Free Republic

Maryland parents have a religious right to withdraw their children from classes on days that storybooks with gay and transgender themes are discussed, the court ruled.Public schools in Maryland must allow parents with religious objections to withdraw their children from classes in which storybooks with L.G.B.T.Q. themes are discussed, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday. The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s liberal members in dissent. The case extended a winning streak for claims of religious freedom at the court, gains that have often come at the expense of other values, notably gay rights. The case concerned a...

In a sweeping ruling, the Supreme Court limited the ability of federal judges to block executive actions throughout the country through nationwide injunctions, greatly affecting how parties seek judicial relief going forward. The court’s 6-3 ruling Friday, with all six GOP-appointed justices in the majority, deals a significant blow to legal challenges against President Donald Trump’s extreme executive orders and other actions, many of which have been blocked or temporarily put on hold through nationwide injunctions. Nationwide, or universal, injunctions prevent the government from enforcing a law, regulation, or policy across the entire U.S. — not just against the specific...

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday handed a major win to the Trump administration by allowing it to take steps to implement its proposal to end automatic birthright citizenship. In a 6-3 vote, the court granted a request by the Trump administration to narrow the scope of nationwide injunctions imposed by judges so that they apply only to states, groups and individuals that sued. That means the birthright citizenship proposal can likely move forward at least in part in the states that challenged it as well as those that did not. The court was divided on ideological lines, with...

A new report from the head of the IRS’s Taxpayer Advocate Service shows that the agency has lost more than one-quarter of its workforce since President Donald Trump assumed office.The overhaul is consistent with the administration’s effort to slim down the federal government, but it raises questions about the agency’s readiness for the 2026 tax season.According to the June 25 report, the IRS workforce has dropped from 102,113 employees to 75,702 since January—a roughly 26 percent reduction. The majority of those departures came through voluntary exit programs rolled out by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a Trump administration initiative...

The president pushed back against claims the U.S. intelligence community did not have evidence Tehran is close to developing nuclear weapons. JNS Staff. U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday apparently turned down Tehran’s request to pressure Israel into ending its kinetic war with Iran.

Belarus has freed Sergey Tikhanovsky, a key dissident figure and the husband of exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, following a rare visit by a senior US official, Tikhanovskaya’s team announced on Saturday. Tikhanovsky, a popular blogger and activist who was jailed in 2020, arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania, alongside 13 other political prisoners, his wife’s team said. The release came just hours after Belarusian authorities announced that authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko met with US President Donald Trump’s envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, in Minsk. A video published on his wife’s official Telegram account showed Tikhanovsky disembarking a white minibus, with a...

General Mills said on Tuesday it would remove artificial colors from its full U.S. retail portfolio by the end of 2027. The Cheerios maker also said it would remove synthetic dyes from all its U.S. cereals and foods served in K-12 schools by summer 2026. General Mills added the change will impact only a small portion of the K-12 school portfolio, as nearly all of its school offerings are made without certified colors while 85% of the U.S. retail portfolio is made without artificial colors. This move comes a few months after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laid out...

Wages are on the rise thanks to the nearly 1 million illegal migrants who have taken advantage of the Trump administration’s self-deportation program, according to the nonpartisan research organization Center for Immigration Studies. CIS put the number of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S. under the Biden administration at a conservative 15.4 million. While the Trump administration has followed through on its promise of mass deportations, the self-deportation program implemented by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in February is “cheaper for taxpayers and arguably much more effective,” wrote CIS fellow in law and policy Andrew Arthur. “DHS can’t...

A widely used federal website that publishes information about changing weather patterns, drought conditions, agricultural best-practices, atmospheric changes and greenhouse gas emissions will no longer be updated, according to current and former employees familiar with the site. The website will stop publishing new content on July 1. The site, climate.gov, is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As of 2021, it received nearly one million visitors every month, and was one of the most trusted sources of climate-related information in the U.S., according to public surveys about the site. A staff of 10 people wrote content and...

President Donald Trump plans to sign a trio of resolutions Thursday to revoke California’s nation-leading vehicle emissions standards. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), author of a resolution to nix the state’s electric vehicle sales mandate via the Congressional Review Act, and Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) confirmed that the White House has scheduled the signings at 11 a.m. on Thursday. Trump’s signature will finalize his administration’s monthslong effort to thwart California’s authority to set stricter electrification rules for passenger vehicles and commercial trucks, along with higher standards for heavy-duty diesel engines. Trump’s EPA revoked an earlier version of California’s vehicle emissions...

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday that he was removing the entire membership of the influential vaccine advisory panel that makes immunization recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy said he was making the unprecedented move to retire the 17 independent vaccine experts from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices because the panel has been “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest” and has become a “rubber stamp” for vaccines. Kennedy has long criticized the panel, which makes vaccine recommendations to the CDC director....

“Under federal law, schools cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens.” ... Texas has finally ended what amounts to a decades-long incentive for illegal immigration: taxpayer-funded in-state tuition. For over twenty years, Texas laws required state colleges and universities to offer reduced tuition to aliens, whether they were here legally or not. Late yesterday, those laws abruptly came to an end, only hours after the U.S. Department of Justice sued to block the state from enforcing them. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott announced the parties’ joint consent ... Enacted in 2001, the Texas Dream...

WASHINGTON (AP) — As transgender service members face a deadline to leave the U.S. military, hundreds are taking the financial bonus to depart voluntarily. But others say they will stay and fight.For many, it is a wrenching decision to end a career they love, and leave units they have led or worked with for years. And they are angry they are being forced out by the Trump administration’s renewed ban on transgender troops.Active duty service members had until Friday to identify themselves and begin to leave the military voluntarily, while the National Guard and Reserve have until July 7. Then...

British-born CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour revealed on her podcast "The Ex Files" on Wednesday that she recently prepared to travel to the U.S. as if she were traveling to North Korea. Speaking with her ex-husband Jamie Rubin, a former State Department official, Amanpour recalled a speech she gave at Harvard Kennedy School last month. Although she was a prominent media figure, she expressed fear that she would be stopped by border security. "I must say I was afraid," Amanpour said. "I’m a foreigner. I don’t have a green card. I’m not an American citizen. I’m fairly prominent, and I literally...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to take the rare step of renaming a ship, one that bears the name of a gay rights icon, documents and sources show. Military.com reviewed a memorandum from the Office of the Secretary of the Navy -- the official who holds the power to name Navy ships -- that showed the sea service had come up with rollout plans for the renaming of the oiler ship USNS Harvey Milk. A defense official confirmed that the Navy was making preparations to strip the ship of its name but noted that Navy Secretary John...

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2025 is 4.6 percent on June 2, up from 3.8 percent on May 30. After this morning’s releases from the US Census Bureau and the Institute for Supply Management, the nowcasts of second-quarter real personal consumption expenditures growth and real gross private domestic investment growth increased from 3.3 percent and -1.4 percent, respectively, to 4.0 percent and 0.5 percent.

More than a quarter-million Chinese students attending college in the United States saw their futures plunged into uncertainty Wednesday when the Trump administration announced an aggressive crackdown on student visa holders from that country. With an estimated 277,398 students pursuing primarily undergraduate and graduate degrees, China ranks only behind India among foreign countries with the highest number of students attending college in the U.S., according to data from the Institute of International Education. Since China’s middle-class boom in the early aughts, its students have flocked to U.S. institutions, which in turn welcomed the enrollment boost and mostly unsubsidized tuition fees....

Americans celebrating Memorial Day by hitting the road will likely be paying the cheapest gas prices since 2003. GasBuddy, a fuel savings platform, said Tuesday that it forecasts the national average price of gasoline to be $3.08 per gallon on Memorial Day. That would make it the cheapest since 2021 in nominal terms. After adjusting for inflation, it would be the lowest since 2003. This is not expected to be short-lived. Prices of gasoline are expected to average around $3.02 per gallon between Memorial Day and Labor Day, with prices falling below three dollars on some days. That’s likely to...

At the National Institutes of Health, six directors — from institutes focused on infectious disease, child health, nursing research and the human genome — are leaving or being forced out. At the Federal Aviation Administration, nearly a dozen top leaders, including the chief air traffic officer, are retiring early. And at the Treasury Department, more than 200 experienced managers and highly skilled technical experts who help run the government’s financial systems chose to accept the Trump administration’s resignation offer earlier this year, according to a staffer and documents obtained by The Washington Post. Across the federal government, a push for...

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