Free Republic

The State of Texas is terminating a massive $8.5 billion investment with trillion-dollar asset manager BlackRock over the state's determination that the firm is engaged in a boycott of energy companies. In an announcement first shared with FOX Business, Texas State Board of Education Chairman Aaron Kinsey said the so-called Texas Permanent School Fund (PSF) had delivered a notice to BlackRock on Tuesday, informing the New York City-based firm of the action. According to Kinsey, the move was made in accordance with a 2021 state law that seeks to distance the state and its large public purse from financial institutions...

A federal judge has agreed to allow a Georgia county to require that certain voters cast provisional ballots, just days before two runoff elections in the state that will decide control of the U.S. Senate. More than 4,000 voters faced eligibility challenges ahead of the Jan. 5 runoffs based on unverified postal change-of-address records. The new injunction from U.S. District Court Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, issued just before midnight on Wednesday, replaces an earlier restraining order she had issued that prevented Muscogee County from forcing those voters to cast provisional ballots at all. The latest order represents a significant move...

The former British spy and Soviet Union double agent George Blake has died at the age of 98. The RIA news agency reported that Blake died in Russia, citing the country’s SVR foreign intelligence agency. “We received some bitter news – the legendary George Blake passed away,” it said. Blake was the last in a line of British spies to operate secretly for the Soviet Union, exposing the identities of hundreds of western agents across eastern Europe in the 1950s and humiliating the intelligence establishment when his work was discovered at the height of the cold war. Some of the...

Presidential hopefuls in the Democratic primary have in recent weeks found themselves facing a new litmus test: Do they want to eliminate private health insurance? Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) faced a straightforward version of this question and gave a straightforward response. “Let’s eliminate all that,” she said of private coverage. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) faced a slightly more confusing version of this question and gave a slightly more confusing answer that indicated support for keeping certain parts of the health care system private.

A secret effort to influence the 2017 Senate election in Alabama used tactics inspired by Russian disinformation teams, including the creation of fake accounts to deliver misleading messages on Facebook to hundreds of thousands of voters to help elect Democrat Doug Jones in the deeply red state, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.

Carrying horns, handwritten signs and bottles of gasoline to set tires on fire, a group of men marched into one of the many protests that have paralyzed parts of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, this year. They were angry with their president, who let Parliament collapse and failed to hold scheduled elections. They were angry with the United Nations for not ensuring a fair vote for his successor. And they were angry with the former American secretary of state who had helped put him in power. “You see all these people here?” said one of the Haitian-flag-draped protesters, Jean Renold Cenatus,...