Free Republic

BOISE, Idaho — Ammon Bundy has once again been arrested, along with two other men, following a Monday morning confrontation outside the Ada County Courthouse. Bundy and another man, Aaron Schmidt, were arrested Monday morning outside of the courthouse after failing to appear for their jury trials, according to a news release from the Ada County Sheriff’s Office. Both men refused to wear masks, which are required to enter the courthouse by order of the Idaho Supreme Court....

It is planned that the film will be shown in California (USA) at the Architecture Design Art Film Festival program in March 2021.A documentary about William Brumfield, a professor of Slavic Studies, who personally took over 150,000 photographs of Russian Orthodox churches, will be shown at the A.V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow on March 13 and 14. The documentary film by Irma Komladze titled “The Treasure of William Brumfield” tells about a professor of Slavic Studies at Tulane University, author of numerous monographs on the history of Russian literature, photographer, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences,...

A judge may unseal absentee ballots in Fulton County so a government watchdog can investigate allegations of voting fraud in the November election. A lawsuit filed in Fulton County Superior Court contends that fraudulent ballots were cast and other irregularities occurred as workers counted ballots at State Farm Arena on election night. Those allegations were investigated and dismissed by the secretary of state’s office. Nonetheless, Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero — who is overseeing the case — said he’s inclined to order the ballots to be unsealed and reviewed by experts hired by Garland Favorito, a voting-integrity advocate....

CNA Staff, Mar 11, 2021 / 08:31 pm MT (CNA).- The American Civil Liberties Union has received a major donation from a billionaire heir whose LGBT activism includes both funding for efforts to limit religious freedom and funding for Christian groups - including Catholic dissenters - that want to change their churches’ teachings on marriage and sexual morality. The donation of $15 million from Jon L. Stryker and Slobodan Randjelovic, his same-sex spouse, is the largest LGBT-focused grant in ACLU history. The organization will rename its LGBTQ & HIV Project for the two men, the ACLU announced March 4. Stryker...

Several South Side and south suburban Catholic parishes will consolidate this summer, the Archdiocese of Chicago announced, as part of the ongoing Renew My Church initiative aimed at more efficiently tending the Catholic flock as church attendance falls and the number of priests declines. St. Benedict Parish and School in Blue Island, St. Walter Parish and School in Chicago’s Morgan Park neighborhood and St. Peter Claver Mission in Robbins will unite under a single name and pastoral staff in July, with regular public services held only at St. Benedict. St. Benedict and St. Walter schools will unite for the coming...

My beloved sisters and brothers in Christ, Today, we commence our annual pilgrimage to Holy Pascha – a sacred journey of Forty Days and Forty Nights, from which we emerge into the Holiest Week of the year, and the Passover from death to life. As we chant today, on Pure and Clean Monday – Kathara Deftera: Τὴν πάνσεπτον ἐγκράτειαν, ἐναρξώμεθα φαιδρῶς, ἀκτῖνας ἀπολάμποντες, τῶν ἁγίων ἐντολῶν, Χριστοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἡμῶν, ἀγάπης τὴν λαμπρότητα, προσευχῆς τὴν ἀστραπήν, ἁγνείας καθαρότητα, εὐανδρείας τὴν ἰσχύν, ὅπωςλαμπροφόροι προφθάσωμεν, εἰς τὴν ἁγίαν καὶ τριήμερον Ἀνάστασιν, τὴνκαταλάμπουσαν ἀφθαρσίαν τῷ κόσμῳ. Let us begin the most holy season...

Mark Zuckerberg has control and power few have ever experienced in the history of humanity, and while many have called for the breakup of his social media empire, we’ve rarely ever heard how those who actually guide Facebook’s fleet feel about it. As a new Project Veritas video shows, those that think the empire should fracture include those at the top, who most recognize just how dangerous the monster they control is.As pointed out by the new Project Veritas video, Facebook’s Global Planning Lead, Benny Thomas, doesn’t care that he’d make less money as a result, but made it clear...

With a small military training program, the United States military has joined efforts to fight a brutal insurgency that has devastated northern Mozambique. American Special Forces soldiers began training Mozambican troops this week as part of an effort to repel a spreading insurgency in northeastern Mozambique that American officials say is linked to the Islamic State. The insurgency, near some of the world’s biggest gas reserves, has killed at least 2,000 civilians and displaced another 670,000. The American program is modest in size and scope: a dozen Army Green Berets are to train Mozambican marines for the next two months....

When the senator approached Fr. Robert Whitney to receive Communion, he 'instead said a blessing over the senator. Murkowski did not make a scene and went back to her seat.'March 15, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — A Catholic priest was punished in late 2019 for denying liberal Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska Holy Communion over her support of legal abortion, an Alaska radio host has revealed. KENI morning host Dan Fagan wrote that, early last week, he received a call from a man claiming that a priest had denied Murkowski Communion, and that as punishment the Archdiocese of Anchorage transferred him...

The city of Chicago endured a violent weekend between the evening of March 12th and the early morning hours of March 15th – with 39 people having been shot across the city, 4 of which died from their sustained injuries. One shooting incident in particular resulted in 15 people being shot, and 2 dying. One of the most detrimental shooting incidents within Chicago over the weekend occurred at approximately 4:40 a.m. on March 14th within the 6700 block of South South Chicago Avenue. Police say that some sort physical altercation took place at a party, which then escalated into gunfire....

New virus in China similar to Covid?Reports: Another virus reportedly starting in China similar to Covid, say Chinese researchers.— FrontalForce (@FrontalForce) March 14, 2021"I just saw this tweet below from Dr. Gordon Chang. I have no idea at this point what it means. Better to share the information with a caveat." #China’s military is talking about pathogens that will sicken only non-#Chinese, so one day #Beijing will develop a civilization-killer. In the meantime, we need to deter #XiJinping from spreading it as he deliberately spread #COVID19. #coronavirus https://t.co/tRcK1bs4xw— Gordon G. Chang (@GordonGChang) March 14, 2021

Misinformation and fake news continue to be a major problem across social media platforms. Now, a new study reports people with high emotional intelligence are much less likely to fall for deceptive and untrue news items. Conducted at the University of Strathclyde, the study asked a group of volunteers to take a look at various social media news stories, some true and some false. The group then tried to determine which were real and which were fictitious. Each participant also gave a short explanation as to their fact-checking thought process and filled out a test to gauge their emotional intelligence....

CNN has said a lot of crazy things over the past four years.But one of the things that makes CNN special, in a bad sense of that word, is how imperial their hosts are; from Jake Tapper to Brian Stelter, they think they dictate the truth.But Don Lemon may have taken the cake with his comments today. He apparently knows the mind of God and is telling us what God thinks.Lemon was on The View with Meghan McCain discussing the comments made by the Pope about same-sex unions, as my colleague Streiff wrote about earlier today. Basically, the Pope was...

Places with highest daily reported cases per capita Seven-day average of daily new reported cases per 100,000 residents

In June of 1993, standing proud, I entered through the hallowed gates of medicine as I recited a time-honored oath. For more than two millennia, students of medicine worldwide have made a similar pledge. We committed “to do no harm and commit no injustice.” We vowed to rise above borders and fickle winds of “current thought.” And we promised to be guided by a moral duty to always to do the right thing. It was crystal clear: the patients’ well-being is the priority. Among it’s various versions, the Hippocratic oath supercedes transient ideologies as an ethical ideal that supersedes the...

The Washington Post issued a correction revealing it “misquoted” Donald Trump’s comment on a call with a Georgia election official.The outlet quietly admitted that the former president never asked the state’s top election investigator to “find the fraud,” but rather encouraged the official to “scrutinize” ballots.The Post’s full, seven-sentence correction attributes the misquote to faulty “information provided by a source”:Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the...

As concerns mount over the efficacy of the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine, the Bay Area’s leading public health officials have come together for what appears to be their definitive statement on the vaccine options currently available in the United States. Public health officers from Santa Cruz, Berkeley and all nine Bay Area counties — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma — issued a statement Monday emphasizing the fact that all of the vaccine options are “safe and have been shown to be highly effective at preventing symptomatic illness and hospitalization.” “The...

[Catholic Caucus] The McCarrick Report – After the dust has settled First published in Catholic Family NewsIntroductionIt’s been almost twenty years since this writer introduced St. Peter Damian’s moral masterpiece, the Book of Gomorrah, [1] to readers of Catholic Family News. [2]And now, thanks to CFN editor Matt Gaspers, here I am again – this time to review somewhat belatedly, the long-awaited “Report on the Holy See’s Institutional Knowledge and Decision-Making Related to Former Cardinal Edgar McCarrick (1930 to 2017), aka, “the Report,” released by the Holy See on November 10, 2020. [3]The reader will recall that the McCarrick investigation...

Regular booster vaccines against the novel coronavirus will be needed because of mutations that make it more transmissible and better able to evade human immunity, the head of Britain’s effort to sequence the virus’s genomes told Reuters. The novel coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people globally since it emerged in China in late 2019, mutates around once every two weeks, slower than influenza or HIV, but enough to require tweaks to vaccines. Sharon Peacock, who heads COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) which has sequenced half of all the novel coronavirus genomes so far mapped globally, said international cooperation was needed...

The Wolf Administration’s latest relaxation of Covid-19 emergency rules for many public venues wasn’t met Monday with the kind of widespread rejoicing you might have expected at within many of Pennsylvania’s long-suffering entertainment and recreation sectors. To many operating movie theaters, special event venues and even larger stadiums and arenas, the incremental step-ups in capacity limits still aren’t enough to get them back to profitability, and when overlaid with social distancing requirements, may not make any difference at all. Many of these businesses have been hit the longest and the hardest from the restrictions put in place late last winter...