Free Republic

Planned Parenthood performed over 390,000 abortions while receiving nearly $700 million in government grants and reimbursements, according to its latest annual report for 2022-2023. Pro-life activists say the findings appear consistent with the long-term trend of the nation's largest abortion provider performing more abortions and providing fewer health services. According to Planned Parenthood's 2022-2023 annual report, the corporation performed 392,715 abortions and provided less than 2,000 adoption referrals. The organization also offered over 30,000 fewer Pap tests than recorded for 2021-2022. Additionally, preventative care visits also declined by over 30%. Despite the decline in health services, Planned Parenthood reported receiving...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) administration lost track of the $24 billion in taxpayer funds it spent over the past five years in an attempt to curb the state’s homelessness crisis, an audit has found. The California State Auditor’s report, released on April 9, detailed multiple “gaps” in accountability in regards to how the money was allocated during the 2018-2023 fiscal years. Lead auditor Grant Parks said the state “has not collected sufficient data” to prove that the billions of dollars improved the situation.

For a long time, Israel forbade ships entering the Gaza Strip because it was so easy to ship arms to Hamas. So why is this pier to Gaza happening now? Since Oct. 7, 2023, external humanitarian aid has primarily had to enter the Gaza Strip via the land crossing at Rafah, which is run by Egypt. Gen. Abdel Fatteh El-Sisi, the ruler of Egypt for the past decade, is as committed as Israel to the goal of keeping arms out of the hands of terrorists, so Israel trusts his government in Egypt to vet these shipments and ensure that armaments...

To keep Earth from overheating too much, the nations of the world need to put fewer loopholes in climate agreements and far more money — trillions of dollars a year — into financial help for poor nations, the United Nations climate chief said Friday. In an unusual and blunt lecture at a university in Baku, Azerbaijan, the host city of upcoming international climate negotiations later this year, United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell called gains made in the past not nearly enough. Without the proper amount of cash, he said those could “quickly fizzle away into more empty...

There’s no such thing as a wind or solar ‘farm’, just an ugly industrial siteIn a story filled with all the standard climate alarmist narratives, USA Today recently reported on the rising movement by local governments in the United States to refuse to permit unwanted wind and solar industrial sites in their jurisdictions. After setting the stage by parroting the Biden administration goals of “100 per cent clean energy by 2035, a goal that depends on the building of large-scale solar and wind,” USA Today points to the reality that such big, intrusive, ugly, and destructive industrial sites have been...

Congressional leaders in the House and Senate have reached a deal on a spate of appropriations bills, clearing the way for a short-term spending patch that would extend funding deadlines further into March. Appropriators finalized the agreement on Wednesday, two sources told the Washington Examiner, just three days before the government is set to enter a partial shutdown. The proposal would maintain the two-pronged deadlines Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has advocated but would extend the dates slightly to give lawmakers time to finalize the legislative text and bring them to the floor for votes. “We are in agreement that Congress...

Joe Biden and the United Nations are pulling off one of the worst security threats to the United States in its 248-year history. ... According to the former director of Panama’s National Border Service, the U.N.'s migration agenda is behind the insanity along the southern border, and the world body's NGO (non-governmental organizations) partners are intentionally making the crisis worse. Oriel Ortega, now a security and defense consultant to Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo, told the Epoch Times during an interview on Thursday that he saw a dramatic jump in immigration in 2016, at the same time that NGOs moved into...

About $60 billion in the bill would go to supporting Ukraine as it defends itself from the Russian invasion that began nearly two years ago. There's nearly $14 billion to allow Ukraine to rearm itself through the purchase of weapons and munitions and another nearly $15 billion for support services such as military training and intelligence sharing. The support also includes nonmilitary assistance. About $8 billion would go to help Ukraine's government continue basic operations with a prohibition on money going toward pensions. And there's about $1.6 billion to help Ukraine's private sector. About a third of the money allocated...

These migrants appear to have better rides than some Brooklyn families they’ve been hitting up for cash, food and clothes. Authorities on Friday night towed at least five unregistered vehicles apparently being used by migrants that were illegally parked outside the city’s controversial tent shelter at Floyd Bennett Field, according to Assemblywoman Jaime Williams (D-Brooklyn) The wild scene – which Williams caught on video and shared on Facebook — included a white pickup truck with no plates being towed from a grassy lot that is federal parkland to the dismay of at least one migrant seen pleading to gain access...

Reserve officer: Every luxury villa in Gaza has UNRWA equipment * Many comments on the segment on Friday with the experiences of a reserve officer in Gaza. This morning, while reporting on UNRWA, here are a few more: Speaking of UNRWA, there is an amazing phenomenon in Gaza. You enter luxury homes. Luxury villas and apartments equipped with my equipment will not exist in 50 years, and yet you find use of UNRWA equipment in them. In the kitchen, bags of flour from UNRWA and in the children's room from the organization's school notebooks. It exists in every house in...

A proposed high-speed passenger train between Las Vegas and Southern California got another boost on Tuesday with Biden administration approval to issue $2.5 billion in tax-exempt bonds for the $12 billion project. The announcement benefiting the Brightline West project followed a $3 billion U.S. Department of Transportation grant in December and government authorization in 2020 for the company to sell $1 billion in similar bonds. ... The 218-mile (351-kilometer) Brightline West project aims to whisk passengers at 186 mph (300 kph) or more in electric trains on new tracks along the Interstate 15 corridor ... No date has been announced...

I wish this was a headline from the Babylon Bee but no, this is real life.. Remember when Democrats and RINOs in Congress told President Donald Trump that $15 billion was too much for a border wall? Then they said $6 billion was too much. Then they said $3.2 billion was too much. The border wall was never finished and the Biden-Harris regime has been practically begging illegal aliens to come across and to bring friends. Lots of friends. Lots of military-aged male friends. Good times.. As a result, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is supposed to be working...

A group of European parliamentarians who are in Washington to drum up more support for Ukraine have a message for lawmakers and the White House: Get your act together. The group is wrapping up a frustrating week spent meeting with policymakers and lawmakers, and is ready to leave town unsure of America’s place in European security after finding their U.S. counterparts unable, or unwilling, to act on important issues. The parliamentarians spent the week “pleading with Americans to be Americans, to be engaged, to be focused, to be disciplined, and to work as closely as possible with us,” Ali Ehsassi,...

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has a history of providing financial support to left-wing groups, announced on Monday that it would spend billions of dollars in 2024. The Gates Foundation’s board of trustees has approved a record $8.6 billion budget for 2024, up from $8.3 billion in 2023 and $7 billion in 2022, the charity announced from Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum is hosting its annual meeting. Over the years, the charity has poured tens of millions of dollars into pro-abortion groups, Democrat-aligned nonprofits and Chinese government organizations, among other causes. The foundation works in areas...

Joe Biden on Saturday stopped to talk to reporters posted up on the South Lawn as he departed to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland for another weekend vacation. Reporters asked Joe Biden about escalations with Iran, the border crisis and Ukraine. Biden denied there is a crisis at the southern border even though an estimated 11 million illegal aliens – mainly military-age males from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East – invaded on his watch. “Would you call the situation on the southern border a ‘crisis’?” a reporter asked Biden. He blamed Republicans....

The cries of climate alarm get ever louder and more urgent. (E.g., New York Times, January 9, “It’s confirmed: 2023 was the planet’s warmest year on record and perhaps in the last 100,000 years. By far.”). We’re all about to boil! Something must be done! OK, but then there is the proposed solution: Order up by government fiat that our current fully working and inexpensive energy system must be replaced with a never-demonstrated pipe dream conjured up by political science and gender studies majors who know nothing about how an energy system works. We’re far enough into this by now...

An annual report from the Inspector General of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) revealed that millions of dollars worth of tech devices were reported lost or stolen “without appropriate search and recovery efforts.” The fiscal year 2023 annual report released Tuesday states CPS schools reported 77,505 tech devices as lost or stolen during the 2021-22 school year, totaling well over $23 million in original purchase price. The discovery, as a result of the district’s first post-COVID-19 inventory, calls the numbers “unacceptably high” and says the oversight process is in need of a “serious overhaul.” The report said the missing items included...

More than $1 billion worth of shoulder-fired missiles, kamikaze drones and night-vision devices that the United States has sent to Ukraine have not been properly tracked by U.S. officials, a new Pentagon report concludes, raising concerns they could be stolen or smuggled at a time Congress is debating whether to send more military aid to Ukraine.The report by the Defense Department’s inspector general, released Thursday, offers no evidence that any of the weapons have been misused after being shipped to a U.S. military logistics hub in Poland or sent onward to Ukraine’s battlefields.“It was beyond the scope of our evaluation...

On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee learned in testimony from the owner of Hunter Biden’s art gallery that a majority of the first son’s artwork was purchased by Joe Biden’s Democratic donors.The art gallery owner—Georges Bergès—also told the committee that he never communicated with the White House about the supposed ethics agreement that the Biden Administration previously claimed was governing Hunter Biden’s “work within his profession,” which included his art career.“The Biden White House appears to have deceived the American people about facilitating an ethics agreement governing the sale of Hunter Biden’s art. Hunter Biden’s gallerist never had any communication...

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been accused of hiring a private lawyer she was in a 'romantic' relationship with to prosecute Donald Trump, according to a stunning filing by one of the former president's co-defendants. The bombshell allegations are included in a filing by Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official who is accused of taking part in the 'fake electors' scheme as one of 18 people charged in the state along with Trump. The public court filing, which seeks the dismissal of charges against him, alleges that Willis was in a personal relationship with private lawyer Nathan...