Free Republic

For the second half of my public school education I lived in a small rural county which had just one high school -- a high school which graduated significantly less than 200 students/year. In other words, the local school board had exactly one high school to supervise, and a rather small one at that. Given that the county had significantly less than 10,000 residents in it, school board members were accountable. Any naughtiness in order to appease wacky academic trends could be countered by disgruntled parents in short order. When I was in junior high, they had a Bible reading...

One of the Bay Area's tech giants is closing its San Francisco office, multiple media outlets reported this week. PayPal has a location at 425 Market St., between First and Fremont streets, and it will remain open for employees to use on a voluntary basis until early June. The San Francisco office houses staff who work for the company's Xoom service that allows customers to send money to family and friends around the world and pay international bills. The digital payment firm’s headquarters will continue to operate in San Jose. PayPal would not comment specifically on the closure, but said...

Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) said in a new interview it is possible she loses her reelection bid to a “rubber-stamp Republican.” “I may be the last man standing. I may not be re-elected,” the senator told The New York Times. “It may be that Alaskans say, ‘Nope, we want to go with an absolute, down-the-line, always, always, 100-percent, never-question, rubber-stamp Republican.’ “And if they say that that’s the way that Alaska has gone — kind of the same direction that so many other parts of the country have gone —I have to accept that,” she added. “But I’m going to...

A detailed list of the destroyed and captured vehicles and equipment of both sides can be seen below. This list is constantly updated as additional footage becomes available.

Four environmental groups that want the U.S. Postal Service to buy more electric delivery vehicles are suing to halt purchases of thousands of gas-powered trucks as the agency modernizes its mail delivery fleet. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in California asks a judge to order the Postal Service to conduct a more thorough environmental review before moving forward with the next-generation delivery vehicle program. Plaintiffs contend that purchases of fossil fuel-powered delivery vehicles will cause environmental harm for decades to come. “Louis DeJoy’s gas-guzzling fleet guarantees decades of pollution with every postcard and package,” said Scott Hochberg, an...

Impeachment-happy Democrats are expected to hold a hearing to explore the possibility of impeachment for Supreme Court justices in the wake of controversial messages surfacing from the wife of conservative Justice Clarence Thomas.

FORTRESS MONROE, Sunday, April 27. Hon, E.M. Stanton, Secretary of War: A fugitive black, just arrived from Portsmouth, brings the Petersburgh Express of yesterday, which contains the following dispatch: NORFOLK, Friday, April 25. The enemy passed Fort Jackson at 4 o'clock yesterday morning. When the news reached New-Orleans, the excitement was boundless. Martial law was put in full force, and business was completely suspended. All the cotton and steamboats, excepting such as were necessary to transport coin, ammunition, &c., were destroyed. At 1 o'clock to-day the operator bade us good by, saying that the enemy had appeared before the city....

Moderna on Thursday asked U.S. regulators to authorize low doses of its COVID-19 vaccine for children younger than 6, a long-awaited move toward potentially opening shots for millions of tots by summer. Frustrated families are waiting impatiently for a chance to protect the nation’s littlest kids as all around them people shed masks and other public health precautions -- even though highly contagious coronavirus mutants continue to spread. Moderna submitted data to the Food and Drug Administration that it hopes will prove two low-dose shots can protect babies, toddlers and preschoolers -- albeit not as effectively during the omicron surge...

Russia has nearly doubled its revenues from selling fossil fuels to the EU during the two months of war in Ukraine, benefiting from soaring prices even as volumes have been reduced.Russia has received about €62bn from exports of oil, gas and coal in the two months since the invasion began, according to an analysis of shipping movements and cargos by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.For the EU, imports were about €44bn for the past two months, compared with about €140bn for the whole of last year, or roughly €12bn a month.The findings demonstrate how Russia has...

Climate change will result in thousands of new viruses spread among animal species by 2070 — and that’s likely to increase the risk of emerging infectious diseases jumping from animals to humans, according to a new study. Researchers, who published their findings Thursday in the journal Nature, used a model to examine how over 3,000 mammal species might migrate and and share viruses over the next 50 years if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which recent research shows is possible. They found that cross-species virus spread will happen over 4,000 times among mammals alone. Birds...

Gavin Loxton has more than 5,000 sheep at the high-country farm he runs in Lake Tekapo, New Zealand, so he said it wasn’t surprising that he didn’t notice when one of his lambs was missing about four years ago. But he definitely noticed when the sheep was found. After several years on the run, the wayward male Merino was discovered on April 14 hiding in an outcropping of rocks on Mount Edward — which has an elevation 6,765 feet — with almost double his weight in wool. Shrekapo, as he was nicknamed by residents of the Lake Tekapo township, had...

@newsmax @tedcruz delivers a speech at America First Policy Institute on America's role in war. "The job of our military is not nation building. The job of our military is not invading distant lands and transforming them into Switzerland." Clip ...

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled an international “Declaration for the Future of the Internet” with 50 other countries, slamming the policies of “authoritarian” governments — while endorsing efforts to curb online “disinformation” and “harassment.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed legislation that strips Walt Disney World of its independent, special district status after the company objected to the state's new law regarding discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms. While the motive behind this action is problematic, some of its supporters argue that there is nothing to fret about, since it was time to revoke a cronyist privilege granted to Disney 50 years ago anyway. But if this is really a fight against cronyism, the legislation goes about it the wrong way.Cronyism is the unhealthy alliance of business and government. It takes...

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginia House Democrats voted Wednesday to remove their caucus leader, months after an unsuccessful election cycle that saw the party lose full control of the state government. The 48-member caucus voted by secret ballot to remove Minority Leader Eileen Filler-Corn, who previously served as Virginia's first female House speaker, according to lawmakers and staffers who spoke with reporters shortly after the vote. The membership voted against removing caucus chair Charniele Herring, lawmakers said. No immediate vote was held on who would fill Filler-Corn's role. The vote on whether to remove the two women came after a...

May it never be said that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis isn’t the giving type. Just one month ago, with a single stroke of his pen, DeSantis gifted Southern Nevada and other tourism destinations across the country billions of dollars in tourism revenue that are likely to flow out of Florida in the wake of the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.

Washington -- I do not go to the movies. Oh, I go to reruns of "The Godfather," "The Godfather: Part II" and "The Godfather: Part III." (There was a "Godfather: Part III," was there not?) I got a little tired of all those Italians eating pasta and killing each other. Seriously, I was raised in the suburbs of Chicago, and I grew up with the children of mafiosi. To this day, I am amazed at how true to life the Godfather movies were. At least their domestic scenes were realistic. There have been other movies that I have watched --...

I despise the institution of independent prosecutor, or “special counsel” as the current iteration is known in federal regulation. I am thus sympathetic to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s insistence, in Senate testimony on Tuesday, that the Biden investigation — which the administration disingenuously minimizes as if it implicated only the president’s son, Hunter — is in the capable hands of the Biden Justice Department, with no need to appoint a special counsel.

Joe Biden takes lunch seriously. As vice president, his weekly lunch with Obama wasn’t just a meal. It was a meeting when things really got done, a moment set aside on the White House calendar for the two men to break bread and build out an agenda. The weekly meal was so important to Biden that he carried over the tradition to his own presidency. "I made the same deal with her that Barack and I made," he said of his newly minted vice president just weeks after his inauguration. That meant drop-in privileges at the Oval Office and carte...

Joe Biden takes lunch seriously. As vice president, his weekly lunch with Obama wasn’t just a meal. It was a meeting when things really got done, a moment set aside on the White House calendar for the two men to break bread and build out an agenda. The weekly meal was so important to Biden that he carried over the tradition to his own presidency. "I made the same deal with her that Barack and I made," he said of his newly minted vice president just weeks after his inauguration. That meant drop-in privileges at the Oval Office and carte...