Free Republic

... The Near North district, which includes River North and parts of downtown, saw the highest number of reported assaults of any district in the city. In 2020, there were 77 sexual assaults reported in the Near North district, according to the CPD’s CompStat figures. Through Sunday, there were 151 sexual assaults reported this year — a more than 95% increase over last year and the most in two decades in the district. While police and advocates don’t directly blame the large number of bars and nightclubs in the area for the spike in reports, they note alcohol or drugs...

America has literally lost the plot. On the last soundstage, all parts are interchangeable: Men become women, and the grizzled butch coaches of college athletics can't wait to put 'em on the ladies' track team. Women become men, and then pregnant men, and then threaten the hospital for the humiliation of having to give birth in a "maternity ward". Warner Bros gives J K Rowling the bum's rush for being so out of it as to think periods are something women have. In the TERF wars, lesbians are transphobic because they don't wish to date women with penises. At dark...

As we close the books on 2021, the award for worst prediction of the year was that Donald Trump would somehow fade from political influence. Anti-Trumper Karl Rove gushed last February 11 that Trump was “effectively tarnished for all time and incapable of running in 2024.” Rep. Liz Cheney may have taken Rove’s advice or agreed with it, foolishly betting her political future on a banishment of Trump from the political stage. Instead, it is Cheney who is being shown the door and will likely be humiliated in her own upcoming primary. Democrat John Kerry, whose presidential ambitions crashed in...

As we approach 2022, many are wondering what the year ahead may bring. While we can't read too much into numerology, the number 22 associated with this year is a very significant prophetic number, carrying multiple layers of biblical meanings. 22 - Number of Completion and Fullness The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters - from the first letter Aleph to the final letter Tav. The Hebrew Bible features many 'acrostic' passages, which are passages using all22 letters of the alphabet in sequence, with each successive letter starting a new line. From a Hebraic mindset, passages that use the entire...

On Sunday, Anthony “Dr. Science” Fauci said that he thought a vaccine mandate for air travel would be a great idea. On Monday, having run it up the flagpole without any salutes, he walked that idea back again. But on Tuesday, to make it impossible for Americans to plan even a day in advance, Biden put vaccines for air travel back on the table. If Democrats aren’t intentionally trying to destroy America, they’re certainly doing a good job by accident. Here’s where we are:The CDC has long acknowledged that vaccines do not stop COVID infections or spread, so that means...

Yesterday, while scrolling through my news feed, I ran across a rather alarming headline from NBC news. It declared that COVID hospitalizations among children were rising. That would be a particularly worrisome development because we have long been operating on the assumption that children were the least likely to be infected with the novel coronavirus and, even if they were, they tend to experience the least severe symptoms. Also, most of the new cases are from the Omicron variant at this point, and that strain is supposed to be considerably “milder” to begin with. But you don’t have to dig...

A summary of decades of research on a rather 'out-there' idea involving viruses from space raises questions on just how scientific we can be when it comes to speculating on the history of life on Earth. It's easy to throw around words like crackpot, rogue, and maverick in describing the scientific fringe, but then papers like this one, from 2018, come along and leave us blinking owlishly, unsure of where to even begin. A total of 33 names were listed as authors on this review, which was published by Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology back in August 2018. The...

South Africa research suggests infection with milder variant protects against more severe variant, while peer-reviewed study finds "robust, cross-reactive and sustained immune responses" from COVID in children. The rapid spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 worldwide "may have positive implications in terms of decreasing the Covid-19 burden of severe disease," according to a new study funded by the Gates Foundation and South African, U.S. and U.K. government agencies. Led by researchers in South Africa, where the variant was first identified, it's the latest study to suggest the pandemic is approaching endemic status, calling into question the benefits of strict...

I bet the Bearcats at 20/1 on 12/20 when Covid protocols weren’t a concern. With the Covid Roulette forfeiting games right and left, there are even odds among the four teams that they could be crowned champion or participant in the championship without hiking a football. I’m no mathematician but 20/1 now seems like a much better bet. I checked this morning 11/1. So Vegas is now playing Covid Roulette?

Antibodies, which are developed after the infection with delta strain of the coronavirus, may not protect from the new omicron strain and vice versa, Director General of the DNKOM Center for Molecular Genetic Studies Andrei Isayev told TASS. "Big number of mutations means that the virion of this strain structurally differs from virions of other strains - they have different spike proteins. That is why the antibodies developed by those who earlier had suffered from other strains or got vaccinated cannot brace omicron. That means that there will be no cross-immunity between the omicron and other strains. Accordingly, antibodies that...

All things considered, 2021 was a good year for Republicans. In 2022 will the GOP build on its 2021 successes, or allow itself to be dragged back to 2020? The answer is right in front of our eyes. This year has been a disaster for the Democrats largely because they refused to move forward, electing instead to remain mired in the past and fighting yesterday’s battles. If Republicans take the same course in 2022, they will likely reap the same disappointing harvest. The events of last January 6 at the U.S. Capitol will predictably be a focal point for Democrat...

The iconic CBS Sunday morning news show “Face the Nation” edited out a network correspondent’s passionate criticism of COVID-19 policies for the harm they have caused children and teenagers who have a minuscule chance of suffering serious illness or death from the disease. Newsbusters reported the remarks of CBS correspondent Jan Crawford were axed seconds before they would have aired Sunday. “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan, in a special year-end show with a reporter roundtable, pivoted the discussion, saying, Well, I want to get to underreported stories as well, Jan?” Crawford immediately responded, saying her to underreported story centered...

While Christians are facing persecution and shrinking numbers throughout the Middle East, Israeli Christians are facing a different reality with growing numbers and high quality of life. The number of Christians in Israel grew by 1.4 percent in 2020 reaching 182,000 people with 84 percent saying they are satisfied with life in Israel, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). Israeli Christians make up about 1.9 percent of the state's population, most of them speaking Arabic. The majority of Christians live in Nazareth (21,400), Haifa (16,500), Jerusalem (12,900) and Shefar'am (10,400), according to the CBS. The recent storms that...

Authorities in New Jersey released the mugshot of the personal trainer police say shot both his parents on Christmas morning inside their $3.2 million Long Island home, according to reports. Dino Tomasetti, 29, is accused of shooting his father, 65, and mother, 64, the New York Post reported. The father was hit in the back and his mother in the head, the paper reported. The Daily Voice reported that his father is in worse condition than the mother. The Post reported that Tomasetti, who resides in Brooklyn, was arrested in Mahwah, N.J., after allegedly fleeing the home in Hewlett Harbor...

During Donald Trump's second impeachment trial last February, his lawyers argued that he bore no responsibility for the riot that interrupted the congressional tally of Joe Biden's electoral votes on Jan. 6 because "the breach at the Capitol was planned several days in advance." In their view, that meant the violence had nothing to do with the inflammatory speech that Trump gave that day, during which he urged his supporters to "fight like hell" and "stop the steal." That defense elided the months that Trump spent promoting the fantasy that systematic election fraud had deprived him of his rightful victory,...

The U.S. Constitution is the sacred text of American government and civic life. But it's time to face facts: The document, written in 1787, isn't working. The signs are all around us. Just 38 percent of Americans in a recent Gallup poll expressed either a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the presidency, down from 48 percent in 2001. Congress, never high in the public's estimation to begin with, fell from 26 percent to a mere 12 percent. The Supreme Court has also taken a hit, down from 50 percent to 36 percent during the same period....

Can we muster the fighting spirit and a willingness to push back against the administrative tyranny that rings round all of modern life? In 1972, three black men, Melvin Cale, Louis Moore, and Henry D. Jackson, Jr., hijacked Southern Airways Flight 49, demanding $10 million and safe passage to Cuba. The hijacking lasted nearly 30 hours and involved multiple stops throughout the United States, Canada, and eventually, Cuba. In the process of negotiating with the FBI, the hijackers threatened to ram their aircraft, a Douglas DC-9, into the High Flux Isotope Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee if their demands weren’t...

Glycyrrhizin was valued in ancient Arabia and Greece for treating coughs and in China for relieving irritation of the mucous membranes. In modern times, glycyrrhizin has been shown to be a formidable antiviral, fighting herpes, HIV, hepatitis, influenza, encephalitis and pneumonia as well as less known viruses like respiratory syncytial virus, arboviruses, vaccinia virus and vesicular stomatitis virus. Glycyrrhizin Has Medicinal Properties You may think of licorice as an extract, a sweetener or even a candy, like Good and Plenty, but it’s actually complex biochemically and offers important medical benefits. According to PubChem, a database of chemical molecules maintained by...

We have previously warned about a whopping food crisis and supply problems in the fertilizer market. Well, now is worse because that was BEFORE we had the natural gas crisis. Why is that important? Natural gas is THE critical input into making fertilizer. Urea is essentially ammonia in solid state, the process of which entails reacting ammonia with CO2. And we all now know — thanks to the climate nazis — that CO2 is currently the devil. The problem of course is that with no natural gas there is no urea, and with no urea there is no fertilizer. And...

As of July 1, 2020, there were 331,501,080 people living in the United States of America, according to the Census Bureau's estimate. A year later, there were 331,893,745. That was an increase of only 392,665 -- or 0.1%. In a press release published last week, the Census Bureau announced that this was the lowest annual rate of population growth "since the nation's founding." To put that in perspective, the 392,665 increase in the number of people living in the United States between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021 was less than half the 862,320 unborn babies the Guttmacher Institute...