Free Republic

MEXICO CITY — Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s calls to impound the money undocumented workers send home and to jack up fees for Mexicans crossing the border legally each day could prove harmful to the economies of both countries, Mexican experts said Monday. Even proponents of Trump’s immigration stance said some aspects of his platform are impractical or cannot be implemented in their entirety. Trump, whose surge in U.S. polls has troubled many Mexicans, issued a policy paper Sunday that called for blocking the money undocumented Mexican workers send home to their families and increasing fees at border crossing points and...

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- More than 380 people in 26 U.S. states have been diagnosed with a stomach illness tied to Mexican cilantro contaminated by human waste, two federal agencies said Tuesday. It's the fourth consecutive summer in which the intestinal infection cyclosporiasis has been reported in the United States. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration are investigating the cause of the latest outbreak, which appears to have begun after May 1. The FDA said it suspects the contamination came from "contact with the parasite shed from the intestinal tract of humans" in...

Obamacare has offered insurance to millions of people, but they’re unhappy with the coverage they’re getting and are particularly upset about the costs, according to a survey released Monday that suggests the health care law continues to struggle to win over Americans. Just 30 percent of customers on Obamacare’s exchanges were satisfied with their coverage, the health care research arm of the Deloitte consulting firm said. Only a quarter of Obamacare customers in the survey were confident that they could get care when they needed it, and just 16 percent felt “financially prepared” to handle future health care costs, Deloitte...

The economic expansion—already the worst on record since World War II—is weaker than previously thought, according to newly revised data. From 2012 through 2014, the economy grew at an all-too-familiar rate of 2% annually, according to three years of revised figures the Commerce Department released Thursday. That’s a 0.3 percentage point downgrade from prior estimates. The revisions were released concurrently with the government’s first estimate of second-quarter output. Since the recession ended in June 2009, the economy has advanced at a 2.2% annual pace through the end of last year. That’s more than a half-percentage point worse than the next-weakest...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday mounted a furious counterattack against critics of the Iran nuclear deal, telling skeptical lawmakers it would be fantasy to think the United States could simply "bomb away" Tehran's atomic know-how. Testifying before Congress for the first time since world powers reached the landmark accord with Iran last week, America's top diplomat was confronted head-on by Republican accusations that Iranian negotiators had “fleeced” and "bamboozled" him.

President Barack Obama on Friday welcomed the Supreme Court decision to give same-sex couples the right to marry. In a speech in the Rose Garden, Obama called the ruling justice "with a thunderbolt." The president acknowledged that many Americans have religious objections to the high-court decision. "Today should also give us hope that the many issues we grapple, often painfully, real change is possible," he said. The president said the ruling was the result of small acts of courage by ordinary Americans that made the country realize that "love is love."

Nearly half of the 26.5 million Americans (46%) who work part-time are desperate to work full-time, according to a new report — “A Tale of Two Workforces: The Benefits and Burdens of Working Part Time” — by Rutgers University. The vast majority of the nation’s 26 million part-time workers — from college students working in coffee shops between classes to freelance computer software designers working for multinationals — receive no benefits beyond their paychecks and almost one-third say their financial condition is flat out poor. Nearly one-in-five American workers is employed in a part-time job, logging fewer than 35 hours...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama on Wednesday announced a new hostage policy designed in large measure to ensure that families of captives are treated as partners. Several families of hostages have complained recently that they were held at arms-length and treated with suspicion. In a speech at the White House, Obama said that the new policy was designed to make families partners and allow them to communicate with the hostage takers or pay ransom without fear of prosecution. In some cases, the government would facilitate that communication to make sure that they are not defrauded. But Obama stuck with the...

Here they come looking for 'mo money. Just great! Barry ties up traffic today and Thunderthighs ties it up tomorrow. So glad I don't have to drive anywhere near the pair of idiots. Good luck to all you liberals on the west side getting around town. Just think green you dummies!

Parents from the north of Italy have organized a massive demonstration, called “Defend Our Children,” against gender ideology in schools, which will be held this Saturday in the Saint John Lateran Square in Rome. The demonstrators will be protesting Italian educational programs that are meant to blur the sexual identity of children. In the northern Italian city of Trieste, parents are in uproar over a taxpayer-funded elementary school program that includes dressing little boys as girls and girls as boys to overcome so-called “gender stereotypes.” Schools are calling the exercise “the game of respect,” which purportedly adopts many guidelines from...

The government is proposing to regulate aircraft emissions in much the same way as power plants, saying they are a threat to human health because they contain pollutants that help cause global warming and therefore should be regulated. The Environmental Protection Agency announcement Wednesday clears the way for possible U.S. adoption of international emissions standards, which are expected to be released next year. U.S. regulations wouldn't apply to small piston-engine planes or military aircraft. The International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, has been working for several years on developing global aircraft emissions standards for the first time.

Wild chimpanzees enjoying opportunistic booze-ups on palm wine have helped shed light on a theory about evolution, scientists said on Wednesday. Chimps in the west African country of Guinea discovered a free treat in raffia palms tapped by local people to extract a sweet, milky sap which then ferments into an alcoholic drink. The apes scrunched up leaves in their mouths, moulding them into spongy pads that they then dipped into the sap-gathering container, which villagers attach to the tree near its crown. Tests showed that the beverage's alcoholic content varied from 3.1 percent to a whopping 6.9 percent, the...

Hillary Clinton is asking supporters to chip in a buck. In an email this afternoon, Clinton writes, "I’m asking you to step up today, give just $1, and become a Launch Donor -- one of the tough, essential supporters who stood with me from the very beginning." But Clinton says it's not about the dollar. "It's not about the money. It's about knowing that when I step on the stage on Saturday, you’re with me. You have my back -- just like I’ll have yours." The ask is a lot less expensive than the one Clinton is making of those...

Caitlyn Jenner’s “Vanity Fair” cover has created a rare, possibly even enlightening moment in American culture. The cover image went viral in minutes, garnered Jenner more than 2 million Twitter followers in 24 hours and — along with transgender activists like actress Laverne Cox, who recently appeared on the cover of “Time” magazine, and writer Janet Mock — will help promote more understanding and, in an ideal world, less discrimination against the transgender community. On Monday, hours after Jenner’s cover photo appeared online, President Barack Obama tweeted: “It takes courage to share your story.” The former Olympic champion known as...

A US military C-17 transport aircraft that usually carries at least 100 troops flew to Geneva Airport to pick up Secretary of State John Kerry and flew him to Boston where he'll be treated for a broken leg. The Air Force plane touched down in Switzerland on Monday after taking off from a US base in Ramstein, Germany, and then headed to Massachusetts after collecting the 71-year-old politician. Kerry tweeted out 'big thanks' to his well-wishers and said he looked forward to getting his leg set and getting back to work at the State Department.

Phoenix (CNN)—Jon Ritzheimer is a former Marine, and he has no middle ground when it comes to Islam. His T-shirt pretty much says it all: "F--- Islam." Ritzheimer is the organizer of Friday's "Freedom of Speech Rally" outside the Islamic Community Center in Phoenix. It's the mosque that Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi attended for a time. They're the men who drove from Arizona to a Dallas suburb to shoot up a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest there. Both were killed by police early this month. Many Muslims consider demeaning depictions of Mohammed to be blasphemous and banned by Islamic law.

Rio Rancho Police Chief Michael Geier detailed the last moments of Officer Gregg Benner's shift during a news conference Tuesday in which police identified a known gang member with an extensive criminal record that included a manslaughter conviction and weapons charges as the man suspected of fatally shooting the officer. Andrew Romero, 28, was a passenger in the vehicle that Benner attempted to stop just after 8 p.m. Monday near a fast-food restaurant, Geier said. "It started out as, for all practical purposes, a routine traffic stop, something our officers do daily," the chief said. "Officer Benner is a hardworking,...

When Florida high school senior Jessica Morales received her yearbook this year, she was both shocked and disappointed to find a deeply offensive photo amongst its pages. The picture, which took up nearly half a page, featured various students dressed in sombreros, ponchos, and mustaches while holding fake green cards, with another student dressed up as “border patrol” between them. As a young Hispanic woman, Morales couldn’t believe the yearbook had included the photo, let alone featured it so prominently. So, she posted it to social media, where it quickly went viral — and now, she’s speaking out about why....

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch)—Since the Great Recession ended in 2009, commentators have often railed against an economy that seemed to only create lowest-wage jobs. But a new study of labor market data by the Kansas City Fed has found the opposite is true. The study concludes that job growth has been strong for middle-skill and high-skill workers, but has remained weak for low-skill jobs. Middle-skill jobs rebounded in the first two years of the recovery and high-skilled jobs started to return in 2012, according to the study, which analyzed quarterly data from the Labor Department’s household survey. Growth in the upper two...

The U.S. is bringing in 100,000 Muslims every year through legal channels such as the United Nations refugee program and various visa programs, but new reports indicate a pipeline has been established through the southern border with the help of the federal agency whose job it is to protect the homeland. They are coming from Somalia and other African nations, according to a Homeland Security official who was caught recently transporting a busload of Africans to a detention center near Victorville, California. Somalia is the home base of al-Shabab, a designated foreign terrorist organization that slaughtered 147 Christians at a...