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ROME — Pope Francis received Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in a private audience Saturday, the Vatican Press Office reported. Warnock, senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, said he deeply admires the pontiff’s efforts “to center humanity in public life — from addressing poverty and hunger, to fighting the climate crisis, to promoting peace.”

The Institute for Justice says its data show that a century-old Supreme Court doctrine created a huge exception to the Fourth Amendment. Police can traipse onto the vast majority of private property in the country without a warrant thanks to a century-old Supreme Court decision, according to a new study by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public-interest law firm. In a study published in the spring 2024 issue of Regulation, a publication of the Cato Institute, Institute for Justice attorney Josh Windham and research analyst David Warren estimate that at least 96 percent of all private land in the...

Hollywood star Barbra Streisand has found her next big role: defense attorney for Fulton County district attorney Fanni Willis. Barbra Streisand has argued her case for the embattled Fani Willis, who is on trial in Georgia for her alleged ethical violations in the prosecution of former President Donald Trump and 18 other co-defendants.

Whistleblowers at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) are sounding the alarm on a reported 1,300-page draft document that allegedly justifies a proposed rule that would effectively ban private gun sales, according to a watchdog group. "The fact that inside ATF sources are blowing the whistle on this draft rule is an indication of what a difficult position it would put the ATF in. ATF agents did not sign up to go after law-abiding citizens for private sales protected under the Second Amendment of the Constitution," Tristan Leavitt, president of watchdog group Empower Oversight, said in a...

ROME — Pope Francis received Italian American director Martin Scorsese for a private meeting in the Vatican on Wednesday. Scorsese, who directed the controversial 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ and is currently working on a movie of the life of Jesus, has said that when he thinks of Pope Francis, he thinks of “compassion.” n Wednesday’s meeting, the 81-year-old director presented Pope Francis with a book chronicling the making of his Oscar-nominated film Killers of the Flower Moon. Papal confidant Father Antonio Spadaro, a harsh critic of American Christians, gushed effusively over the meeting, insisting that it formed...

The British government has reportedly hired a fleet of private boats to help the Border Force bring illegal Channel migrants ashore at a cost to the taxpayer at least £36 million. According to a report from The Times of London, the UK Home Office — the government body responsible for controlling immigration and protecting the country’s borders — has signed a contract worth £36 million for the hiring of a “charter of vessel(s) to support small boats operations in the Dover Straits”. The contract, which is set to come into force in April and will last until at least the...

Some of the most radical changes proposed in the new ATF rule are to completely redefine “personal collection,” “personal collection of firearms,” “personal firearms collection,” and “hobby.” Three of the long-term exceptions to “engaged in the business” have been:a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms;Personal collection of firearms has long meant “the firearms owned by a person.”None of the wording of those exceptions was changed by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act or BSCA,...

Two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions are victories for anyone dealing with government administrative agencies, say lawyers interested in the cases. One constitutional scholar warns that the decisions are only the first steps in the fight to maintain our form of democracy. “Administrative power is the greatest threat to our constitutional rights,” Phillip Hamburger, a Columbia University School of Law law professor and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), told The Epoch Times. Mr. Hamburger is the author of “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” a treatise on the dangers of administrative law. Lawyers interviewed by The Epoch Times believe...

WASHINGTON, DC – Senate Democrats’ demands for conservative private citizens’ interactions with Supreme Court justices are unconstitutional, violating First Amendment and equal protection rights, according to lawyers representing Leonard Leo, co-chairman of the Federalist Society. Partisan Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have been pursuing conservative Supreme Court justices – but only conservative justices – for years. But now Democrats are targeting conservative private citizens, with Chairman Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) leading the charge. In the latest salvo, Durbin and Whitehouse fired off a letter on July 11 to Leo, requesting that he provide the committee...

Three of America's largest tax preparation companies have been accused of sharing tens of millions of taxpayers' sensitive financial data with tech giants Google and Meta without their consent. A seven-month congressional probe, led by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, alleges H&R Block, TaxAct and TaxSlayer used visitor tracking technology embedded in websites to share the information. In a potential violation of federal law, the investigation found data was in some cases misused by Facebook parent company Meta for targeted advertising. According to the report, alongside sharing data such as addresses and phone numbers, companies also shared details about taxpayers' filing...

Facebook founder and deranged liar Mark Zuckerberg loves to lecture ‘the little people’ about what is good for them.But that doesn’t get in the way of him living his best life.Zuckerberg has donated millions to anti-police organizations, including PolicyLink, the group behind DefundPolice.org, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang shared on his substack.While he may support defunding the police for the rest of us, that doesn’t stop him from lavish spending on his own private security, a cost in excess of $43.4 million over the last three years.

California Rep. Nancy Pelosi has continued her jet-setting ways despite relinquishing her leadership post and pushing for aggressive climate policies, according to a Fox News Digital review of campaign finance records. The former Democratic leader's campaign disbursed $43,663.80 on private jet travel with Advanced Aviation in March and appears to be the biggest private jet spender during the first quarter of the year, her filings show. Pelosi has now spent nearly $700,000 on charter aircraft in recent years, primarily with Advanced Aviation, her longtime preferred company. Based just outside of Washington D.C., in Northern Virginia, Advanced Aviation offers aircraft ranging...

I think most of us would agree that today WE ARE LIVING IN THE GREATEST CULTURAL, RELIGIOUS AND ECONOMIC CRISIS IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. We are living in the most confusing times in the history of the world and of the Church. WE DESERVE ALL OF THIS because in recent decades there has been a great decline in the number of people who seek to obey and live God’s holy laws with the help of God through prayer and the Holy Sacraments. (Note: When pasting this document into Free Republic, it seems that most of the special formatting...

“The Supreme Power cannot take from any Man any part of his Property without his own consent. For the preservation of Property being the end of Government, and that for which Men enter into Society, it necessarily supposes and requires, that the People should have Property, without which they must be supposed to lose that by entering into Society, which was the end for which they entered into it, too gross an absurdity for any Man to own. Men therefore in Society having Property, they have such a right to the goods, which by the Law of the Community are...

Goldman Sachs has abandoned a plan to buy a pricey private jet equipped with its own shower, ... in canceling the order for the shower-equipped model, Goldman likely forfeited a big deposit, with one industry expert estimating it was likely equal to 5% of the purchase price, or $3.75 million. ... The use of a private jet by Goldman CEO David Solomon and other top bankers has reportedly been a source of angst among staffers ... For decades, top bankers at Goldman were loathe to fly on a company-owned private jet — instead opting to assume fractional ownership in an...

Climate Czar John Kerry is headed to a tropical location in the dead of winter for the sake of fighting climate change. "Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry will travel to Nassau, The Bahamas, from February 14-16 and Munich, Germany from February 17-18. In Nassau, Secretary Kerry will continue efforts to advance international cooperation among nations particularly vulnerable to the climate crisis at the 44th Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM)," the State Department released in a statement Monday night. "In Munich, he’ll participate in the Munich Security Conference to engage...

Private companies added an estimated 127,000 jobs in November, a sharp slowdown from October and the lowest monthly gain in nearly two years, according to a new ADP jobs report. The estimate, which does not include public sector jobs, fell from 239,000 private jobs added in October and marks the latest sign of a cooling labor market as the Federal Reserve rapidly raises interest rates. Private companies added 357,167 monthly jobs on average last year, a steady pace spurred by the nation’s pandemic recovery that has since slowed amid the central bank’s monetary tightening, which is aimed at lowering inflation....

Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), called during a March 2021 virtual conference to eliminate all private bank accounts and deposits. Omarova discussed one of her papers, “The People’s Ledger How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy,” which would help “redesign” the financial system and make the economy “more equitable for everyone.” She said it would change the “private-public power balance” and democratize finance to a more systemic level. During her conference speech, she said, “There will be no more private bank accounts, and all of the deposit accounts...

President Joe Biden is pushing forward on an executive order calling for 30 percent of U.S. land be “conserved” — up from the 13 percent that are national parks and other federal holdings — including private property. And while environmentalists want even more restrictions, Republicans and Americans whose livelihood depends on land are strongly opposed to what they see as a land grab by the federal government. “This ‘30×30’ goal has received a great deal of attention in farming and ranching communities across the country,” American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall wrote in April. “America’s agriculturalists are asking whether...

Misinformation is very often is factually true, that’s why they’re angry about it.Last March, as the first big clusters of Coronavirus cases, started to appear in this country, media executives in Silicon Valley coordinated with officials in Washington to determine how much the public was allowed to know about the growing epidemic that was killing them.Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook emailed Tony Fauci at NIH, to assure him that Facebook users would see only Tony Fauci’s approved guidance on Covid-19. Twitter and Google effectively did the same.Twitter and Google eliminated any post that deviated from Washington’s official line. In many cases,...