Free Republic

California’s least-populous county declared a public health emergency Tuesday morning, as COVID-19 cases, driven by the infectious omicron variant, soared in the area

The right-wing fight to suppress the teaching of uncomfortable truths in public schools reached a comical new low this week in a Virginia bill that blatantly misstated a basic fact about U.S. history. Wren Williams, a 33-year-old Republican, pre-filed the bill on Tuesday, the day before he was sworn in as a new member of the Virginia House of Delegates. It proposed a new standard for regulating high-school social studies curricula in the state, including a requirement that students learn about “the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.” This was a clear misunderstanding of the 1858 “Lincoln-Douglas debates,”...

My Wife and I are Christians who have been Baptized. I attend an Evangelical Church on a regular basis - my Wife attends a local Methodist Church occasionally. My Wife is very knowledgeable about the Bible and most always looks and finds very positive guides in the Bible. We discuss the Bible together. We love God and Pray often. Our Friend worries that my Wife will go to Hell and talks fearfully that she is not SAVED. We know we are flawed but we have declared our love for God and Jesus publicly thru Adult Baptism. We know we are...

GIVING IT ALL YOU'VE GOT Ever hear the expression "Giving it the whole nine yards"? Do you happen to know where it comes from? I used to think it was a sports term. "Not so", say several experts. But there seem to be at least two schools of thought on the phrase's origin. Both seem plausible. I'll let you decide. One explanation says that it's an expression from the construction trade. A full truck load, according to this rationale, will dump nine cubic yards of sand or gravel at your work site. In such a case, I suppose the...

A woman pulled over for several traffic violations in Troy, Michigan, was questioned by the police about the liquid in a plastic cup in her car. She reportedly told officers it was an alcoholic beverage before spilling it out on the ground. Local station WDIV-TV reported that officers pulled the woman over at 10:22 p.m. on January 3. The 35-year-old woman came to a stop in her SUV, but put it in reverse and hit the bumper of the police squad car. Officials said that when responding officers spoke with the woman, who did not have a driver's license with...

UCSC science writers examine the evidence for ghost hunting, chemtrails, cryptozoology and moreEach year, the graduate students of UCSC’s Science Communication Program research a different topic for the first GT issue of the new year. This year, with so much abuse and misuse of science floating around, especially on social media, we decided to take on the topic of pseudoscience. It’s a wildly varied list of subjects, and whether they’re fun and seemingly harmless, have implications for believers’ pocketbooks, or are the basis for sinister conspiracy theories, it’s edifying to know their scientific basis—or lack of one—and to consider...

HUMAN-animal hybrids could be used to grow lifesaving organs and replacement limbs - but some fear it may be scientists "playing God". History has been made as David Bennett, 57, from Maryland in the US, had a genetically-modified pig heart implanted into his chest. Bennett had terminal heart disease, and underwent the bizarre-sounding procedure as a last hope - and he is now doing well three days after the operation. And in the past scientists have used the techniques to splice human and monkey embryos together, transplant fetal organs into rats, and even grow human ears on mice. The idea...

Election officials in the Texas county that includes the state capital, Austin, have rejected about half of applications for mail-in ballots, following new voting restrictions brought in by Republicans. The voter identification rules have led to the rejection of about half of the 700 mail-in ballots requested in Travis county for primary elections in March, according to the county’s clerk. The denied ballots in Travis county follow a similar trend across Texas, with officials in Harris county, which includes the city of Houston, and Bexar county, which includes San Antonio, also turning down a substantial number of mail-in ballot applications....

Buried cash, extravagant watches are the latest seizures in an investigation that already revealed a massive cache of millions of dollars, drugs and ammoOne year ago, the suspected leader of a Sinaloa cartel cell was arrested at a private airport outside Boston, and a month later a massive cache of drugs, cash and ammunition was seized from an Otay Mesa trucking yard. The bust netted a high-profile suspect and a stash worth several million dollars. But perhaps the most valuable assets to come of the whole operation were the cellphones, nearly 40 of them. The seized phones have provided federal...

One of the largest news outlets in Denmark apologized to its readers for “hypnotically” trusting the government’s COVID narrative for the past two years.In a shocking admission of failure to uphold the standards journalistic integrity, Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet newspaper ran a story titled “We failed” on Tuesday, admitting that the paper was hoodwinked by the mainstream COVID narrative and complicit in misleading the public and fostering undue fear.For ALMOST two years, we — the press and the population — have been almost hypnotically preoccupied with the authorities’ daily coronavirus figures,” read the article’s introduction. “WE HAVE NOT been vigilant enough...

A 24-year-old woman was stabbed to death Thursday afternoon while working at a Hancock Park furniture store by a man who is still on the loose. Brianna Kupfer of Pacific Palisades was working alone at the Croft House furniture store in the 300 block of La Brea Avenue, near Beverly Boulevard, when a man entered the store, attacked her and stabbed her to death with a knife, Los Angeles police said. The man was last seen exiting the store through the back and heading northbound in the alley, according to video surveillance footage.

Binging on TV shows like Squid Game and Love Island might leave you thinking humans are naturally duplicitous, but actually a little bit of social nous is a core part of human interaction.Emotional manipulation has been referred to as the dark side of emotional intelligence by psychological scientist Prof Elizabeth Austin at the University of Edinburgh. But what does that mean? Austin and her colleagues created the Emotional Manipulation Scale in 2007. According to the scale, people who are high on emotional manipulation say yes to behaving in ways that have obvious negative consequences such as ‘I know how...

Send the Marxist elements of the Democratic Party back to the ash heap of history. In the post-Trump era, the pundit class remains obsessed with the state of the Republican Party. Is it still in thrall to Donald Trump? Does it remain committed to “democracy,” as circumstantially defined by those clutching pearls as they whisper the question fretfully? Can it sustain a sufficiently broad coalition, ranging from economic libertarians to the “Let’s Go Brandon” contingent, in order to take what appear to be highly winnable elections in 2022 and 2024? Beneath this breathless focus on the Republican Party and its...

Cigarette smoke and even second-hand smoke somehow, all of a sudden, can trigger blood clots, heart attacks and strokes, according to cigarette manufacturers and distributors. This comes as a huge coincidence in its timing as millions of people around the world who have been injected with Fauci Flu shots are now suffering or have died from those exact “side effects.” What you are about to see is Big Tobacco covering for Big Pharma as cigarette warning labels now pretend that cigarettes will kill or maim you the same exact way that the Covid jabs do. One hand washes the other....

The devices—developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX—have a warming feature to prevent snow built up from disrupting the signal “Starlink works great until the cats find out that the dish gives off a little heat on cold days,” For those concerned about cats outside in cold weather, Taylor clarifies they do have access to heated cat house. But even when temperatures reached minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit, the kitties still used the satellite dish as a $500 cat bed. “When the sun goes down, they head back to their house,”

Police employ them and scientists study them, but what is life like for the rare few who can never forget a face? Super-recogniser Yenny Seo didn’t think it was anything special As a child, Yenny Seo often surprised her mother by pointing out a stranger in the grocery store, remarking it was the same person they passed on the street a few weeks earlier. Likewise, when they watched a movie together, Seo would often recognise “extras” who’d appeared fleetingly in other films. Once, while working at a part-time job at a clothing store when she was at uni, Seo had...

About $7 million worth of surplus personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies, purchased by a Northern California county earlier in the pandemic, was damaged in recent rainstorms after it was left outside for months, officials said Friday. San Mateo County officials acknowledged the disaster following a KGO news report, published Thursday, that showed video of scores of sodden boxes outside the San Mateo Event Center in the San Francisco Bay Area. San Mateo County, south of San Francisco, is among the wealthiest counties in the nation. Workers are inspecting the damaged boxes to see if the items inside — many...

Nicola Madden, aged 43, was taking part in an online meeting when she suffered a suspected heart attack on January 11.A beloved mum tragically died during an online meeting after her birthday. Nicola Madden, aged 43, was taking part in an online meeting when she suffered a suspected heart attack on January 11. Her daughter Charlotte, aged nine, acted quickly and called her dad Stuart McDougall, but Nicola tragically passed away, Liverpool Echo reports. Friends and family of the civil servant from Waterloo have now set up a GoFundMe page in memory of Nicola, who they describe as a sociable...

Now his devastated family have been left in shock by his death and are paying tribute to the 'legend'.A Scots family have been left heartbroken after their 'friendly giant' dad suddenly died in his sleep. Billy Muir, from Glasgow, went to bed feeling 'peaky' around January 7th and sadly never woke up. The Rangers daft 54-year-old grandfather had taken a covid test shortly before which turned up negative last week. Now his devastated family have been left in shock by his death and are paying tribute to the 'legend'. Daughter Kate Muir Daily Record: "He was a big 6ft 6...

Just two weeks into the new year, the U.S. has already seen more than a million new COVID cases on multiple days. The Omicron variant has created a dangerous surge, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimating that this version of the virus currently accounts for more than 98 percent of cases in the country. Omicron is spreading even faster than the previously dominant Delta variant, and pushing case counts higher than ever before. Health officials across the country have started to update existing policies in response to the surge, with some places introducing vaccine mandates for...