Free Republic

The US on Thursday vetoed a Security Council resolution to admit the Palestinian Authority as a full member state of the United Nations. 12 countries voted in favor of the resolution: Slovenia, Sierra Leone, Russia, South Korea, Mozambique, Malta, Japan, Guyana, France, Ecuador, China, and Algeria. Two countries abstained – Britain and Switzerland. Foreign Minister Israel Katz said following the vote, “The proposal to recognize a Palestinian state, more than 6 months after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and after the sexual crimes and other atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists was a reward for terrorism.” “I commend...

A majority of adults in the United States said the decline in union membership is bad for the country, according to a survey conducted earlier this year. The Pew Research Center poll found that 54 percent of surveyed U.S. adults believe the decline in union membership is bad for the country. Another 59 percent said that the decline is bad for working people, the survey found. Union membership has been decreasing in the U.S. in recent years. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the union membership rate at 10 percent in 2023, which is slightly down from 10.1 percent...

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) – Hungary’s prime minister said Friday he does not support moving forward on negotiations on Ukraine’s future membership in the European Union, signaling again that his country could pose a major roadblock to Kyiv’s ambitions to join the bloc. EU leaders are to decide in mid-December whether Ukraine should be formally invited to begin talks to join the 27-member union, with Hungary seen as a potential obstacle. Unanimity among all member states is required to admit a new country into the bloc, giving Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a powerful veto.

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tore into NATO leaders including President Biden Tuesday for not extending NATO membership to his war-torn country — introducing fresh diplomatic drama into the annual gathering of the military alliance’s leaders. Zelensky, who will join the NATO summit in Lithuania on Wednesday, slammed the reticence as “weakness” and “absurd” — just moments after Biden referred to the development of new non-public language under development for NATO ascension. “Now, on the way to Vilnius, we received signals that certain wording is being discussed without Ukraine. And I would like to emphasize that this wording...

President Joe Biden said Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” that he didn’t think Ukraine was ready for NATO membership. Biden said, “I don’t think it’s ready for membership in NATO. But here is the deal, I spent a great deal of time holding NATO together because I believe Putin has an overwhelming objective at the time that he launched 85,000 troops into Ukraine, and that was to break NATO. He was confident in my view that he could break NATO. So holding NATO together is really critical.”

At the end of the meeting of G7 nations in Japan, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Sunday that Ukraine currently does not meet the requirements to join the NATO alliance. The expansion of the American-led NATO alliance into Ukraine does not seem to be on the cards any time soon, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz downplaying the idea after meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Hiroshima, Japan over the weekend.

Big Labor and its acolytes have been trumpeting a recent Gallup poll suggesting widespread public support for organized labor.According to the survey, about 71 percent of Americans expressed a favorable opinion of unions, up from 64 percent pre-pandemic and a low of 48 percent in 2009.Even more revealing, they say, are figures from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) showing the overall number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions increased by 273,000 — 1.9 percent — to 14.3 million during 2022 over the previous year.If true, it would be the best showing for unions since the 1960s.Both notions...

The Ukrainian government has revealed it plans to be a full European Union member-state within two years ahead of a historic Ukraine-EU summit in Kyiv. “We have a very ambitious plan to join the European Union within the next two years,” revealed Denys Shmyhal, the Prime Minister of Ukraine, in comments to POLITICO. “So we expect that this year, in 2023, we can already have this pre-entry stage of negotiations,” Shmyhal continued, speaking ahead of a summit between President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and top eurocrats at the European Commission and the European Council.

Let’s start with a scenario that your church has an average worship attendance of 100. I use that number for simplicity. The median worship attendance is 65.Now, let’s ask a simple question. How many attendees do you have to add to your attendance in a year to stay even?The answer for a typical church is 32 with a worship attendance of 100. You can double the number to 64 if the church’s attendance is 200.Did you get that? A church has to increase the number of attendees by 32 percent each year just to stay even.In a church with 100...

The leaders of nine NATO nations from Central and Eastern Europe issued a joint statement on Sunday in support of Ukraine's path to membership in the alliance. "We firmly stand behind the 2008 Bucharest NATO Summit decision concerning Ukraine’s future membership," the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Poland, Czechia, Romania, North Macedonia, and Slovakia said on Sunday. At that 2008 summit, NATO allies said they "welcomed" Ukraine and Georgia's aspirations to the join the alliance, though no clear timetable has ever been announced.

Ask anyone who shops at Costco (COST) what they think of it and you'll probably hear exuberant praise, along with a list of the great deals they scored on their last visit. More than 111 million people pay an annual membership fee just to get in the door, with fewer than 10% each year who decide the experience isn’t worth the price of renewing. To some, shopping at Costco is close to a religious experience, which might explain why Sunday is its busiest day. For others, going to the warehouse is like going on a treasure hunt. They may be...

New York businesses are struggling to abide by the state’s mask and vaccination rules, with one gym alone seeing 200 membership suspensions or cancelations over the coercive rules thrust upon business owners by the Democrat governor. This month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) issued an ultimatum to businesses, requiring them to either check the vaccination status of customers or require masks across the board. The state will not revisit the rule until January 15, 2022. But now, businesses which were already struggling due to extended lockdowns and restrictions are facing yet another uphill battle.

A year after reporting the largest single-year membership decline in more than 100 years, churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, lost more than 400,000 members in 2020 and set a new record for the single-year decline amid the coronavirus pandemic and a bitter culture war. The Annual Church Profile report shows membership in SBC congregations declined by a staggering 435,632 in 2020, more than 50% higher than the 287,655 members the denomination reported losing from 2018 to 2019. While the number of SBC congregations increased slightly by 62 to 47,592 over the previous year, the...

Church is essential. That’s what many of us have said in the face of ongoing COVID restrictions. But to a growing number of Americans, church is not essential — even among those who believe.Gallup surveys the religious attitudes and practices of Americans twice each year. They roll this data into three-year chunks for comparison over time. From 1998-2000, 69% of American adults were members of a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque. By 2008-2010, that figure had dropped to 62%. And by 2018-2020, just 49%. So over one decade, a drop of 7%. Then over the next decade, a drop of...

While the number of churches in the Southern Baptist Convention has increased slightly, total membership in those churches suffered the largest single-year decline in more than 100 years, according to recent measures from LifeWay Christian Resources. In the Annual Church Profile prepared by the publishing and distribution division of the SBC based in Nashville, Tennessee, data show that the denomination lost some 287,655 members, nearly 2% of its adherents from 2018 to 2019. Current membership stands at 14,525,579. While the number of churches in the denomination increased by 74 for a total of 47,530 churches over 2018, it did not...

Presbyterian Church (USA) recently reported that it lost around 50,000 members and over 100 congregations in 2019, which was hailed as a slowing of their years-long decline.The largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States released a report last Thursday regarding the current membership and church numbers.From 2018 to 2019, PC(USA) went from approximately 1,352,000 active members to approximately 1,302,000 members, or a drop of around 50,000.The number of congregations belonging to PC(USA) also declined, going from 9,161 in 2018 to 9,041 in 2019. This is around 400 fewer congregations than the denomination had in 2016.The Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson,...

Yesterday, we received a desperate call from a Kansas City, Missouri, church whose local government is reaching new and terrifying heights in destroying our constitutional freedom. The Kansas City government is now DEMANDING that churches turn over membership lists, along with the names, telephone numbers and physical addresses of anyone who enters a church! This order also applies to all businesses.

The Episcopal Church saw a greater decline in members and average worship attendance in 2018 than in 2017. According to statistics recently made available by the Office of the General Convention, The Episcopal Church saw its active baptized members decline from approximately 1.712 million in 2017 to 1.676 million. The 36,000-member drop is larger than the previous two years, when the denomination declined by about 32,500 members in 2017 and a little more than 34,000 members in 2016. In 2018, the average Sunday worship attendance declined by about 23,500 people, making it the largest drop the church body has seen...

The Disciples of Christ could lose half their membership within ten years if the current rate of decline remains the same, according to a report by the Institute on Religion & Democracy. Also known as the Christian Church, the Disciples saw their membership decline by 7 percent, going from approximately 411,000 in 2017 to approximately 382,000 in 2018, according to an entry posted Tuesday on the IRD’s blog Juicy Ecumenism. Worship attendance fell 11 percent, going from about 139,000 in 2017 to about 124,000 in 2018, and baptisms declined by 13 percent, from approximately 4,300 in 2017 to approximately 3,700...

NRA Members at 2016 Exhibit In June of 2017 Pew Research published a poll that showed over fourteen million adults in the United States self identified as National Rifle Association (NRA) members.  From pewresearch.org: Three-in-ten U.S. adults say they currently own a gun, and of that group, 19% say they belong to the National Rifle Association. While the demographic profile of NRA members is similar to that of other gun owners, their political views, the way they use their firearms and their attitudes about gun policy differ significantly from gun owners who are not members of the organization. Twenty-four...