Free Republic

Elizabeth Zemba of Mt. Pleasant, a daily Pennsylvania Turnpike traveler, turned to art and creativity to express frustration with the highway's ever-rising tolls. She created an Internet meme. A photo of a turnpike tollbooth is overlaid with the logo: "Pennsylvania Turnpike re-inventing highway robbery since 2009." For many, annual turnpike toll increases simply have become too much to bear. Two weeks ago, a coalition of truckers and motorists advocates filed a class action suit against the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, PennDOT and Gov. Tom Wolf, seeking to recoup "excessive fees" that went to underwrite projects other than the operation of the...

FULL TITLE: 'Up to 10' people crushed to death as 950-ton pedestrian bridge collapses on top of cars and pedestrians on Florida college campus - just five days after it was installed Up to 10 people have been killed when a newly installed pedestrian bridge spanning several lanes of traffic collapsed at Florida International University on Thursday. US Senator Bill Nelson of Florida told local TV station CBS Miami that between six to 10 people died. The 174-foot 'instant bridge' hailed as a feat of engineering and safety, was installed Saturday morning but was not due to open to the...

Tensions between Whole Foods Market and some of the most important brands it sells in its stores will come to head on March 19. The grocer notified certain vendors about the meeting last Saturday. A key issue discussed will be Whole Foods' efforts to centralize its merchandising. Tensions between Whole Foods Market and some of the most important brands it sells in its stores will come to a head on March 19, when they will congregate for a recently announced summit, sources familiar with the situation tell CNBC. The grocer notified certain vendors about the meeting by email last Saturday....

Imagine you open the faucet of your kitchen sink expecting water and instead out comes cash. Now imagine that it comes out at the rate of $1 million a minute. You call your plumber, who thinks you’re crazy. To get you off the phone, he opines that it is your sink and therefore must be your money. So you spend it wildly. Then you realize that the money wasn’t yours and you owe it back. Now imagine that this happens every minute of every day for the next three years. At the end of the three years, you owe back...

UN Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov warned on Tuesday that Hamas-controlled Gaza on the verge of "full collapse", AFP reported. According to Mladenov, a key to saving Gaza from disaster was restoring the government of Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas to power there, a decade after it was forced out by Hamas in a bloody coup. "Without that Gaza risks exploding in our face again, this time in a far more deadly and violent manner than in the past," Mladenov was quoted as having said at the annual conference of Israel's Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv....

"Seen accurately. American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel . And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special — the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics. It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes....

At least 10 construction workers died and several were injured after a partially constructed bridge in central Colombia collapsed on Monday. The laborers were working on the bridge's drainage system when the incident occurred. The victims fell 280 meters (920 feet) into a ravine in Chirajara about 95 kilometers (60 miles) from the Colombian capital of Bogota.

The impending economic collapse is hidden from most. People only see a rising stock market, not the negative underlying factors that will cause the whole system to crash. The weakening of the U.S. dollar is just getting started, warned veteran market forecaster Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital. “We have just begun a major, long-term bear market in the dollar,” he said, which should cause a spike in oil prices. He thinks oil will reach $80-$100 a barrel in 2018. The commodity currently trades at roughly $63 a barrel. Shiff focuses on oil as just one example of the...

John O'Connor of the AP has just broken the news that the unpaid bills of the Great State of Illinois have reached the awe-inspiring sum of $16.5 billion. Illinois is chasing a moving target as it tries to dig out of the nation's worst budget crisis, and a review obtained by The Associated Press shows $7.5 billion worth of unpaid bills – as much as half the total – hadn't been sent to the official who writes the checks by the end of June. Although many of those IOUs have since been paid, a similar amount in unprocessed bills has replaced...

I recently had the opportunity to read "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin, a prodigious tome dealing with the circumstances surrounding the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. I was taken aback by some of its provocative assertions. America joined World War I largely to help a few bankers profit off the war (despite a long-standing Monroe doctrine that prohibited our involvement in European affairs) The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was supported by international financial interests in order to destabilize Russia and steal the wealth of the Russian people; and So-called "foreign aid" is merely a...

POLL: Why is the once thriving nation of Venezuela on the brink of total collapse? THE UNITED STATES HAS WAGED AN "ECONOMIC WAR" AGAINST VENEZUELA SOCIALISM HAS DESTROYED THE VENEZUELAN ECONOMY I'M NOT SURE

Fact-checking' website Snopes is asking its users for help in a GoFundMe saying an 'outside vendor' is 'holding it hostage'   But the site which claims to be 'transparent' and to tell people the facts they need to know hasn't told those donating everything that is going onIn fact it is at the center of a bitter legal battle with its CEO being accused of fraud, lies, conspiracy and putting prostitutes and his honeymoon on expensesDavid Mikkelson set up company which owns Snopes.com in 2003 with then wife Barbara but she sold her 50 per cent stake during bitter divorceOwners of...

Author, art professor, feminist, and cultural commentator Camille Paglia speaks on the current transgender mania, the wisdom of early medical & surgical intervention (calling it "child abuse"), and how the explosion of gender identities is a recurring sign of cultural collapse throughout the history of civilization.

Advertisers are turning to gay couples and ethnic minorities to sell their products Advertisers are so worried about being accused of racism or homophobia they are shying away from using images of white people and straight couples. Marketing departments are even putting diversity above relevance to their target audience to avoid accusations of bigotry, a survey of 500 companies has found. A third of advertisers questioned said they had used fewer white models and heterosexual couples over the past year. More than a third of these said they were taking this approach to “prevent perceived discrimination”. The findings are likely...

AL-RAQQA– Considering IS’ state and its attacks’ tactics within al-Raqqa city, it comes to light the extent to which its collapse is imminent, still, the situation should not be underestimated since victory cannot be achieved so easily.Syrian Democratic Forces have declared on June 6 the commencement of the al-Raqqa liberation from IS gangs, SDF broke into the city from the eastern and western sides after fierce clashes with IS gangs.The forces managed till now to liberate 8 neighborhoods from IS gangs which are :al-Sabahiya, al-Romaniyah, al-Qadisiyah, Huteen, Yarmouk western al-Raqqa and al-Mushlab, al-Sinaa, and al-Batani eastern of the city, and...

The German court system has been brought “to the limits” due to the massive number of asylum cases waiting to be challenged, the Association of German Administrative Law Judges warned Thursday. Robert Seegmüller, the organization’s chair, said the courts have piled up a huge backlog, with 250,000 asylum decisions waiting to be challenged in court. “The situation is dramatic for administrative courts,” Seegmüller told German news outlet Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND), according to The Local. “We are now completely stretched to our limits.” Seegmüller warned that a collapse of the court system is inevitable unless authorities invest more resources and hire...

I predicted the Trump POTUS victory from the day Trump announced his candidacy. I predicted that the industrial "blue collar" union folks would go massively for Trump, they did, I said Trump would get over three hundred electoral votes, he did. I now predict the Democrat Party will lose between 8-10 Senate seats and, 12-20 House seats in the upcoming 2018 Mid-Term elections. The Senate losses could even be larger. If the attempts to repeal Obamacare fail and Senate Democrats do not support the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, the Democrat Party will lose Senate seats in Florida, Virginia, West...

Four insurance carriers are seeking average rate increases ranging from 9 percent to 150 percent for individual health plans sold in Maryland for 2018. The proposed rate increases average at 38.5 percent and would bring monthly premium prices for a mid-level plan for a 40-year-old Baltimore resident to between $359.25 and $714.95. The proposed rates are subject to review and approval by the Maryland Insurance Administration. The requests come on the same day House Republicans in Congress passed a bill repealing parts of the Affordable Care Act and replacing them with new provisions. Individual plans are for people who aren't...

The federal government once again hit the debt ceiling. The ceiling limits the amount of money the federal government can borrow — a number that was set at $20.1 trillion. Although the issue should have been dealt with in 2015, then-Speaker John Boehner capitulated to President Obama and postponed the debt limit until March 16, 2017. Since then, the federal debt has grown by $1,414,397,000,000 — more than one trillion in less than two years. President Trump promised during his campaign to bring back American prosperity and make Washington work for everyone — not just for the small group of...

Observers expect targeted killings of Islamic State members to continue throughout the eastern province as ISIS' power wanes and locals seek to enact revenge for atrocities carried out by the group and its associates, opposition outlet Alsouria writes Information from the areas under Islamic State (ISIS) control in the Deir-ez-Zor province has confirmed reports of a wave of assassinations targeting members of the group. Activists on social media said the number of executions carried out by ISIS in the city of Abu Kamal east of Deir-ez-Zor and in other cities and towns inside the province had increased, amid accusations of...