Free Republic

Millions of poor Americans have signed up for no-cost health insurance that they could have gotten even without the passage of Obamacare. In recent years, the publicity of Obamacare has driven them to sign up in droves, so much so that economists and health policy wonks have dubbed the phenomenon the "woodwork effect," or the "welcome mat" population. This group turned out to be larger than anyone anticipated. A working paper released Monday finds that 43 percent of those who gained insurance in 2014 came out of the woodwork. According to MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the authors...

The Center for Immigration Studies has released a new report, "Welcoming Unaccompanied Alien Children to the United States", analyzing the Obama administration's persistent efforts to relocate the children of Central American illegal aliens to the United States. The report is online at http://cis.org/Welcoming-Unaccompanied-Alien-Children-to-the-United-States. When the illegal flow of mostly teen-age boys from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador across the border reached record levels in 2014, the administration at first tried to arrange for them to stay by presenting them as victims of trafficking. But for the immigration benefits of being trafficked to apply, there must be coercion and exploitation; this...

Temperature and sea level aren't the only things expected to rise as a result of climate change. As heat becomes more extreme in some parts of the world, scientists expect a significant rise in the number of climate refugees. Climate scientists expect the coming decades to feature a mass exodus of millions from the Middle East and North Africa as extreme temperatures become more common. "In future, the climate in large parts of the Middle East and North Africa could change in such a manner that the very existence of its inhabitants is in jeopardy," Jos Lelieveld, director of the...

Much of Baltimore's unrest a year ago was rooted in socioeconomic conditions of the city. The Justice Policy Institute examined some of those issues in a 2015 report called "The Right Investment? Corrections Spending in Baltimore City." The report listed indicators of lost opportunities for the communities surveyed: unemployment and commute time, income and public assistance, educational attainment, public safety, housing, physical health and addiction. The report finds that the same neighborhood had the highest rate of emergency narcotic calls to 911 with nearly one narcotic call made for every two people, compared to other neighborhoods in Baltimore. Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park...

Lee Kantar lost two moose calves this past weekend. They are just a few among many calves that did not survive their first year in the forests of Maine. Kantar, a moose biologist for the state’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, has only been tracking calves for a few years but early death is a trend he and others can see across the animal's southern range, which stretches through the northern U.S. and Canada. Scientists speculate that young and adult moose alike are plagued by new diseases and parasites. Brain worm and winter ticks, for example, are both worsening...

The protests outside Donald Trump's rally in Costa Mesa on Thursday night appear to point to an upcoming month of activism by Latinos and others as the GOP front-runner tries to seal the presidential nomination in the state. While the billionaire businessman has faced protests elsewhere, California could prove to be potent ground for demonstrators because of its large Latino population and Trump's negative comments about immigrants in this country illegally. A USC/Times poll found that 77% of Latinos in California have a negative view of Trump. Yet among Republicans, Trump is ahead in that poll and several others. Although...

More than 113,000 young Latinos in California weren't counted in the 2010 census, a new study says, and Latino advocacy groups want to be sure the U.S. Census Bureau is working to reduce that number in 2020. With an estimated 47,000 uncounted Latino children, Los Angeles County alone is home to 12% of the estimated 400,000 Latino children in the U.S. not counted in 2010, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund and Child Trends' Hispanic Institute. California could gain another congressional seat in 2020, and "that will depend...

Food Producers Alert They Have Only 15 Days Left of Inventory amid Rampant Inflation. Despair and violence is taking over Venezuela. The economic crisis sweeping the nation means people have to withstand widespread shortages of staple products, medicine, and food. So when the Maduro administration began rationing electricity this week, leaving entire cities in the dark for up to 4 hours every day, discontent gave way to social unrest. On April 26, people took to the streets in three Venezuelan states, looting stores to find food. Maracaibo, in the western state of Zulia, is the epicenter of thefts: on Tuesday...

Expect insurers to seek significant premium increases under President Barack Obama's health care law, in a wave of state-level requests rippling across the country ahead of the political conventions this summer. Insurers say the law's coverage has been a financial drain for many of them, and they're setting the stage for 2017 hikes that in some cases could reach well into the double digits. For example in Virginia, nine insurers returning to the HealthCare.gov marketplace are seeking average premium increases that range from 9.4 percent to 37.1 percent. The health law's nagging problems seem to center on lower-than-hoped-for enrollment, sicker-than-expected...

Austria outlined plans Wednesday to erect a fence at a border crossing with Italy that is a vital link between northern and southern Europe, escalating a stand-off over how to handle a migration crisis. Migrants are crossing the Mediterranean Sea from Africa to Italy in growing numbers, and Austria has said Rome must stop them from traveling onward toward northern Europe or it will have to introduce border controls at the Brenner Pass in the Alps. But with Austrian preparations for controls already under way, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said Austria's move was "shamelessly against European rules, as well...

Two words dominated the conversation at ED's Tea with Teachers last week on the topic of supporting undocumented students: fear and hope. Educators balanced their concerns for their undocumented and mixed-status students, while acknowledging the hope that they ultimately deserve. During the tea, I couldn't help but think of the student from my school district, who was sitting in a jail cell rather than a classroom, feeling those same emotions. Wildin David Guillen Acosta was taken from his front yard on his way to his Durham, N.C., school in January, while his mother watched helplessly from their home. He would...

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's socialist government ordered public workers on Tuesday to work a two-day week as an energy-saving measure in the crisis-hit South American OPEC country. President Nicolas Maduro had already given most of Venezuela's 2.8 million state employees Fridays off during April and May to cut down on electricity consumption. Water shortages and electricity cuts have added to the hardships of Venezuela's 30 million people, already enduring a brutal recession, shortages of basics from milk to medicines, soaring prices, and long lines at shops.

BALTIMORE - The immense new CVS dominates the corner of Pennsylvania and West North avenues. It's a contrast that shows what's changed and what hasn't in the past year, since Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died of injuries sustained in police custody, unleashing days of protests. But if 2015's protests emphasized police brutality and race relations, the absence of more stores like CVS that are easily accessible to people in impoverished, predominantly black neighborhoods underscores Baltimore's other persistent inequities. Scarcity defines life in Sandtown-Winchester, the 72-block neighborhood where Gray lived for part of his life. Its roughly 9,000 residents...

Two men were killed and at least six other people were wounded in shootings Tuesday across Chicago. One man was killed and another was critically wounded in a shooting at 4:37 p.m. in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side. The men, ages 19 and 24, were traveling in a vehicle in the 900 block of West Garfield when another vehicle pulled up and someone inside fired shots, according to Chicago Police. Earlier Tuesday evening, a man was shot in the West Side Austin neighborhood. The 23-year-old was outside of a home in the 4700 block of...

Donald Trump says the electoral delegate allocation is "rigged" and rival "Lyin' Ted" Cruz is trying to steal the election away by wooing supporters. But in Pennsylvania, where 54 unbound delegates are elected directly by district and free to vote as they wish, Trump is employing the same hunting playbook Cruz has used for weeks. Hate the player, not the game? Trump insists he can reach that key number - 1237 delegates - by winning the pledged delegates awarded in primaries, but his team is nonetheless on the ground working to sway the unbound delegates his rivals hope to use...

My local congressional district became one of those battlegrounds that we see playing out across the country, as Ted Cruz supporters outflank Donald Trump backers at the little-known, little-attended Republican Party meetings to select delegates to the national convention. Here's one delegate's story of how it all went down. Q: Who won the district? If Trump won it, why didn't pro-Trump delegates win at the meeting? A: The primary dictates how the delegates are to vote on the first ballot. It doesn't dictate who the people are that are elected to represent the convention body at the RNC. Q: Did...

SWIFT, the global financial network that banks use to transfer billions of dollars every day, warned its customers on Monday that it was aware of "a number of recent cyber incidents" where attackers had sent fraudulent messages over its system. The disclosure came as law enforcement authorities in Bangladesh and elsewhere investigated the February cyber theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank account at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. SWIFT, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a cooperative owned by 3,000 financial institutions.

The slaying of Xulhaz Mannan, editor of Bangladesh's first magazine for gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, has deeply shocked Bangladesh's embattled community of free-thinking intellectuals. Mannan, 35, was hacked to death in the capital Dhaka by a group of assailants posing as couriers. Islamist militants have targeted atheist bloggers, academics, religious minorities and foreign aid workers in a series of killings. But the death of Mannan, who published gay rights journal Roopbaan and also worked for US aid agency USAID, has caused particular alarm because his links to a powerful Western government offered no guarantee of safety. Homosexuality is...

The internet represents an extraordinary opportunity for democracy. Yet despite the scientific consensus that global warming is real and primarily due to human activity, studies show that only about half the population in some countries with among the highest CO2 emissions per capita understand that human beings are the driving force of our changing climate. Even fewer people are aware of the scientific consensus on this question. Climate Feedback intends to change that. It brings together a global network of scientists who use a new web-annotation platform to provide feedback on climate change reporting. For the first time, Climate Feedback...

Donald Trump was asked this week, "Do you believe in raising taxes on the wealthy?" He replied, "I do. I do - including myself. I do." Yet Trump's own tax plan would cut the highest marginal federal income-tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. How does this tax plan square with Trump's newly professed support for "raising taxes on the wealthy"? This is similar to Trump's rampant inconsistency on Obamacare. Trump says he's for repealing Obamacare, but he's not for cutting Medicaid which, thanks to the efforts of those like John Kasich, accounts for most of Obamacare's coverage increases....