Free Republic

While much of the world is focused on the coronavirus outbreak, influenza continues to take its toll in the United States, where an estimated 15 million people have been infected and 8,200 have died from the disease so far this flu season. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said those numbers aren't unusually high, they're far higher than the 4,583 cases of coronavirus and 106 deaths confirmed worldwide as of Tuesday morning. Five people have been stricken with coronavirus in the U.S. and no deaths have been reported. Overall, the World Health Organization estimates that the flu...

Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign has released a plan to combat the spread of infectious diseases in the wake of the recent coronavirus outbreak....

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A closely watched bond market phenomenon has again flashed yellow, but investors are loathe to give it much weight. Yields on the 10-year Treasury note briefly fell below those of the 3-month bill early Tuesday for the first time since October, on concerns over the economic impact of the coronavirus. An inverted yield curve has historically been an indicator of looming recession as it tends to reflect worries over future growth among bond investors. However, worries about the coronavirus have so far done little to shake the upbeat growth views many investors and analysts had going...

I explore Surah 76, and explain how Islamic "paradise" is simply a reflection of Muhammad's own base desires. I also point out how Muhammad repeatedly violated commandments from God.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of feeling sickened. Our nasty politics of revenge, our unabating obsession with hating the other side, our too-quick-to-cancel culture and our fetishization of extreme purity is not only exhausting but it’s making us sick. It’s in President Trump’s puerile tweets and anger-drenched rallies, where he demeans and mocks his political enemies, real and perceived. It’s also in many of his policies, like a Muslim ban, family separation and anti-LGBTQ legislation that’s punitive purely for the sake of delighting bigoted supporters. It’s in Congress, where the parties have decided that working together is...

Last year, Dr. Robert Epstein, although he is a Democrat, testified before Congress on the way Google manipulated voters ahead of the 2016 election “on a massive scale” in favor of Hillary Clinton. On December 27, his wife Misti died in a horrific car crash, instantly raising questions that the nefarious crime cabal behind so many “accidental” deaths and “suicides” was indeed behind the young, beautiful woman married to the daring Dr. Epstein. Until Sunday, however, Dr. Epstein had not himself said in so many words that there was anything suspicious about Misti’s death. Police had ruled that drugs or...

RUSH: Since the impeachment and Ukraine stuff got going here in October… Do you realize how long this had been going on? The House Intelligence Committee, not Judiciary — Schiff and his underground basement room where he called 18 witnesses… Schiff called 18 witnesses, not 17. We just haven’t seen anything released from the 18th witness. You know who the 18th witness is? The whistleblower. Schiff called 18 witnesses, depositions and so forth. Republicans zero. Zero witnesses in Schiff’s underground SCIF where he was conducting these depositions and interviews and orchestrating public testimony based on what these people said during...

MATT DRUDGE, who rose to stardom when he broke the Monica Lewinsky story around the last presidential impeachment, still runs the news aggregation site that bears his name during this one. And he’s still one of the most influential people in the media. The now-52-year-old Drudge and a skeleton staff effectively invented clickbait. They still present lines of juicy, but context-less text, aggregated from around the web, in a typewriter font: “STUDY: Farmers have most sex…” “Interior minister warns of repeat of migrant influx into EU…” “HILLARY 2020? ‘DON’T TEMPT ME’…”

Matt Drudge, the founder of the Drudge Report, appeared to distance himself from President Trump and from his previous support for the current commander in chief. Drudge, whose site rose to prominence during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, was asked about the apparent shift his site took by Columbia Journalism Review's Bob Norman. The reporter visited Drudge's home in Florida so he could ask him about the current administration, but Drudge didn't answer when Norman knocked. He did answer his phone when Norman called him after leaving his property, according to a CJR article by Norman, which was published on Wednesday.

4 hours ago ... Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp says it’s trying to battle fake news and social-media clickbait with Knewz, its own curated headline-aggregation service. The company’s new Knewz.com site — a text-heavy agglomeration that has already drawn critiques of its cluttered design — officially launched Thursday as a “beta” test. The site, patterned after other aggregators like Google News, Apple News and Drudge Report, compiles headlines and links for publications across a broad range of political leanings, from Fox News and Newsmax to Daily Kos and Mother Jones. In announcing the launch of Knewz.com, News Corp said readers will...

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted American women the right to vote and catapulted them out of the shadows of dependence into the full sunlight of long-awaited civic freedoms. The right to vote was only the beginning of a long list of goals achieved by the early women’s right movement. It also gained for us the right to control our property, to defend ourselves and our children from abusive husbands, to earn advanced degrees, and join professions reserved for men. But one right the early feminists did not fight for was the right to...

Climate activist Greta Thunberg has applied to trademark her name and her movement Fridays for Future to prevent them from being misused for commercial reasons, she announced Wednesday. Thunberg said in an Instagram post that she and the movement “are constantly being used for commercial purposes without any consent whatsoever” for marketing, selling products and collecting money. “This action is to protect the movement and its activities,” she wrote, adding that, “I assure you, I and the other school strikers have absolutely no interests in trademarks. But unfortunately it needs to be done.” She added that the movement belongs to...

Three days before the New York Times received a selectively leaked copy of a book manuscript written by John Bolton, Mr. Bolton’s lawyers were informed by the White House the manuscript could not be published. [Source: John Roberts] On January 23rd John Bolton was denied authorization to publish. On the evening of January 26th the New York Times wrote about a copy of the transcript. It now appears Bolton’s team held a retaliatory motive and may have leaked the manuscript themselves.

I'M FURIOUS! I am watching this sham impeachment trial in its question-and-answer phase and am SHOCKED that Trump's defense team is overlooking the ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.. The DemonRat House Managers' position is that an upcoming election should NOT prevent Trump from being impeached, yet by their OWN standard have the AUDACITY to state that Trump and his defense team MUST NOT DARE INVESTIGATE Joe Biden as this would be 'interference in an upcoming election'!

UPDATE, with Trump Campaign video President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign team has wasted little time using the Don Lemon “Boomer Rube” moment to stir up support. In a mash-up video that combines footage of the CNN segment with clips from The Hunger Games, Team Trump juxtaposes Lemon with the unctuous purple-haired TV host played in the film by Stanley Tucci. Watch it below. “Liberal ‘elites’ in The Capitol ruling class look down on the people,” says the message accompanying the tweeted clip. “They laugh at you. They mock you. They think you don’t matter. Let’s prove them wrong on November...

The preference for having witnesses or no witnesses at the Senate hoax trial is a difficult one for many to decide. What is your preference and why are you making that preference?

Washington (CNN)The White House has issued a formal threat to former national security adviser John Bolton to keep him from publishing his book, "The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir," sources familiar with the matter tell CNN. In a letter to Bolton's lawyer, a top official at the National Security Council wrote the unpublished manuscript of Bolton's book "appears to contain significant amounts of classified information" and couldn't be published as written. The letter, which is dated January 23, said some of the information was classified at the "top secret" level, meaning it "reasonably could be expected to...

Most Americans alive today were born in a time where American naval supremacy was essentially a birthright. Other than the occasional intercept of a Cold War-throwback Russian bomber, we take the security of our coastlines -- maybe even our hemisphere -- for granted. That wasn't the case in January 1942. Enemy submarines prowled our Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico coastlines, and newspapers featured near-daily stories of Americans lost at sea. The featured image above tells the story of the crew of the Prusa, a cargo ship torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-172 south of Hawaii on 19 December 1941....

The average Christian, reading his Bible in happy devotion, stumbles across this passage: Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church… (Col 1:24) The passage is particularly disturbing for a certain strain of Protestant thought that emphasizes Christ’s sufficiency for all things. Christ has accomplished all things necessary to our salvation and we are thus able to “rest” in His completed work. For many, this is at the heart of grace. God has done for...

Satisfaction with race relations in the United States has jumped under President Trump, the latest indication that the Republican is making significant inroads with blacks and other minorities in advance of the 2020 presidential election. New details from a Gallup survey on satisfaction said race relations and the “position” of minorities under Trump are far higher than they were under President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. Race relations scored the highest satisfaction advance, 14 points, from 22% at the end of the Obama administration to 36% this month, said Gallup. And, “The position of blacks and other racial...