Free Republic

Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine said she is expanding the state’s order on wearing masks to cover all outdoor and indoor areas. In a news conference Tuesday, Levine said the mask order covers requires wearing face coverings at schools, gyms, doctors offices, public transportation and anywhere food is packaged or served. Essentially, the order calls for wearing masks when leaving your household. “We must all be diligent in wearing masks all the time,” Levine said. Levine announced the expanded mask order as part of a handful of “targeted” and “strategic” steps to try and slow the spread of the...

t may contain the “Crossroads of the World,” but Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday that Manhattan is “not the center of our universe.” Only about 10 percent of Manhattan office workers were back as of Sept. 18, more than six months after the coronavirus pandemic upended life in the Big Apple, the Wall Street Journal had reported, citing data from commercial real estate services firm CBRE Group Inc. “When Mayor de Blasio makes dismissive comments about the dire lack of commercial activity in Midtown, he’s really dismissing the needs of hundreds of thousands of everyday New Yorkers who will...

Nicola Sturgeon today announced parts of Scotland that are home to millions of people will be moved into its toughest coronavirus level at the end of the week as she warned infection rates remain 'stubbornly high'. The First Minister said 11 council areas, which include the city of Glasgow and have a combined population of approximately 2.3 million people, will be subject to Level Four restrictions from 6pm on Friday. People living in Level Four areas are banned from meeting with other households indoors while all non-essential shops must close.

More than a third of Americans want to have their pumpkin pie and eat it too this Thanksgiving, according to a new survey. Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, 38 percent are planning a holiday dinner with 10 or more people — and 27 percent don’t plan on practicing social distancing during their celebration, according to the national survey by the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

James Harden’s rapid disillusionment with the Houston Rockets over the past few weeks has been dizzying. The former NBA MVP somehow went from being a satisfied, extremely well-compensated cornerstone of one of the best teams in the West to a guy desperately trying to force his way to the Eastern Conference.

Americans, especially young, left-leaning Americans don’t have much of a conception of the reality of socialism. They have some idea that it means the government taxing the wealthy and providing “free” (read: taxpayer-funded) services to those that are left fortunate. That is completely wrong. In fact, it’s a semi-rosy view of how the Nordic welfare systems work, and those aren’t even socialist systems in the first place. Plus, they tax everyone quite heavily, not just the upper class; the average tax in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark is between 40% and 60%, but it is a more or less flat tax....

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) — A dean at a university in Virginia has resigned after posting a statement on Facebook that called supporters of President-elect Joe Biden “ignorant, anti-American and anti-Christian.”

Democrat and George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley is warning that the Biden transition team has taken an "ominous turn" after former Vice President Joe Biden hired a number of anti-free speech zealots. "For those of us who have been critical of the growing anti-free speech movement in the Democratic Party, the Biden transition team just took an ominous turn. The New York Post reports that Biden tapped Richard Stengel to take the “team lead” position on the US Agency for Global Media, including Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty," Turley writes...

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday told lawmakers that it was a “mistake” to censor the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) over a tweet about the wall at the southern border -- as the company faces accusations of political bias.

Spike Lee’s next project will be a movie musical about the origin story of Viagra, Pfizer’s erectile dysfunction drug. The Entertainment One film is based on David Kushner’s Esquire article titled “All Rise: The Untold Story of the Guys Who Launched Viagra.” Lee is directing the untitled musical from a screenplay he wrote with Kwame Kwei-Armah. The movie will feature original songs and music penned by Stew Stewart and Heidi Rodewald, the duo behind the Tony-winning musical “Passing Strange.” In a statement, Lee said, “First And Foremost,I Thank Ms. Jacquelyn Shelton Lee. I Thank My Late Mother For As She...

Elevator etiquette requires that no more than two parties share a ride, and that’s only if the next party in line says it’s OK. And Broadway is still dark, an ominous symbol of what Covid has wrought on the Big Apple.

The Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a statement last week defending the integrity of the 2020 election. The problem, however, is two of the main election software companies that have been called into question – Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic – sit on CISA. And that information was never disclosed, the Epoch Times reported.Below is the the joint statement put out by the Executive Committee of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council (SCC):“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across...

An event organized by professors at NY University was shut down by Zoom recently. Zoom refused to participate due to inclusion of Leila Khaled, a terrorist that participated in two plane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s. Zoom pulled out of another Khaled event in September at San Francisco State University. Zoom recently dropped out of a guest lecture event hosted by a group of NYU professors. The event’s guest speaker was Leila Khaled, a Palestinian terrorist that participated in two plane hijackings in 1969 and 1970. The professors claim that Zoom’s refusal to host the virtual event was a...

A robot called Monster Wolf, equipped with sensors that can detect bears or vermin, is installed in an effort to scare away bears that have become an increasingly dangerous nuisance in the countryside, in Takikawa on Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido. KYODO / REUTERS A town in northern Japan has recently been plagued by a plethora of wild bears, roaming around neighborhoods and petrifying residents. In an attempt to prevent attacks, the town of Takikawa has now installed terrifying robotic wolves to howl at the bears and scare them off, Reuters reports. The residents of Takikawa, located on the...

Karl Rove, the longtime GOP operative and former adviser to George W. Bush, is heading up Senate Republicans’ fundraising efforts for the Georgia runoff elections. Rove has been tapped as the finance chairman for the Georgia Battleground Fund, a joint fundraising effort by the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the campaigns of GOP Georgia Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, a person familiar with the effort confirmed to The Hill. Republicans and Democrats are expected to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the two runoffs in Georgia over the next eight weeks as they battle for control of...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday issued a new license to Chevron Corp, the last major U.S. oil company still operating in Venezuela, giving it until June 3 to wind down its joint ventures in the OPEC member nation. The United States last year imposed sanctions barring imports of Venezuelan oil and transactions made in U.S. dollars with Venezuela's state-run oil company PDVSA, a move designed to starve the country of oil dollars and oust socialist President Nicolas Maduro. Chevron has had a special U.S. operating license exempting it from sanctions on Venezuela's vital oil sector since...

Apple's latest operating system, macOS Big Sur, uses a new API to constantly send users' data (including how, when, and where a Mac is used) to Apple. This data is transmitted to Apple without encryption, meaning anyone with access to the same network as the Mac can see the information. There are plenty of reports of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other big tech companies tracking and logging user data. Thankfully, Apple has been a bastion of respect for user privacy in both the computer and smartphone world. Right? According to a new report from Jeffrey Paul, a computer privacy blogger...

Six weeks after the city and county of San Francisco reopened restaurant dining rooms, cases of COVID-19 have skyrocketed by 250 percent, city officials say. That’s why, as of 11:59 p.m. on Friday, November 13, 2020, restaurants will be required to shut their indoor dining operations down again, and to revert to an outdoor dining, takeout, and delivery model for an unknown period of time. “With winter on the way, limited indoor dining represented the only real hope for many restaurants to survive the next three months,” the GGRA says, as “the majority of restaurants simply cannot make it financially...

Now that the COVID hysteria has seemingly done its job of scaring enough voters to vote against President Trump, a glimpse of its potential for reshaping America is coming into better focus. Although the severity of the virus appears to have diminished since the deadly days of Spring, the number of cases has soared with the dramatic expansion of testing that is now available. More cases are inspiring mayors and governors to impose more infringements on personal liberty. Citing the rise in COVID cases, Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) has announced new restrictions on travel "to help fight the...

San Francisco’s Department of Public Health (DPH) has shut down at least 10 bars across the city, saying that even after repeated warnings, the venues continued to violate health orders intended to slow the spread of COVID-19. And according Ben Bleiman, the city’s most vocal defender of bars and nightlife, they should shut down even more. According to DPH spokesperson Jenna Lane, that list is accurate, but she hastened to add that all of those closures were only temporary, and that as of November 11, all the bars had reopened. Here’s how it works, Lane says: Members of the public...