Free Republic

Jussie Smollett has given his first interview about the shocking racist and homophobic attack he was subjected to as he walked home from a Subway in Chicago last month at 2am. The Empire actor spoke to ABC's Robin Roberts for an interview that will air on Good Morning America on Thursday morning. In a brief promo for the interview, he is seen tearing up after Roberts asked him if he feared for his life at any point during the attack. It is the first time the 36-year-old himself will answer questions on camera about the incident which shocked the nation...

The oceans are warming faster than previously estimated, setting a new temperature record in 2018 in a trend that is damaging marine life, scientists said on Thursday...."Global warming is here, and has major consequences already. There is no doubt, none!" the authors wrote in a statement.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold its first hearing under the chamber’s new Democratic majority on climate change. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who became the panel’s chairman Thursday when the new Democratic-majority House was sworn in, said climate will come before other major issues within Energy and Commerce’s broad jurisdiction, including health care and technology. Pallone said he is dedicating the first hearing to climate is meant in part to highlight how Democrats believe Republicans ignored the issue during their eight years in the majority. “Part of the reason why we want to deal with climate change first...

Forget "rolling coal." A new trend called "ICE-ing," in which pickup truck owners purposefully block electric vehicle charging stations, appears to be gaining ground around the country. The practice, whose name is derived from "internal combustion engine," was observed over the holidays at a Sheetz gas station in Hickory, N.C. Reddit user Leicina shared a photo on Dec. 23, 2018, of three large pickups blocking access to Tesla Inc. charging stations. The drivers apparently chanted "----Tesla." "I've never had a supercharging experience like this one," wrote Leicina, who owns a Tesla Model 3. "These trucks blocked all the chargers, chanted...

President Vladimir Putin defended the jailing of a 77-year-old veteran activist over calls to a protest, saying that Russia doesn’t want a repeat of events like the “yellow vest” demonstrations that have rocked France in recent weeks. Moscow’s District Court sentenced human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov to 25 days in jail for allegedly called for a rally against the detention of a group of young people... Ponomaryov, whose sentence was later reduced to 16 days, was barred from attending the funeral of his longtime friend, veteran rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva — a ceremony Putin attended. “We don’t want to have...

Dr. Peter Pry is the Executive Director of the EMP Task Force. Pry explains there are three sources of EMP: the sun, nuclear weapons, and non-nuclear weapons. The entire world would be affected, putting “electric grids and critical infrastructures” as well as “billions of lives” at risk. Pry believes it is “inevitable” that we will be struck by a Carrington-class geomagnetic storms, for “it’s not a question of if, but it’s a question of when will that happen.” A second EMP threat stems from nuclear weapons “detonated at high altitude” of 30 to 400 kilometers. “A single nuclear weapon detonated...

In early November, gale-force winds whipped a brush fire into an inferno that nearly consumed the town of Paradise, California, and killed at least 86 people. By the second morning, I could smell the fire from one foot outside my door in Berkeley, some 130 miles from the flames. Within a week, my eyes and throat stung even when I was indoors. Air quality maps warned that the soot-filled air blanketing the Bay Area had reached “very unhealthy” levels. For days, nearly everyone wore masks as they walked their dogs, rode the train, and carried out errands. Most of those...

Saturn's rings make it one of the most striking planets in the solar system, but scientists believe they could disappear in less than a 100 million years -- which isn't all that long when you consider that the gas giant itself is more than 4 billion years old. New research from NASA shows that the rings, made predominantly of water ice, are being pulled apart by the planet's gravity and onto Saturn's surface as deluges of "ring rain." "We estimate that this 'ring rain' drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn's rings...

Months after President Trump took office, Russia’s disinformation teams trained their sights on a new target: special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Having worked to help get Trump into the White House, they now worked to neutralize the biggest threat to his staying there.

A former Obama administration official with ties to a liberal advocacy group funded by Democratic megadonors George Soros and Tom Steyer helped prepare the Fourth National Climate Assessment, whose dire predictions have since been attacked as overblown. Andrew Light, who worked on the 2015 Paris accord negotiations as a senior adviser to the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change under Secretary of State John F. Kerry, served as a review editor for the assessment, overseeing the pivotal final chapter that concluded under a worst-case scenario that global warming could wipe out as much as 10 percent of the U.S. economy...

Climate change isn’t just about extreme heat waves in distant future decades, or melting glaciers far away from the neighborhoods, forests and farms of Virginia. Storms are dropping heavier rainfall, summer nights aren't cooling off as much, tides are creeping higher than before – and it’s already happening in our backyards. Those trends are likely to continue and intensify by the time a child growing up today gets to retirement age. The scenarios and the evidence are laid out in a new report called the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which was composed by hundreds of experts across 13 federal agencies.

CNN anchor Jim Sciutto issued a stark warning on Wednesday morning against the effects of climate change, stating during a newscast that "we don't want to be slowly burned to death." “I just want to ask the question for folks at home, folks like us. We got kids. We don’t want to be slowly burned to death on our own planet here," said Sciutto, who served in the Obama State Department prior to coming to CNN. "Is the human race running - in the simplest terms running out of time to take the measures necessary to rein in this rise...

Margaret Atwood is working on a sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the most popular and influential feminist novel ever written. Her sequel, titled “The Testaments,” opens 15 years after the conclusion of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and is narrated by three women, according to a statement released by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday on Wednesday. In a note to readers, Atwood wrote, “Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.” “The Testaments” will be published on Sept. 10, 2019, with a...

... The new U.S. report, as well as a United Nations report issued in October, instead aim at frightening the public—exactly the approach that so manifestly has failed to move the needle for 35 years. Maybe it’s because voters are skeptical of doom-mongering. Maybe they have grown fatalistic about climate change. Or maybe, reflecting the folly of climate campaigners, they’ve gotten a message that acting on greenhouse gases requires giving up prosperity. Reporting Sunday on the French fuel-tax demonstrations, the New York Times noted: “Many in the crowd said that they did not disdain the government’s environmental goals, but that...

Several hours after announcing their suspensions, two campaign workers have been fired from Democrat J.B. Pritzker’s campaign amid controversy over an Instagram photo of a campaign worker wearing a charcoal face mask that resembles blackface. The campaign on Friday morning insisted the incident was not racial in nature and the employees in question would be suspended without pay for exercising poor judgment. But within hours, the campaign workers were ousted. The post by Carolyn Mehta — which LinkedIn identifies as the campaign’s Deputy Get Out The Vote Director — comes as the Pritzker campaign faces a lawsuit from former campaign...

7:50 p.m. A law enforcement official says tests have determined that a powder found inside an envelope delivered to CNN along with a pipe bomb was harmless. The official wasn’t authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

... Until recently, the consequences of climate change were thought to be so far into the future that many average people, including those who live in coastal zones, declared they needn’t bother; they’d be long dead by the time catastrophe struck. No more. Climate change is here, costing billions of dollars every year to recover from destructive events. Without adapting to that new reality, the world will confront rising costs of disasters that put economic growth, health, and in some places, even survival at risk. To spur action, a coalition led by billionaire Bill Gates, former United Nations Secretary General...

As a scientist who’s spent the past decade helping natural-resource managers in federal, state and tribal governments prepare for climate change, I’ve become used to giving terrible news. I thus often find myself feeling like an oncologist delivering a stream of devastating prognoses. Also like an oncologist, I find myself and others scrutinizing my bedside manner: am I being too cold, clinical and detached as I describe an apocalyptic future? As scientists, we are trained to present information clearly and dispassionately to avoid the appearance of bias. Unfortunately, this communication style falls desperately flat when speaking to the public, making...

Murphy Brown creator Diane English says she may need to get security protection as she works on the return to CBS of the biting political comedy series. “I might have to have some protection,” English told reporters in a scrum after her show’s Q&A panel at TCA. “I’m not kidding.” English referenced the “scary times” in which the show is coming back with original episodes after two decades. The very first episode, which takes place on November 8, 2016, “really sticks our head into the lion’s mouth,” said star Candice Bergen, boasting, “This show has no fear of anyone.” These...

(CNN)Deadly fires have scorched swaths of the Northern Hemisphere this summer, from California to Arctic Sweden and down to Greece on the sunny Mediterranean. Drought in Europe has turned verdant land barren, while people in Japan and Korea are dying from record-breaking heat.Climate change is here and is affecting the entire globe -- not just the polar bears or tiny islands vulnerable to rising sea levels -- scientists say. It is on the doorsteps of everyday Americans, Europeans and Asians, and the best evidence shows it will get much worse.