Free Republic

If it’s true that Gross has allowed Sweeney to ascend to fourth place, Monday’s announcement likely harkens to one of the great political maneuvers in the past decade. Sweeney, a registered Republican, is the proverbial darling of resource development organizations throughout Alaska. Her empassioned advocacy on behalf of the North Slope and the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation put her distinctly at odds with the crunchy environmentalism that defined Gross’ campaigns. One of the few things either camp had in common were relationships to opponents of the Pebble Mine project in western Alaska. Those opponents share something else in common: an...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) - It was supposed to be a “recovery day.” After working 41 hours in three days caring for COVID patients, Katie Slayton had the day off on Sept. 22, 2021. A single mother of a five-year-old son, the Williamson County nurse had dropped him off at daycare that evening so she could run to the mall. A few hours later, she picked him up and prepared to pull out of the parking spot when she saw police lights directly behind her. What would happen next would result in devastating consequences: charges of DUI and felony child neglect,...

[Catholic Caucus] Monastery St Benoît: Dissolved Community Answers Bishop ReyFather Alcuin Reid's Benedictines responded June 21 to reports that Fréjus-Toulon Bishop Dominique Rey had suppressed their community.The monks announced they will continue their lives waiting for “better times” on their property which is controlled by a civil association. The statement declares that it is false that the monks refused to meet Rey.According to the statement, Reid "repeatedly asked to meet" with Rey, explaining that they missed one summons because it did not arrive until the day after the scheduled meeting, and another because Reid was not in France on the...

One of my favorite non-religious fiction books of all time is World War Z (An Oral History of the Zombie War) by author Max Brooks (the son of Mel Brooks). Despite its ominous title, the book isn’t so much about zombies and gore, as it is about human behavior and what people do when a crisis happens. What was more fascinating, was the way the book was formatted. It was written in such a way as to chronicle the global crisis after the fact, as the main character was tasked by the United Nations with documenting the viral outbreak from...

The Uvalde City Council meeting will be streamed in the video player above. Uvalde City Council members are slated to vote Tuesday night on “granting a leave of absence from future council meetings to Councilman Pete Arredondo,” according to a meeting agenda.

Explanation: Does the Sun return to the same spot on the sky every day? No. A better and more visual answer to that question is an analemma, a composite of images taken at the same time and from the same place over the course of a year. The featured analemma was compiled at 4:30 pm many afternoons from Taiwan during 2021, with the city skyline of Taipei in the foreground, including tall Taipei 101. The Sun's location in December -- at the December solstice -- is shown on the far left, while its location at the June solstice is captured...

The ink hadn’t even dried on my story on the death on June 12 of a healthy young teenager, 17-year-old Gwen Casten, who died in her sleep when I read this article about another high-profile vaccine-related death of a healthy 34-year-old who also apparently died in her sleep on Jun 20, 2022, just 8 days after Gwen Casten died.IMPORTANT NOTE: The cause of Dani Hampson’s death has not been revealed but how does someone die in the very early hours of the morning you are going to be married? It’s most likely she died in her sleep.However, the rest of...

Pope Francis gives private audience to pro-LGBT priest known for pagan practicesFr. Richard Rohr continues to promote his heretical interpretations of Catholic teaching without impingement.Pope Francis today received in audience a prominent priest known for his long-standing public rejection of Catholic teaching, advocacy of LGBT ideology, and downplaying of the role of Jesus in salvation.Pope Francis met Monday with Father Richard Rohr, O.F.M., the founder of the eponymous Rohr Institute and the meditation center called the “Center for Action and Contemplation,” situated in Albuquerque, New Mexico. LifeSiteNews contacted the Holy See Press Office inquiring as to the details of the...

President Biden said Tuesday that there’s enough COVID relief funding to get through “at least this year,” but the administration needs more money for vaccines for children and “to plan for the second pandemic.” Congress has not approved a $10 billion COVID funding request, despite the Biden administration’s insistence that the money is needed for future COVID variants and worldwide vaccination efforts. […] “We have to think ahead, and that’s not something the last outfit did very well. That’s something we’ve been doing fairly well. That’s why we need the money,” the president said. …

A type of cancer treatment known as CAR T therapy has shown great promise for blood cancer treatments in the last decade, but too often, patients relapse within a short time. Now, a team of researchers has uncovered some critical clues about why—potentially leading to treatments to prevent these relapses. CAR T therapy involves isolating virus-fighting T cells from a patient's blood and genetically modifying them with chimeric antigen receptors (CAR), which target surface marker expressed on cancer cells. It has proven particularly effective in fighting blood cancers such as acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. However, remissions...

Trapped-ion quantum computers are quantum devices in which trapped ions vibrate together and are fully isolated from the external environment. These computers can be particularly useful for investigating and realizing various quantum physics states. Researchers at NIST/University of Maryland and Duke University have recently used a trapped-ion quantum computer to realize two measurement-induced quantum phases, namely the pure phase and mixed or coding phase during a purification phase transition. Their findings, published in a paper in Nature Physics, contribute to the experimental understanding of many-body quantum systems. To measure the purification phase transition first outlined by Gullans and Huse, the...

Eating a larger proportion of protein while dieting leads to better food choices and helps avoid the loss of muscle mass, according to a study. An analysis of pooled data from multiple weight-loss trials shows that increasing the amount of protein even slightly, from 18 percent of a person's food intake to 20 percent, has a substantial impact on the quality of the food choices made by the person. In addition, the researchers found a moderately higher intake of protein provided another benefit to the dieters: a reduced loss of lean body mass often associated with weight loss. Weight-loss regimens...

The surface of Lake Mead, North America’s largest artificial reservoir, now stands at 1044 feet above sea level and is dropping fast. If Lake Mead’s water level falls another 149 feet, a dangerous level known as a “dead pool” could wreak havoc across Southwestern US. Since the beginning of March, Lake Mead has dropped about 23 feet, and compared with the 5-year trend, the reservoir’s water levels are well below average, at the lowest point since the lake was filled nearly a century ago. A graph might not do justice to visualizing just how fast the water level has fallen....

France's highest administrative court has upheld a ban on full-body "burkini" swimsuits in public pools, rejecting an appeal by the city of Grenoble. Last month, Grenoble authorised all swimwear, including burkinis... But the court said it could not allow "selective exceptions to the rules to satisfy religious demands". France has strict laws on which swimming costumes can be worn and the issue of religious expression in public places is divisive. French opposition to the burkini stretches as far back as 2016, when several local municipalities attempted to outlaw it on beaches for violating the country's strict separation between religion and...

Auction prices of used trucks are falling almost as quickly as they rose over the last year. That is leaving owner-operators stuck with overpriced equipment they thought they could pay for in a hot spot freight market that is cooling off. “The market is primarily absorbing trucks from fleets no longer retaining all of their older iron as new trucks trickle in and, to an extent, from owner-operators leaving the industry or going to work for a fleet,” said Chris Visser, senior analyst and commercial vehicles product manager for J.D. Power Valuation Services. In its latest Guidelines report, Power said...

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common cancer affecting children. The T-ALL form of leukemia that emerges from early T lineage cells has a poorer prognosis than B-lineage ALL. The prognosis for relapsed T-ALL is very poor and new therapies are sorely needed. A joint study discovered a new combination of drugs that is effective against T-ALL. The finding is based on a previous discovery made by the Tampere University research group where the general tyrosine kinase inhibitor dasatinib was found to be effective in approximately one third of the tested patient samples. In the treatment of leukemia, the...

France's highest administrative court has upheld a ban on full-body "burkini" swimsuits in public pools, rejecting an appeal by the city of Grenoble. Last month, Grenoble authorised all swimwear, including burkinis, sparking a legal battle with the government. Burkinis are worn largely by Muslim women as a way of preserving modesty and upholding their faith. But the court said it could not allow "selective exceptions to the rules to satisfy religious demands". The dispute went all the way to the Council of State after a local court in Grenoble suspended the ban on the grounds that it seriously undermined the...

The January 6 Committee opened its fourth public hearing Tuesday with complaints about protests at the homes of election officials across the country, while saying nothing about protests at the homes of Supreme Court justices. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) condemned then-President Donald Trump for not condemning the 2020 protests, without noting the fact that the Biden White House has specifically encouraged protests outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, against existing federal law. Moreover, Biden has never personally condemned the attempt assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. A White House official tried to claim otherwise, but Biden’s condemnation came...

Azithromycin helps improve asthma control and reduce exacerbations in children with poorly controlled asthma, according to a study published in the June issue of Chest. Jagat Jeevan Ghimire, M.D., from All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, and colleagues randomly assigned 120 children (5 to 15 years of age) with poorly controlled asthma to receive azithromycin three times weekly for three months along with standard treatment or standard treatment alone. The researchers found that the numbers of children with well-controlled asthma according to Global Initiative for Asthma guidelines were 41 of 56 in the azithromycin group versus 10...

The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which previously classified Media Research Center as one of the “Toxic Ten” of alleged climate misinformation, is now trying to pressure Google to suppress pro-life websites. The U.K.- and U.S.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) is targeting alternatives to abortion by calling search results for pro-life crisis pregnancy centers “anti-abortion fake clinics.” Twenty-one lawmakers recently sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, urging him to suppress the pro-life search results based on the CCDH report. The CCDH report claimed that 11.46 percent of results for the queries “abortion clinic near me” and...