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For 14 months, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended draconian restrictions on Americans’ daily lives to combat the spread of COVID-19. The CDC disregarded the psychological hardships and economic losses the restrictions inflicted. Now the evidence is emerging that the restrictions were based on flimsy science or sheer guesswork.

THE Hubble space telescope has been taken offline with all observations halted until further notice. The Nasa team behind the $1.5billion contraption said that it was placed into "safe mode" at 4pm ET (9pm GMT) on Sunday due to a software bug. The telescope, which orbits about 547 kilometers (340 miles) above Earth, is not in danger of shutting down permanently, according to the official Hubble Twitter account. "All science systems appear normal and Hubble is safe and stable," the account tweeted on Monday. "The team is working [on] plans to safely return it to normal science operations." Launched in...

Ok. I’m not computer genius and I don’t know if anyone knows how to tell me in a simple way how to get rid of this but when I right click on a photo and attempt to save to my IPAD photos I get this message: Cannot save photo the file couldn’t be saved (NSCocoaErrorDomain512) I have looked this up on Google and the answers to fix this problem are bewildering to me. Stuff about strings and document file. Is there a way to fix this easily? Btw this is on my IPAD. I do not have a smartphone.

January 20th is past, and Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, is the President of the United States. To all those who prophesied that Trump would serve a second consecutive term and assured us that he would be inaugurated on the 20th, I appeal to you in the strongest possible terms: admit your error, take full responsibility, and do not, under any circumstances, continue to put a false hope into the hearts of God’s people. What you prophesied did not come to pass. There is not an alternative, spiritual reality in which Trump is still functioning as president. Nothing is going...

[AIER Editor’s note: the article and video discussed below have been pulled by Johns Hopkins Newsletter. You can read the announcement here. An additional explanation is here. The claims made by the economics professor will clearly require more investigation, as the announcement says. That said, AIER is publishing this in the interest of objective science and open discussion.]Article originally published by AIER.At the time of this writing, the United States currently maintains the highest number of Covid-19 deaths and ranks 11th for the highest deaths per capita. There have been approximately 262,000 recorded Covid-19 deaths in the United States, which...

A recount monitor in Georgia discovered a 9,626-vote error in the hand recount in DeKalb County, according to the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party. “One of our monitors discovered a 9,626-vote error in the DeKalb County hand count. One batch was labeled 10,707 for Biden and 13 for Trump—an improbable margin even by DeKalb standards. The actual count for the batch was 1,081 for Biden and 13 for Trump,” David Shafer wrote on Twitter on Nov. 18. “Had this counting error not been discovered, Biden would have gained enough votes from this one batch alone to cancel out Trump’s...

TOPLINE In updated guidance posted on its website over the weekend, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged an inability to accurately determine if individuals had been infected with Covid-19 via antibody tests; if the test is used in a population where prevalence is low, it's possible that "less than half of those testing positive will truly have antibodies."

C-SPAN is publishing inaccurate transcripts of President Donald Trump’s remarks during the vitally important national coronavirus task force daily briefings. Yes, really. So Trump is being falsely attacked for what Trump never said (again). The worst of it, lately, is Trump asking questions to scientists. Those questions have been transformed into statements that Trump never made. But as I endeavored to clear up the fog, I was shocked to discover that C-SPAN’s textual transcript are the source of the confusion. The quotes that Trump haters are throwing around happen to be accurate reports of the inaccurate C-SPAN transcript. Not everyone...

The gunman who opened fire in a Texas church on Sunday, killing two before dying from gunshot wounds, owned a shooting range and had taught its parishioners how to shoot, the Texas Attorney General said on Monday.

**SNIP** The data helped spur action in certain corners of Congress, but progress was halting and ad hoc — some offices offered need-based stipends, others imposed restrictions on intern pay or simply refused to budge on the issue. And, Vera says, “Senator Schumer’s office was one that we had reached out to to work with. They were not on board with paying their interns.” He characterizes the office’s response as: “‘We’re just not going to do it — we’re going wait until there is legislation.'” That was particularly disappointing for two reasons. First, as the minority leader, Schumer had a...

Citibank and Barclay Credit Cards can be denied based on systems issues. Barclay readily acknowledges they have an issue but it took over 20 minutes on the phone with Citibank for them to get their administration to acknowledge they have an issue. In my specific case I was trying to buy an airline ticket but it kept getting a system error. Calls to the CC company did not fix the problem, however it was nice to find out it was their issue. It seem strange that both Citi and Barclay would have the same issue at the same time. Looks...

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez spoke at Indiana University Law School this week. The name of the talk was The Lawyer’s Duty: Social Justice, Racial Justice, Economic Justice, but somehow Perez ended up discussing the Electoral College, and made a huge error in the process. “The Electoral College is not a creation of the Constitution,” Perez said. “It doesn’t have to be there.” Except, the Electoral College is in the Constitution. Right here in Article II, to be exact: Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the...

Stimulus program to incentivize using electronic health records 'vulnerable to abuse' An Obama administration program to encourage the use of electronic health records made over $729 million in erroneous payments, according to a new audit. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also paid dead doctors for enrolling in its program, the audit, released by the agency's inspector general Monday, revealed. "From May 2011 through June 2014, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services paid an estimated $729 million in Medicare electronic health record incentive payments to eligible professionals who did not comply with Federal requirements," the inspector general said....

I get this error when I try to donate to FreeRepublic. Good Hunting... from Varmint Al

Raleigh, N.C. — In a formal complaint to the Durham County Board of Elections, Thomas Stark, the attorney for the North Carolina Republican Party on Saturday demanded a recount of votes cast on and before Election Day, citing a counting error involving 90,000 ballots. Thomas Stark, general counsel for the GOP and a Durham County voter, filed the protest with the Durham County Board of Elections, alleging malfeasance in regard to the accuracy of the count. In the complaint, Stark says the county used data from potentially corrupt tabulation machines from five early voting sites and one general election precinct....

Early voting in Illinois got off to a rocky start Monday, as votes being cast for Republican candidates were transformed into votes for Democrats. Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library. “I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.” He notified the election judge at his polling place and...

Analysis Nov. 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) - A Dominican friar, Fr. Adriano Oliva, has celebrated the 800th anniversary of his religious order with a book about “the Church, the divorced and remarried, and homosexual couples.” Amours (“Loves”) is a study of St Thomas Aquinas’ definition of love and aims to show that the “Angelic Doctor” recognized the “natural” character of homosexuality. In the wake of the Synod on the family, Oliva pleads for new ways of welcoming divorced and remarried and homosexual couples into the Church and of recognizing their unions in civil law. His editor, the “editions du Cerf” publishing...

The thought that most frequently pops into my head when I read diatribes by militant atheists is "Why won't you read a book?" Of course, put thus, the thought is implausible. The militant atheists who get interviewed in newspapers presumably have read books. Christopher Hitchens had certainly read a lot of books. But there are good books and there are bad books, and then there are necessary books. And, clearly, they haven't read any of the books that should, in a cultured society, be presumed necessary for participation in public debate. Take the theoretical physicist and public speaker Lawrence Krauss....

Google says it is "appalled" that its new Photos app mistakenly labelled a black couple as being "gorillas". Its product automatically tags uploaded pictures using its own artificial intelligence software. The error was brought to its attention by a New York-based software developer who was one of the people pictured in the photos involved. Google was later criticised on social media because of the label's racist connotations. "This is 100% not OK," acknowledged Google executive Yonatan Zunger after being contacted by Jacky Alcine via Twitter. "[It was] high on my list of bugs you 'never' want to see happen."

This is why I use the word “attempted” in describing the pope’s desire to eradicate capital punishment: because he lacks the authority to make such a change. Shocking, I know, but I said it before and I’ll repeat it again: the teaching on this matter is settled. In order to advance this position, Pope Francis would have to declare several of his predecessors as well as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Thomas More (who prosecuted heretics in an England where that was a capital offense), a papal decree, an apostolic constitution, and also St. Paul’s own divinely-inspired writing in...