Free Republic

The White House wants to get something straight: President Joe Biden is unpopular. But he's not that unpopular. Yes, really. Witness a polling memo released Thursday night by deputy White House chief of staff Jen O'Malley Dillon that takes issue with a new Quinnipiac University poll that shows Biden's job approval at a meager 33%. "This week's Quinnipiac poll, just like Quinnipiac's poll for the last five months, is very likely an outlier," writes Dillon. As evidence, she cites the FiveThirtyEight running poll average (of all polls conducted) that shows Biden with an average job approval score of 43%. She...

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and his counterpart at Google, CEO Sundar Pichai, secretly struck a deal in 2018 to carve up the digital advertising market between the two tech giants, according to newly revealed allegations from top state law-enforcement officials. Previously, it was reported that the deal was signed by Zuckerberg’s No. 2, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who moved over to the social network after a stint heading up Google’s online ad sales team, according to the allegations in a lawsuit by a group of state attorneys general. But according to newly unredacted court filings, Zuckerberg and Pichai also signed...

“Whether we like it or not,” an implantable microchip meant to read COVID-19 vaccination status could be implemented globally, according to Hannes Sjöbald, the managing director of Dsruptive Subdermals, a company headquartered in Spain, which has already designed the chip. Dsruptive Subdermals is already marketing the chip as a simple way of always having proof of COVID-19 vaccination status with you.The chip is roughly the size of a grain of rice — two millimeters by 16 millimeters in size — and is implanted under the skin. When it is scanned, a PDF will appear showing the details of a vaccine...

Police in New York City have arrested a 30-year-old homeless man with a criminal record in the cold-blooded murder of a 19-year-old Burger King cashier, who was gunned down after handing over $100 during a robbery earlier this week. The NYPD on Friday announced that Winston Glynn, who is said to have worked at another Burger King, was in custody in connection with the Sunday morning killing of Kristal Bayron-Nieves. He faces charges of murder, robbery, criminal use of a firearm and criminal possession of a weapon. A police spokesperson declined to release any additional information, but unnamed NYPD sources...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said on a podcast episode that aired Friday one of his biggest regrets in office was not speaking “much louder” against the Trump Administration’s calls for lockdowns in the early days of the pandemic, with the comments coming just days after former President Donald Trump appeared to label DeSantis “gutless.” DeSantis said on the conservative podcast “Ruthless” he believes Trump Administration officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci “panicked” as Covid-19 quickly spread around the U.S. in March of 2020, leading to calls for lockdowns. Tensions are reportedly growing between Trump and DeSantis, who was one of...

FULL TITLE: EXCLUSIVE: Jeffrey Epstein brought EIGHT young women with him on his trips to see Bill Clinton at the White House: Displayed photos of himself posing at the Briefing Room podium at his Palm Beach mansion Visitor logs obtained by DailyMail.com reveal Jeffrey Epstein was not always alone when he visited the Clinton White House between 1993 and 1995 Records show he brought along eight women, including his girlfriends Celina Midelfart, Eva Andersson, Francis Jardine, and Ghislaine Maxwell His relationship with the four other women who accompanied him - Jennifer Garrison; Shelley Gafni; Jennifer Driver; Lyoubov Orlova - is...

Kupfer was working alone at the store when she was killed around 1:35 p.m., according to the Santa Monica Observer. “A customer found the body of Brianna Kupfer on the floor of the Croft House when he walked into the store,” the report continued.

Puts in doubt his participation in key World Cup qualifiers later this monthAlphonso Davies' return from a bout of COVID-19 has been put on hold, with his Bundesliga team saying the Canadian soccer star shows signs of an inflammation of the heart muscle. The 21-year-old from Edmonton, who also plays for Bayern Munich in the German league, has been sidelined, with his participation in doubt for Canada's World Cup qualifiers later this month. Bayern manager Julian Nagelsmann told a pre-match news conference Friday that the problem was detected in the follow-up examination that all players who have had COVID undergo....

The internet personality said in a YouTube video Thursday that he spent $3.5 million on an unopened set of first edition Pokémon cards that turned out to be G.I. Joe cards. In the video, Paul and his friend Bolillo Lajan San, a known card collector, met with the Baseball Card Exchange in Chicago to discover if the cards were the real deal. “We all got duped,” one of the card authenticators said after analyzing the boxes.The outside of the boxes had Pokémon branding, but the inside were green G.I. Joe cards.

(NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) A small pile of pebbles is clogging up the Perseverance Mars rover's operations. The rover, which is collecting rock samples for eventual return to Earth, began to struggle on Dec. 29, after extracting a core from a rock the mission team nicknamed "Issole." According to a NASA blog, the problem occurred in the device that transfers the drill bit and sample out of the rover's drill arm and into a carousel inside the rover's chassis for storage. During the transfer, sensors within the rover recorded a higher-than-normal amount of friction at an unexpected point in the process. The...

Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin has named two women with track records of opposing “critical race theory” — a once obscure collegiate field that’s become a conservative catch-all term for racial equity and diversity initiatives in public schools — to top posts at the Virginia Department of Education. Jillian Balow, formerly Wyoming’s elected superintendent of public instruction, will take on the same job in Virginia, Youngkin announced in a news release Thursday. Jillian Balow, Virginia’s incoming superintendent of public instruction. (Wyoming Department of Education) Before stepping down to join Youngkin’s administration, Balow supported a proposed Wyoming bill that would require K-12 schools...

RICHMOND, Va. (WWBT) - Days away from a new administration in the governor’s mansion, we’re getting a closer look at what changes to expect for your kids in school. Governor-Elect Glenn Youngkin has promised to rescind the mask mandate on his first day in office. We wanted to get to the bottom of what that will mean for your students. To get straight to the point - expect some changes. But, it may take some time to get clarity on how those changes are implemented for our kids. “I think parents should be empowered to make decisions for their children,”...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two months after U.S. President Joe Biden announced an unprecedented effort among major oil consuming economies to work together to bring down rising fuel prices, prices are again approaching multi-year highs. And Biden has few options to stop the rally. Global benchmark Brent crude passed $84 a barrel on Wednesday and leading analysts are forecasting that oil could pass $100 a barrel in the first quarter. Biden spearheaded a coordinated release of oil from strategic reserves with Japan, India, South Korea, Britain and China in November that helped quell prices - even though, in the end,...

Spoiler alert: It's not about immigration.

A legal challenge by a Northern Ireland gay rights activist who claimed he was discriminated against when a bakery refused to make a cake with a slogan supporting same-sex marriage has been dismissed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The court declared the action inadmissible and said the applicant, Gareth Lee, had “failed to exhaust domestic remedies” available through the UK courts. In the ruling, published yesterday, a majority of seven judges said Mr Lee had not invoked his rights under the ECHR “expressly at any point in the domestic proceedings”.By relying solely on domestic law, they said,...

Critics excoriated California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his fellow Democrats Thursday over a set of videos showing the shocking aftermath of looted trains in Los Angeles. The videos, posted on Twitter by local CBS photojournalist John Schreiber, showed massive amounts of opened packages, cardboard, and packaging materials strewn around the tracks. "Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to [Lincoln Heights] to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, [UPS] boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains," Schreiber...

As the midterm elections approach later this year, some states and jurisdictions have required voting ballots to be made available in other languages besides English. The Latino population continues to grow in the United States and some counties have mandated that ballots in Spanish are available at polling sites. However, Spanish and non-English ballots are not required across the nation, though some advocates say that multilingual ballots are critical for democracy. "We need to have bilingual ballots, bilingual material across the country, it should be a national requirement and a national norm," said Domingo Garcia, the national president for the...

Republican Rep. John Katko of New York announced on Friday that he's retiring from Congress at the end of his term, which former President Donald Trump is touting as "great news." "Great news, another one bites the dust," Trump said in a brief statement following the announcement. "Katko, from Upstate New York, is gone!"

LOS ANGELES — Cannabis advocates, small farmers and business owners called Thursday for an overhaul of the California marijuana tax system as they struggle to keep afloat amid rising operating and regulatory costs. They gathered outside the State Capitol in Sacramento to make their case and warn that the industry could collapse if steps aren't taken soon. “We’re here today because the craft cannabis industry here in California is in crisis and on the brink of collapse,” said Amber Senter, a co-founder and the executive director of Supernova Women, a nonprofit organization that works to create opportunities for people of...

An Indonesian woman has been flogged 100 times in Aceh province for adultery while the male involved, who denied the accusations, received just 15 lashes. Ivan Najjar Alavi, the head of the general investigation division at the East Aceh prosecutors’ office, said the court handed down a harsher sentence for the woman after she confessed to investigators she had sex outside of her marriage. Judges found it difficult to convict the man, who was then the head of the East Aceh fishery agency and also married, because he denied all wrongdoing, Alavi said. Aceh is the only region in Muslim-majority...