Free Republic

This week, the juxtaposition between the Senate impeachment trial against President Donald Trump and his address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is surreal. The first is an attempt to remove Trump from the presidency; the second was an incredibly powerful speech that focused on the success of our nation and his presidency. It might lead one to ask, "How could both be true?" Yet here we are. The impeachment proceedings get almost nonstop coverage, so let's focus on the other, more worldly, more positive, less covered event. According to the WEF website, the organization "engages the foremost...

The University of Michigan has placed its provost on leave after allegations of sexual misconduct were made against him, the school has announced. Martin A. Philbert, who earns $570,340 a year, was placed on administrative leave on Tuesday, according to a letter from the university.

“It saddens me”, he says,” to see the white man beating his breast over and over, too emasculated to put up any resistance to people who’ve come to threaten him on his own doorstep”. He believes that a toxic mix of guilt, “human rightsism”, political naivety and crass ignorance of History have a debilitating effect on Europeans’ capacity to fight the invasion. He accuses the corrupt African leaders of destroying the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings in all impunity, but is equally critical of the ideologues who are paving the way for them. They should stop blaming...

BEIJING - Major Chinese cities, including the capital and virus-hit Wuhan, banned all large gatherings over the coming Lunar New Year festival, the most important holiday on the Chinese calendar, in an expanding effort contain the rapidly spreading outbreak.The announcement Thursday came as authorities expanded travel restrictions imposed on Wuhan to surrounding municipalities, shutting down travel networks and attempting to quarantine about 25 million people - more than the population of Florida. The extreme measures were accompanied by other indications that Communist Party authorities were struggling to control the outbreak, notably the aggressive censorship of any criticism or skepticism on...

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced a policy on Wednesday that will end cash bail for those being released from custody. The policy was formalized on Wednesday. The DA’s office says those being held ahead of their trial will now be based on the risk rather than wealth and poverty.

At least two of the FBI’s surveillance applications to secretly monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page lacked probable cause, according to a newly declassified summary of a Justice Department assessment released Thursday by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The DOJ's determination essentially means that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant authorizations to surveil Page, when stripped of the FBI's misinformation, did not meet the necessary legal threshold and should never have been issued. “Today’s unprecedented court filing represents another step on the road to recovery for America’s deeply damaged judicial system," Page said in a statement to...

Intel shares rose after the chipmaker's earnings easily cleared Wall Street expectations and management guided for a much stronger 2020 than analysts anticipated. The stock rose 6.73% to $67.58 a share in postmarket trading Thursday, after having risen 0.94 % in regular trading hours. Earnings per share for the December quarter grew 19% year-over-year to an adjusted $1.52, beating Wall Street estimates of $1.25. --snip-- Management guided for full year 2020 revenue of $73.5 billion, better than analysts estimates of $72.4 billion.

A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs across the Chinese mainland by 2025, and has generated much excitement, as well as some concerns. Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping, and the addition of a biological dimension to geopolitical tensions between China and other nations. But Chinese microbiologists are celebrating their entrance to the elite cadre empowered to wrestle with the world’s greatest biological threats. “It will offer more opportunities...

How to protect yourself (from coronavirus): "There are currently no vaccines available to protect you against human coronavirus infection. You may be able to reduce your risk of infection by doing the following: (#1) .. wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds (#2) ..avoid touching your eyes, nose, or mouth with unwashed hands (#3) .. avoid close contact with people who are sick " Also: (#4)..stay home while you are sick - don't spread the illness (#5) ..avoid close contact with others (#6).. cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough...

Following a unanimous vote by the city council Tuesday night, Oakland has now become the first city in California to ban criminal background checks on potential renters. “Indescribable emotions and feelings,” said John Jones III of Oakland, who got out of prison in 2012 and struggled to find a place to live in Oakland despite his well-paying job as an aviation mechanic. Jones said he’s among the many who left prison only to end up on the streets, contributing to Oakland’s homeless crisis. That’s why he’s been lobbying hard for the Oakland City Council to pass the Fair Chance Housing...

Gotta ask again. If the VP was assigned to be point man for foreign policy re Ukraine and then his son gets an unusually lucrative position in that country based on nothing but family connection, wouldn't that obviously be a corrupt conflict of interest? How about if the same thing happens in other countries, say China, for instance? If said corrupt VP now wants to be president of the U.S. wouldn't it be in our national interest to investigate this?

FedEx is warning its customers about a new text-based scam that has been using the company’s name to obtain personal information from phone users. In the past week, a number of people have taken to Twitter with screenshots of messages sent to their phones disguised as package notifications from FedEx. The messages, which sometimes address users by their names, ask them to set their delivery preferences and include a tracking code. The texts also feature a link to a site that takes the user to a fake Amazon site and asks them to complete a survey, according to photos obtained...

Officials at the Brazos County Health District said Thursday they are investigating a suspected case of the 2019 novel coronavirus. The male patient, who has been identified as a student at Texas A&M University, had traveled from Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus that has made headlines in recent days first originated, officials said.

Six researchers who resigned last month from Florida’s Moffitt Cancer Center admitted to opening secret bank accounts in China to hide millions that they received from China’s Thousand Talents programme, say the preliminary findings of an internal investigation. Among the six were Alan List, Moffitt’s president and chief executive officer, and the centre’s director, Thomas Sellers. They are the latest and most senior researchers to lose their jobs in a nationwide hunt for academics suspected of working for China, in what US authorities claim is an organised attempt to steal intellectual property. At least 200 people are being investigated at...

Lindsey Graham started out by telling reporters that there is “no way” that Hunter Biden got rich from Burisma and his father didn’t know anything about it. “Somebody needs to look” at the why the prosecutor investigating Burisma was fired and the new prosecutor dropped the case, Lindsey said. A reporter then asked Lindsey Graham if Joe Biden is corrupt. “I don’t think Joe Biden is corrupt, but I don’t think he’s beyond being looked at.” he said. “I love Joe Biden, but I’m going to tell you, I’m not going to sit on the sidelines and just watch the...

Whenever liberals in the media approvingly cite conservative leaders, like Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, it’s to somehow contrast them as suddenly reasonable and sensible. Unlike the modern Republican Party. So it’ not a shock that Politico is looking to Goldwater as a model for how the Senate GOP should respond to Donald Trump: In other words, tell him to resign. This is what the Arizona senator did with Richard Nixon in 1974. That way it would spare going through a Senate impeachment trial in which the all Democrat team of House managers would have to present their incredibly weak...

The world needs to prepare for millions of people being driven from their homes by the impact of climate change, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said on Tuesday.

Adam Schiff rebuked Republican senators for walking out of Donald Trump's impeachment trial on the second full day of the Democratic case to remove the president – but at least 16 senators weren’t even there at the start of his remarks for the historic trial. Just minutes later, fellow Democratic impeachment manager Rep. Jerry Nadler made a key constitutional point by playing a video clip from Sen. Lindsey Graham from the impeachment of Bill Clinton – but Graham was not even in the chamber to hear it. The moment was noticeable inside the august Senate chamber, and was not lost...

A FISA Court order declassified Thursday confirmed that the government had found two of the four FISA applications authorized for the FBI to surveil 2016 Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page to be “not valid,” and will further investigate the validity of the other two. The order revealed that the government found two of the surveillance application renewals to be “not valid” because the FBI provided “insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.” Based on the ordering of the applications, it is likely the review found the second and third...

I am trying to help some family out who want to use a VPN both while on public wifi, and at home for simple privacy from their ISP. They are using 2 Mac laptops, 2 older iPhones, 2 iPads, and 1 old android phone. They do not need to use every device at the same time. They have Apple email accounts, gmail accounts, and Outlook and Hotmail email accounts; all email accounts are run through OSX Mail and iOS Mail. Whenever the VPN is enabled on the Macs, Microsoft instantly sends warning notices to the Outlook and Hotmail email accounts...