Free Republic

    ~The FReeper Canteen Presents~ Road Trip: Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Virginia .The Norfolk Naval Shipyard, often called the Norfolk Navy Yard and abbreviated as NNSY, is a U.S. Navy facility in Portsmouth, Virginia, for building, remodeling, and repairing the Navy's ships. It is the oldest and largest industrial facility that belongs to the U.S. Navy as well as the most multifaceted. Located on the Elizabeth River, the yard is just a short distance upriver from its mouth at Hampton Roads.Currently, the shipyard is composed of several noncontiguous areas totaling 1,275 acres. Norfolk Naval Shipyard provides repair and modernization...

hen NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015, researchers hoped that its data would help them unravel some of the dwarf planet's mysteries. Instead, the discoveries made during the close-up look at Pluto and its moon Charon revealed more questions that needed answering. One of the big revelations from the flyby was the discovery of an ocean beneath the icy shell encapsulating Pluto. The ice shell was thin in a spot near the equator that's about the size of Texas, known as Sputnik Planitia, which helped researchers notice Pluto's odd topography and suggest the ocean's existence. But this...

Grumpy Cat leaves behind a beloved legacy and a profitable business. Feline celebrity Grumpy Cat, whose real name was Tardar Sauce, died this week due to complications from a urinary-tract infection, her owners shared Friday. The cat, who was seven years old, first rose to fame after a photo of her went viral on Reddit in 2012. In the intervening years she has become one of the most recognizable animals in the world. As a result, she’s had marketing deals with companies ranging from Honey Nut Cheerios (GIS) and Friskies (NSRGY) cat food and starred in a television film where...

I just wanted to thank everyone for your kind thoughts and prayers. I really appreciate reading them. It really was a shock for me. Like I said, Donna was not sick. She just went to bed early Monday night. Her door was mostly closed when I got up the next morning. I went over to my mother's house to get her out of bed and make breakfast. I then came home around 10am and she was still sleeping. I went in her room to wake her and found her gone. I am still in shock. I find myself forgetting that...

Penny Wong has blasted WeChat campaigns targeting Labor with fake news, as a new claim emerges warning refugees will soon outnumber Chinese Australians. On Tuesday Wong, Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman, demanded Scott Morrison “rule out any Liberal party involvement in the malicious false content” and linked the messages to potential foreign interference in Australian democracy. In one set of messages, seen by Guardian Australia, Liberal supporter Jason Zong cites Labor’s policy to increase the humanitarian intake to 32,000, claiming “in 10 years that will be 320,000 and that’s not including their relatives and four wives who can all immigrate”. “After...

“A huge piece of Jewish history in the state of Illinois is going to be closing,” Gordon said. The building was started in 1869 and finished a year later. This year marks the sesquicentennial celebration, Gordon said. “With the closing of B’nai Sholom, between St. Louis, Missouri and Rock Island, Illinois there is no community with a synagogue along the river,” Frolick said. “This is it. This is the last one. That’s quite a stretch of miles.

[Catholic Caucus] Pope reads Italian bishops the riot act over delayed annulment reform ROME - Pope Francis Monday read Italian bishops the riot act Monday for failing to fully implement a revised marriage annulment procedure he rolled out in 2015, saying that after four years, most dioceses have not yet applied the new process.“It is with regret that I note that the reform, after four years, remains far from being applied in the great majority of Italian dioceses,” the pope said during a May 20 speech to the Italian bishops’ conference.Italy has the largest bishops’ conference in the world, and...

[dayglored's note: This is direct from the horse's mouth, Microsoft Technet. It's a bad one, like the WannaCry malware from a couple years ago.] Today [May 14] Microsoft released fixes for a critical Remote Code Execution vulnerability, CVE-2019-0708, in Remote Desktop Services – formerly known as Terminal Services – that affects some older versions of Windows. The Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) itself is not vulnerable. This vulnerability is pre-authentication and requires no user interaction. In other words, the vulnerability is ‘wormable’, meaning that any future malware that exploits this vulnerability could propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer in a...

One of President Trump’s lawyers asked another one to lie about the extent of Mr. Trump’s business interests in Russia, according to Michael Cohen, one of the lawyers involved in the exchange. Cohen told Congress in testimony earlier this year that Jay Sekulow told him to say the president’s dealings on a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016, or before the GOP primary season kicked off. In fact, Mr. Trump’s team pursued the project through June of that year, according to investigators.

In the second episode of "Chernobyl," ...A large fire rages in the ruins of the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. ... Deadly radioactive dust has drifted all the way out of the Soviet Union and into Sweden. The air above the reactor literally glows where the uranium core has become exposed. And the people leading the disaster response decide to dump thousands of tons of sand and boron on the core. But why did first responders use sand and boron? And if a similar nuclear disaster were to occur in 2019, is this what firefighters would...

Hardly any of the more than 100 Buffalo area priests implicated as child molesters spent so much as one day in jail. For years, most of their victims were too scared or embarrassed to make complaints. But Buffalo Police had marching orders not to arrest Catholic priests, according to former vice squad Detective Martin Harrington and other retired officers. Instead they alerted the bishop's office to any illegal activities. "The department's unwritten policy was that Catholic priests did not get arrested," said Harrington, who investigated vice crimes for 17 years and retired in 1995. "I never had any experience with...

Bill Shorten's disastrous election campaign is being compared to that of Hillary Clinton after both left-leaning leaders were unexpectedly defeated by their conservative opponents. Mr Shorten spent the last day before the election drinking beer in a Melbourne pub with Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, while Mr Morrison took a whirlwind, last-minute tour of five marginal seats across three states. The contrast echoed the eve of the United States election in 2016 when Mrs Clinton spent time with Barack Obama, Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, while Donald Trump went to five states and held a midnight rally in Michigan, a...

U.S. Attorney John H. Durham, who is examining the origins and propriety of the FBI’s Russia inquiry, has been working in Washington for months, looking into a related matter and quietly building a team of investigators, people familiar with the matters said. The Courant and other news organizations reported Monday that Attorney General William Barr assigned Durham to examine the circumstances under which the FBI opened a disputed counterintelligence investigation into possible ties between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and efforts directed from Russia to interfere with the U.S. election. The Barr assignment comes months after Durham began investigating whether...

A new leaked document shows that Theresa May’s plans for a “new” Brexit withdrawal agreement contains no new ideas or any substantial changes. Prime Minister Theresa May, whose attempts to pass a version of her EU-approved withdrawal treaty have so far failed three times, has said of this new version of the deal that it would “represent a new, bold offer to MPs across the House of Commons, with an improved package of measures that I believe can win new support”. However, speaking of a summary of the deal as it had been given to ministers, one unnamed Whitehall source...

Update - As I would not be an abortee, so I would not be an abortionist.

Conservative pundit Dan Bongino is calling out anti-Trump Congressman Justin Amash to leave the Republican Party. Amash made recent headlines when he called for President Trump’s impeachment base don the Mueller report, which vindicated him of any collusion with Russia. The Guardian reported that as the only Republican in Congress to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump, Justin Amash is facing his own party’s wrath.In a series of tweets on Saturday, the Michigan congressman said attempts to obstruct justice as outlined in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election amounted to “impeachable conduct”.

A Washington, D.C.-based federal judge has sided with House Oversight Committee Democrats seeking to enforce their subpoena of Trump accounting firm Mazars USA, in a major ruling that breathes new life into Democrats' ongoing efforts to probe the president's financial dealings. The subpoena seeks access to a slew of Trump financial documents dating back to 2011, including personal records and records of various affiliated business and entities. Democrats pursued the subpoena after former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress in February that the president's accountants routinely and improperly altered his financial statements -- including some signed by Mazars --...

As followers of Jesus, we are called to submit to the laws of the land and to honor those in authority. The New Testament is very clear on this (see especially Romans 13:1-7). It is also very clear that there are exceptions to this rule, namely, when the authorities require us to disobey the Lord (see Acts 5:40-42). In that case, with respect, we say, “We must obey God rather than man” (see Acts 4:18-20; 5:29; to be perfectly clear, I’m speaking of non-violent resistance to the law.)That time has come for parents in California. In good conscience, they must say...

The contours of a second-term agenda for President Trump are coming into view, 18 months before the 2020 election. Immigration and the economy will be at its heart, just as they were during his 2016 run. But issues of trade and deregulation will be there, too — as will a nominal proposal to replace ObamaCare with some as-yet-unspecified legislation. It’s a very early stage at which to begin laying out a second-term platform. But supporters of the president argue the haste is justified. The Democratic nomination process, featuring a huge field of contenders, is already consuming a lot of media...

China's state-owned media outlet Global Times has released an editorial saying it is "far from optimistic again" about Chinese-Australian relations after Prime Minister Scott Morrison's unexpected election win. In an editorial posted to the newspaper's official WeChat account just after midnight following the election, the newspaper said Chinese people were concerned about the impact Mr Morrison's election would have on foreign relations. "This election result also means that China-Australia relations, which have deteriorated in recent years under the leadership of the ruling Coalition formed by the Australian Liberal Party and the National Party, will continue to have uncertain prospects," the...