Free Republic

A New Jersey Transit police officer spotted a man lying on the railroad tracks in Secaucus and managed to pull him to safety mere seconds before a train arrived.

Some justice has been served in the senseless killing of Melquiesha "Mel" Warren, a 23-year-old woman shot dead in a SoMa parking lot in 2013 over a fender bender, following a night in which she'd been celebrating her wife's birthday with friends. 26-year-old Michael Sione Green of San Mateo was found guilty Thursday on counts of murder, attempted murder, firing at a motor vehicle, assault, being a felon in possession of a firearm, carrying a concealed firearm, and carrying a loaded firearm, according to the DA's office in a release. District Attorney George Gascon says, "The jury sent a clear...

It’s time to come out of the closet. Or, more precisely, the sweat lodge. My family lives without air con­ditioning, except for one antique, ­semi-comatose window unit that “cools” the bedroom to approximately the same temperature as Dallas at dusk. Our house in Philadelphia was built in the 1920s, when people were tough and resourceful. For most of the year, the house is cool and pleasant, as long as there isn’t a mash-up of continuously scorching days and epic humidity, when the air is putrid, stagnant and, if it were a color, would definitely be mustard.

Julian Assange will be addressing the Green Party Convention on Saturday morning. Assange has been heavily involved in the U.S. elections this year, with WikiLeaks’ releasing damaging emails that showed officials in the Democratic party worked against Bernie Sanders’ campaign during the primary. The emails forced the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Here’s what you need to know. Julian Assange is scheduled to speak to the Green Party delegates through a live feed video on Saturday, August 6, the Green Party announced. He’ll be speaking at 11:45 a.m. Central, before the party nominates its presidential and vice presidential candidates. Jill...

Dennis Green, former head coach of the Vikings and Cardinals, has died at the age of 67. Green became head coach of the Vikings in 1992, instantly leading the team to a playoff berth. In 1998, he coached the team to one of the best offensive performances in league history. The team finished 15-1 and lost to the Falcons at home in overtime of the NFC championship game. Green and the Vikings returned to the NFC title game in 2000.

Seven years into Barack Obama’s presidency, the scales may slowly be falling from the eyes of The New York Times. Could the truth about America’s red diaper baby President be starting to emerge? In a story about papers of his reported father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., the Times said that President Obama has shown no interest in “the newly discovered documents, which included nearly two dozen of his father’s letters, his transcripts from the University of Hawaii and Harvard University, and references from professors, advisers and supporters.” The paper added, “Nearly three years later, as Mr. Obama celebrates his last...

New Map Shows the Dark Side of Artificial Light at Night ... The most fundamental difficulty, however, has been that no one knows exactly how severe the problem is.

Since both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sander are quite keen to talk about climate change and carbon taxes, let’s take a brief break from the campaign trail and check in on how Mother Gaia is doing these days. We’ve recorded what some climate scientists claim is a string of record warmest months over the past year and if I were judging by the almost snow-free, mild winter we just enjoyed in upstate New York and the rest of the northeast (watch out for the bears) I’d have to agree. So I assume this means we’re all doomed. But oddly...

**SNIP** Four years of drought have transformed this biosphere of wealth into something a little less than immaculate, with some homeowners actually letting their lawns turn brown in an effort to conserve precious water. But enough is enough, declared the Blackhawk Homeowners Association, which issued a letter to the 9,000 residents of Blackhawk stating that as of June 1st, “beautiful landscaping ” will again be required. The letter told residents that they must have a healthy lawn or drought-tolerant landscaping, or face fines, even litigation.

Adding wind and solar to Ontario's grid drives emissions higher.

To go along with the infamous "Mars hoax," which claims that the Red Planet will appear as large as the full moon in the sky; the "Nibiru cataclysm," a supposed disastrous encounter between Earth and a large planetary object; and "Zero-Gravity Day," when people on Earth supposedly can experience weightlessness, we now have the "nights of the green moon." This latest fallacy to sweep the blogosphere claims that on Wednesday (April 20), and again on May 29, the moon will appear to turn a shade of green. The full moon of April will occur on Friday, April 22. The explanation...

On Tuesday I published a short post about the key arguments of climate-change skeptics while also pointing out that some 98 percent of published scientists in the field believe human-caused climate change is indeed happening and must be addressed. For years the two sides have been talking - or yelling - past one another, which benefits none of us. As expected, the post brought forth a wave of comments from readers. Many lambasted me for providing a forum for the "lunatics" who deny human-caused climate change. Climate skeptics, on the other hand, chastised me for only presenting their more simplistic...

Climate records back to Viking times show the 20th century was unexceptional for rainfall and droughts despite assumptions that global warming would trigger more wet and dry extremes, a study showed on Wednesday. Stretching back 1,200 years, written accounts of climate indicated that variations in the extremes in the 20th century were less than in some past centuries. "Several other centuries show stronger and more widespread extremes," lead author Fredrik Ljungqvist of Stockholm University told Reuters. "We can't say it's more extreme now." Ljungqvist said many existing scientific models of climate change over-estimated assumptions that rising temperatures would make dry...

SunEdison, which bills itself as the world’s largest green energy company, may soon file for bankruptcy protection, according to a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, as the company faces “liquidity difficulties” despite getting millions in government subsidies.

U.S. solar energy company SunEdison Inc, whose aggressive acquisition strategy has saddled it with almost $12 billion of debt, is at "substantial risk" of bankruptcy, one of its two publicly listed units warned on Tuesday. A bankruptcy would rank among the largest involving a non-financial company in the past 10 years, according to bankruptcydata.com. SunEdison declined to comment. SunEdison's shares - already reeling from a Wall Street Journal report on Monday that the company was being investigated for overstating its cash position - fell as much as 60 percent to a record low of 50 cents.

California regulators may force a massive solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert to shut down after years of under-producing electricity — not to mention the plant was blinding pilots flying over the area and incinerating birds.

The first chunk of a $3bn commitment made at the Paris climate talks ‘shows the US stands squarely behind climate commitments’, the State Department said. The Obama administration has made a first installment on its $3bn pledge to help poor countries fight climate change – defying Republican opposition to the resident’s environmental plan. The $500m payment to the Green Climate Fund was seen as critical to shoring up international confidence in Barack Obama’s ability to deliver on the pledges made at the United Nations’ climate change conference in Paris in late 2015. Obama is expected to announce a number of...

House lawmakers sharply criticized the head of the Department of Energy’s green energy loan program for not releasing documents requested by a committee looking into companies that have received taxpayer dollars. “It is disconcerting that the executive director of a major government program is unwilling to commit — to actually commit — to providing all the documents that an investigation committee of the Congress has requested,” California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher .. told Mark McCall, the head of the DOE’s loan office, in a hearing Thursday, “and that the answer being given is using weasel words ... House committee members...

Miami (AFP) - As glaciers melt due to climate change, the increasingly hot and parched Earth is absorbing some of that water inland, slowing sea level rise, NASA experts said Thursday. Satellite measurements over the past decade show for the first time that the Earth's continents have soaked up and stored an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers, the experts said in a study in the journal Science. This has temporarily slowed the rate of sea level rise by about 20 percent, it said. "We always assumed that people's increased reliance on groundwater for...

I have no clue how many climate science denial myths a Republican presidential candidate can fit onto the head of a pin, but given these zingers are generally huge it's probably not that many. But we do now have some clue how many myths one of those candidates, Senator Ted Cruz, can fit into an eight-minute diatribe. At least six. When asked about climate change at recent hustings, Cruz has been delivering a stock set of answers from the Little Book of Climate Change Denial (not a real book). At one such event in New Hampshire, the representative from Texas...