Free Republic

A Quebec environmental group is taking the federal government to court. ENvironnement JEUnesse filed a class-action suit on behalf of Quebeckers aged 35 and under seeking a declaration that the government’s behaviour in the fight against climate change infringes on their human rights. The claim also seeks punitive damages. They are not alone. Similar claims have been filed on behalf of young people in other jurisdictions, including the Netherlands, the United States and Colombia. Understanding and addressing the challenges of climate change is rapidly becoming the next legal frontier. As environmental lawyer David Boyd recently noted, litigation is one of...

Americans have reached consensus on the need to act in response to climate change with one conspicuous exception: Republicans. A new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll identifies that sharp break in the evolving pattern of public opinion as scientists have amplified their warnings of rising global temperatures and linked them to a range of natural disasters. Overall, 66 percent of Americans now say they've seen enough evidence to justify action, up from 51 percent two decades ago. That figure incorporates 85 percent of Democrats, 79 percent of independents, 71 percent of women, 61 percent of men and strong majorities...

Storm-driven data-center outages, production disrupted by flooding, forest-fire smoke choking workers at the corporate headquarters — already in 2018, Amazon has experienced at least a half dozen notable disruptions to its operations connected to climate change, according to a group of employees urging the company to be more transparent with its response to the global threat. About 16 Amazon employees, who are also company shareholders thanks to stock-based compensation, have filed a shareholder resolution asking the company’s board of directors to publicly report on how the Seattle-based commerce giant “is planning for disruptions posed by climate change, and how Amazon...

It was a blazing hot day in La Quinta, California, and Irving Berlin was inspired to write a song. Not just any old tune: having completed the lyric, the composer told his secretary he “just wrote the best song that anybody’s ever written”. White Christmas was not a hit initially. But in 1942, two years after it was written, the song topped the US charts, thanks in part to its popularity with American soldiers stationed overseas during the second world war. It was a hit in Britain, too, perhaps helped by the fact that, unlike swathes of the southern US,...

I voted for Trump. Now his wall may destroy my butterfly paradise. The Republican party is abandoning the conservative principles I treasured. By Luciano Guerra Luciano Guerra is a nature photographer and outreach coordinator and educator for the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas. December 17 at 6:00 AM Right now, in Mission, Tex., we don’t worry about immigrants who crossed the border illegally or drug smugglers. We worry about having to defend our private property from seizure by the federal government. I work at the National Butterfly Center — which is along the U.S.-Mexico border — documenting wildlife and...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t taking it easy after suffering three broken ribs in November. The 85-year-old Supreme Court justice was out for the second night in a row Sunday for the premiere of the biopic on her life, “On the Basis of Sex.” On Saturday, Ginsburg was at the Museum of the City of New York for a screening, and the next night she appeared at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, where she said that being played by British actress Felicity Jones was a strange experience.

The Republican hopes the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston will look more favorably on his case challenging the constitutionality of Maine's voting law. Rep. Bruce Poliquin is appealing a recent federal judge’s rejection of his lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of ranked-choice voting. Poliquin and three other residents of Maine’s 2nd Congressional District filed a notice of appeal Monday, four days after a U.S. District Court judge dismissed his constitutional arguments and refused to order a new election. Attorneys for Poliquin said they plan to file a brief Tuesday with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in...

But the 302 (here) presents Flynn as eager to provide information to the FBI about his interactions with Kislyak. He told the FBI agents that he had called Russia and other countries to ask where they stood on the UN vote, "not any requests of, 'hey if you do this'." He also told the FBI agents he had not discussed the Obama administration’s impending actions against Russia and had not been informed of them at the time of his call with Kislyak because he was on vacation in the Dominican Republic without access to television news or a working government-issue...

The impeachment countdown is on. Democrats are lurching inexorably toward trying to dump President Trump, even if they won’t admit it now. Conventional wisdom says that the Dems, who are about to take over the U.S. House, are proceeding cautiously, and will be reluctant to launch into impeachment proceedings. Nancy Pelosi is trying her best to restrain herself. Don’t believe it. Democrats would like nothing better than to oust Trump. If Robert Mueller provides them with the ammo, the party won’t be able to resist. Left-leaning voters are pressuring lawmakers to act, thinking about the months long torture that impeachment...

Former FBI Director James Comey had harsh words for House Republicans on Monday, saying their silence in response to President Donald Trump’s attacks on the Justice Department is “shameful.” Comey said Republicans “have to have the courage to stand up and speak the truth, not be cowed by mean tweets or fear of their base.” He was on Capitol Hill for a second closed-door interview with two Republican-led committees investigating what they say was bias at the Justice Department before the 2016 presidential election. Republicans argue department officials conspired against Trump as they started an investigation into his ties to...

President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order soon, possibly as early as Tuesday, creating a U.S. Space Command that will better organize and advance the military's vast operations in space, U.S. officials say. Vice President Mike Pence will make the announcement Tuesday at the Kennedy Space Center, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, two U.S. officials said. Trump's order is separate from his oft-stated goal of creating a "Space Force" as an independent armed service branch, but it's considered a step in that direction. The move will launch a long and complicated process, requiring the Defense Department to pull...

The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) has released its list of Worst Ethics Violators of 2018, which includes 2020 presidential hopefuls Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Both Harris and Warren used their opposition of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court as an opportunity to fundraise, according to FACT. The two Democratic Senators sent out emails claiming that the donation played a vital role in battling his confirmation. Shortly thereafter, FACT filed an ethics complaint against both senators. Warren was caught off guard during a televised debate when her opponent mentioned that she was under...

This filing was recorded at 6:03 PM Eastern. Judge Emmet Sullivan is demanding Special Counsel Robert Mueller to release the original 302 report from the Michael Flynn interrogation in January 2017. The original 302 report is still missing! Mueller HAS NOT turned it over!

The highly redacted 302 documents revealed a startling fact, the 302 from the first interview with Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017 appears to be missing. There is a shroud of mystery regarding the actual facts that surround the first interview former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had with two FBI Special Agents at the White House. Pieces of the puzzle, however, have slowly come together over the past year. In the past week, those pieces of evidence, or lack thereof, have become even more pronounced after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office was ordered by Judge Emmet Sullivan to turn over...

The midterm elections were, to an important extent, a referendum on the Affordable Care Act; health care, not Donald Trump, dominated Democratic campaigning. And voters delivered a clear verdict: They want Obamacare’s achievements, the way it expanded coverage to roughly 20 million people who would otherwise have been uninsured, to be sustained. But on Friday, Reed O’Connor, a partisan Republican judge known for “weaponizing” his judicial power, declared the A.C.A. as a whole — protection for pre-existing conditions, subsidies to help families afford coverage, and the Medicaid expansion — unconstitutional. Legal experts from both right and left ridiculed his reasoning...

The fight over President Donald Trump’s $5 billion wall funds deepened Monday, threatening a partial government shutdown in a standoff that has become increasingly common in Washington. It wasn’t always like this, with Congress and the White House at a crisis over government funding. The House and Senate used to pass annual appropriation bills, and the president signed them into law. But in recent years the shutdown scenario has become so routine that it raises the question: Have shutdowns as a negotiating tool lost their punch? Monday brought few signs of progress. A partial shutdown that could occur at midnight...

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) announced Monday he will not seek re-election in 2020. .... “I will not be a candidate for re-election to the United States Senate in 2020,” Alexander said in a statement. “The people of Tennessee have been very generous, electing me to serve more combined years as Governor and Senator than anyone else from our state. I am deeply grateful, but now it is time for someone else to have that privilege. I have gotten up every day thinking that I could help make our state and country a little better, and gone to bed most nights...

North Carolina Republican lawmakers said Friday they would challenge Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls. Cooper vetoed the legislation on Friday, even though more than 55 percent of the state electorate approved of the measure in a referendum, the News & Observer reported. The legislation requires voters to show any of a range of accepted photo IDs— including driver’s licenses, student IDs from higher education institutions, state and local government ID cards, and military ID cards. The bill also allows county election boards to provide free photo identification cards...

Senators linked arms and voted Monday to advance a new bill combining sentencing and prison reforms, setting up final passage later this week and creating the groundwork for a major bipartisan compromise. President Trump had urged GOP Senate leaders to drop their longstanding objections and allow the bipartisan bill to reach the floor, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally agreed, after the bill was changed a final time to win over some additional conservatives. With those changes in hand, the measure cleared a potential filibuster on a 82-12 vote, far more than the 60 votes needed. The Senate will now...

The office of Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders is being accused of wielding its political power in order to seek retribution against a Vermont business owner who ran an ad attacking Sanders over his hypocrisy. Rodolphe “Skip” Vallee, the CEO of St. Albans-based gasoline distributor and retailer R.L. Vallee, is alleging that Sanders and his senior press adviser, Daniel McLean, conspired against the business owner by drumming up a class-action lawsuit, according to federal court documents. Vallee, who owns more than 45 gas stations in and around Vermont, produced an anti-Sanders television advertisement that aired locally in September 2014. The advertisement criticized...