Free Republic

Teh famous Rodgers and Hammerstein song from Carousel.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on Wednesday there is “growing momentum” on gun violence legislation after another bipartisan senators’ meeting on the matter was held earlier that day. “Today a group of eight bipartisan Senators met to continue negotiations on a gun violence bill that can get a broad, bipartisan vote in the Senate. This follows a similar meeting yesterday,” he tweeted. “There is growing momentum to get something done and we agreed on a plan to keep working.”

Women in the United States continue to earn less than men, on average. Among full-time, year-round workers in 2019, women’s median annual earnings were 82% those of men. The gender wage gap is narrower among younger workers nationally, and the gap varies across geographical areas. In fact, in 22 of 250 U.S. metropolitan areas, women under the age of 30 earn the same amount as or more than their male counterparts, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data.

COVID-19 is here to stay, the country’s top infectious disease expert said Sunday. The persistence of the coronavirus means yearly vaccine booster shots could be in store for everyone, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser, told PIX 11 in an interview. [CUT] All Americans can expect to get regular boosters in the future, according to Fauci, who compared the situation to annual flu shots. “We know that immunity wanes over time,” he said. “Depending upon what this virus does, there is certainly a reasonably good chance that we will have the same sort of situation that we...

One gas station in downtown Los Angeles is charging upwards of $8 a gallon for regular gas. This comes as gas prices continue to rise across California and the U.S. The average price in Los Angeles County rose to a record $6.172 on Tuesday. However, the Chevron station off Alameda in Downtown LA is charging over $8 a gallon. Many people in the area say the station is price gouging. In a statement released to FOX 11, Chevron said there are multiple factors that go into the price of a gallon of gasoline, "including some unique ones specific to California."...

Dr. Anthony Fauci said he will likely step down from his leadership positions by 2024 — regardless of who ends up in the White House. The country’s leading infectious disease expert made the announcement during an interview with Neil Cavuto on Wednesday when the Fox News anchor asked if he would continue serving in government if former President Donald Trump were reelected.

Barack Obama and Michelle Obama visited the National Gallery of Art on April 28. The former president and first lady took in some of James Van Der Zee’s portraits from Harlem in the 1920s and ’30s and also visited the “Afro-Atlantic Histories” exhibit that’s on now. The Obamas had a private visit. They were shown around by the National Gallery’s director, Kaywin Feldman. Curator Diane Waggoner accompanied them on their tour of the Van Der Zee photographs, and curators Steven Nelson, Kanitra Fletcher, and Molly Donovan were with them when they viewed “Afro-Atlantic Histories.” The former first couple ended their...

Ukraine began evacuating its soldiers on Wednesday from the embattled city of Severodonetsk, the strategic eastern city that Russia has been battling to take over in a bid to control the Donbas region, local officials said. Ukrainian forces retreated after suffering big losses in the city that’s now about 80% controlled by Russian forces, Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Haidai said Wednesday. “This is not a betrayal,” Haidai wrote in a post on Telegram. The governor said the retreat across the river to Severodonetsk’s twin city, Lysychansk, was part of their strategy

President Joe Biden’s policies have helped drive the nation’s foreign-born population to 47 million as of April, the largest in United States history, new analysis reveals. Researchers at the Center for Immigration Studies analyzed monthly Census Bureau data, finding that, as of April, about 47 million foreign-born residents reside in the U.S. This is “the largest number ever recorded in any U.S. government survey or decennial census,” as researchers note.

Whether true or not, the left has decided that black people are as easy to play as Donald Trump. While frantically replacing African Americans with immigrants, they announce: "Replacement" is a white supremacy theory! Pay no attention to the Latino immigrants doing construction and Indian immigrants getting all the "diversity" jobs. Employers in need of cheap labor lost slavery, Jim Crow and, finally, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the ability to legally discriminate against African Americans. So they turned around and, one year later -- just as black Americans were poised to move into the middle class en masse...

It may be nearly three years since the world officially exhausted all of the available IPv4 internet addresses, but now a new initiative has been proposed that could free up hundreds of millions of addresses that are currently unused – or are they?While the world is still slowly moving towards broader adoption of the newer IPv6 protocol, which offers a vast address space, the widespread continued use of IPv4 has caused problems because all available ranges of the roughly 4.3 billion addresses it supports have largely been allocated.Now it seems that Seth Schoen, formerly a senior staff technologist at the...

UVALDE, Tex. — Pedro “Pete” Arredondo sat before the Uvalde school board last year and let members know what the school system police force needed to be ready to face an active shooter. The pandemic had cut into trainings for his six-member department, the chief said, and while officers had completed a program the previous summer, they needed more — as many as possible. “It’s just like golf, if you play once a year, in six months you’re just not all that great,” Arredondo said, according to a video posted on YouTube of the March 2021 meeting. He stressed that...

The Uvalde school shootings, coming as they did just before Memorial Day, have thrown into high relief one of this country's most vexing problems. No, it's not guns, even "military-style" guns, to use a term that has no meaning except apparently to journalists—who should also brush up on the meaning of "semi-automatic" while they're at it but probably won't. Guns have been a part of American society since the Pilgrims shot their first turkeys, and have served the country well throughout its history. That some of them have been used in the commission of crimes by criminals hardly outweighs their...

Violent crime rates in more than a dozen Twin Cities suburbs have increased over the last couple of years, according to five years of crime data analyzed by the Star Tribune. “A total of 51 homicides were recorded in those suburban communities in 2021, more than double the 22 recorded in 2019. But most of the increase occurred in the north metro suburbs,” according to the report.

Struggling to respond to large gatherings of young people downtown following a spate of shootings, Chicago police arrested 13 people and recovered 11 guns during a daylong, sometimes rowdy Memorial Day party at North Avenue Beach. Promoted on social media as a “2000s themed cookout,” the beach “takeover” on Monday drew hundreds of people as temperatures jumped into the 90s. Officers began making gun arrests shortly after the event started and were pelted by glass bottles thrown by partygoers, according to Chief of Patrol Brian McDermott. At one point, a call went out for a “mass arrest” after a cop...

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked to clear up some details about Joe Biden’s latest whopper of a lie. Last Friday he delivered the commencement address at the Naval Academy. He told a story never before heard and not mentioned in his autobiography. Biden told the midshipmen that he applied to the Naval Academy in 1965. That couldn’t possibly be true, though. Jean-Pierre’s response was cringe-worthy. Here’s the story – Biden told the midshipmen about applying to the Naval Academy with a letter from then-Senator J. Caleb Boggs in 1965. The problem with that is Biden graduated from...

During an interview with White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese on Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” host Jake Tapper contrasted revelations that President Joe Biden wasn’t informed about the baby formula issue until April with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s claim that the administration has “been doing this whole of government approach since the recall” and wondered if a whole of government approach “doesn’t include” the president.

Explanation: It wasn't the storm of the century -- but it was a night to remember. Last night was the peak of the Tau Herculids meteor shower, a usually modest dribble of occasional meteors originating from the disintegrating Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3. This year, calculations showed that the Earth might be passing through a particularly dense stream of comet debris -- at best creating a storm of bright meteors streaking out from the constellation of Hercules. What actually happened fell short of a meteor storm, but could be called a decent meteor shower. Featured here is a composite image taken at...

From now on, Russian and Belarusian entities can only buy CPUs operating at below 25 MHz and offering performance of up to 5 GFLOPS from Taiwanese companies. This essentially excludes all modern technology, including microcontrollers for more or less sophisticated devices. Due to restrictions imposed on exports to Russia by the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union, leading Taiwanese companies were among the first to cease working with Russia after the country started full-scale war against Ukraine in late February. This week Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) formally published its list of high-tech products that are banned...

Seattle has become the first US city to set a minimum wage for app-based delivery drivers after new rules were passed on Tuesday. The "Pay Up" bill will set the minimum wage for these workers in accordance with the city's rate of $17.27 per hour and come into force in 2023, The Seattle Times reported. "We live in an expensive city; many delivery workers earn below the minimum wage after expenses and tips are accounted for," said Lisa Herbold, one of the council members behind the bill, in a statement. "The passage of this legislation will help tens of thousands...