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US President Donald Trump announced via Twitter late Friday that a signed agreement has been reached with Mexico, and that the tariffs scheduled to go into effect on Monday have been suspended. Just last week, Trump announced that a five percent tariff on all goods coming from Mexico would go into effect on June 10, and would gradually increase up to 25 percent until the illegal immigration problem was resolved. The announcement launched a flurry of talks between officials from both countries, with reports that Mexico was willing to make some concessions. Late Friday, Trump tweeted, “I am pleased to...

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica, June 5, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — President Carlos Alvarado of Costa Rica has called on the Central American nation to “discuss as a society” possible legislative action to force Catholic priests to tell authorities when they hear confessions of child abuse and pedophilia. Proposed by Deputy Enrique Sanchez, a member of the president’s left-of-center Citizen Action Party, the bill would amend Article 206 of Costa Rica’s criminal code and require clergy and others who have contact with young people to report allegations of sexual abuse of minors. Priests who fail to report what they heard in confession...

Is Donald Trump playing chess while his critics play checkers? One economist begrudgingly seems to suggest that might be the case. Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg, who just last month asked if Trump was trying to lose the 2020 election with his tariffs, says the president’s recent moves might all be part of his grand plan to extend his stay in the White House.

An excavation in Egypt may have uncovered the oldest church ever discovered in the North African nation. While working on the ruins of an ancient Basilica, research teams discovered the ruins of an even older structure, which is likely to “offer new insights into the growth of early Christianity in Egypt and elsewhere in the Mediterranean,” according to Ancient Origins. The incredible discovery was made by a team of Polish archaeologists, led by Dr. Krzysztof Babraj, from Kraków’s Museum of Archaeology. The group were involved in a dig at the ancient port of Marea, near the city of Alexandria, when...

FULL TITLE: Trump’s tariff threat is engaging Mexico to protect the border: National Border Patrol Council president National Border Patrol Council president Brandon Judd tells FOX Business’ Lou Dobbs that President Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Mexican goods is forcing Mexico to act on securing the southern border.

**SNIP** Maya Rockeymoore’s charity paid over $250,000 in “management fees” to her own for-profit consulting firm between 2013 and 2015, according to audited financial reports for the foundation published by the Daily Caller on Thursday. The payments were made by Rockeymoore’s foundation, the Center for Global Policy Solutions, to her consulting firm, Global Policy Solutions. The two entities also had a cost-sharing agreement in which the foundation covered its own expenses related to any joint projects. IRS law prohibits insiders at nonprofit groups from self-dealing, or using foundation money for their own personal financial benefit. Tax records of nonprofit charities...

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President Donald Trump on Friday night backed down from imposing a 5% tariff on all goods entering the country from Mexico, instead reaching an agreement with the country. On Twitter, Trump wrote that Mexico “agreed to take strong measures” to “stem the tide of Migration through Mexico, and to our Southern Border.” He added that the agreement would “greatly reduce, or eliminate, Illegal Immigration coming from Mexico and into the United States,” but left it up to the State Department to provide further details. The tariffs that were to go into effect Monday have been “indefinitely” suspended, Trump wrote.

The Catholic Church has been asked to back a national strike against pension changes aimed at cutting the nation's deficit Brazil's nine largest trade unions, as well as various pastoral commissions, have asked the country's Catholic bishops to help organize a nation-wide general strike on June 14 to protest changes to the country's pension system. Bishop Roberto Francisco Ferreira Paz, representative of Brazil's National Conference of Bishops, has said that plans of the government of Jair Bolsonaro would harm the welfare of ordinary people. Major reform of the pension systemThe announced pension "reform" is a key element of government efforts...

Cardinal Cupich said the vote 'marks a sad moment in our history as a State' The Illinois Senate has approved an expansive abortion bill that would declare abortion to be a “fundamental right” in the state and would remove regulations on abortion clinics and doctors. Shortly before midnight on the final day of the legislative session, the Senate approved the bill by a vote of 34-20. It had passed the House last week in a 64-50 vote. The bill now goes to the desk of Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who has indicated that he will sign it. Cardinal Blase Cupich of...

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested Friday that the Supreme Court is deeply divided as it closes out its 2018-2019 term this month, with a series of high-profile cases on the 2020 census and political gerrymandering poised to be released. She hinted, while speaking to a conference of federal judges in New York, that the number of decisions decided by a five-member majority will grow.

Venezuela has hit a worrying milestone. The United Nations says more than 4 million refugees and migrants have left the country, which is suffering from political chaos, food shortages and hyperinflation. The U.N. has called this exodus the "largest in the recently history of Latin American and the Caribbean." "The pace of the outflow from Venezuela has been staggering," the U.N.'s refugee agency UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration said in a joint statement. The numbers make it clear that the pace is escalating. The U.N. says one million people have left since November 2018. And the high rate...

Sooo…this is messed up. The New York Times recently published a piece called “Madonna at Sixty,” written by Vanessa Grigoriadis. It explores her ever-changing public persona and such. It’s kind of the typical fluff piece you’d imagine the New York Times would put out about a celebrity: The night before the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas in May, Madonna was sitting in the arena attached to the MGM Grand hotel, staring at a double of herself. The double, who was standing on the stage many yards away, was younger and looked Asian but wore a similar lace minidress and...

Sen. Mitt Romney said Friday he may never be ready to endorse President Donald Trump's re-election, but wouldn't give the race's Democratic front-runner, Joe Biden, "more than a 50-50 shot" of winning the White House. "I think the attitude here has got to be the same as across the country, which is the president will surely be the Republican nominee and an incumbent in a growing economy is more likely to win than to lose. But it's not a sure thing," he said. Romney said if the Democrats nominate "a strong contender, anything's possible." But he declined to say whether...

By: Scripps National items.[0].image.alt President Donald Trump tweeted Friday evening that the United States had reached a deal with Mexico and that he would be suspending pending tariffs on goods imported from Mexico.

I am pleased to inform you that The United States of America has reached a signed agreement with Mexico. The Tariffs scheduled to be implemented by the U.S. on Monday, against Mexico, are hereby indefinitely suspended. Mexico, in turn, has agreed to take strong measur

I have a young protégé who told me that he was going to attend the Belmont Stakes with a group of his friends. I think this will also be his first visit to a racetrack This will be the 54th consecutive Belmont Stakes I have attended. I sent him a copy of the Past Performances earlier in the week, and just now I prepared an analysis of the races for him. I thought some FReepers might be interested in what I sent to him so I reproduce it below. ML/NJ

A former Minneapolis police officer who shot and killed an unarmed woman who had called 911 said Friday he "knew in an instant that I was wrong" and apologized to her family, just moments before a judge brushed off a defense request for leniency and ordered him to prison for 12½ years. The stiff sentence for Mohamed Noor capped a case that had been fraught by race from the start. Noor, a Somali American, shot Justine Ruszczyk Damond , a white, upper-middle-class dual citizen of the U.S. and Australia, when she approached his squad car in the alley behind her...

This wasn't some slip of the tongue. Appearing on Nicolle Wallace's MSNBC show, Deadline: White House, this afternoon, John Heilemann warned that "I'm about to use some language that might need to be bleeped out." Heilemann then proceeded to use barnyard vulgarity to attack Fox News in general and Sean Hannity in particular: "I yield to no one in my tendency to call 'bulls---' on people at Fox News when they lie. And so, obviously, Sean's full of it, right? . . . The political reality she [Nancy Pelosi] is confronting is the political reality created by Sean Hannity and...

Summary of Interview: Dave Janda Interviews Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe on the NSA data collection policies and parallel intelligence platforms, i.e., Hammer and the DNC leak. As Janda notes credits are due to Mary Fanning and Alan Jones investigative work on the topic.