Free Republic

US politicians should stop calling for a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics to avoid hurting bilateral ties and China will take "countermeasures" if necessary, China's foreign ministry said on Monday (Dec 6). The Biden administration is expected to announce this week that US government officials will not attend the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, CNN reported on Sunday. More from AsiaOne Read the condensed version of this story, and other top stories with NewsLite. Those calling for a boycott are "grandstanding" and should stop "so as not to affect the dialogue and cooperation between China and the United States...

New details have emerged about the days and hours leading up to a deadly shooting at a Michigan high school. Officials said on the day of the shooting, the parents of suspect Ethan Crumbley, came to the school to meet with teachers about multiple behavioral problems the 15-year-old had. According to Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard, two separate teachers brought up concerns over Crumbley’s behavior in the classroom. This occured once on Monday and again on Tuesday, which was the day of the massacre. “We have since learned that the schools did have contact with the student the day before...

The world over, people feel lied to, unheard, and pushed aside. They no longer have any faith in their leaders. They’re lashing out against their governments and health officials, in some cases by rejecting the COVID-19 vaccine. Populism, a political expression of this mistrust, is correlated with vaccine hesitancy. In a 2019 study, Jonathan Kennedy, a sociologist at Queen Mary University of London, found a significant association between the percentage of people who voted for populist parties within a country and the percent who believe vaccines are not important or effective. Past research has similarly found that populists around the...

Future pandemics could be even more lethal than COVID-19 so the lessons learned from the outbreak must not be squandered and the world should ensure it is prepared for the next viral onslaught, one of the creators of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine said. The coronavirus has killed 5.26 million people across the world, according to Johns Hopkins University, wiped out trillions of dollars in economic output and turned life upside down for billions of people. "The truth is, the next one could be worse. It could be more contagious, or more lethal, or both," Sarah Gilbert said in the Richard Dimbleby...

[H/T Bratch]As Mark Twain famously noted: history may not always repeat, but it rhymes. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has taken the leading elements of a dark time in history and now openly advocates for their repetition. Can these people not hear themselves? This is madness.Mrs. von der Leyen’s husband is Heiko von der Leyen, the Director of the US biotech company Orgenesis which specializes in medical research to include cell and gene therapies. Mr. Heiko von der Leyen organizes the scientific experiments, and then his wife Ursula advocates for forced vaccinations for all citizens within the European...

A predictive model of a polarized group, similar to the current U.S. Senate, demonstrates that when an outside threat—like war or a pandemic—fails to unite the group, the divide may be irreversible through democratic means. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as part of a Dynamics of Political Polarization Special Feature, the model identifies such atypical behavior among the political elite as a powerful symptom of dangerously high levels of polarization. "We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a little bit closer initially, but if polarization is too extreme, eventually the...

JOHANNESBURG — Some South Africa hospital wards are jammed with patients infected with the omicron coronavirus variant as President Cyril Ramaphosa urged South Africans on Monday to get vaccinated. In the past week, cases have reached more than 16,000, up dramatically from 2,300 last Monday, according to South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases. The NICD says the increase in cases in such a short period of time is “unprecedented” in the trajectory of the pandemic, now in its fourth phase in the country. “Unfortunately, we’re seeing a more than doubling of hospital admissions each day,” said Ian Sanne, an...

PALM BEACH, Fla., Dec. 06, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Trump Media & Technology Group (‘TMTG’) today announced that Congressman Devin G. Nunes has been selected to join the Company as Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Nunes is currently a sitting U.S. House Representative, representing California’s 22nd congressional district, and formerly the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Mr. Nunes will be leaving the U.S. House of Representatives and will begin his new role as Chief Executive Officer of TMTG in January 2022.

KINGSPORT, Tenn. - Matthew Hawn checked his phone to see if the wait was finally over. It had been five months since he was fired for teaching about White privilege at a high school in rural Tennessee. Two months since he had fought to regain his job at an emotional three-day hearing, becoming a symbol of the acrimonious debate over the way race, racism and history should be taught in America's schools. A lifelong resident of Kingsport, Hawn was well aware his liberal views made him an outlier in his overwhelmingly White, mostly conservative community. But that had never mattered...

Nashville police arrested a woman on Thursday (Nov. 2) accused of carrying a handgun on the East Nashville Magnet School’s campus, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department reported. Barquita Williams was released from police custody on $1,000 bond. According to the police, the incident stemmed from a physical fight in the school building between two female students at dismissal time. They had argued with each other earlier in the day. As they fought in a stairwell of the school, several other students jumped into the brawl. Meanwhile, parents were waiting outside to pick up their kids as the students scuffled inside...

Three women were robbed and at times assaulted in separate incidents over the course of 25 minutes in Chicago’s Lakeview, police said Friday. The startling string of Thursday incidents comes on the heels of a four-robbery pattern in the neighborhoods of Lakeview and Lincoln Park, according to CWB Chicago, which was the first to report the news. Robberies citywide are up 8% for the last 28-day period, which ended on November 28, according to department crime statistics. The first incident on Thursday happened around 5:10 p.m. local time in North Southport Avenue and West Byron Street, where the victim was...

The killer drone whooshed out of its launch tube, spreading its carbon wings and shooting into the sky. Flying too fast for the naked eye to track, the battery-powered robot circled the Utah desert, hunting for the target it had been programmed to strike. Moments later, the drone sailed through the driver’s side window of an empty pick-up truck and exploded in a fireball. “Good hit,” exclaimed an operator from AeroVironment, the company that produces the drone and sells it to the U.S. military. NBC News traveled to a military testing center for exclusive access to the first-ever public demonstration...

ransomnote: Posting a transcript of this brave, strong woman's 2 minute video clip below because it's likely to be deleted by Twitter. Video is in English with German subtitles.FareTheeWell on Twitter: ".Message to the people of the World 👀👀💥 https://t.co/jyudOsW9XV" / TwitterTranscript begins:This message goes out to the people in Australia.My name is Christian Anderson. I’m a member of European Parliament, and I am answering your SOS call.I will do whatever I can to make it known to the world that your once free and liberal democracy has been transformed into a totalitarian regime, which tramples on humans rights, civil...

Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Rumble's parent company Cantor Fitzgerald, stated on Monday that they have worked out a distribution deal with Donald Trump's planned "Truth" social media platform. Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Rumble's parent company Cantor Fitzgerald, stated on Monday that they have worked out a distribution deal with former President Donald Trump's planned "TRUTH" social media platform. "Truth and the 45th president are going to use Rumble's infrastructure, their technology, their cloud distribution capability, so they are going to be a service provider, a tech provider to the president's Truth Social," Lutnick told interviewer John Bachman on...

Kim Taylor, 73, a retired nurse, was alone in a pen at Cultivate Care Farms feeding livestock when a sheep repeatedly rammed her. Police and medical workers responded shortly after 9 a.m. Taylor, who went into cardiac arrest, was rushed to UMass Memorial Marlborough Hospital where she was pronounced dead. There were no witnesses to the incident. Cultivate Farms is a nonprofit farm that focuses on therapy, wellness and community outreach. The organization's website outlines its approach: "Through physical work and connection with the animals, clients gain insight into their own abilities for positive change within themselves and in relationships...

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently announced that the state government would provide more than $100 million in funding to support the existing Florida National Guard and to reestablish a Florida State Guard. The governor’s press release explained that the funding “supports vital emergency response services that the National Guard provides,” and includes resources “to establish the Florida State Guard” which “will enable civilians to be trained in the best emergency response techniques,” making Florida the “23rd state with a state guard recognized by the federal government. The governor’s decision provoked something of a partisan freak out on social media, with...

DENVER (AP) — A state audit has found that Colorado likely or potentially paid $73.1 million in fraudulent unemployment claims during the coronavirus pandemic’s first year, including $3.9 million on behalf of dead people and $5 million on behalf of people who were unqualified because they were incarcerated. The Office of the State Auditor report released Monday cited a nationwide surge in criminal identity theft used to seek federal and state pandemic unemployment aid as an underlying factor in payments in the names of dead and incarcerated people. It also cited pressure to expedite federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal...

President Joe Biden is the kind of man who deliberately would steer his car into a ditch, crawl from the wreckage, and then probe the ditch for criminal conduct. Such nonsense mirrors Biden’s recent instructions to the Federal Trade Commission. Citing “mounting evidence of anti-consumer behavior by oil-and-gas companies,” Biden told the Federal Trade Commission to “bring all of the Commission’s tools to bear if you uncover any wrongdoing.” Is Biden cynical enough to blame Big Oil for a national fiasco that he concocted? Or is he so touchingly self-unaware that he misses the connection between higher pump prices and...

My daughter is 24 and graduating college this year. I want to get her a magazine subscription for young ladies. A lot of women's magazines lean heavily left even thought they're not supposed to be political. Can anyone recommend a young women's magazine that's fun to read and that might lean conservative?

Explanation: What's that unusual spot on the Moon? It's the International Space Station. Using precise timing, the Earth-orbiting space platform was photographed in front of a partially lit gibbous Moon last month. The featured composite, taken from Payson, Arizona, USA last month, was intricately composed by combining, in part, many 1/2000-second images from a video of the ISS crossing the Moon. A close inspection of this unusually crisp ISS silhouette will reveal the outlines of numerous solar panels and trusses. The bright crater Tycho is visible on the upper left, as well as comparatively rough, light colored terrain known as...