Free Republic

Italy is making life more uncomfortable for unvaccinated people this holiday season, excluding them from indoor restaurants, theatres, and museums starting Monday to reduce the spread of coronavirus and encourage vaccine sceptics to get their shots.Italian police have been empowered to check whether diners in restaurants or bars have a “super” green health pass certifying that they are either vaccinated or have recently recovered from the virus. Smart phone applications that verify people’s health pass status have been updated to prevent entry to concerts, movies or performances to those who have merely tested negative in recent days. The measures run...

Penn administration 'strongly advise' its swimmers to avoid talking to the media about the situation surrounding Thomas.. ... Even after a Wednesday team meeting where a source says Penn administration "strongly advised" its swimmers to avoid talking to the media about the situation surrounding transgender Penn swimmer Lia Thomas, a second female Penn swimmer has stepped forward to speak out ... The second female Penn swimmer to speak out, who was granted anonymity due to what is viewed as threats from the university, activists, and the political climate, wants people to know that Penn swimmers are "angry" over the lack...

"White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that President Joe Biden supports law enforcement and believes they should be properly funded and supported in light of the recent spike in violent crime. ..."

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 Union;...

"A public records request revealed that parents at Estrella Foothills High School in Goodyear, Ariz., successfully halted a Transgender Awareness Week that aimed to push left-wing gender theory on the school community."

Gov. Andy Beshear said dozens, maybe up to 100, were killed in western Kentucky after a long and significant tornado ripped through the area overnight. "We believe our death toll from this event will exceed 50 Kentuckians and probably end up 70 to 100," said Beshear. The city of Mayfield, Kentucky was hit particularly hard, including a candle manufacturing factory that was operating at the time the twister hit. There were 110 people in the building at the time that it was nearly collapsed by the tornado. Dozens are expected to be lost from there, Beshear said.

Elon Musk argued in recent remarks that “government is simply the biggest corporation, with the monopoly on violence.”Musk — who serves as chief executive of both Tesla and SpaceX — made the remarks during The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit, where he also slammed President Biden’s domestic agenda.“It does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people who have demonstrated great skill in capital allocation, and give it to an entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation, which is the government,” he commented.“Government is simply the biggest corporation, with the monopoly...

"Kentucky Republican James Comer recalls his fight between Adam Shift on House floor on ‘The Evening Edit’"

More than 500 residents in Oregon have now died of COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated against the virus as health officials continue to report over 2,000 new infections daily. Since the beginning of the pandemic, health authorities in Oregon have recorded a total of 552 breakthrough COVID-19 deaths throughout the state. Of the total number of deaths, 273 people had been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. At least 144 received the Moderna vaccine and 78 were given the Johnson & Johnson shots, according to data from the Oregon Health Authority. The recent report also showed that there were...

Last Thursday a 25-year-old criminal with a long history of arrests named Vincent Pinkney went on a stabbing spree in Manhattan. His first victim was an Italian Ph.D. student at Columbia University:The student, Davide Giri, was traveling home from soccer practice just before 11 p.m. when he was stabbed in the abdomen about two blocks from his apartment building, the police and friends said. He was taken to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead…Mr. Giri, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science who was expected to graduate in May, had begun working as a research assistant at Columbia around...

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There’s an ad out right now for Google’s Chromebook laptop with a slogan that says, “Switch to a new way to laptop.” While I’m hesitant to disparage any of our digital overlords for fear of being stricken from search results, I feel obligated to take a stand. You can’t “laptop” something; “laptop” isn’t a verb.While I try my hardest to keep things positive here at Grammar Guy H.Q., certain things grate my grammar gears. While I’ve touched on the “verbification” of nouns before, I haven’t explored how marketers and company names have verbified nouns ad nauseam.I know I’ve seen other...

NASA's new Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer spacecraft is a tiny satellite with the unique ability to capture images in X-ray with polarization and timing information for every photon captured. It's designed to operate for 2 years and capture new scientific measurements of some of the most extreme places in the universe with gravitational and magnetic fields that would destroy ordinary matter.And in an interesting turn of events the satellite switched from the intended launch vehicle to a cheaper option that nobody considered - the Falcon 9. This is the first time we've seen a rocket lauched from a domestic US...

UNITED STATES STEAMER, SAN JACINTO, AT SEA, Nov. 16. SIR: In my dispatch by Commander TAYLOR, I confined myself to the reports of the movements of this ship and the facts connected with the capture of Messrs. MASON, SLIDELL, EUSTIS and MACFARLAND, as I intended to write you particularly relative to the reasons which induced my action in making these prisoners. When I heard at Cienfuegos, on the south side of Cuba, of these Commissioners having landed on the Island of Cuba, and that they were at Havana, and would depart in the English steamer of the 7th of November,...

For many years—most of my politically cognizant life, in fact—I felt secure in my politics. Truth and justice, I believed, leaned leftward. If you were some version of a decent human being, you cared about those less fortunate than you, which meant that you supported a whole host of measures designed to even the playing field a little. Sometimes, these measures had unintended consequences (see under: Stalin, Josef), but that wasn’t reason enough to despair of the long march to equality. Besides, there was hardly an alternative: On the other end of the political transom lurked despicable creeps, right-wing orcs...

While documenting my former high school’s attempt to indoctrinate me with critical race theory six years ago, I remarked that now, several years later, “the situation has undoubtedly worsened.” Worsened it has. Now, Campbell Union High School District has promoted more than 100 “equity resources” to students and staff, including a document that taught students how to put a curse on those who say “all lives matter.”Colorblindness, Cops, and CursesThe page serves as a vast library for CRT resources and features 60 different links, including a Google Drive folder with 45 different documents. The list made sure to include the...

Each of the three South Omaha teens was at a tender age: 19, 17, 15. Jose Antonio Ramos, 19, was dabbling on the edges of hard drugs and the Sureños gang. The 17-year-old, Marcos Garza-Calderon, was on probation for methamphetamine possession and was posting pictures of himself on Facebook wearing a Tupac shirt and flashing gang signs, the butt of a handgun near his pocket. The 15-year-old, Manuel Gijon-Villa, was just finishing up his sophomore year at Bryan High School and hanging out with the two older teens. They were friends. Close enough to be hanging out in the same...

CNBC’s Jim Kramer bizarrely touted the current state of the US economy as “the strongest economy” he has ever seen. This claim was made despite high inflation and high gas prices. It just happened to come after the Biden Administration met with news outlets about their economic coverage. Tucker Carlson responded to this on his Fox News show. Tucker played a clip of Jim Kramer from 2008 telling Americans not to take money out of Bear Sterns. This was a few days before it collapsed. Tucker continued to blast Kramer. “In a normal country, with a functioning meritocracy, anyone who...

The UK is facing a substantial wave of Omicron infections in January without further restrictions, scientists say. The number of deaths from the variant by the end of April could range from 25,000 to 75,000 depending on how well vaccines perform, they said. But the experts behind the study said there was still uncertainty around the modelling. In the worst-case scenario tougher restrictions may be needed to stop hospitals being overwhelmed, they said. The study is by an influential group of disease modellers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) who also advise the government - but...

For many rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, self-incriminating messages, photos and videos that they broadcast on social media before, during and after the insurrection are influencing even their criminal sentences. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson read aloud some of Russell Peterson’s posts about the riot before she sentenced the Pennsylvania man to 30 days imprisonment. “Overall I had fun lol,” Peterson posted on Facebook. The judge told Peterson that his posts made it “extraordinarily difficult” for her to show him leniency. “The ’lol’ particularly stuck in my craw because, as I hope you’ve...