Free Republic

The Census Bureau is spending millions of dollars on an ad campaign seeking to assure members of the Latino community that their information will not be shared with local or federal authorities. The ads, which are a part of the bureau’s $500 million campaign, are focused on mitigating fears regarding the now-excluded citizenship question from the 2020 census. The entire advertising campaign with 1,000 ads will continue over the next five months, including $50 million targeting Latino populations, $40 million focused on African Americans and $20 million on Asian Americans, according to Culture ONE World, a Washington-based ad agency, Politico...

Bedrest studies simulate aspects of spaceflight by placing volunteers in bed for long periods of time with their head 6° below horizontal. At all times one shoulder must touch the bed—meals, showers and toilet breaks included. ESA has conducted many bedrest studies with Medes in Toulouse, France, and at the German aerospace center DLR's ':envihab' facility in Cologne, Germany. The space agency is now welcoming the Jožef Stefan Institute based in Planica, Slovenia, to conduct a new round of 60-day studies: one in Toulouse and one in Planica. Finding ways to stay healthy in orbit is a large part of...

Last week, on the first day of early voting in North Carolina, over 700 people waited in torrential rain to attend a 7 a.m. event for billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg. Among the attendees at Footnote Coffee in downtown Winston-Salem was 22-year-old Wake Forest undergrad Meredith Happy, who posted a Snapchat shortly after she walked into the event. The picture wasn’t of any campaign signage, or even the candidate, but of a kingly spread of food that included quiches, smoked salmon with capers and chopped eggs, a fruit platter, cookies, and assorted pastries. She captioned the photo “Daddy Bloomberg.”...

https://twitter.com/LarrySchweikart/status/1229405075677663232

WASHINGTON — President Trump commuted the 14-year prison sentence of former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, the Democrat who was convicted of trying to essentially sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat for personal gain, and pardoned the financier Michael R. Milken and Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, the president announced on Tuesday. “Yes, we commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich,” Mr. Trump told reporters just before boarding Air Force One for a four-day trip to the west coast where he is scheduled to hold three campaign rallies. “He served eight years in jail, a...

Drafting, blocking and bumping are essential elements of racing on NASCAR’s fastest tracks. When Ryan Blaney pushed fellow Ford driver Ryan Newman in the final lap of the Daytona 500, it was something both men have done hundreds of times on superspeedways. ... A car running alone in the pack without a drafting partner is often shuffled back in the field. Drivers who can lock bumpers and stay connected surge toward the front. The downside to this racing is that one wiggle can create a harrowing accident, and pack racing usually leads to massive wrecks that collect multiple competitors who...

DAYTONA 500 IS OVER.... I watched the Daytona 500 on Monday. It was the worst Race I have ever seen. I have seen many since the late 1960's or so. The pushing by direct contact caused most major wrecks - of which there were many. Somehow the Front and Rear Bumpers were latching together and caused spinouts. In the 1950 -60's it was common for the 2nd place car on the last lap to touch the rear quarter of the lead car - spin-out and go on to Win. Think Richard Petty. The multiple attempts for an non- Caution finish...

Democrat Representative David Nangle was arrested by the FBI and IRS on a 28-count indictment that includes a wide variety of corruption charges. Some of those charges include, at this time, bank fraud, wire fraud, lying to a bank, and even filing false tax returns...

RUSH: Does the Democrat Party realize what Michael Bloomberg is doing to them? Does Crazy Bernie? Has he figured out yet what Bloomberg is doing? This is stunning to watch this, and all of the… You know, Bloomberg obviously has never been opposition researched. Bloomberg has bought off all opposition in his political career. As Mayor of New York City, he buys off the media by putting them on charitable boards that Bloomberg money is the number one source of. He’s bought off every critic he can possibly imagine in the Drive-By Media. And, as such, there hasn’t been any...

A bad month for Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts keeps getting worse. She finished in a respectable third place in the Iowa caucuses, but a results-tallying meltdown muddled what could have been a good evening. New Hampshire was better at logistics but worse for her candidacy, considering she ended up closer to candidates who dropped out after the primary than those who finished on top. Her staff members and plenty of allies argue that as a result, she is being ignored by the news media and some voters during a pivotal moment in the primary, and she is at risk...

The number of people applying to be cops in Montgomery County, Maryland, has dropped by half in recent years, according to a department complaint last week. Officials suggest it's because of growing national skepticism toward policing. "When you do a job that's being highly criticized on a daily basis, we have to ask ourselves, how do we find good candidates that really want to be under that type of scrutiny," said Acting Police Chief Marcus Jones. Montgomery County won't have an easy time importing its officers from other communities, either. Recruitment of law enforcement officers is down in areas around...

Pearson, the world's largest textbook publisher, announced that it is moving from a traditional to a "digital first" publishing model. This development upends several traditions that are more than a century old. It will bring about a digital transformation in textbook publishing that has been in the works for a long time and will fundamentally change the way college students get their educational materials. The traditional model for publishing textbooks has been simple: An author, typically a full-time college professor, writes a textbook under contract with a publisher. The publisher puts out a print edition, gets course instructors to adopt...

Russians flocked to Google for information about HIV tests after an influential YouTuber’s documentary shed light on the scale of the country’s HIV epidemic this week. Journalist Yury Dud’s two-hour documentary addresses what he refers to as an ignored issue that “affects each and every one” of his millions of subscribers. Almost 8 million people viewed Dud’s HIV documentary in the 48 hours since it went online Tuesday. “We filmed this episode to add knowledge and make life a little easier for those with HIV,” Dud says in the video. The number of searches for Russian-language terms relating to HIV...

A business accused of using the Biden name to rake in high-dollar clients was raided by the FBI last month. The FBI searched Ellwood City Medical Center in Pennsylvania and the home of Grant White, the CEO of Americore Holdings, as part of its investigation into the company’s recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy claims, according to RealClearInvestigations. Americore Holdings, a company that acquired and managed rural hospitals, filed for bankruptcy in December to avoid paying its creditors. James Biden, the younger brother of former Vice President Joe Biden, was not directly listed by the FBI in its investigation but has been...

CRB: Your own attitude towards Trump as a political figure has changed over time. How would you describe that evolution? NP: Well, when he first appeared on the scene, I disliked him because he resembled one of the figures that I dislike most in American politics and with whom I had tangled, namely Pat Buchanan—I had tangled with him in print and I had accused him of anti-Semitism. And he came back at me, and I came back at him. And it was a real street fight. And I said to my wife: “This guy [Trump] is Buchanan without the...

Just weeks after President Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate of bogus partisan impeachment charges by the House of Representatives, a group of federal judges will hold an ’emergency meeting’ on Tuesday. The judges will meet to discuss the intervention by Attorney General William Barr against the abusive proposed sentence for Roger Stone and the criticism by President Trump of the proposed sentence and the federal judge overseeing the case, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, as well as other actions by Barr and Trump regarding ‘politically sensitive’ cases before the judiciary.

TOKYO -- As an extraordinary two-week quarantine of a cruise ship ends Wednesday in Japan, many scientists say it was a failed experiment: The ship seemed to serve as an incubator for the new virus from China instead of an isolation facility meant to prevent the worsening of an outbreak. Since the virus was identified late last year in central China, it has sickened tens of thousands of people and killed more than 1,800. As of Tuesday, 542 cases of the virus, known as COVID-19, have been identified among the 3,711 quarantined passengers and crew, making the ship the site...

RENO, Nevada — A new poll shows Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) surging to a double-digit lead over his rivals nationwide — and billionaire Mike Bloomberg qualifying for Wednesday’s Democrat debate. The National Public Radio/Marist/PBS Newshour poll, released early Tuesday morning, shows Sanders with 31%, far ahead of Bloomberg, who is in second place with 19%. The poll was conducted Feb. 13-16 — i.e. after the New Hampshire primary — on land lines and mobile phones among a sample of 527 “Democrats and Democratic leaning independents” registered to vote, with a 5.4% margin of error. The poll shows that Sanders is...

Go ahead and add Atlanta Braves right fielder Nick Markakis to the long list of players who is furious with the Houston Astros right now. The team's sign-stealing scandal has turned Major League Baseball upside down, with each passing day only bringing more shame to Houston. For Markakis, he truly sounded like a disappointed parent while calling out the Astros. That's the voice of a man who is straight-up not happy with what happened, as well as how Rob Manfred has decided to handle the fallout of the ordeal. "It angers you, especially coming from a guy who's played the...