Free Republic

Two 16-year-old Iowa schoolboys have been charged with murdering their Spanish teacher, after one of them bragged about it on social media, according to a criminal complaint. The body of Fairfield High School teacher Nohema Graber, 66, was found dumped in a park Tuesday hours after she was first reported missing, according to officials. Her body had been hidden “under a tarp, wheelbarrow and railroad ties” after she appeared to have been killed by “trauma to the head,” court records show. Officials have not speculated on a possible motive, or given details on what the teens allegedly discussed in the...

DENVER (CBS4) – Police typically use arrest affidavits to simply state the circumstances surrounding an arrest. Last week, a Denver police officer used an arrest affidavit to warn the court not to give a defendant bail. Robert Avila had been arrested three times in 24 hours. While his initial charges weren’t felonies, officers described him as erratic, incoherent and escalating, but the judges twice released him on a personal recognizance bond, which meant he just had to promise to return for his next court appearance. Avila’s first arrest came on Oct. 25 just after 10 p.m. Police were called to...

PITTSBURGH — A 34-year-old woman was arrested outside Family Court in downtown Pittsburgh after Allegheny County Sheriff’s deputies say she pointed a gun at her mother. According to deputies, Kerneisha McClelland and her mother were at a court proceeding. When the women left the court facility and McClelland left to get her vehicle, deputies say when she returned, she confronted her mother and began arguing. With a child strapped into a car seat in the back of the vehicle, deputies said McClelland pulled out a Bersa .380 handgun and pointed it at her mother. McClelland’s mother went back into the...

President Biden’s approval is tanking among black voters, an Emerson College survey released this week found. The survey showed Biden’s overall disapproval increasing yet again in the last two months, going from 47 percent in September to 50 percent in November. Overall, that is an 11-point increase in overall disapproval since February. Meanwhile, in that same timeframe, his approval has dropped from 49 percent to 41 percent from February to November.

Gun violence is an endemic problem in the United States -- once again getting worse in some areas after many years of declines and persistent at high levels in others. Despite being one of the leading causes of death, one thing that that's difficult to know is the scope of the problem, fueled in part by a more than a two-decade-long prohibition -- recently changed -- on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention using federal funds to "advocate or promote gun control." It wasn't always this way -- the CDC in 1983 adopted a public health approach to gun...

The date is Feb. 9, 1997, and the man responsible for one of the most egregious environmental follies in human history is sitting at a restaurant in Boyce, Virginia, with the leader of the movement seeking to undo his mistake. Of the hundreds of dams Floyd Dominy green lit during his decade running the Bureau of Reclamation, none are as loathed as his crown jewel, the Glen Canyon Dam. In 1963, Dominy erected the 710-foot (216-meter) tall monument to himself out of ego and concrete, deadening the Colorado River just upstream of the Grand Canyon, drowning more than 250 square...

Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Friday laughed when asked about Joe Biden’s plans to bring gas prices down.

I remember when it crashed down into the 7000's back in 2009 the pundits swore it would take 30 years to get back to it's 2008 level because massive amounts of people got burnt and they would never get back into the market. So much for that.

Colorado's Democratic Gov. Jared Polis is under fire after a new trove of documents revealed he used loopholes to avoid paying federal income taxes for years. Driving the news: A ProPublica report published Thursday found Polis, a tech entrepreneur and former congressman, used donations and financial arrangements to get out of paying federal income taxes in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Explanation: Light-years across, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula appears in silhouette against a rich, luminous background of stars. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, obscuring clouds are part of a Milky Way molecular cloud some 1,200 light-years distant. It is also listed as Barnard 150 (B150), one of 182 dark markings of the sky cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard. Packs of low mass stars are forming within, but their collapsing cores are only visible at long infrared wavelengths. Still, the colorful stars of Cepheus add to this...

Police evacuated students at Yale University after several bomb threats were called in around campus Friday, police said. Responding officers said the threats targeted “multiple buildings” in the Old Campus area of the campus in New Haven, Connecticut, the Yale Daily News reported. Eight buildings were evacuated out of an abundance of caution, including University Theater, Jonathan Edwards College and the Yale Art Gallery, the newspaper reported.

Gutfeld!' panel discusses the Democrats' reactions to Tuesday night's election defeat

The latest version of the Build Back Better Act, one of the centerpieces of President Joe Biden’s economic and social agenda, includes a tax credit for local outlets for employing journalists. Lawmakers in the House and the Senate have introduced bills to try to boost struggling local newspapers and broadcast outlets. Under the text of the bill released Wednesday, per Punchbowl News, employers would get a credit against employment taxes for local news journalists. It would provide a credit up to $25,000 to defray employment taxes in the first year, and $15,000 in the next four years, for each employee....

White House principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday that President Biden wouldn’t wait to sign the infrastructure bill and would sign it after it passes the House. “If the infrastructure bill is passed today, he will sign it,” Jean-Pierre told reporters during a briefing Friday afternoon. “It’s important to get that done for the American public.” Jean-Pierre stressed, however, that both the infrastructure bill and broader spending package are “critically important” to Biden.

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) on Friday criticized a provision in House Democrats’ social spending bill to provide a payroll tax credit to local news outlets, as Democrats struggled to secure the votes to pass the broader package. Scalise took issue with the provision in a tweet, highlighting an estimate from the Joint Committee on Taxation that it would cost $1.67 billion over the next decade. “What a scam,” Scalise said. Dems’ radical spending bill exposed: Tax credits for journalists. Make no mistake—this is Biden and Dems in Congress helping pay the reporters’ salaries who cover for them. Experts...

Two NYC firefighters gave The Epoch Times an update on the present situation of the FDNY under the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.Most alarming was an internal document indicating that on Nov. 3, there were only 55 percent of firetrucks available. The normal number, according to him, should be about 90 percent.

Pope Hugs Anti-Christian Hindu NationalistIndian Catholics compare meeting to Hitler's greeting Vatican officialsVATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) - Indian Christians are exploding with outrage after the Vatican released photographs of Pope Francis and India's anti-Christian prime minister Narendra Modi clasped in a warm embrace. Meme compares Hitler and Modi meetings India's religious minorities and secular-minded Hindus — who regard Modi as a racist, populist, nationalist and Hindu-supremacist politician — recoiled in horror at the images of Modi and Francis during a papal audience Saturday. Christians asked if Francis had addressed the persecution of minorities that has peaked under Modi, with Christians and...

Today's lithium batteries commonly use a liquid electrolyte to carry ions between the two electrodes, but scientists eyeing solid alternatives see some exciting opportunities ahead. Among them are the authors of a new study who have used cellulose derived from wood as the basis for one of these solid electrolytes, which is paper-thin and can bend and flex to absorb stress as the battery cycles. One shortcoming of the electrolytes used in today's lithium batteries is that they contain volatile liquids that carry a risk of fire if the device short circuits, and can promote the formation of tentacle-like growths...

A Chinese official has responded to the Pentagon's latest report on China's military power in comments shared with Newsweek, saying it is the United States, not China, that is bringing the world closer to nuclear war. The Department of Defense released on Wednesday its annual "Report on Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China," covering a wide range of assessments regarding China and its People's Liberation Army, the world's largest armed forces and the top military competitor of the U.S. Among the more notable findings was the observation that China was "accelerating the large-scale expansion of its...

A Florida man has been arrested in connection to the bloody murder of a convenience store manager who was stabbed 73 times in 1996 after DNA from a discarded beer can linked him to the cold case, investigators said Thursday. Kenneth Stough Jr., 54, was taken into custody in Lake County on Tuesday more than 25 years after the murder of 31-year-old Terence Paquette, Orange County Sheriff John Mina told reporters at a press conference. Paquette was found dead on the morning of Feb. 3, 1996, inside the bathroom of the Lil’ Champ convenience store in northwest Orange County. Mina...