Free Republic

Last week’s eruption of the volcano near the Pacific island nation of Tonga was 600 times more powerful than the nuke dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II. As a result, the eruption was so loud that many Tongans went deaf after the first explosion. “The first explosion…our ears were ringing and we couldn’t even hear each other, so all we do is pointing to our families to get up, get ready to run,” Marian Kupu, a journalist on Tonga, told Reuters. The eruption was so loud that it could be heard across the world, even thousands of miles...

CNN hosts scrambled to explain away Joe Biden’s remark during his car crash of a press conference when he said that the 2022 mid-term elections could be “illegitimate.” Former President Donald Trump was vehemently monstered by the media both in 2016 and 2020 for suggesting the election outcome could be compromised. Following the riot on January 6 last year, Trump’s so-called undermining of the election process was blamed for the raid on the Capitol itself. Tens of millions of Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was rigged have also been denounced as everything from dangerous radicals to domestic terrorists....

Shoppers will get personalized recommendations pushed to their phones as they browse the new Amazon Style store stocked mostly non-Amazon fashion labels, the Seattle based company said. Amazon declined to offer any more details on the labels. The store will be about 30,000 square feet, similar in size to a Kohl’s but about one-third the size of other department stores, like Macy’s. But it will offer more than double the number of styles as traditional stores do because it will show one of each style on display while keeping the rest in the back room. The selection is chosen by...

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Accusing the United States of hostility and threats, North Korea on Thursday said it will consider restarting “all temporally-suspended activities” it had paused during its diplomacy with the Trump administration, in an apparent threat to resume testing of nuclear explosives and long-range missiles. North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said leader Kim Jong Un presided over a Politburo meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party where officials set policy goals for “immediately bolstering” military capabilities to counter the Americans’ “hostile moves.” Officials gave instructions to “reconsider in an overall scale the trust-building measures that we...

At some of the world’s most sensitive spots, authorities have installed security screening devices made by a single Chinese company with deep ties to China’s military and the highest levels of the ruling Communist Party. The World Economic Forum in Davos. Europe’s largest ports. Airports from Amsterdam to Athens. NATO’s borders with Russia. All depend on equipment manufactured by Nuctech, which has quickly become the world’s leading company, by revenue, for cargo and vehicle scanners. Nuctech has been frozen out of the U.S. for years due to national security concerns, but it has made deep inroads across Europe, installing its...

WASHINGTON — Mayor Lori Lightfoot said GOP candidates for governor, making crime — especially in Chicago — central campaign themes should think twice about damaging the city’s reputation. “Vilifying the economic engine of your state just strikes me as a really foolhardy strategy,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times on Wednesday. Lightfoot said there are “definitely productive ways in which a governor can be helpful. But anybody who thinks that they’re going to solve crime by sitting in Springfield and lobbing bombs obviously doesn’t understand the first thing about public safety.”

Federal authorities raided the house of U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar in Laredo, Texas, on Wednesday. Details of the raid remain unknown. “The FBI was present in the vicinity of Windridge Drive and Estate Drive in Laredo conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity,” the FBI revealed in a prepared statement. “The FBI cannot provide further comment on an ongoing investigation.” Cuellar is one of the few Democrat congressmen who has been vocal about the crisis at the border and the lack of action by the Biden administration. Not sure if anyone is home, but the dogs are watching. pic.twitter.com/WIYITB6WbF — Valerie Gonzalez...

Vice President Kamala Harris insisted Thursday morning that the US was prepared to levy “serious and severe costs” against Russia should its president, Vladimir Putin, order an invasion of Ukraine — hours after President Biden suggested during a White House news conference that a “minor incursion” would be met with a less robust response. Harris was dispatched to NBC’s “Today” show to clean up after her boss, who initially vowed Wednesday that Moscow “will be held accountable” in the event of an invasion, but then suggested that the severity of the consequences “depends on what it does.” -snip- “Did the...

Former President Donald Trump was vehemently monstered by the media both in 2016 and 2020 for suggesting the election outcome could be compromised. Following the riot on January 6 last year, Trump’s so-called undermining of the election process was blamed for the raid on the Capitol itself. Tens of millions of Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was rigged have also been denounced as everything from dangerous radicals to domestic terrorists. So when Joe Biden questioned the legitimacy of the upcoming election during a live press conference, the media was placed in an invidious position. Biden was asked by...

San Francisco children make up just 13% of its population, the smallest share of kids among the 100 most populous cities in the United States. Yet for the past 22 months and counting, an outsized burden of COVID-19 mitigation has been placed on them. As a parent, I have become increasingly concerned by the lack of cost-benefit analysis and rigor over which policies are the most effective or even necessary, and which policies may be causing long-term damage. Early and consistent evidence that children are at very little risk of serious COVID-19 complications has been largely ignored, while paranoia and...

Confronted by an army of tiny, slanted pillars of frozen sand, carved by the harsh winds on the shores of Lake Michigan, nature photographer Joshua Nowicki knew he had spotted something extraordinary. The marketing photographer, who snaps landscapes for a living, heads down to the lake almost every night in search of opportunity. This particular December evening in 2021, Nowicki stopped by Tiscornia Park Beach in St. Joseph to photograph spectacular ice starting to accumulate on the lighthouse pier, but he found something far stranger. “Waiting for sunset, I was walking along the beach and happened upon them,” Nowicki told...

Biden vaporizes innocent Afghan family WASHINGTON — Newly declassified surveillance footage provides additional insights about the final minutes and aftermath of a U.S. drone strike last year in Kabul, showing how the military made a decision to murder based on imagery that was fuzzy, hard to interpret in real time and prone to confirmation bias. The strike on Aug. 29 killed 10 innocent people — including seven children — in a tragic mistake by Biden that punctuated the end of the 20 year war in Afghanistan. The disclosure of the videos was a rare step by the U.S. military in...

Kamala Harris faced a barrage of questions about the failed voting rights legislation, 2022 midterms, COVID and weak polling during less-friendly-than-usual network interviews airing Thursday morning on the one year anniversary of her and President Joe Biden's inauguration. -snip- Guthrie and Harris then got into a cross-talk match where the vice president asked to be able to finish her statement before the host was able to push her on the matter. 'The specific question, if you don't mind – does he think, now that these bills haven't been passed, that the '22 midterms won't be legitimate or fair or free?'...

France's parliament on Thursday denounced a "genocide" by China against its Uyghur Muslim population, in a resolution that risks straining ties between Paris and Beijing two weeks before the Winter Olympics. The non-binding resolution, adopted with 169 votes in favour and just one against, was proposed by the opposition Socialists in the lower house of parliament but also backed by President Emmanuel Macron's Republic on the Move (LREM) party. It reads that the National Assembly "officially recognises the violence perpetrated by the People's Republic of China against the Uyghurs as constituting crimes against humanity and genocide". It also calls on...

An Olympic sprinter says she is “upset” at being diagnosed with a rare heart condition after getting her Pfizer booster shot. Swiss athlete Sarah Atcho, who competed in the four-by-100 metres relay at the 2016 Brazil Olympics, revealed in an Instagram post to her 22,000 followers this week that she had been diagnosed with pericarditis, or inflammation of the lining around the heart. Pericarditis and more serious myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, are known but rare side effects of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. The 26-year-old said she received her booster on December 22 “because I...

A top virologist and vaccine creator blasted COVID vaccination of children as “an unforgivable sin,” saying that it could result in a spike in childhood diseases and new threats to public health.Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, a former senior officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who has worked with pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis, said that the COVID jabs are suppressing natural antibodies that children need to fight a host of diseases.“Because of the sustained suppression by the vaccinal antibodies, kids may no longer be naturally protected against a number of childhood infections that do not usually...

Russia announced Thursday it will hold huge naval drills involving more than 140 warships and supporting vessels this month and in February, at a time of heightened tensions with Western nations. The war games to be held in the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Mediterranean will involve "more than 140 warships and support vessels, more than 60 aircraft, 1,000 pieces of military equipment, and about 10,000 servicemen," the defence ministry said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies.

. investigating the alliance among conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, longtime Trump associate Roger Stone and the president .

The banner headline is … US existing home sales declined 4.6% MoM in December. But that isn’t the interesting news. The interesting news is the mystery of the missing housing inventory. While various pundits told us that inventory would be returning … it isn’t. And the median price of existing home sales is up 14.85% YoY with insane Fed stimulus still in play. That was December. What will January bring with rising mortgage rates? Freddie Mac’s 30-year commitment rate rose to 3.56% today. When will housing inventory for sale start to increase? Probably about the same time The Fed ACTUALLY...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Wednesday he thinks Russia will invade Ukraine and warned President Vladimir Putin that his country would pay a “dear price” in lives lost and a possible cutoff from the global banking system if it does.Biden, speaking at a news conference to mark his one-year anniversary in office, also said a “minor incursion” by Russia would elicit a lesser response. He later sought to clarify that he was referring to a non-military action, such as a cyberattack, that would be met with a similar reciprocal response, and that if Russian forces cross the Ukrainian...