Free Republic

Children of military families were forced to wear masks and stay socially distanced Tuesday at the White House as First Lady Jill Biden read them a children’s book. Biden welcomed a second-grade class from Malcolm Elementary School in Waldorf, Maryland for a Christmas event at the White House that included a Donkey Hodie puppet show sing-a-long, appearances from the Wild Kratts stars, and assorted characters from PBS shows.

A jury has awarded $10 million to a South Carolina woman who sued Walmart after she needed multiple surgeries because of an infection that resulted from stepping on a rusty nail inside one of the company’s stores in Florence, her lawyers said. “The weakness of Walmart’s case, among other things, was their failure to produce a video that they claim showed their conforming behavior to a company policy calling for employees to perform regular safety sweeps,” the news release said. “No such evidence was presented for the duration of the five-day-long trial.”

The House could vote as early as Wednesday on a temporary measure to fund the government through the beginning of next year as Democrats seek a way to starve off a shutdown. Government funding runs out Friday at midnight. The House measure would then go to the Senate for approval. Democrats are seeking the stopgap solution as they struggle to deal with their December agenda, which includes keeping the government running, passing a critical defense bill, raising the debt ceiling and final approval for President Joe Biden's signature Build Back Better legislation.

Insider requested all flight-history data associated with four planes owned by Jeffrey Epstein. The FAA rejected the request but later provided the records in response to an unrelated request. The new FAA records include hundreds of previously unknown flights made by Epstein's jets. They corroborate Insider's reporting on Epstein's travel patterns as documented in court records and flight-signal data. A searchable database now contains 2,618 flights made by Epstein's private jets from 1995 to July 6, 2019. In January 2020, Insider asked the Federal Aviation Administration for all the agency's flight records, including departure and arrival data, associated with a...

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he and GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had a “good conversation” about raising the debt ceiling and that talks are ongoing as Congress barrels toward a debt cliff. Schumer, speaking on the Senate floor, said Congress needed to deal with the debt ceiling “soon,” after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned lawmakers that they have until Dec. 15 to raise the nation’s borrowing limit. “I recently had a good conversation with the Republican leader about this issue, and I expect to continue those talks on achieving a bipartisan solution to addressing the debt limit,”...

Coronavirus hospitalizations are sharply increasing in a South African province that has been identified as an early hotspot of the omicron variant, raising concerns about the new strain as health officials work to learn more about its transmissibility and severity. The Gauteng province — which includes Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa — has seen hospitalizations spike by almost 400 percent since the beginning of November, according to NBC News. During the week ending Nov. 6, hospitalizations in the province rose from 120 to 580, according to data from South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), cited by...

Barcelona-based biotech company Libre Foods has announced its first foray into the world of fungi-based whole-cut meats, with an animal-free bacon designed to captivate meat eaters. Having showcased the rashers at a private tasting event in Barcelona, feedback is being used to push commercial roll-out in early 2022. Libre Foods has announced a fungi-based bacon product created using fermentation (precision) technology. It is designed to meet the growing EU demand for pork, currently a $53 billion industry, that offers an alternative to the disadvantages of commercial pig farming. The fungi bacon was unveiled to investors and food-tech community members at...

Fifteen state financial officers sent a letter to U.S. banks last week noting $600 billion in assets they pledge to take elsewhere if the financial institutions embrace corporate wokeism and prohibit financing to the fossil fuel industry.Led by West Virginia Republican Treasurer Riley Moore, the group promised “collective action” in the form of an “economic boycott.”“Just as each state represented in this letter is unique in its governing laws and economy, our actions will take different forms,” they wrote in the letter obtained by The Federalist. “However, the overarching objective of our actions will be the same – to protect...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday he had not yet decided whether to run for six more years in the Kremlin when his current term ends in 2024, while praising U.S. President Joe Biden's decision to seek reelection in that year...."What President Biden said about his possible reelection I think he was absolutely right to do." Putin said..."The U.S. president doesn't need my opinions, but I think he acted absolutely rightly."

Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on Monday highlighted the sentencing differences given across the country based apparently on political ideology. Speaking with Fox News reporter Bill Melugin, Carlson said the QAnon Shamam will get three years behind bars for entering the Capitol building on Jan. 6., but a criminal who smashed a GOP senator’s office with an axe faced a relatively light punishment. Fox News’ Bill Melugin tells Tucker Carlson about TPM’s report by @MrAndyNgo and @MiaCathell that revealed a man with ties to Antifa only received probation after attacking a Republican Senator’s office with an axe.Read more: https://t.co/gOdPJMVMb0 pic.twitter.com/PXIsp4iNzw— The...

Study in Science of more than 780,000 Veterans is the first to compare waning protection rates across all three vaccine types available to most Americans and to directly report death rates after breakthrough infection. A new study in the leading journal Science reviewed COVID-19 breakthrough infections among 780,225 Veterans, finding that vaccine protection declined from 87.9% to 48.1% during the 2021 Delta surge in the U.S. The researchers from PHI, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of Texas Health Science Center found a dramatic decline in effectiveness for the Janssen (Johnson and Johnson) vaccine, from 86.4% in March...

From L-R, NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins has warned it may take weeks before scientists ascertain the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines against the new omicron variant, which could be more contagious and have more mutations than the other strains. “We do know that this is a variant that has a lot of mutations — like 50 of them, and more than 30 of those in the spike protein, which is the part of the virus that attaches to your...

Former New York Mets star Lenny Dykstra blasted left-wing, anti-gun activist David Hogg Sunday after the youngster tweeted that he is chagrined over the homelessness problem in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University. Hogg, who has become a left-wing hero for his constant woke posts on Twitter, won himself a place at prestigious Harvard even though at 1270, his SAT scores wouldn’t seem to merit his inclusion there — Harvard usually doesn’t even consider applicants unless they have a 1460 SAT or higher. And on Sunday, the anti-gun teen posted a tweet about how he often sees homeless people as...

Former New York Mets star Lenny Dykstra blasted left-wing, anti-gun activist David Hogg Sunday after the youngster tweeted that he is chagrined over the homelessness problem in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University. Hogg, who has become a left-wing hero for his constant woke posts on Twitter, won himself a place at prestigious Harvard even though at 1270, his SAT scores wouldn’t seem to merit his inclusion there — Harvard usually doesn’t even consider applicants unless they have a 1460 SAT or higher. And on Sunday, the anti-gun teen posted a tweet about how he often sees homeless people as...

It turns out that the Billion-Dollar King of Abortion’s philanthropic organization gave close to $200 million to just one extremist abortion group that prides itself as being the “professional association of abortion providers.” Warren Buffett’s Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation gave at least a whopping $196,388,893 between 2003 and 2020 alone to the National Abortion Federation (NAF), according to Foundation Directory Online data. NAF boasts that its mission is to “unite, represent, serve, and support abortion providers in delivering patient-centered, evidence-based care.” It also states that it “provides direct services to patients who need help accessing abortion care.” In addition, NAF...

The omicron Chinese coronavirus variant was present in Europe before it was identified in South Africa, Dutch health authorities revealed Tuesday. According to the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), the omicron variant was infecting the Netherlands nearly one week before the world awakened Friday to the strand experts and scientists said first originated in South Africa.

With a younger generation increasingly focused on the problem of rising global temperatures, prominent environmental activist and author Bill McKibben is launching a new grassroots movement to mobilize older Americans to combat climate change and to work on related social justice issues. McKibben, 60, has partnered with co-founders Akaya Windwood, a 65-year-old nonprofit consultant, and Vanessa Arcara, a millennial who worked at 350.org, to mobilize older Americans. Their new group, known as Third Act, is having a soft launch this week and a full-fledged rollout early next year. “Third Act is for people like me — that is to say...

Pastor Artur PawlowskiA prominent Canadian pastor is now free to criticize the government’s lockdowns and restrictions on Christian worship in response to coronavirus after an appellate court suspended the enforcement of a lower court ruling requiring him to state the government’s preferred narrative about the lockdowns every time he made public remarks. Pastor Artur Pawlowski of Street Church and The Cave of Adullam in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, who has become a well-known figure for his outspoken objection to authorities' restrictions on corporate worship and viral videos documenting his tense exchanges with law enforcement officials seeking to enforce the restrictions, will...

We’ve been keeping track of plant-based meat alternatives for a while now. This year, vegan chicken offerings have sprung up big time, and overall, the momentum has felt strong. But now, the Financial Times reports that sales of plant-based meat are starting to fall. This might come as a surprise given the wild amount of choices at grocery stores these days, but it turns out that variety might actually be part of the problem. A data group called SPINS found that in the four weeks prior to October 3, sales of vegan meat substitutes dropped 1.8% as compared to 2020....

An experimental chewing gum could reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a recent study published in the journal Molecular Therapy. You might already have noticed headlines calling the findings "fresh hope" in our fight against COVID-19. But how excited should we be? And would this gum work against omicron, the newest variant of concern? Evidence shows people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have high levels of virus in their saliva. So researchers in the US wanted to investigate whether a specially designed chewing gum could reduce the amount of virus in the mouth, and therefore potentially...