Free Republic

Despite it being legal under volunteer exemption.. Police in the UK arrested a man for handing out free soup in a park, claiming that he had violated COVID-19 restrictions. Nick Smith had been giving out free soup to people in his village for 17 weeks before Sussex Police intervened, claiming he had violated COVID rules by encouraging people to gather. However, Smith cited exemptions under the rules for volunteering, which allows for up to 15 people to gather either indoors or outdoors. Smith said he found the whole experience “very shocking” and insisted he was only trying to help people...

Biden talks about his team as if he asked to see headshots over resumes. Ultimately, that’s a surefire way to upset just about everyone.President Joe Biden is incredibly proud of his staff’s sexual and racial diversity. You don’t even have to ask. He’ll tell you that his choices were tailor-made to “look like the country,” meeting he demands of his party’s identity-focused base. Yet, as we’ve seen time and time again, staffing based on immutable characteristics instead of earned qualifications can only end poorly.Party activists oftentimes stubbornly adhere to a radical worldview, a position much easier to hold when not...

(CNN)Dustin Diamond, who played the role of Screech on the popular 1990s high school comedy "Saved by the Bell," died Monday after a recent cancer diagnosis, according to Diamond's manager, Roger Paul. He was 44. Diamond first shared news of his cancer diagnosis last month. At the time, his manager said his client's health was "serious" and that Diamond was undergoing further testing at a Florida hospital. He underwent his first round of chemotherapy days later. An actor and stand-up comedian, Diamond found fame playing Samuel "Screech" Powers for more than a decade on the "Saved by the Bell" franchise.

Most Americans presume that Mexico is a Christian country, unaware that many Mexicans who identity as Catholic regularly practice a form of pagan idolatry, according to Universidad Cristiana de Mexico President Jaime Castro. Castro leads an evangelical Christian university in Querétaro, Mexico. As Mexican Christians share the Gospel, they often face persecution from Mexican traditionalist Catholics, he told The Christian Post. Unlike Christianity, traditionalist Catholicism relies on giving gifts to the gods in exchange for health, good fortune and protection from evil. They often participate in animal sacrifices to the gods and worship saints, incorporating practices from pagan Aztec beliefs....

Nancy Sinatra still can’t get past her anger towards Donald Trump even though he is no longer the President. Now, Frank Sinatra’s daughter admits that she will not even forgive the people who voted for him.

Once on the margin of the margins, calls for the nationalization of US fossil fuel interests are growing. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the basic argument was this: nationalization could expedite the phasing out of fossil fuels in order to reach climate targets while ensuring a “just transition” for workers in coal, oil, and gas. Nationalization would also remove the toxic political influence of “Big Oil” and other large fossil fuel corporations. The legal architecture for nationalization exists — principally via “eminent domain” — and should be used. But the case for nationalization has gotten stronger in recent months.

Over these past few weeks, Apple has experienced something it isn't used to: bad PR in the wake of essentially banning popular social media app Parler from its phones without publicly providing any truthful explanationWar is brewing in Silicon Valley. A long-simmering fight between Apple and Facebook — two of the architects of Big Tech — spilled into the avenue this past week, with commercial and legal threats hitting the pages of both tech publications and broader media.To read the Cult of Mac journalists who dominate Big Tech reporting, you’d think America had flipped the calendar back 10 years to...

How Socialism Wiped Out Venezuela's Spectacular Oil Wealth Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. It's out of gasoline. Andrés Figueredo Thomson | 2.1.2021 12:50 PM Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves and yet the country has run out of gasoline. The socialist government has lost the capacity to extract oil from the ground or refine it into a usable form. The industry's gradual deterioration was 18 years in the making, tracing back to then-President Hugo Chávez's 2003 decision to fire the oil industry's most experienced engineers in an act of petty political retribution. The near-total collapse...

MIDLAND, South Dakota — On the day President Biden was inaugurated in Washington, D.C., Laurie Cox wept. They weren't tears of joy. News had spread that morning that the incoming president would be pulling the plug on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. For Cox, the owner of the two-story Stroppel Hotel in Midland, South Dakota, news of a shutdown also meant her business would take a major hit. "I had a real gut-sinking feeling and was watching little snips of the news and Facebook to see what was going to happen after the inauguration," she told the Washington Examiner.

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s top election official will resign after her agency’s staff discovered a mistake that will block voters from deciding this spring whether to allow survivors of decades-old sexual abuse to sue the perpetrators. The Department of State did not advertise, as required, a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would open a two-year window for litigation by survivors of child sexual abuse who have aged out of the statute of limitations. Secretary Kathy Boockvar, who oversaw a tense and difficult presidential election in the battleground state, will resign Feb. 5, Gov. Tom Wolf announced Monday. Spotlight PA...

The Gift of GabIntroduction I want to take this occasion to write a bit about free speech, the importance of free speech, and the consequent importance of Gab. I am writing as one who has already transferred over to Gab, and I would encourage you all to do the same. Get your thinking sorted out on these free speech issues, and the biblical basis for it, and then make your way over. There may be some sluggishness in the sign-up because of how many people are getting woke to the woke and who are trying to do the same thing....

Now that the fawning over President Biden’s inaugural address is over, we can take a serious look at it. It was, in a word, awful. Probably no one expected much from the 78-year-old failing politician, so no one was disappointed. But inaugural addresses are supposed to be defining moments, which is why they should be studied, if only briefly. Who wrote the speech? Who reviewed it? The buck stops with Biden, of course, but who—or which faction, or factions—actually crafted it? And did Biden review it? How many times? Once? Once is not enough. Once is never enough. Is there...

Two men in Indonesia’s conservative Aceh province were publicly caned 77 times each on Thursday for having engaged in consensual sex. The men, aged 27 and 29, were arrested in November after neighbors became suspicious of their relationship. They broke into their rented room and caught them having sex, according to Heru Triwijanarko, Aceh’s acting Sharia police chief. Last month they were sentenced to 80 strokes each, but received 77 after having spent some time in prison. The flogging took place at Banda Aceh’s Tamansari city park. The men stood in the center of a circle, as dozens watched and...

Grocery workers in Oakland and San Jose could soon earn hazard or “hero” pay for their work during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I’ve talked to grocery store workers, they’re scared because there’s a new strain of COVID and because the cases continue to rise,” said Oakland City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas. “They’re risking their lives to serve us,” said Bas. “Hazard pay would make a huge difference so if that if they get sick or a loved one gets sick they have a little bit of extra money to pay the bills.”

New York’s Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo is the poster child for the most macabre chutzpah we have ever seen. Having mismanaged his state’s Wuhan China virus pandemic to the point of herding COVID-19 patients into nursing homes where even he admits it spread like a wildfire through dry grass. Yet he blames everyone but himself for his state’s carnage, has written a book bizarrely claiming to be his state’s savior, and even won an Emmy for his daily bloviating press conferences. Ir should have been for best performance in a horror show. Now we know the carnage and death he...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law on Friday that extends eviction protections through the end of June. Tenants who qualify for the protections will still owe their rent, they just can't be evicted for not paying all of it.

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no longer restricted by the Trump administration, issued an extensive federal public health order late Friday requiring all individuals to wear masks over their mouth and nose on nearly all forms of public transportation and private ride-sharing services—and makes refusal to wear a face-covering a violation of federal law.” CDC—No Longer Constrained By Trump—Issues Order That Makes Not Wearing A Mask On Public Transportation A Federal Crime, Tommy Beer, Forbes, 1/30/21The underlying assumption providing authority to the CDC’s mask requirement is that human life is valuable and must be preserved at all costs....

Because of the horrible fiasco of the January 6 U.S. Capitol "Reichstag Riot," Americans never saw the "patriotic Woodstock" that preceded it and lasted for hours. Nowhere have I seen aerial views from TV network helicopters, and now private drones are forbidden over federal DC. This guy put his video camera up on a flagpole and hoisted it up, panning the crowd. I don't know how many patriots were there, but it was in the 100s of thousands at least. I was up the hill closer to the Washington Monument, but this was the view that we all had. It...

It is growing increasingly unlikely that California's state legislature approves Gov. Gavin Newsom's plan to reopen the state's schools for in-person learning anytime soon. Under the proposal, school districts will receive additional funding if they agree to a firm timetable for reopening schools beginning in mid-February. The proposal was submitted to the state legislature as an adjustment of the state budget and offers additional funding for schools, up to $450 to $750 per student, if they commit to reopening However, in committee hearings last week, the state's lawmakers winced at the Feb. 1 deadline for school districts to apply. “Why...

If the refusal of lawmakers to enact a president's policies is justification for unilateral executive action, then a slide toward elective monarchy is inevitable."Ease up on the executive actions, Joe," The New York Times urged recently inaugurated President Biden last week. While supportive of the president's broadly progressive agenda, the newspaper's editorial board found his flurry of executive orders and other unilateral actions both troubling and vulnerable to easy reversal by future presidents. "This is no way to make law," the Times added. Unfortunately, creeping rule-by-decree has become common for presidents, and Biden's impatience with the normal frustrations of the...