Free Republic

Tony, an energetic 7-year-old who loves playing football and roughhousing with his brothers wasn’t all that excited when his parents took the family to see Santa in December. Instead, he was tired and lethargic. Tony has been in and out of the hospital, his body weakened by chemotherapy. Pauline McLaurin quit her job as a fifth-grade teacher to care for him, and they struggle to pay their bills on the salary her husband, Ronnie McLaurin, makes as an electrician. As if that weren’t enough, the McLaurins have a new worry. They lost their private insurance when Pauline McLaurin left her...

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/04/breaking-department-defense-branch-chief-caught-undercover-video/Nicolas Turza, the Department of Defense Branch Chief who was caught on undercover video calling President Trump “illegitimate” has resigned. The O’Keefe Media Group on Wednesday released undercover video of a Defense Department Branch Chief attacking President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Nicolas Turza, a Department of Defense Branch Chief, called President Trump “illegitimate” and vowed to “resist him, everything he does.” Turza also attacked Hegseth and said the 44-year-old is “insanely young” and unfit to lead. “The same guy who tried to overthrow an election is just, like, truly setting us down a path of dictatorship. He’s illegitimate....

President Trump has repeatedly shared an image of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's finger tattoos in an effort to link the Maryland man, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador on March 15, to the notorious MS-13 gang. On Monday, Mr. Trump again shared a photo of Abrego Garcia's left hand on social media, alleging he "had 'MS-13' tattooed onto his knuckles." The image shows the characters "M," "S," "1" and "3" digitally added above Abrego Garcia's existing tattoos — a leaf, a smiley face, a cross and a skull — along with labels describing each symbol beneath. Many people online recognized...

There was emotion across the United States following the death of Pope Francis, with many mourners contrasting the Argentine pontiff's gentle touch with the harshness of the current US administration. At New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral, hundreds of Catholics gathered in mourning, including worshipper Peter who said "we lost a very good man" whose values were entirely at odds with those of President Donald Trump. Francis "cared about (people) most of us forget about – the poor, the downtrodden, the forgotten, and the healing power of forgiveness", said the 70-year-old, who did not provide his last name, as Catholics and...

April 18, 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of Ernie Pyle’s death on the battlefield Eighty years ago, Ernie Pyle, one of America's most recognized war correspondents, was killed while covering the Battle of Okinawa during World War II. HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) -- Eighty years ago, one of America’s most recognized war correspondents was killed while covering the Battle of Okinawa during World War II. When it came to telling the story of the American soldier fighting the good fight overseas, no one compared to Ernie Pyle. “He exemplified the courage and the willingness to hear the story of the common soldier,...

MIAMI — After Florida International University’s police department entered into an agreement with the federal government to carry out immigration enforcement on campus, some students say they are terrified. “It’s scary and nerve-racking,” said an undergraduate at the university. The student, who's not being identified because he lacks legal immigration status, told NBC News he came to the U.S. when he was 5 with his family after they were threatened by gangs in their native El Salvador. FIU is one of a number of universities in Florida that have signed agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the 287(g)...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Campus mentors. Move-in events. Scholarships. Diversity offices that made them feel welcome on predominantly white campuses. As U.S. colleges pull back on diversity, equity and inclusion practices, students of color say they are starting to lose all of these things and more. The full scope of campus DEI rollbacks is still emerging as colleges respond to the Trump administration’s orders against diversity practices. But students at some schools said early cuts are chipping away at the sense of community that helped open the door to higher education. “It feels like we’re going back. I don’t know how...

Sen. Chris Van Hollen took aim at President Donald Trump and the El Salvador government over their treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the migrant who the government said in court was erroneously deported to El Salvador, and for trying to deflect from the notion that the U.S. government is flouting court orders to "facilitate" his return to the U.S. The Maryland Democrat joined Abrego Garcia's wife and mother and other supporters at Washington Dulles International Airport on Friday and spoke about his three-day visit, providing more details about the one-hour conversation he had with Abrego Garcia. Van Hollen took aim...

President Donald Trump’s tariffs are threatening to put a crimp in Christmas. The United States imports as much as 75% of the toy products it sells from China, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, making it one of the industries most reliant on that country’s supply chain. Along with sports equipment and games, it is the fourth-largest import category from that nation. As a result, toy industry officials are warning U.S. consumers to expect higher prices and fewer choices this year, including for the holidays, as a result of Trump’s tariffs. “Christmas is in danger,” said Greg Ahearn, president and...

More than 200 journalists, including prominent members of the French press, lay down on the steps of the Opéra Bastille in Paris in a symbolic "die-in" as the names of the reporters killed in Gaza were read out on Wednesday. Many wore red-stained press signs and fake flak jackets as they carried photographs of journalists killed in Gaza while trying to report on the war launched by Israel after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “Gaza of faces, not just numbers”, read posters bearing photographs of their fallen Palestinian colleagues. “You can see them behind me, showing pictures of those...

A pause to NIH funding has researchers scrambling for contingency plans at the University of Washington’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. The center’s brain bank is preserving more than 4,000 brains for research. SEATTLE — Andrea Gilbert thought she knew what would happen to her brain. The 79-year-old retired attorney, who has Alzheimer’s disease and receives care at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, agreed to donate it for research in 2023. She hoped to help scientists unlock the keys to a disease that had left her writing notes to remind herself if she’d already brushed her teeth. The fate of that...

When his camera stopped working on his iPhone recently, New Yorker Richard Medina didn't waste any time. With the threat of tariff-fuelled price hikes on smartphones bearing down, he quickly called his phone company for a new one. "I said, 'We've got to switch this out now,'" the 43-year-old recalled. "Let's take care of it." The move was a sign of the pressure rising across the US, where households are being buffeted by what could be staggering price rises, and even possible shortages triggered by the sweeping tariffs that US President Donald Trump announced this month. Some are trying to...

Strolling in bright sunshine across the immaculately raked gravel of Paris's Tuileries gardens, Barbara and Rick Wilson from Dallas, Oregon, were not exactly in disguise. But earlier that morning, on their very first trip to France, Rick, 74, had taken an unusual precaution. Before leaving his hotel, he'd taken a small piece of black tape and covered up the Stars and Stripes flag on the corner of his baseball cap. "We're sick about it. It's horrible. Just horrible," said Rick, as he and his wife contemplated the sudden sense of shame and embarrassment they said they now felt, as Americans,...

LOS FRESNOS, Texas — Leonardo Baez and Nora Avila-Guel’s bakery in the Texas community of Los Fresnos is a daily stop for many residents to share gossip over coffee and pick up cakes and pastries for birthdays, office parties or themselves. When Homeland Security Investigations agents showed up at Abby’s Bakery in February and arrested the owners and eight employees, residents of Los Fresnos were shocked. Abby’s Bakery doesn’t employ violent criminals and Baez and Avila-Guel are not the people who border czar Tom Homan calls the “worst of the worst” and says are the priority for mass deportations. “I...

When wildfire smoke drifts into the Methow Valley, it tends to stay, settling in the folds of the Cascade foothills like a choking fog. Recent summers have brought weeks-long binges of unhealthy air to one of Washington state’s poorest counties, rivaling some of the most polluted cities in the world. Countering this intensifying threat are small nonprofit organizations such as the Methow Valley Citizens Council, which has been distributing air purifiers, maintaining a network of air quality monitors, and spreading the message about how to keep safe when the smoke rolls in. Much of that work was funded by a...

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - With the ink still fresh on U.S. President Donald Trump's latest batch of tariffs, some are already bracing for what may come next in his effort to strong-arm trading partners into doing his bidding. As the epicentre of the financial world and the issuer of the global reserve currency, the United States has a number of levers that Trump can pull to coerce other countries, from credit cards to the very provision of dollars to foreign banks. While deploying these unconventional weapons would come at a large cost for the U.S. itself and may even backfire altogether,...

When the upper brass of Bay Area tech flocked east to pay their respects to Donald Trump earlier this year, they surely expected some preferential treatment in return. But instead, the president just hit them where it hurts. Trump revealed sweeping new tariffs on Wednesday, including a 10% baseline tax on all imports and double or triple that much for certain countries. He dubbed the non-baseline tariffs “reciprocal” and noted that some goods would not be subject to those levies, including semiconductor chips, in a win for Silicon Valley. Nonetheless, on Thursday, the very tech executives who kissed Trump’s proverbial...

Senior Food and Drug Administration leaders are planning for cutbacks to the number of routine food and drug inspections conducted by the agency, multiple officials say, due to steep layoffs this week in support staff. Around 170 workers were cut from the FDA's Office of Inspections and Investigations, according to two federal health officials who were not authorized to speak publicly. One of the biggest immediate impacts on the agency's inspectors stems from the elimination of the office's travel operations division, one official said. The team's work ranged from booking flights to coordinating with the State Department to secure translators...

Carey Stewart Cezar, a retired nurse who lives in Baltimore, watched with dismay Wednesday as President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports. Cezar voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election and opposes Trump’s economic policies. But she said she has another reason to be skeptical of Trump’s tariffs: She is a descendant of one of the legislators behind the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, a law that many economic historians believe worsened the Great Depression. “I think it’s a terrible idea and potentially devastating,” Cezar, 70, said in a phone interview Wednesday, a few hours...

Tuesday’s elections in Wisconsin and Florida were kind to the favorites but not to billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk. And that result could stick around long after the votes are counted. State Circuit Judge Susan Crawford won a pivotal election to maintain liberal control of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court despite a big push from Musk and his millions, while two Republican candidates in Florida won special House elections in deep-red districts. But even though their candidates won just one of the three contests on the ballot, it was a good night for Democrats. They spent heavily to back Crawford, who...