Free Republic

Oil companies are getting thrashed by falling oil prices. Some analysts predict that there will be no new net investment in the U.S. oil and gas industry in 2015, and the possibility of declining investment in 2016. At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency is pummeling the industry with a new set of National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone (NAAQS), released the day before Thanksgiving. Congress has little control over oil prices, which are set in world markets, but it does have authority over the EPA. The EPA’s new 626-page ozone regulation, accompanied by a 575-page Regulatory Impact...

A 350-pound Walmart shopper was arrested yesterday after he was found sitting atop five stolen rib eye steaks in the seat of a motorized scooter that he was riding around the South Carolina store. Rodney Fowler, 43, was spotted Tuesday afternoon placing the steaks in his scooter by a Walmart loss prevention officer, according to a police report. “Suspect sat on the steaks and exited the store passing all points of sale, without attempting to pay for said merchandise,” cops noted.

CHICAGO — When Chicago Public Schools student Jennifer Gonzalez stepped up to a White House podium Monday, nervous to give a speech in front of first lady Michelle Obama and dozens of other dignitaries, she fell back on her theater training. Gonzalez, 16, also got to chat with the first lady as photos were snapped before the event. "When I told her I was from Chicago, she said 'It's an honor for you to represent my hometown,'" Gonzalez said.

Despite millions spent to make climate change a wedge issue during the midterms, environmentally friendly candidates didn’t fare well on Election Day. Green groups funneled an unprecedented amount of money into top Senate races that determined control of the upper chamber but fell short. The nation’s top environmental groups including the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and billionaire Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate spent at least $85 million on six Senate races. Out of those six races, only two candidates willing to take action on climate change won their races....

Obama’s Pennsylvania stop for gubernatorial hopeful Tom Wolf was a subpar affair in terms of turnout, with only about a quarter of the seats at the venue taken — a sharp contrast to the commander-in-chief’s earlier politicking days of packed stadiums. The White House pool report said that Mr. Obama’s speech at a basketball arena in Philadelphia was markedly empty — and that was after those prepping the venue partitioned off several hundred seats to make the speaking area smaller and more intimate. Press in attendance even noted that the floor area was dotted with spaces.

The tale of the engines that propelled the Antares rocket, which exploded in a spectacular ball of flame in Virginia Tuesday night, begins four decades ago, thousands of miles away, in the land of communism and Sputnik. There, in the Soviet Union, rocket scientists conceived and built dozens of rocket engines meant to power Russian astronauts into the cosmos. But it didn’t work out that way. Instead, all four launches of the mighty N1 Soviet rocket, which used an earlier iteration of the first-stage engines used in Thursday’s launch, failed between 1969 and 1972. And as the Soviet Union abandoned...

Colombia, Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago have all announced travel bans as Ebola concerns grow. Colombian authorities announced that anyone entering their country from Ebola-stricken countries will face heavy scrutiny. Colombia’s National Health Institutes have said they developed a questionnaire to determine who should be under suspicion of potentially having contact with Ebola. Colombian newspapers have reported that some have already been detained due to the newly instituted executive actions. Fernando Ruiz, Colombia’s vice minister of health, said of the reports, “The cases are not suspicious. They are simply people who have traveled to places where Ebola is present....

Breaking news in Sweden after two days of hunt. Swedish government report that a russian submarine is sending an SOS message on a de-crypted frequency.

For the first time in Ohio history, a prison inmate has been diagnosed with leprosy, state corrections officials said Thursday. The inmate, whose name was not released, was diagnosed with the chronic bacterial infection on Tuesday at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution, according to the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. The infected prisoner is a native of Micronesia, a region of islands in the Pacific Ocean, and has served time at three other Ohio prisons since 2011, according to Stuart Hudson, the DRC's managing director of health care and fiscal operations. He's now being treated at Ohio State University Medical Center...

Gwyneth Paltrow has won numerous awards for her acting, but speaking apparently came with some difficulty Thursday with President Barack Obama standing beside her. "You're so handsome that I can't speak properly," the actress, singer and food writer gushed after introducing Obama to several hundred supporters seated on white fold-out chairs in the lush backyard of her home in the movie star haven of Brentwood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles. In a not-so-subtle reference to her "conscious uncoupling" earlier this year from husband Chris Martin, Paltrow said it was a "profound honor" to have Obama in the home she shares...

It’s not your imagination: the stock market has gone a little bonkers lately. This week alone the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) plummeted 272 points on Tuesday, rocketed back 274 points Wednesday and sank more than 330 points today. October has already recorded five days where stocks moved more than 1%. That’s as many 1% moves as we saw in the prior five months combined. So why are stocks so crazy? There’s no set answer but here are three of the most obvious explanations making the rounds on Wall Street.

Los Angelenos will have lots of time on the roads this afternoon to contemplate the midterm elections when President Obama flies in for one of those “Hollywood fundraisers” news outlets love to sniff at — especially this one, at the home of Gwyneth Paltrow. Gwyneth’s Brentwood neighborhood was festooned with Obama Drone non-fan posters in anticipation of the president’s visit — tickets to which raised $1K to $32K per head for the Democratic National Committee, depending on whether the ticket holder wanted to actually get dinner as well as a photo with Obama. Press already is reporting that Obama plans...

A turkey on Highway 1 caused a Canadian motorcycle rider to crash sometime early Monday, and the man told investigators he then walked to a coastal bluff and jumped off, naked. The 27-year-old Alberta man had shed his clothing as he walked and was found, nude and seriously injured, on rocks about 40 feet below a coastal bluff in Salt Point State Park. The CHP is investigating the man’s crash and a Sonoma County sheriff’s investigator is looking into what happened afterward, including whether he was trying to die or hurt himself or acted because of his injuries, said CHP...

"Yet some scientists who have long studied Ebola say such assurances are premature — and they are concerned about what is not known about the strain now on the loose. It is an Ebola outbreak like none seen before, jumping from the bush to urban areas, giving the virus more opportunities to evolve as it passes through multiple human hosts. Dr. C.J. Peters, who battled a 1989 outbreak of the virus among research monkeys housed in Virginia and who later led the CDC’s most far-reaching study of Ebola’s transmissibility in humans, said he would not rule out the possibility that...

'In 1976 I discovered Ebola, now I fear an unimaginable tragedy' Peter Piot was a researcher at a lab in Antwerp when a pilot brought him a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had fallen mysteriously ill in Zaire...

As she weighs another bid for the White House, Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday she has a "grandmother glow" that's fueling her campaign for female empowerment and gender equality around the world. Speaking to a national convention of female real estate professionals, the former secretary of state and potential 2016 Democratic presidential contender called on business and political leaders to close the gap in wages and leadership positions between men and women. Clinton, who joked that she felt that glow after the recent birth of her first grandchild, Charlotte, said she wanted all women to grow up in a world...

An Oklahoma man who had been suspended from his job was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder in the gruesome beheading of a co-worker, who was attacked from behind as the man sought revenge, a prosecutor said Tuesday. Alton Nolen, 30, could face the death penalty for Thursday’s deadly attack on Colleen Hufford, 54, at the Vaughan Foods plant in Moore. He also faces two assault charges.

THE WHITE HOUSE — In an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS that aired Sunday, President Obama called on the leaders of ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, to exercise more moderation and inclusivity in their beheadings of infidels. The president was responding to a question from 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, who asked whether the administration was specifically addressing the beheadings and mutilations of thousands of Yazidi, Kurdish and other minority groups in northern Iraq and eastern Syria. Read more: http://www.duffelblog.com/2014/09/president-calls-isil-moderate-inclusive-beheadings/#ixzz3EkBcq1BU

The leaders of a new, Christian movement think they’ve solved a centuries-old mystery: why men are absent from church. But their answer isn’t politically correct. They believe Christianity has become feminized. There are generally more women than men in every type of church, in every part of the world, according to church growth experts like Patrick Johnstone, author of Operation World. A traditional explanation is that women are more spiritual than men. But the leaders of this new movement suggest that the church’s music, messages and ministries cater to women. One of the leaders is David Murrow, author of a...

California Governor Jerry Brown, a self-proclaimed crusader against climate change and a major backer of electric cars, signed a bundle of bills this weekend aimed at tipping the scales further in favor of zero-emission vehicles. The main piece of legislation, called the Charge Ahead California Initiative, sets a target of putting at least a million zero-emission or near-zero-emission vehicles on the state’s roads by 2023. To get there, the initiative asks that the state Air Resources Board devise a financial plan that would make it easier for low-income drivers to buy electric cars by extending extra credits to them so...