Free Republic

The students' negative COVID tests weren't good enough for school administrators.When 15-year-old Ellah Nahum and a few other unvaccinated students showed up at Los Angeles' New West Charter School on Tuesday, January 18, after winter break, they brought lunches, backpacks, and negative COVID-19 tests, hoping to be allowed in. They'd been negotiating with school administrators since early October, when the school had announced that a vaccine mandate would go into effect in January. Prior to returning to school from winter break, they'd requested a hearing, attempting to find alternative options to getting vaccinated. When they showed up at school around...

I can not get my credit card donation to work. Never had this problem before using the same cc (member over 25 yrs). I know all my entered info is correct. Suggestions?

The claim that the virus that causes COVID-19 definitely was not from a laboratory, put forth in a paper quietly shaped by Dr. Anthony Fauci that was cited by other scientists who called the lab idea a “conspiracy theory,” was “antithetical to science,” a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director says. “The purpose of science is to have rigorous debate about different hypotheses. I’ve never really experienced in my life where there was private telephone calls among scientists that had a decision on what position they would take collectively, and to see that position then published in a...

Rafael Nadal is a truly great tennis player but the once great sporting nation of Australia has abandoned it's own proud history of sportsmanship to persecute Nadal's rival Djokovic for insisting on his rights to medical privacy and personal control of what substances are injected into his own body. I rate the chances pretty low of Cheif Commissioner Shane Patton doing anything to bring Novak's vicious criminal persecutors to justice. But I have started the formal process by demanding an investigation and one young police officer took the first step toward doing that. Patton should support her. And when and...

Even the most fervent germaphobes among us will agree that not all bacteria are worthy of a glob of Purell. Still, just the word “bacteria” is enough to bring a grimace to someone’s face. And why not? Popular culture has made countless movies about worlds where tiny microbes exterminate humans, and the list of infamous bacteria is formidable — tuberculosis, salmonella and Clostridium, to name a few. But behind the fear and disease, there’s a duality. Bacteria sicken yet protect our bodies. They can topple civilizations but can nourish our food. We actively try to avoid them, yet microbes permeate...

The first sign of trouble for Empyreal came on May 17, when a sheriff's deputy in Dickinson County, Kan., pulled over one of its vans' drivers on I-70 for an alleged traffic violation and questioned her. She told the deputy she was on her way to pick up cash at medical pot dispensaries in Kansas City, Mo., then planned to drive the money back through Kansas the next morning to deposit it at a credit union in Colorado, according to the DEA. Medical marijuana is legal in Missouri but not in Kansas. The next morning, the DEA put the driver...

The blowtorch flame cast a halo of heat on Oko Jewelry’s double-paned, laminated glass door. After letting the glass cool, two masked men shattered the posh East Burnside Street shop’s threshold about 4 a.m. last Thursday, then reached through to the deadbolt and let themselves in.

GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING. The images interspersed throughout the video are graphic and many may find them highly disturbing. I did not provide any such images from the video below – just one photo of Dr. Jane Ruby and Mr. Richard Hirschman. The 3 images within the first 10 minutes are medical in nature, pertaining to blood clots in an embalming setting, the third picture includes a glimpse of the deceased's legs. I posted time markers in the transcript to indicate approximate location of the images, but I was not precise and they may appear a bit earlier in the video...

No one appears to have been in charge at Black Lives Matter for months. The address it lists on tax forms is wrong, and the charity's two board members won't say who controls its $60 million bankroll, a Washington Examiner investigation has found. BLM's shocking lack of transparency surrounding its finances and operations raises major legal and ethical red flags, multiple charity experts told the Washington Examiner. ... "Like a giant ghost ship full of treasure drifting in the night with no captain, no discernible crew, and no clear direction," CharityWatch Executive Director Laurie Styron said of BLM. ... BLM...

Spend enough time studying the “racial equity” and “ethnic studies” programs sweeping school districts across the nation and you’ll find that they are following in the footsteps, on a several-year delay, of one of America’s most progressive cities: Seattle. It’s worth examining, then, how all that worked out in Seattle. Despite decades of the most aggressive equity programs anyone could ask for, Seattle’s racial disparities are among the worst in the nation – and they’re getting worse, not better. At the forefront of Seattle Public Schools’ (SPS) initiatives was Tracy Castro-Gill, until recently its director of ethnic studies, who represented...

Lia Thomas' Teammate Reveals Trans Swimmer Doesn't Always Cover Up His Genitals in Locker Room Members of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team are uncomfortable changing and showering in the locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, according to a new report. The Daily Mail reported Thursday that one of the female swimmers is speaking out about the issues she and her teammates face after the school allowed a man who identifies as a woman to join the squad this year. Thomas — who competed on the men’s team as Will Thomas for three years before taking a hiatus,...

Another must-pass bill, another rushed policy that severely damages the privacy and constitutional rights of cryptocurrency users. We’ve just seen language in the America COMPETES Act of 2022 (see page 1482)—a bill ostensibly about economic competitiveness with China—that would strip all administrative procedures and safeguards from the imposition of so-called “special measures” prohibitions in the Bank Secrecy Act while simultaneously expanding authority for such prohibitions to cryptocurrency activities. In brief, it would hand the Treasury Secretary unchecked discretion to forbid financial institutions (including cryptocurrency exchanges) from offering their customers access to cryptocurrency networks. The Secretary may not use this discretion...

From a pregnant man to a biting lip, the 37 new emojis coming to iPhones have finally been revealed. Apple's own designs for the new emojis are already available in a beta test of iOS 15.4 software update released on Thursday, prior to its full release in the spring. The pregnant man and pregnant person recognise that 'pregnancy is possible for some transgender men and non-binary people', says Emojipedia, which is part of the California-based Unicode Consortium, the central bank of all approved emoji. But the two new pregnant emoji could also potentially be used as 'a tongue-in-cheek way to...

Days after Spotify announced on that it is granting Neil Young’s wish and removing the singer-songwriter’s music from the platform, an online rumor began to spread that Barry Manilow will be following suit. However, as of Friday (Jan. 28), the 78-year-old star’s music is still on Spotify, and he took to Twitter to address the situation. “I recently heard a rumor about me and Spotify,” he tweeted. “I don’t know where it started, but it didn’t start with me or anyone who represents me.”

One of the stories in my new book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults is that of the changed status of undergraduates and professors. They don’t relate to one another the way they used to. If you wandered the hallways at State U in 1980, you’d sense an ordinary relationship of students and teachers, one side in charge, the other obedient (whether because of fear, custom, or sincere respect—it would vary). Do it today, and you get a whole other feel. Let me explain. Around 2011, I joined a panel at University of Minnesota on...

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci this week failed to provide a timeline for a when the U.S. will reach a state of pre-pandemic normalcy, stating that they will have to “always be prepared for the possibility that there may be a variant that will make that timetable turn around.” AP White House reporter Zeke Miller asked on Wednesday if the public health experts believed that “this is the last disruptive surge of COVID-19, given all of the tools — you know, vaccines, boosters, antibodies, and the like?”

Actor Sean Penn is no champion of the conservative movement and there’s a good chance he never will be. But he does appear to agree with many of his political opposites when it comes to traditional gender roles. The “Mystic River” alum is unhappy with men becoming more feminine and wishes the trend would reverse. “I am in the club that believes that men in American culture have become wildly feminized,” Penn told UK-based inews.co while promoting his new movie, “Flag Day.” “I don’t think that being a brute or having insensitivity or disrespect for women is anything to do...

Her teen children helped pin the man until police arrived.A Watsonville mother fought off an armed man who broke into her home during the day on Wednesday. According to police, the mom and her teen children arrived at their home on Holly Drive when they noticed the window had been tampered with. When the family tried to go inside, they encountered a man who closed the door from inside the home. The mom and the burglar began to struggle at the door, police said. During their scuffle, the man pulled a knife and threatened to stab the family. The mom...

Back on the Hill!… Everyone is being respectful and showing nothing but love

A man was sentenced to two years in federal prison last week for attempting to export at least $150,000 worth of wild succulents that he poached from native habitats in Northern California state parks, the United States Justice Department said, SFGate.com reported. On Oct. 11, 2018, Byungsu Kim, 46, and co-defendants Youngin Back, 47, and Bong Jun Kim, 46, traveled by car from Los Angeles International Airport to Crescent City, Calif., with plans to harvest wild plants and smuggle them to South Korea, the department said in a statement Jan. 20. Throughout October 2018, they pulled plants from the ground...