Free Republic

The Biden administration missed another deadline to hold quarterly onshore oil drilling lease sales after a federal court ruled it was legally required to do so. The Department of the Interior (DOI) defied the June 2021 court ruling which ordered the administration to halt its ban on new oil and gas leases, the Western Energy Alliance — a fossil fuel industry group that challenged the ban — said Wednesday. In August 2021, the DOI vowed to publish notices of competitive sales in December and hold a lease sale 45 days later, two promises it failed to keep, in court filings....

Two of the UK’s leading mayors are calling for urgent action to prepare for mass migration to cities due to the climate emergency, as a major report into the issue launches at the UN headquarters in New York on Wednesday. Mass migration to some of the world’s cities due to the climate emergency is already under way and the World Bank has estimated that unless significant action is taken, 216 million people could be on the move by 2050. In 2020, 30 million people were displaced due to the climate crisis, and 70% of people internally displaced due to the...

It's Bridgerton meets The Bachelorette for NBC's newest dating show, the first trailer for which was released on Monday. In The Courtship, which premieres on Sunday, March 6 at 8 p.m. ET, 16 men will compete to sweep one woman off her feet. But they'll be doing their best to woo her the old-fashioned way, with carriage rides, archery, ballroom dancing, and hand-written love notes in a setting straight out of Regency-era England.

Special counsel John Durham‘s explosive court filing has complicated any attempt by the Biden administration to shut down his investigation of the FBI‘s Russian election interference probe due to the political firestorm it would ignite. Mr. Durham alleged in the case against Democratic attorney Michael Sussmann that people affiliated with Hilary Clinton’s 2016 campaign exploited access to former President Donald Trump’s internet data to link him to Russia. The revelation puts the Biden administration in the hot seat because several top Clinton campaign officials have made their way to the White House. One of them is National Security Adviser Jake...

The recent publication of the book The Black Boom by author Jason L. Riley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, throws a monkey wrench into the progressive claim that Democrats are the benefactors of minorities. Riley says his research shows that "blacks saw economic progress under Trump that the Obama administration didn't come close to matching." Riley, who is no fan of Trump and didn't vote for him in either 2016 or 2020, points out that "racial inequality improved on Trump's watch, and much of the media were too busy agitating against him to take note or give credit...

South Korean authorities announce that they will start handing out free COVID-19 rapid tests amid the ongoing surge of virus infections, The Associated Press reported. Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum said on Wednesday that officials will start the new initiative next week by handing out testing kits at secondary schools, senior health care facilities and neighborhood welfare centers in an effort to strengthen protection for unvaccinated children and high-risk groups.

A snake spotted moving through a plane’s lights caused an AirAsia flight to be rerouted Feb. 10 in Malaysia. The flight was traveling domestically from Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, to Tawau when the snake was discovered, according to CNN. A person on board reportedly captured video of the reptile’s outline slithering in the overhead lights, and it was shared on TikTok.

A new analysis by the Heartland Institute reports the typical American family’s home heating and cooling costs increased by as much as $1,000 in 2021 as a result of President Joe Biden’s energy and environmental policies. “The average U.S. household in 2021 spent an extra $600 in higher gasoline costs and $70 in higher electricity costs. Further, households that use natural gas spent an extra $300, on average, and those using home heating oil paid $1,000 more. Cumulatively, the average American household paid about $1,000 in higher energy costs in 2021, compared to 2020,” Heartland authors Linneau Lueken and Jack...

EV Charging Insanity In order to match the 2,000 cars that a typical filling station can service in a busy 12 hours, an EV charging station would require 600, 50-watt chargers at an estimated cost of $24 million and a supply of 30 megawatts of power from the grid. That is enough to power 20,000 homes. No one likely thinks about the fact that it can take 30 minutes to 8 hours to recharge a vehicle between empty or just topping off. What are the drivers doing during that time? ICSC-Canada board member New Zealand-based consulting engineer Bryan Leyland describes...

Sweden has no plans now to apply for NATO membership and isn’t considering the issue, the country’s Foreign Minister Ann Linde said on Monday, TASS reported. This is stated in the foreign policy declaration 2022, released by the country's government. "Freedom from military alliances serves us well and contributes to stability and security in Northern Europe,” Linde said. Such a course, she added, implies an active, broad, and responsible security and foreign policy combined with deepening defense cooperation, including transatlantic cooperation. The declaration makes no mention of the so-called NATO option. In December 2020, a parliamentary majority voted in favor...

Two neighborhoods in Houston were littered with racist and antisemitic flyers over the weekend, about a week after residents in a separate area of the city woke up to similar hate messages. A Harris County resident told CNN she found 400 flyers tucked inside plastic bags around two neighborhoods in the Houston area on Sunday. They featured messages of hate, including an image of Adolf Hitler and the caption "We can do it again."

The city name “Munich” is already profoundly associated with cinematic moral confusion. It was the title Steven Spielberg gave his relativistic reflection on the way the Mossad avenged the murder of Israeli athletes in 1972. Now Netflix has given us Munich: The Edge of War, a prestige film that has gained a high-end audience and that has been hailed by many critics. At its heart is a quest to undo the legacy of one of history’s greatest heroes and to lionize one of its weakest statesmen. The movie seeks nothing less than to celebrate Neville Chamberlain, a man whose name...

Former President Donald Trump urged the Justice Department Tuesday to release all remaining documents related to the FBI’s investigation into allegations his 2016 campaign colluded with Russian officials, claiming they show “tremendous dishonesty and corruption.” “They have the declassification order. And they should declassify, absolutely, especially in the light of what has just happened and what has just been revealed,” the 45th president told Fox News, referring to special counsel John Durham’s recent court filing alleging Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid a tech company to mine data from servers at the White House and Trump Tower in a bid...

41-year-old Jonathan Watson, a California inmate accused of killing two convicted child molesters with a cane last month, has publicly confessed to the murders. Watson added that he’d given prison officials plenty of warning before the attacks, but it fell on deaf ears. In a letter to Mercury News, Watson confessed to killing 48-year-old David Bobb and 64-year-old Graham De Luis-Conti just one week after he was transferred to California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran. In the letter, he stated that a “child molester” moved into his pod six days into his stay at the prison....

A previously unknown uncontacted tribe has been confirmed for the first time by authorities in Brazil, according to Survival International, an organization that "champions tribal peoples around the world." Very little is known about the tribe, but it’s already clear they are facing a myriad of threats ranging from organized violence to COVID-19. The uncontacted tribe’s presence was recently verified by an official expedition by FUNAI, Brazil’s federal agency for indigenous affairs, in an area along the Purus River in the western Amazon region of Brazil. The expedition did not make contact with the tribe, but confirmed their presence after...

Fans of the Los Angeles Rams will be required to provide proof of vaccination or a negative test to attend the team’s Super Bowl Championship outdoor parade on Wednesday, mere days after pro-restriction elitists, such as Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) and plenty of celebrities, failed to apply the rules to themselves yet again, forgoing masks at the game as their latest public display of hypocrisy.

TAPACHULA, Mexico (Reuters) -A dozen undocumented migrants on Mexico's southern border sewed their mouths shut on Tuesday in a bid to convince the country's immigration authority to grant them passage toward the U.S. border. The migrants, mostly Central and South Americans, helped each other seal their lips using needles and plastic threads, leaving a small space to consume liquids and using alcohol to wipe away drops of blood from the stitches, Reuters images show. “The migrants are sewing their lips together as a sign of protest," said Irineo Mujica, an activist at the demonstration. "We hope that the National Migration...

In an interview Tuesday on the John Solomon Reports podcast, popular television news host Bill O'Reilly predicted the political demise of President Joe Biden and declared that Canadian Freedom Convoy truckers "won" their battle with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over his sweeping COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Liberal governnments across the world "basically said," according to O'Reilly, "'Look, we're going to tell you what to do with the COVID. And you're not going to have a voice in it. So we're going to tell you, 'You got to wear masks, you got to get vaccinated, you got to, you know, stand...

The Tribe that Wants Kids Forever Masked One critical benchmark of a civilized society is how it treats its most vulnerable human populations and how it treats animals. Does the populace look the other way when the elderly, children, the disabled and animals are abused or are perpetrators apprehended and punished to the furthest extent of the law? Are abusers incarcerated, or merely given a slap on the wrist and set free to torment and destroy more of G-d’s miraculous living creations? In general, the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic empowered large numbers of truly awful and unhappy people to unleash their...

A new study uncovered a mechanism for how caffeine in coffee and tea can protect against cardiovascular diseaseDepositphotos VIEW 1 IMAGES Your morning vice might not be that guilty a pleasure after all: coffee seems to have a range of health benefits, but exactly how it affects the body to produce these results remains unknown. A new study has identified specific proteins that caffeine works on, which help the liver remove bad cholesterol from the bloodstream and protect against cardiovascular disease. Several large-scale, long-term studies have revealed that coffee is good for you in various ways. One study tracked the...