Free Republic

Donald Trump Jr. declared Tuesday that there are high-level forces in the U.S. government working against his father, President Trump. Speaking at a conservative conference in West Palm Beach, Fla., Trump's oldest child said there is a movement to not let "America be America." "There is, and there are, people at the highest levels of government that don't want to let America be America," he said at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit. Trump Jr. also said that special counsel Robert Mueller's federal Russia inquiry is indicative of the sort of "rigged system" that his father complained about during...

Social Security's unfunded liabilities total $12.5 trillion in present-dollar terms over a 75-year timeframe, the administration's trustees reported Thursday, an increase of $1.2 trillion from last year's estimate. The trustees report showed that Social Security's combined trust fund can only pay scheduled benefits through 2034, a projected date that is unchanged from a year ago. Medicare's trust fund, though, is in better shape than previously estimated and will run out a year later than previously anticipated, in 2029. At those dates, beneficiaries would face the prospect of an immediate cut in benefits unless policy were changed in some way to...

Berkshire Hathaway Inc has been sued by a New York bicycle courier company over an alleged illegal scheme to cheat employers buying workers' compensation policies. The complaint, filed late Friday by Breakaway Courier Systems, came as Berkshire's Applied Underwriters unit faces scrutiny over its workers' compensation policies, including some that have been banned by California, Vermont and Wisconsin. Breakaway, with about 300 employees, accused Berkshire and Applied of "siphoning" premiums through a web of illegal shell companies, with diverted premiums going to unlicensed out-of-state insurers. The plan amounted to a "reverse Ponzi scheme" where unsuspecting employers expecting to buy affordable...

How online auctioneer EnergyNet helps bring liquidity, and recovery, to America’s busted oil patch. In the first 18 months of the oil bust, 70 companies have gone bankrupt, defaulting on $40 billion in debt. A trillion dollars of oil company equity has been wiped out. Layoffs top 200,000. With oil holding at around $45 a barrel, more liquidations are on the way. Already the old guys swear this bust is worse than in 1986, when oil dropped below $25 in today’s dollars. At least one thing is better now: Thanks to the magic of the Internet, it’s easier for cash-strapped...

It is a well-known fact that the corporate world is powered by high-end coffees. With pithy corporate executives forced to work early morning hours to keep their companies competitive, they must find a good source of status-quot coffee to start their day and show they are in charge. Powerful liberals understand this fact and have thus encouraged young lesbians to start ‘exciting careers’ in the barista industry. By working at local Starbucks nationwide, lesbians have...

Computer automated hedge fund strategies weren't the only winners amid recent volatility. Hedge funds also appear to have timed oil’s recent slump and rebound. That's according to Bloomberg's Moming Zhou, who reports  that hedge fund significantly curbed their bearish positions in crude oil just after it fell to a 12-year low last week -- and then rebounded in its biggest jump since 2008. While oil had a brutal start to 2016 after a disappointing 2015 showing, many are coming around to the idea of a recovery in prices, as Citi argued it could be the trade of the year, some...

Mama needs a brand-new bag! According to a recent study by Baghunter, the legendary Hermès Birkin bag is a better investment than both gold and stocks. The luxury site compared the returns on the three investments over a 35-year period, and, as it turns out, the value of the Birkin, which starts at $11,000 on Baghunter, has never decreased. In fact, while the values of gold and the stocks have fluctuated, the top-handle tote's value has steadily increased more than 500 percent in the last three and a half decades. That makes for an average annual increase of 14.2 percent,...

ISLAMABAD: Eight “high value terrorists” wanted by Pakistan and other countries are holed up inside Lal Masjid, while another was killed by security forces in the ongoing operation, Religious Affairs Minister Ejazul Haq said on Sunday. “Nine suspected terrorists said to be far more dangerous and harmful than Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives were hiding inside the mosque compound,” Haq told a press conference here. Haq said that the militants and not Abdul Rashid Ghazi, Lal Masjid’s deputy chief cleric, were controlling the mosque. “The militants are holding children and Ghazi hostage,” he said. He said that about 500 male...

Sophie Cruz's encounter with the pope during a parade in Washington this week looked to be one of those spontaneous, once-in-a-lifetime-moments Francis has become known for. But for 5-year-old Sophie, the chance to wrap her arm around the pope's neck as he offered a hug, kiss and a blessing unfolded as perfectly as it was scripted by members of a coalition of Los Angeles-based immigration rights groups. For nearly a year the group had been preparing the young girl from suburban Los Angeles to make a dash for the popemobile to deliver a message about the plight of immigrant parents...

Solar scientists predict that the Earth will enter a "mini ice age" around 2030 due to decreased activity by the sun, which will bring with it frigid cold winters. The last time the Earth experienced a similar situation occurred between 1645 and 1715.

No TV nor radio news will cover this. CNN Reports Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Extremely Secretive Two copies of the biggest free trade deal in history are sitting in reading rooms -- one at each end of the Capitol. The document is classified. Only members of Congress and staffers with security clearance can access it. And they can't make copies or even carry their own handwritten notes out the door. This is how trade negotiations work. Fearful that they'll undercut their own negotiators, leaders of the countries involved don't want the details of what they're hashing out revealed until the...

Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange MyCoin has allegedly shut its doors and stolen HKD 3 billion ($386.9 million) in the process. The South China Morning Post reported Monday that 30 MyCoin clients approached a local lawmaker with complaints that the company had fled with funds from up to 3,000 investors. The reports coming out of Hong Kong would seem to indicate that there may have been a Ponzi scheme at play. "No one seems to know who is behind this," a woman surnamed Lau, who said she lost HKD 1.3 million, told the paper. "Everyone says they, too, are victims ......

Tuition is up 1,200 percent in 30 years. Here's why you're unemployed, crushed by debt -- and no one is helping The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation...

<p>Those big, ugly early birds began circling over the corporate headquarters of the revenue-camera industry last week when federal prosecutors announced that felony corruption charges had been filed against the Chicago city official in charge of one of the world’s largest red-light camera operations. More dominoes are expected to fall as FBI agents take the investigation to other cities.</p>

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just completed a series of landmark reports that chronicle an update to the current state of consensus science on climate change. Its conclusion: On our current path, climate change could pose an irreversible, existential risk to civilization as we know it, but we can still fix it if we decide to work together. But in addition to the call for cooperation, the reports also shared an alarming new trend: Climate change is already destabilizing nations and leading to wars. That finding was highlighted in last week's premiere of Showtime's climate change docu-drama...

The Internal Revenue Service’s watchdog warned taxpayers Thursday about a sophisticated nationwide phone scheme that it said is “the largest scam of its kind” it has seen. The scheme involves callers claiming to represent the IRS and demanding immediate payments with a prepaid debit card or wire transfer, the watchdog said. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration Russell George said that “thousands of victims” have paid more than $1 million to fraudsters and that his agency has received more than 20,000 reports of contact.

Shares of Australian investment firm Macro Energy gained 42% yesterday, after news emerged that it plans to enter the bitcoin space and raise A$9.1m ($8.2m) in funding.

U.S. and Japanese regulators are investigating the collapse of the world's largest exchange for trading bitcoins, the virtual currency that has grown in popularity among technophiles for buying products and services online. The separate investigations were launched Wednesday as supporters of the virtual currency insisted that the shutdown of Mt. Gox was only a temporary setback for the novel monetary system. The failure of the Tokyo exchange, which may have included the theft of almost 750,000 bitcoins worth more than $300 million, was seen by critics as derailing prospects for the virtual currency. But several high-profile bitcoin investors came forward...

Aretha Holland-Jackson, 45, admitted in federal court that she used her access to the Department of Human Services’ computer system to set up public assistance for nearly two dozen phony beneficiaries. Using fake names and Social Security numbers, Holland-Jackson obtained government ID cards that she and others used to withdraw food stamps, cash and other public benefits from ATMs, according to prosecutors. Allison Holland, Holland-Jackson’s 47-year-old sister, also admitted involvement in the scheme. Prosecutors said Holland, of Cheltenham, used three of the fake cards, then saved cash for her sister in a shoebox.