Free Republic

ROME — Pope Francis will celebrate Ash Wednesday Mass Feb. 17 in St. Peter’s Basilica rather than making the traditional walk from the Church of St. Anselm to the Basilica of Santa Sabina on Rome’s Aventine Hill, the Vatican said. Because of ongoing concerns about drawing a crowd and the potential that could have for spreading the coronavirus, the Mass and distribution of ashes will take place with a congregation of about 100 people at the Altar of the Chair in the basilica as has been the practice for the past several months, the Vatican press office said Feb. 5....

Washington National Cathedral is taking flak for having allowed an evangelical who believes homosexuality is immoral to preach during a virtual church service. Max Lucado, a bestselling Christian author and pastor of the nondenominational Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, Texas, preached to the church about the Holy Spirit on Sunday, which outraged some members of the liberal Episcopalian denomination to which the National Cathedral belongs. Lucado, who was invited by the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Paul in the City and the Diocese of Washington, D.C., to preach, has publicly opposed homosexual behavior and gay marriage. A petition...

Europe's oldest person, French nun Sister Andre, has survived COVID-19 and will celebrate her 117th birthday this week, her caregivers said. Lucile Randon, who took the name of Sister Andre when she joined a Catholic charitable order in 1944, tested positive for coronavirus in her retirement home in Toulon, southern France, on Jan. 16. She was isolated from other residents, but displayed no symptoms. Asked if she was scared to have COVID, Sister Andre told France's BFM television, "No, I wasn't scared because I wasn't scared to die... I'm happy to be with you, but I would wish to be...

Newly installed President Joe Biden has decimated thousands of expected jobs and destroyed the lives of many Americans after flippantly canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline on his first day in office through an executive order. Many are terrified after abruptly losing their income because they have no idea how they’re going to put food on the table for their struggling families. Biden’s callous job-killing rampage has killed an estimated 11,000 potential pipeline jobs. That does not include the 5,000 jobs he eliminated when he cavalierly issued another executive order ending the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Mindy Seyler, an...

An Arizona mother whose son was killed by an illegal alien said the Biden administration’s border policies are “absolutely” going to create more “angel families.” Angel families are relatives of those who have been killed by an illegal immigrant. “That’s the saddest thing to me of all,” Mary Ann Mendoza told The Epoch Times on Feb. 8. “I’ve been speaking out on this for 5 1/2 years now.” Mendoza’s son, Brandon, was killed in a 2014 car crash caused by an illegal immigrant who was drunk, high on meth, and speeding along a Mesa, Arizona, highway in the wrong direction....

Does the truth matter? Not if you’re the woke president of the San Francisco School Board, apparently. A revealing interview by The New Yorker with the San Francisco School Board president, 30-year-old Gabriela López, gave some insight into the mindset of a public school board that just decided that 44 of its schools needed to be renamed because of their “racist” ties. Abraham Lincoln? Gone. George Washington? Gone. Paul Revere? Gone.

Here we go. More proof of election fraud by Dominion Voting Machines. A recent hand recount in the Rockingham District 7 NH House Race in Windham, New Hampshire, found that the Dominion voting machines shorted EVERY REPUBLICAN by roughly 300 votes. The Dominion machine counted results were wrong for all 4 Republicans by almost exactly 300 votes. Granite Grok reported: The Town of Windham used Dominion machines to count paper ballots and upon a believable hand recount, it was confirmed each Republican was machine-cheated out of roughly 300 votes. You would think this would have been solved by the Dominion...

Pfizer bails out of India after country demands safety testing for COVID vaccineAmerican’s Frontline Doctors are urging the Biden administration to take note of India’s decision to deny Pfizer’s application based on a lack of safety.NDIA, February 10, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – US-based COVID-19 vaccine maker Pfizer has withdrawn its application for emergency-use authorization of its product in India after the country’s health authorities demanded local safety testing.India’s drug regulator last weekdeclined Pfizer’s request that its experimental COVID-19 mRNA vaccine “BioNTech” (BNT162b) be approved without a local trial of the product’s safety on the country’s population.The country’s Central Drugs Standard Control...

The biggest gap in understanding how business truly works exists between two distinct groups of people: Those who have made a payroll and those who haven’t. Anyone who has run a business – small or large – would only be glad to tell you that it is equal parts fulfilling and terrifying. Why? Private business owners are innovating, creating value and creating an opportunity for themselves and their employees to thrive and live a great life. But the business owner also has to walk a tightrope upon which they balance their own financial security and the solvency of those who...

The NBA is requiring that all teams play the national anthem before games "in keeping with longstanding league policy," just one day after Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told The Athletic the team decided not to play it at home games. NBA Chief Communications Officer Mike Bass released a statement on Wednesday, just a day after Cuban said he had no plans to play the national anthem at any future home games. Fox Bet "With NBA teams now in the process of welcoming back fans into their arenas, all teams will play the national anthem in keeping with longstanding league...

Today, a month after Joe Biden was declared to be our president, there are federal troops in Washington, DC. They were originally sent there to provide security during the sparsely attended Biden installation ceremony because those fearless defenders of freedom and eavesdroppers upon GOP presidential candidates named (at least) Trump, the FBI, claimed, without evidence, that there would be protesters in DC and around the nation, see The FBI Claims Armed Protesters Will ‘Storm’ State Capitols on Inauguration Day; Don’t Get Drawn Into This Nonsense. There aren’t just a few federal troops in DC. More troops were sent to DC...

News chief Jeff Zucker is sticking around for 10 months following a ratings boom, but as parent WarnerMedia embraces a streaming future, is a sale or spinoff in the works? Ending speculation about his future leading the news network, CNN president Jeff Zucker signed on to the daily editorial call Feb. 4 and made his intentions clear. “The truth is, back in November and December I had basically decided that it was time to move on,” Zucker said, sources say, adding that he’d since “had a change of heart.” He told his employees he would remain at the helm of...

Professor Dominic Dwyer, an Australian microbiologist and infectious disease expert who traveled with the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) team investigating the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, said on Wednesday there is little evidence the Chinese coronavirus originated anywhere but China. Chinese scientists working with the W.H.O. team are pushing theories the disease might have originated somewhere else and traveled to China by way of imported food. Dwyer told Australia’s 9News there is “very limited” evidence to suggest the coronavirus came from anywhere but China. “There is some evidence but it’s not really very good,” he elaborated. “I think...

A surge in brutal attacks against Asian American seniors in the Bay Area, including one that resulted in the death of an 84-year-old Thai man, has left residents fearful and angry and activists - including Hollywood celebrities - demanding justice.

The sole U.S. member of the World Health Organization delegation investigating the origins of COVID-19 on the ground in China suggested Tuesday that American intelligence on the matter shouldn’t be trusted. Dr. Peter Daszak, who worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the outbreak, tweeted that he was “disappointed” after the State Department said it won’t take the WHO on its word alone after its delegation announced Tuesday it’s highly unlikely that COVID-19 could have accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab. State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday the State Department will not draw any conclusions on...

The Biden administration is considering whether to impose domestic travel restrictions, including on Florida, fearful that coronavirus mutations are threatening to reverse hard-fought progress on the pandemic.Outbreaks of the new variants ... have lent urgency to a review of potential travel restrictions within the United States, one federal official said.

I’ve said the U.S. is caught in a debt death trap. Monetary policy won’t get us out because the velocity of money, the rate at which money changes hands, is dropping. Printing more money alone will not change that. Fiscal policy won’t work either because of high debt ratios. At current debt-to-GDP ratios, each additional dollar spent yields less than a dollar of growth. But because it must be borrowed, it does add a dollar to the debt. Debt becomes an actual drag on growth. The ratio gets higher, and the situation grows more desperate. The economy barely grows at...

The Biden administration is considering whether to impose domestic travel restrictions, including on Florida, fearful that coronavirus mutations are threatening to reverse hard-fought progress on the pandemic.

Tonight, we sit down with classicist and historian (Victor Davis Hanson) to discuss the rise of critical social justice and (woke) ideology, growing limits on freedom of speech, and his take on the second ideology, growing limits on freedom of speech, and his take on the second (impeachment) trial of former President Donald Trump.“It’s like a public-shaming like the Communist Party used to make people wear dunce caps,” Hanson says.This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady and the rest of his teammates celebrated their Super Bowl LV victory on Wednesday afternoon with a boat parade. At one point during the parade, Brady was captured launching the Lombardi Trophy from his boat to tight end Rob Gronkowski, who caught it with ease just like the two touchdown passes he caught on Sunday to help the Bucs win over the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV. Soon after a video surfaced of Brady being helped off the boat, which led to "Drunk Tom Brady" trending on social media. Brady himself decided...