Free Republic

A gun control group on Monday launched a digital ad campaign pushing for filibuster reform in the Senate, arguing the procedural tool has cost lives by blocking meaningful legislation to overhaul firearm laws. Brady, an anti-gun violence group founded by former Reagan aide Jim Brady and his wife Sarah, debuted two new ads first obtained by The Hill as part of its "#FilibusterIsKillingUs" campaign that calls on the Senate to eliminate the 60-vote threshold required for most legislation to pass. The organization plans to spend $40,000 on its initial round of digital ads, with more outreach likely moving forward. "In...

Steve Cortes, co-host of Newsmax’s Cortes & Pellegrino, predicted on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow that inflation and global supply chain breakdowns would yield what he dubbed a “Biden Blue Christmas” for Americans. Increased costs of goods and services — including for expenses such as food, gasoline, and home heating — reduce Americans’ available income to spend on Christmas holidays, Cortes noted.

Sarah Silverman called out Hollywood’s tendency to cast non-Jewish actors to play Jewish characters, referring to the practice as “Jewface.” The comedian, 50, pointed to Kathryn Hahn as the most recent example after the Catholic-raised actress, 48, was tapped to portray the late Joan Rivers, who was Jewish, in an upcoming limited series. “There’s this long tradition of non-Jews playing Jews, and not just playing people who happen to be Jewish but people whose Jewishness is their whole being,” Silverman said in Thursday’s episode of her eponymous podcast, adding, “One could argue, for instance, that a Gentile [a non-Jew] playing...

The excavations that started in 2015 in Alabanda, which is located on an area of 500 hectares in Çine district and is said to be one of the largest ancient cities in Anatolia, are being headed by Ali Yalçın, professor at the Tavukçu Erzurum Atatürk University’s Department of Archaeology.The fragments of the marble statue of Roman Emperor Hadrianus, which is believed to have been brought to Aydın in 120, have been found in different spots during the ongoing excavations in the parliament building.Works are continuing to find the other parts of the marble statue, which has six parts, including some...

The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally. This constitutes the biggest and most significant Facebook data dump to date. It is seemingly unrelated to an earlier 2021 Facebook data dump, where 500 million users were affected.

GENEVA (AP) — The world’s largest association of airlines said Monday that it is aiming for the air transport industry to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, while acknowledging it will be a “huge challenge.” The International Air Transport Association, which has key offices in Geneva, said its general meeting in Boston had agreed on the target, a commitment that would line it up with the goal of the 2015 Paris accord to help keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius. The industry appears to be counting heavily on a carbon-offset plan laid out by a U.N. organization on...

Alaska allowing hospitals to ration care as virus cases surge © Istock The Alaska Department of Health and Social Services (DHHS) on Saturday activated crisis standards of care for 20 hospitals in the state as it struggles with the latest surge in COVID-19 cases, with some hospitals resorting to having to ration health care. "Today’s action recognizes that Alaska has an interconnected and interdependent health care system, requiring the need for activation of the State’s decision-making framework. That framework includes a progression of conventional, contingency and crisis standards of care identifying strategies to be used depending on the situation and...

Things just keep getting worse for the liberal media in their efforts to insulate President Joe Biden and his party’s onerous $3.5 trillion budget bill from criticism. Americans are seeing right through the propaganda. A new poll of 1,076 likely voters found that a combined 71.5 percent were “Much less likely” (67.3%) or “Somewhat less likely" (4.2%) to support the gargantuan budget bill if they knew “it increases taxes and the national debt.” Things got worse for Biden when the poll was broken down by demographics. An astonishing 73.7 percent of Independents and 50.2 percent of Democrats — both majorities...

The government of Georgia said on Monday that it had no intention of releasing jailed ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili before the end of his six-year sentence, also raising the prospect of fresh charges if he did not "behave." As hundreds of Saakashvili supporters rallied outside the prison near Tbilisi to call for his freedom, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili declared that "No one on the planet can convince us to release Saakashvili." Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili, a long-standing enemy of her predecessor, has said she "will never pardon" him.

Edmonton Oilers coach Dave Tippett has said that forward Josh Archibald is out indefinitely after having been diagnosed with myocarditis.

DNS appears to be a symptom of the root cause of Facebook's global failure. Don't expect a quick fix. The old network troubleshooting saying is, when anything goes wrong, "It's DNS." This time Domain Name Server (DNS) appears to be the symptom of the root cause of the Facebook global failure. The true cause is that there are no working Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes into Facebook's sites. BGP is the standardized exterior gateway protocol used to exchange routing and reachability information between the internet top-level autonomous systems (AS). Most people, indeed most network administrators, never need to deal with...

A diagram illustrating what the new sleep-tracking skullcap could look like and how it would workNeuroEngineering Initiative VIEW 1 IMAGES Everybody knows sleep is important, but there's still a lot we don't understand about what it actually does to the brain – and how its benefits could be boosted. To investigate, the US Army has awarded researchers at Rice University and other institutions a grant to develop a portable skullcap that can monitor and adjust the flow of fluid through the brain during sleep. Most of us are familiar with the brain fog that comes with not getting enough sleep,...

In the middle of the night on July 6, Biden abandoned Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. The Pentagon did not bother telling the Afghanistan military, according to AP. The Taliban has no air force. It has some aircraft now as part of Biden's $90 billion gift to the Taliban. Enter the dragon. Red China. The Daily Mail reported, "There have been multiple reports of military planes arriving at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, just hours after images emerged showing that power was restored to the base for the first time since U.S. forces evacuated the stronghold in July. "Images circulating on social...

Ukrainian police said on Monday they had arrested a 25-year-old man who hacked more than 100 foreign companies and caused damage worth more than $150 million. The hacker, who was not identified, used phishing attacks and hijacked software that allows computers to be accessed remotely, a police statement said. The victims included "world-famous energy and tourism companies", it added. The hacker was caught with the help of law enforcement officials from the United States, France, Europol and Interpol. Police conducted searches at the homes of the defendant and his relatives. "As a result, computer equipment, mobile phones, vehicles and more...

A Democrat member of the Pennsylvania state House of Representatives has introduced a bill to require mandatory vasectomies for men over the age of 40, or who have already fathered three children, "whichever comes first." The bill would also enable women to take "civil action" against those who "wrongfully conceive" with them. The bill would "codify 'wrongful conception' to include when a person has demonstrated negligence toward preventing conception during intercourse."

It took the timely intervention of police officers to save the driver of a Toyota V8 in Kumasi as an angry man who accused him of having sex with his wife chased him with a huge shiny machete. The Toyota V8 owner appears to have been stuck in a traffic jam on the busy streets of Adum when his attacker confronted him, yelling and attempting to break the windscreen. A video of the incident sighted on Famebugs shows him screaming about how the driver used his wealth to influence his wife to allegedly have sex with her. The helpless driver...

he FBI’s latest annual report on hate crimes seemed to deliver more grim news about race relations in America, announcing a nearly 40% rise in anti-black hate crimes in 2020. Major news outlets trumpeted the headline-grabbing statistic, noting that it coincided with a rise in “white nationalism” and came amid a surge in anti-black “hostility” caused by summer 2020 protests. Attorney General Merrick Garland quickly promised “a comprehensive response” by the Department of Justice. But a closer look at the data reveals a more complicated picture.

An Afrobarometer survey by the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) has found that even though the majority of Ghanaians are tolerant of ethnicities other than theirs, “fewer than one in 10 (7%) are tolerant toward people in same-sex relationships”. This means some 93% of Ghanaians are not tolerant of same-sex-oriented people. “Ghanaians, generally, tend to express more nationalistic than ethnic sentiments, and most think they are more united as a people than divided”, the report concluded, adding: “Although discrimination is not an uncommon occurrence, Ghanaians express high levels of tolerance toward foreigners and citizens from different ethnic groups or religious...

Facebook is down, and not in a minor way. The Big Tech mammoth is down worldwide in a way in which they will not be able to easily recover as the DNS A and AAA records have been deleted. Technically speaking, facebook.com is now for sale. They’re not alone. Instagram, WhatsApp, and others have also been affected in the same way. It’s clearly a coordinated attack on a massive scale, though it’s unclear how it was pulled off. We’re not talking about a simple DDoS attack. This is catastrophic and would have required high-level access to certain protocols that one...

A network of glial cells, the logic gates of the gut’s nervous system, are seen in this micrograph. The cells — the dark orbs enveloped in gray — have been colorized according to how they respond to a chemical signal. Credit: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci./Gulbransen Lab ======================================================================================== Revealing the Logic of the Body’s “Second Brain” Scientists discover new science in the gut and, potentially, new leads on how to treat irritable bowel syndrome and other disorders. Researchers at Michigan State University have made a surprising discovery about the human gut’s enteric nervous system that itself is filled with surprising facts....