde has been threatening all tax havens that they will be removed from the SWIFT system if they do not give up all foreign accounts. The...

Right: it’s time to speak for Britain. If these polls are right, then we are on the verge of an utter catastrophe for this country. In just 10 days’ time we could all be walking around like zombies – on both sides of the Scottish border. I don’t just mean that we will be in a state of shock, though that will obviously be true: most people (especially the Scots) have yet to think through the horrific financial and constitutional implications of an English-Scottish divorce. I mean that we will be zombies, walking dead, because a fundamental part of our...