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The dispute within the Republican Party over health care widened further Friday, as President Trump joined with a handful of conservative senators in calling for an outright repeal of the Affordable Care Act if the party fails to agree on an alternative plan by the end of the July Fourth recess. The reemergence of what has for much of the year been a fringe idea within the GOP revealed not only the party’s philosophical divide over Obamacare, but also senators’ growing anxiety that they’re now headed home to see their constituents with little to show for it.

The university originally said it would comply with a letter from the Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State asking the university to remove the items. “We moved too quickly,” East Central University President Katricia Pierson said in a Friday statement. “We regret not taking time to pause and thoughtfully consider the request and the results of our actions on all of the students, faculty and community members who we serve.”

Jerry Springer hopped on Twitter Friday and said President Donald Trump’s recent tweets in which he blasted MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were “beneath the dignity of the Presidency” and of “any decent man.”

President Donald Trump said Wednesday night he has a “good lawsuit” against CNN while speaking at a private RNC fundraiser at Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Trump hinted at suing CNN for its biased stories on the U.S.-Russia narrative, according to new audio released by The Intercept Friday. CNN recently retracted a story from June 22 that claimed Congress is currently investigating Anthony Scaramucci, a member of the transition team’s executive committee, as well as as fundraiser and adviser for the president’s campaign. “It’s a shame what they’ve done to the name CNN, that I can tell you,” Trump...

This is the first time the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has said it aims to send an astronaut beyond the International Space Station, an agency spokeswoman told AFP on Friday. The idea is to first join a NASA-led mission in 2025 to build a space station in the moon's orbit, as part of a longer-term effort by NASA to reach Mars. Tokyo hopes that contributing to the multinational mission and sharing Japanese technology will land it a coveted spot at the station, from which it could eventually send an astronaut to the Moon, the spokeswoman said. The plan was...

Our columnist Jazz Shaw wrote earlier in the week about the dreadful financial crisis in the state of Illinois. The deadline for a budget deal is July 1st which makes tomorrow the last day for lawmakers to try to arrive at the state’s first budget agreement in three years. From CNN Money: After decades of historic mismanagement, Illinois is now grappling with $15 billion of unpaid bills and an unthinkable quarter-trillion dollars owed to public employees when they retire.The budget crisis has forced Illinois to jack up property taxes so high that people are leaving in droves. Illinois may...

The US-led coalition now estimates that 2500 ISIS fighters remain in Raqqa — and that they won’t go anywhere else. CBS News quotes Brett McGurk, the envoy for the anti-ISIS fight, as saying that the US intends to make sure every last one of them dies in the so-called capital of the so-called Islamic State: The last remaining ISIS fighters in Raqqa are surrounded by U.S.-backed forces. @HollyMAWilliams met with a group of former ISIS fighters: pic.twitter.com/q1sXHkDnLK— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 30, 2017 With Iraq declaring an end to the caliphate and promising to have secured Mosul in the...

New U.S. sanctions put in place by former President Barack Obama last December - part of a broad suite of actions taken in response to Russia's alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election - had made it a crime for American companies to have any business relationship with the FSB, or Federal Security Service. SNIP But the sanctions also threatened to imperil the Russian sales operations of Western tech companies. Under a little-understood arrangement, the FSB doubles as a regulator charged with approving the import to Russia of almost all technology that contains encryption, which is used in both sophisticated...

(Spoiler Alert: If you find slavery or infanticide disturbing, you may be too squeamish to read further.) A perfect crystallization of the full heart and soul of socialized or "single payer" health care is on display in the story of Charlie Gard, a ten-month-old infant with a life-threatening genetic condition, and his parents, Chris and Connie, whose desperate efforts to save their child have been diverted, and finally thwarted, first by the British government and now by an entity with the perfectly Orwellian name "European Court of Human Rights." The parents of terminally-ill baby Charlie Gard are ‘utterly distraught’ and...

People will die from this policy! We hear this charge thrown around in political debates that it has become cliché to the point of irony, but does it have any basis in reality for health-care policy? Former Medicare and Social Security trustee Charles Blahous offers his reasoned and measured analysis of the claim — and rejects it entirely. Blahous calls it “spurious,” based on a logical fallacy related to the fallacy of composition: These sensational claims rest on fallacious reasoning, which I’ll describe later in this piece. But first let’s acknowledge that neither I, you, nor anyone else has...

My theory - Trump is great at unmasking the GOP and Dems. He pushed the House to pass a bill regardless of content knowing the Senate would do their own. He also knew both bills would bring out all sides of criticism, the left, the repeal crowd and the replace crowd. And with the perfect timing (GOP frightened to make any decision, holiday weekend, the resistant Dems, and GOP risking dissent with voters), Trump tweets, "Repeal Obamacare, we'll replace it later". Genius! Trump could not start with that position in March without being attacked by the GOP and the Dems....

MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski made an explosive allegation about the first lady on Friday as a bitter dispute between the television host, her fiance Joe Scarborough and President Donald Trump raged on. MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski made an explosive allegation about the first lady on Friday Brzezinski put some oomph behind unsubstantiated rumors that Melania Trump wants out of her marriage during an interview with InStyle that appeared on the magazine's website. 'I know Melania. I haven’t talked to her in months, but if my gut is right, I don’t think she’s going to put up with it much longer,' Brzezinski said....

An angry monster lurks in the shoulder of the Hunter. We’re talking about the red giant star Betelgeuse, also known as Alpha Orionis in the constellation Orion. Recently, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) gave us an amazing view of Betelgeuse, one of the very few stars that is large enough to be resolved as anything more than a point of light. 650 light years distant, Betelgeuse is destined to live fast, and die young. The star is only eight million years old – young as stars go. Consider, for instance, our own Sun, which has been shining as a...

“In Hawaii, ‘close family’ includes many of the people that the federal government decided on its own to exclude from that definition. Unfortunately, this severely limited definition may be in violation of the Supreme Court ruling,” Attorney General Doug Chin said in a news release today.

Even after James O’Keefe and Project Veritas essentially blew the lid right off the fake ‘Russia hacked the election’ narrative, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chairman, John Podesta, doubled down on the debunked narrative when challenged by Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on his ties to a Kremlin-backed company. Podesta met behind closed doors on Tuesday with the members of the House Intelligence Committee as part of the panel’s investigation into supposed Russian efforts to meddle in the presidential election. When asked what he could tell the Thursday Fox audience about the House Intel meeting, Podesta explained that the panel wanted to...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Multiple injuries have been reported in a shooting at Bronx Lebanon Hospital, police said. The incident began at 2:50 p.m. at 173rd Street and Grand Concourse in the Mt. Eden section. Police are going floor by floor searching for a gunman, who is believed to be a former employee. The gunman is believed to be carrying a rifle and to have barricaded himself in the hospital.

Reader Brian emailed an ad for huge discounts on cars. The fine print is rather amusing: Must be subprime and must finance through Chrysler Capital. Frequently, when you see an ad “only x available at this price”, there are really none available at that price. They all went to friends of the dealer. I called about the 2017 Patriot and there were still some left but they were “going fast”. The ad reads “Primary customer must have a FICO score below 620 and must finance through Chrysler Capital” I asked what happens if my credit score was above 620. As...

Photos from inside Venezuela have shown people participating in mass looting as a means of survival, including stealing entire vending machines and carrying them through the streets. The recent bout of looting took place this week in Maracay, the capital of Aragua state, with images showing men carrying vending machines as well as what appears to be a refrigerator down a road with the aid of motorbikes. Other images show people emptying supermarkets, bakeries, butcher shops and pharmacies of their products, as well as setting fires and smoke bombs as people run through the streets. “The serious situation continues in...

The Islamic State still controls a territory as large as Belgium, but it is rapidly declining. The Islamic State caliphate was declared on June 29, 2014, and lasted exactly three years, to June 29, 2017. Islamic State jihadis, however, have been dispersed throughout the world (and have been welcomed back by foolish Western governments), and will be wreaking havoc for years to come. After eight months of grinding urban warfare, Iraqi government troops on Thursday captured the ruined mosque at the heart of Islamic State’s de facto capital Mosul, and the prime minister declared the group’s self-styled caliphate at an...

Disneyland’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride is losing a scene where a bound and tearful woman is on the auction block for pirates to buy as a wife. A banner that now says “Auction, take a wench for a bride” currently hangs over a scene showing women tied by ropes around their waists as a pot-bellied pirate grins at the audience. When the ride reopens, the banner will say “Auction, Surrender yer loot,” and the red-haired woman at the center of the scene will be a pirate herself. A drawing of released by Disneyland shows men and women carrying food...