Free Republic

Joel Holland around the five boroughs to taste — and sketch — the best pizza the city has to offer. Now almost two years later, he has upwards of 400 drawings of pizzerias and other distinct storefronts of restaurants and marketplaces across the boroughs. Holland first shared his sketches on his Instagram and they will be part of his upcoming illustration book, “NYC Storefronts,” slated to hit shelves next fall. In March 2020, the 45-year-old pizza connoisseur and professional illustrator decided to combine his passions by vividly sketching mom-and-pop pizzerias as COVID-19 steamrolled restaurants.

The LGBT lobby didn’t succeed at accomplishing this last year despite their massive efforts. So, this year, they’re starting their campaigning early.HALTON REGION, Ontario (Campaign Life Coalition) – The LGBT lobby and allies at the Halton Catholic District School Board (HCDSB) are pushing full steam ahead to make sure that the Gay Pride flag flies over the board’s Catholic schools this coming June. The LGBT lobby didn’t succeed at accomplishing this last year despite their massive efforts. So, this year, they’re starting their campaigning early. The HCDSB is having a board meeting on January 18 where a motion to fly...

Carpinteri - Correlation between nano-mechanical instabilities THz phonons, and sub-atomic particle emissions: Implications for geochemistry and electrolysis Alberto Carpinteri1, 2 , Oscar Borla1 1 Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy 2Shantou University, Shantou, China ABSTRACT TeraHertz phonons are produced in solids and fluids by mechanical instabilities at the nano-scale (fracture and cavitation). They present a frequency that is close to the resonance frequency of the atomic lattices and an energy that is close to that of thermal neutrons. A series of fracture experiments on natural rocks and the systematic monitoring of seismic events have demonstrated that TeraHertz phonons are able...

What happens when athletes don't follow the COVID rules?As sports slowly re-emerged from the initial COVID-19 pause in 2020, athletes, organizations, and fans had to adjust to a new reality. Public health measures such as hand washing and social distancing were widely established, as transmission of the virus became better understood. Mask mandates were variably instituted and sometimes hotly contested and politicized. The COVID-19 vaccine became a lightning rod for political activism, human rights, religious freedoms, conspiracy theories, and ethical conflicts. The world was hungry for the return of sports, but with COVID-19 still a global threat, the resumption of...

A review of Dom Simon Jubani’s harrowing, inspiring, and occasionally off-putting From the Depths of Hell I Saw Jesus on the Cross: A Priest in the Prisons of Communist Albania. Although all Communist regimes persecuted religion to varying degrees, nowhere did the anti-religious campaign employ such diabolically creative methods of cruelty, and nowhere was it as fatally thorough, as in Albania. Isolated from the rest of the world during the Cold War quite like North Korea today, few outside the western Balkans and the Albanian diaspora know much about the country’s tragic recent history. Hopefully, the shocking memoirs of Dom...

COVID has exposed the reality of our society, in the way that carpenter ants expose the structure of a house. St. Mother Teresa, pray for us.What now seems a long time ago (it was when I was deciding to become a Catholic), there was a controversy over Mother (now Saint) Teresa. It was caused by Christopher Hitchens, who seemed rather more controversial to me, and downright trying to be irritating. I had, at that point, never been irritated by a living Catholic saint. (Even though I was still an Anglican.) I refer, of course, to Hitchens’s book, The Missionary Position,...

Lawyers for Novak Djokovic say the Immigration Minister has erroneously cancelled his visa on the grounds the tennis star is seen as a "talisman of a community of anti-vaccine sentiment". Key points: The Federal Court will hear Novak Djokovic's appeal against his visa cancellation on Sunday morning Lawyers for Djokovic have argued the Immigration Minister's cancellation of the tennis star's visa was legally invalidThey say the minister also failed to consider the impact the saga would have on anti-vaccine sentiment in the communityIn an application lodged with the Federal Circuit Court last night, and released online by the Federal Court...

Nazareth (Agenzia Fides) - The Christian population of Israel continues the slight numerical growth that has characterized it since the founding of the Jewish state, but also continues its progressive decline in percentage compared to other faith communities - Jews, Muslims and Druze - present in the country. The Israeli Central Statistical Office published these data on Christmas Eve 2021. According to the Israeli Statistics Office, 182,000 Christians currently live in Israel, which corresponds to 1.9 percent of the total population, while the growth rate of the Christian population in the Jewish state in 2020 was 1.4 percent. Israeli statistics...

With the right military equipment, a single person can target a plane from three miles away using a heat-seeking missile. While such a nightmare is a rare occurrence, FedEx has applied to the FAA seeking approval to install a laser-based, anti-missile defense system on its cargo planes as an added safety measure. Military planes carry flares that can be remotely ignited and ejected by a pilot to throw off a heat-seeking missile’s targeting system with an alternate heat source, while the plane itself performs evasive maneuvers in an attempt to fool the incoming projectile. Those countermeasures are less effective for...

Pope Francis reassigned the second ranking official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on Monday, the first in an expected series of moves that would overhaul the leadership of the Church’s doctrinal office. The Holy See announced Jan. 10 that Archbishop Giacomo Morandi had been appointed by the pope to lead the Italian Diocese of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla, replacing Bishop Massimo Camisasca, who turned 75 in November. While the appointment of a relatively unknown Vatican official to a small Italian diocese is unlikely to generate headlines, sources close to Morandi’s old department told The Pillar that it was...

Two of the country’s largest retail pharmacies are temporarily closing stores on weekends due to an increase in the number of COVID-19 infections among staffers. The two chains said that the rapid spread of the Omicron variant has depleted staffing at several locations nationwide, affecting customer service and delaying key services like medication prescriptions and vaccinations.

Spanish intelligence wanted to destabilize Catalonia prior to independence referendum, says Jose Manuel Villarejo. The 2017 terror attacks in Spain were orchestrated by the National Intelligence Center (CNI), a former senior police officer said Thursday. The aim was to destabilize Catalonia before an independence referendum but the outcome that left 16 dead, was a miscalculation, said Jose Manuel Villarejo, according to the Catalanews agency. Quoting Villarejo’s testimony in court, the news outlet said the attacks, which included a truck plowing those pedestrians on Barcelona’s La Rambla, "were a serious mistake" on the part of former National Intelligence Center (CNI) Director...

***** Tunes For Our Troops ~ Music From Florida ~ *****~ Support The Artists You Hear Throughout The Canteen ! ~ ***** Warning: Not all music may be appropriate for children! Please click with caution. Thank you! Tunes For The Troops This music is provided for the entertainment of our Troops, Veterans, Allies & their families! Enjoy the variety of musical selections that the Canteen DJs provide throughout the thread. Please ping any DJ with your requests for the Troops! All music is removed on Monday.Thanks to all the DJs for their time & effort providing entertainment for the...

FIRST ON FOX: Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Ks., published White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci's unredacted financial records and accused him of being misleading when he told the Senate his financial disclosure forms were publicly available. [cut] Marshall's office obtained the doctor's most recent disclosure after filing an Office of Government Ethics request with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Jan. 14 (UPI) -- A federal judge on Friday ordered former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli to pay $64.6 million for illegally ballooning the price of a drug to treat parasitic diseases. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York also barred Shkreli from the pharmaceutical industry for life. "Banning an individual from an entire industry and limiting his future capacity to make a living in that field is a serious remedy and must be done with care and only if equity demands," she wrote in her ruling. "Shkreli's egregious, deliberate, repetitive, long-running and ultimately dangerous illegal...

A Portland Police Bureau training presentation on protests ended with a PowerPoint slide listing a prayer for a “dirty hippy” and the promise to send “my humble servants” with hats and bats to “christen” their “heads with hickory” accompanied by a photo of a helmeted officer raising his arm to a woman. The last of the 110 slides in the presentation showed the “Prayer of the Alt Knight | Based Stickman” meme. “Based Stickman” refers to Kyle Chapman, the founder of a group called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights that formed as the “tactical defense arm” of the Proud...

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Thursday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” that the Republican Party was a “shrinking minority party.” Raskin said, “I’m fundamentally optimistic about the history of American democracy, that we have always moved towards being a more perfect union. There has been backsliding, there’s been reaction, there’s been resistance, but in the big picture, we move forward.”

A federal appeals court shot down the bid of Democratic lawyer and discredited dossier funder Marc Elias to wriggle out of sanctions for misleading the court. The former Perkins Coie lawyer, best known for funding British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier while he worked as Hillary Clinton’s top campaign lawyer in 2016, was punished by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in March. The reprimand came for his deceptive behavior in a battle against a Republican-backed Texas law banning straight-ticket voting. An attorney for Elias called the sanctions “unprecedented” in late December and...

We are now getting a channel on comcast called NTD - WMBTV. They're news seems to be down the middle with a slant to the right. It is refreshing to see. Is any one else here watching it? If you are is your opinion in line with mine.

First Week in Ordinary Time Mark 2:1-12 Friends, today’s Gospel focuses on the faith of the four men who brought the paralytic to Jesus for healing. How often the Bible compels us to meditate on the meaning of faith! We might say that the Scriptures rest upon faith and remain inspired at every turn by the spirit of faith. Faith is an attitude of trust in the presence of God. Faith is openness to what God will reveal, do, and invite. It should be obvious that in dealing with the infinite, all-powerful person who is God, we are never in...