Free Republic

A coalition of House committees is asking the White House and 16 other agencies to turn over a trove of documents from the Trump administration related to the electoral vote count and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The request includes the Office of the Vice President, and seeks all White House communications between Dec. 1 and Inauguration Day, specifically asking to relay "communications, if any, with participants in the events of Jan. 6" or their associates. The documents could provide an insight into how a number of Trump administration officials prepared for and responded to the attacks. The...

Three big things stood out in President Biden’s first press conference. 1. The leader of the free world is often lost at sea and says many things that are blatantly false. 2. The media is in the tank and cannot be trusted to hold him accountable. 3. Because of Nos. 1 and 2, America is headed for serious trouble. For this sickening spectacle we had to wait 64 days? Still, the event was meaningful in one distressing way. Now we know beyond all doubt there is no way to deny the terrifying truth. This was Biden’s coming out party, and...

LONDON — William Frostman, a lighting supervisor who has toured with the Rolling Stones and Queen, has just spent a whole year at home, the longest time in his decades-long career. “I just want to wake up on a bus,” Frostman, 60, told dozens of his fellow roadies...Nostalgic as he was for life on the road, there were a few fears at the back of his mind, he said: Would anyone employ him? How would a vaccine passport work? ...But for many roadies — who often rely on monthslong world tours to make a living — a return to full-time...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) have singled out some of President Joe Biden’s statements from his first formal press conference about immigration numbers and said that his statements were not true.

MISSOULA COUNTY, Mont. — A mountainous, 2,600-square-mile region with a population of approximately 119,600 does not seem like your prototypical setting for machine politics. Yet a recent audit of mail-in ballots cast there found irregularities characteristic of larger urban centers — on a level that could have easily swung local elections in 2020, and statewide elections in cycles past. The Biden administration, the Democrat-controlled Congress, and the Democratic National Committee are collectively pressing to both nationalize, and make permanent, many of the extraordinary pandemic-driven voting measures implemented during the 2020 election —particularly mass mail-in voting.

Here is an all too typical Twitter post making the claim that AR-15s are the weapon of choice for mass public shooters. But you have to wonder though if all this media coverage that these are the best weapons for mass public shooters actually causes more of these particular guns to be used than would otherwise be the case.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) downplayed concerns from some House Democrats about reviewing the Iowa congressional race that was won by six votes. The House Administration Committee, led by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), is considering hearing Democrat Rita Hart’s challenge against Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ election victory that was certified by the state of Iowa. Pelosi told reporters that the House has the ability to overturn contested elections and said that Democrats whose races were narrowly contested would do the same as Hart. “I would say to them, if you lost by six votes, would you like to bring your case...

Reporters aren’t in the practice, obviously, of being particularly tough on President Biden. But at his first press conference as president this afternoon, Cecilia Vega of ABC News politely nailed him to the wall on a key failure of his border policy. -snip- In evading this reality throughout the press conference, Biden resorted to a haze of misrepresentations, and inadvertently exposed the senselessness of his own policy. He said that the reason even more family units aren’t being returned is that Mexico can’t take more of them. Again, if it’s okay to send migrants back into Mexico, it makes no...

Update 6:40 p.m.: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced that Aimee Challenor is no longer employed by the company, saying "we over-indexed on protection" and that Reddit had failed its own standards in this case.Dozens of Reddit pages have gone private in protest over the social media company's decision to censor criticism of an employee who hired her father, a child rapist, to run a political campaign Major forums like r/music, r/fitness, and r/coronavirus, which each have millions of users, have closed, along with hundreds of smaller forums. They are protesting a Reddit decision to ban users who mention Aimee Challenor,...

The church of Saints Peter and Paul was built in 1893, but closed by the Bolsheviks in 1933, who tuned it into a cinema. The presence of Catholics in Novgorod dates back to the 9th century. New legal obligations: ministers of worship who study abroad must undergo "re-education" upon returning home. Concerns among Buddhists, Protestants and Catholics. Educational institutions must also receive a special "educational certificate" from state bodies.Moscow (AsiaNews) - After 25 years of official requests, the church of Saints Peter and Paul in Novgorod, the ancient city in the north of Russia, 200 km from St. Petersburg, has...

Octopuses have alternating periods of "quiet" and "active" sleep that make their rest similar to that of mammals, despite being separated by more than 500 million years of evolution. During their active periods of sleep, octopuses' skin color changes and their bodies twitch, according to a report in the journal iScience, and they might even have short dreams. "If they are dreaming, they are dreaming for up to a minute," says Sidarta Ribeiro, a neuroscientist at the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. It's been clear for awhile that octopuses can change color...

Google is turning over user data to US law enforcement, even when requests for that come without a warrant, in the form of requests that are not court-ordered. That emerges from information shared with the LA Times by an anonymous Google user, who said they were notified about this in an email from the tech giant, who said the request came from the Department of Homeland Security, without including the request itself in the email. When this Google user asked to see the document, it turned out to be an administrative subpoena issued by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE),...

Manila (Agenzia Fides) - Because of the emergency linked to Covid-19, this year, Catholics will not be able to celebrate the rites of Holy Week and Easter in presence. Coronavirus infections continue to increase, particularly in Manila and the neighboring provinces. According to information sent to Agenzia Fides, on March 21, the Philippine government announced the ban on all gatherings in the capital and in the provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna and Rizal. This measure was made compulsory from yesterday until April 4, Easter Sunday. Head of State spokesman Harry Roque said all types of gatherings including celebrations of religious...

John Matze, the co-founder and former CEO of free speech platform Parler, is suing the company for wrongful termination and the alleged theft of his 40% ownership of the company. Matze was ousted shortly after Parler’s trouble following the Jan 6 riot at the US Capitol. In the lawsuit filed at the Clark County District Court, in Nevada, Matze is seeking “millions in compensatory damages.” The suit alleges that Parler’s main funder, Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of conservative billionaire Robert Mercer, and other board members, engaged in a scheme to steal his ownership in the company he founded. We obtained...

Vatican declaration 'lacks pastoral care'ANTWERP, Belgium (ChurchMilitant.com) - A Belgian bishop apologized to all who feel that the Vatican's recent reaffirmation of the sanctity of Christian marriage and the inadmissibility of blessing homosexual unions, saying of gay couples: "Their pain is mine today." Writing as a "bishop and theologian," Bp. Johan Bonny of Antwerp on March 17 wrote an op-ed for the Flemish-language De Staandard in reference to the declaration by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that ruled out any blessings for same-sex couples as "illicit" and "unlawful." In response to the directive, Bp. Bonny wrote...

Russia has proposed its strategic Arctic shipping route as an alternative to the Suez Canal after a 400-meter cargo ship got stuck in the canal, blocking one of the world’s key shipping routes and sparking fears of a rise in oil prices. “If you get icebound, we have icebreakers, well to break the ice,” Rosatom added, attaching an article on Rosatom icebreakers rescuing a cargo ship trapped in the ice in late December and early January. While sailing the Northern Sea Route cuts about 40% of the distance between China and European ports compared with taking the Suez Canal, traffic...

In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, (9th Cir., March 18, 2021), the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Washington state school board's dismissal of a high school football coach who insisted on prominently praying at the 50-yard line immediately after football games. The long-running high-profile case was before the 9th Circuit for the second time. (See prior posting.) The court issued a Summary of its decision along with the opinion, saying in part: The panel held that the record before it and binding Supreme Court precedent compelled the conclusion that the District would have violated the Establishment Clause...

In 2004, Boris Johnson, now the UK’s Prime Minister, famously wrote: “If I am ever asked, on the streets of London, or in any other venue, public or private, to produce my ID card as evidence that I am who I say I am, when I have done nothing wrong and when I am simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman, then I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded that I produce it. "If I am incapable...

On Thursday Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (R) signed a sweeping bill that overhauls his state’s election laws that includes new restrictions on mail-in voting. The legislation was pushed through Georgia’s House and Senate after Kemp and the crooked Secretary of State handed Georgia over to the Democrats in TWO separate elections. Because of mail-in ballots, ballot drop boxes, no signature checks and ballot harvesting, the Democrats took control of the White House and flipped the Senate blue. Kemp finally signed new election laws that would require a photo ID in order to vote by absentee ballot and it would limit...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is once again calling for reform of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) Section 230 – as he once is again appearing before a US Congress committee. Zuckerberg’s testimony on Thursday before the House Energy Committee revealed that Zuckerberg is proposing replacing automatic immunity from prosecution for user generated content with platforms like his own demonstrating that they have implemented “adequate” moderation and censorship systems. He said that these systems would be used for “identifying unlawful content and removing it.” The thought behind this seems to be to convince critics that tech giants are doing everything to...