Free Republic

Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., who won a special election to replace national security adviser Mike Waltz in Florida's 6th Congressional District, ripped Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Wednesday for working with Democrats on a Senate resolution designed to rein in President Donald Trump's proposed tariffs.The Senate was poised Wednesday to vote on the resolution, which would end the national emergency Trump declared in an executive order to implement the tariffs on foreign imports. Paul and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who sponsored the resolution, used a special legislative procedure to force a vote. The resolution prompted House Republicans to add a...

The U.S. Justice Department Thursday said it had filed a complaint against three of the country's biggest health insurance companies, Aetna Inc. and affiliates, Elevance Health and Humana, under the False Claims Act.The action also affects three large insurance broker organizations: eHealth, GoHealth and SelectQuote, it said."The United States alleges that from 2016 through at least 2021, the defendant insurers paid hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks to the defendant brokers in exchange for enrollments into the insurers’ Medicare Advantage plans," the Justice Department said in its release.The DOJ also said that Aetna and Humana conspired with the...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the much-anticipated deal with the United States involving rare-earth minerals on Thursday, saying the agreement is "now truly an equal partnership." "All our representatives did a good job. The agreement has changed significantly during the preparation process. It is now truly an equal partnership - one that creates opportunities for substantial investment in Ukraine, as well as significant modernisation of Ukraine's industries and, equally importantly, its legal practices," Zelenskyy posted on X. The fundamentals of the agreement are said to give the U.S. preferential access to new minerals deals in Ukraine, which will also be...

Workers throughout China are flooding the streets in revolt as U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs slam the fragile Chinese export economy. From the cramped streets of Sichuan in the southwest to the cold outskirts of Inner Mongolia in the northeast, furious workers are demanding back pay and protesting mass layoffs as factories shutter under pressure from Trump’s tariffs. Outside a LED light manufacturing plant near Shanghai, thousands of unpaid workers shouted furiously at company managers over wages that haven’t been paid since January. In central China’s Dao County, a similar scene unfolded outside a sporting goods store after the company...

The moves are part of the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign on Iran to help weaken its terrorist activities in the Middle East, including through its use of proxy forces. President Donald Trump on Thursday announced the United States will impose secondary sanctions on all countries or individuals that purchase oil or petrochemicals from Iran. The announcement comes a day after the State Department sanctioned seven entities it accused of trading Iranian oil and petrochemical products. The president confirmed the new secondary sanctions in a post on Truth Social, warning countries they would not be allowed to do business with...

A business in Illinois, owned by a vocal critic of controversial Democratic mayor Tiffany Henyard, was destroyed in a fire deemed “suspicious” by authorities earlier this week. “The fire is suspicious in nature,” Dolton Deputy Fire Chief John Calhoun told WGN. “We do have the fire marshal out here currently with our [mutual aid] arson team.” The blaze erupted around 6 a.m. Tuesday, escalating to a three-alarm fire. No injuries were reported, but the building was a total loss, according to FOX 32 Chicago. A smaller fire occurred at the same site the previous week, WGN noted. The property, owned...

A growing number of transgender musicians have cancelled events in the U.S. over President Donald Trump’s transgender policies even as the U.K. Supreme Court rules that transgender women are not legally biological women. Over the last few weeks, two Canadian singers have cancelled concert appearances in the U.S. claiming that they fear being “targeted” due to the president’s policies. Last month, Halifax trans non-binary pop artist T. Thomason announced that he was pulling out of All Roads Festival in Belfast, Maine, scheduled for May 16, because he is upset over the Trump administration’s policy that the U.S. government will only...

President Trump announced a major shakeup in his national security team on Thursday, tapping Mike Waltz to be his United Nations ambassador while Secretary of State Marco Rubio will fill the national security adviser post on an acting basis. “I am pleased to announce that I will be nominating Mike Waltz to be the next United States Ambassador to the United Nations,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “From his time in uniform on the battlefield, in Congress and, as my National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz has worked hard to put our Nation’s Interests first. I know he will do the...

Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday that the signing of a minerals deal between Ukraine and the United States meant President Donald Trump had forced Kyiv to pay for future U.S. military aid. The deal, signed in Washington on Wednesday, will give the United States preferential access to new Ukrainian minerals deals and fund investment in Ukraine's reconstruction. .... Trump has broken the Kyiv regime to the point where they will have to pay for U.S. aid with mineral resources," Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, wrote on Telegram....

If we don’t insist on the total assimilation and Americanization of our immigrants, we’ll cease to be America and become something else.. If you want to know what mass immigration without assimilation produces in a country, look no further than Scotland. Immigrants from Pakistan now constitute an ethno-religious voting bloc in that country with their very own politicians advocating for nakedly sectarian interests. Recently, a video clip from 2022 resurfaced on social media of Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar standing in front of the flag of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan claiming that “change is coming” and forthrightly calling for...

A trio of House Democrats asked to be removed as co-sponsors of a resolution to impeach President Trump, a sign that many in the party do not want to go down the path of trying to remove the president from office — at least at the current moment. Reps. Kweisi Mfume (Md.), Robin Kelly (Ill.) and Jerry Nadler (N.Y.) had signed on as co-sponsors of Rep. Shri Thanedar’s (D-Mich.) impeachment resolution — which includes seven articles of impeachment — but Tuesday afternoon, they went to the House floor and asked for their names to be taken off the legislation. The...

The Democratic Party is confronting a collapse in favorability ratings in Georgia at a pivotal time, as liberal voters outraged by President Donald Trump’s comeback demand a more confrontational pushback to the Republican’s norm-shattering agenda.The latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows just 35% of registered Georgia voters have a favorable view of the Democratic Party after Trump swept the state and other political battlegrounds in his 2024 return to power. That’s the lowest level of support in nine years of AJC polling. The party’s dismal ratings come as Democratic activists prepare to vote for a new party chair on Saturday amid...

DNI (Director of National Intelligence) Tulsi Gabbard dropped a bombshell during an interview this week with Megyn Kelly, and former NIH Director Anthony Fauci should be worried. Gabbard appeared with Kelly to discuss a variety of issues on investigating leaks from within the administration, whether she would run for president (she did not rule it out), and the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. When the issue regarding COVID-19 came up, Gabbard had plenty of interesting news to share. Gabbard told Kelly that she, along with others, were investigating whether the United States funded gain-of-function research which caused the COVID-19 pandemic....

Contractors for the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue have been summoned to appear before Congress amid a sweeping probe into potentially fraudulent — and even foreign-sourced — donations during the 2024 election, according to a pair of letters exclusively obtained by The Post. The House Oversight, Judiciary and Administration Committees fired off letters to two employees of the AI-powered fraud prevention software firm Sift who worked with ActBlue — and reportedly know “critical” information about how the lead Dem funding portal adopted a “more lenient” standard for suspicious donations. “The Committees are concerned that ActBlue has maintained poor anti-fraud practices that...

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives took a trio of votes this week targeting California’s decades-old authority to enforce its own environmental standards, setting the stage for a significant standoff in the U.S. Senate, where Democrats say Republican leaders would have to defy long-standing congressional order to get the measures passed.The votes called into question California’s waiver from the Clean Air Act of 1970, an authority that has allowed the state to set stricter pollution guidelines and empowered its leaders to set an alternative standard on car emissions to those of the federal government.On Thursday, Republicans in the House, joined...

The ruling is a blow to Trump’s deportation efforts and permanently bars removals under the Alien Enemies Act in South Texas.A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled Thursday that the president exceeded his authority by invoking the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport Venezuelan migrants, dealing a blow to the administration’s deportation efforts and permanently barring such removals in South Texas. In a 36-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. in Brownsville, Texas, rejected Trump’s declarations that the United States was being invaded by a Venezuelan gang to justify using the act to deport migrants without a hearing. He said the...

Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) predicted Thursday on “MSNBC Reports” that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would be the next cabinet member ousted by President Donald Trump. Bennet said, “I think there’s more to it. I think it is an. extraordinary moment that even Donald Trump is admitting that he can’t sustain a national security advisers who had the wisdom of sharing Signal chain with Jeffrey Goldberg. I think it’s probably the case that what President Trump is maddest about is the fact that he shared it with the reporter from the Atlantic. The real problem is that Secretary Hegseth, the secretary...

I am pleased to announce that I will be nominating Mike Waltz to be the next United States Ambassador to the United Nations. From his time in uniform on the battlefield, in Congress and, as my National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz has worked hard to put our Nation’s Interests first. I know he will do the same in his new role. In the interim, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve as National Security Advisor, while continuing his strong leadership at the State Department. Together, we will continue to fight tirelessly to Make America, and the World, SAFE AGAIN. Thank...

The agency suggested that clinical trials in humans may be required for updated Covid shots, raising questions about whether they will be available in the fall.Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a plan that would require placebo-controlled studies for all new vaccines, surprising some experts who noted that such testing already routinely takes place. In a statement, Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that “all new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials” before approval, and called the move a “radical departure” from existing standards. Even though modern studies routinely use...

WASHINGTON (AP) — When the Justice Department lifted a school desegregation order in Louisiana this week, officials called its continued existence a “historical wrong” and suggested that others dating to the Civil Rights Movement should be reconsidered.The end of the 1966 legal agreement with Plaquemines Parish schools announced Tuesday shows the Trump administration is “getting America refocused on our bright future,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said.Inside the Justice Department, officials appointed by President Donald Trump have expressed desire to withdraw from other desegregation orders they see as an unnecessary burden on schools, according to a person familiar with the...