Free Republic

And then there was the book All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who’d supposedly brought Nixon down. When it came out in 1974, I read it avidly. And two years later I was enthralled by the movie version, written by William Goldman and directed by Alan J. Pakula. But there was one thing - in the book and the movie - that always puzzled me. I’ll describe it as it’s presented in the film. Woodward (Robert Redford) meets late at night in a parking garage with his secret source, known as...

A recent doorbell video recording (part 1 here) from a Delaware resident prompted a Republican lawmaker to question why agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives asked a legal firearm owner for his weapons’ serial numbers without a warrant. The video (part 2 here), first posted and reported by Armed American News, shows ATF agents and state troopers on July 12 demanding a homeowner turn over the serial numbers of firearms he recently purchased. “I’m extremely concerned by the reports of a surprise and unwarranted firearms inspection conducted by the ATF. This incident occurred the same day...

The federal investigation into Hunter Biden and his tax affairs has reached a "critical stage," a source told Fox News, as officials are looking into whether to charge President Biden’s son with various tax violations, possible foreign lobbying violations and more. Hunter Biden has been under federal investigation since 2018, according to a source familiar with the matter. A separate source told Fox News that the federal grand jury looking into Hunter’s business dealings wrapped up its latest term late last month, but said no charges have been filed. The investigation is being conducted by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss,...

Surveillance video caught the moment when two hooded individuals approached an Oakland Uber driver's car around 11 a.m. Sunday and demanded he get out, KGO-TV reported. But when 52-year-old Kon "Patrick" Fung refused to exit his vehicle in the 2000 block of 13th Avenue, one of the suspects shot him dead and ran away from the scene, the station said, adding that police are calling it an attempted robbery. Fung's girlfriend of five years told KGO about her personal tragedy in the hopes it will lead to solutions to violence plaguing the northern California city and the Bay Area. "She's...

A business owner in Fort Pierce, Florida, has been driving officials in the coastal town bonkers with his weekly messages on the marquee of his diner, Sweeties. Irreverent at times, often rude and always a woke warrior's worst enemy, the messages routinely take aim at the chief of police and the mayor. And Sweeties, partly owned by 63-year-old Rick Reed, happens to be at the highest-traffic corner of the city. It's a forced passage for thousands of motorists to I-95, the area's transportation lifeline. Last week's sign reads: 'What do you call a lesbian dinosaur? Lickalotofp***' While borderline homophobic and...

The changes outlined by the senators are intended to prevent a repeat of the effort on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the presidential election in Congress.WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators proposed new legislation on Wednesday to modernize the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act, working to overhaul a law that President Donald J. Trump tried to abuse on Jan. 6, 2021, to interfere with Congress’s certification of his election defeat.The legislation aims to guarantee a peaceful transition from one president to the next, after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol demonstrated how the current law could be manipulated to...

“Russia’s geographic goals in Ukraine have changed,” said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavorv at a news conference on Wednesday, July 20. “Now [our] geography is different. It is not only the DNR and LNR, it is also the Kherson region, the Zaporizhzhia region and a number of other territories,” he said and explained that this change was due to “weapons that will pose a direct threat to our territory and the territory of those [eastern Ukrainian] republics that have announced their independence.” FM Lavrov added: “If Western countries supply long-range weapons to Ukraine, [these goals] will move even further.” The Russian...

[Catholic Caucus] “The Pope Knew… and Did Nothing “ Gustavo Oscár Zanchetta, former bishop of Orán, was sentenced to four and a half years for sexually abusing seminarians but only spent a week in prison. Now he is under house arrest. (Rome) "The Pope has known for years" what Monsignor Gustavo Oscár Zanchetta was doing, says a victim of the former bishop of the diocese of San Ramón de la nueva Orán in Argentina. The victim is outraged at the news that Bishop Zanchetta, a convicted sex offender, has been granted house arrest.On March 4th, the former bishop of...

VIDEOAfter the "star witness" of the January 6 Committee imploded due to her second hand hearsay testimony being contradicted by first hand accounts of Secret Service agents, the viewership of the January 6 Committee hearings plummeted. Too bad because due to the fact that those hearing have so few viewers, almost everybody missed it when some very unwanted voices intruded upon the hearings. Listen closely and you will hear those voices.

The German government admits hundreds of thousands of people have had severe side effects following mRNA shots The risk-benefit of the Covid vaccines is getting worse and worse and worse This morning, the German Federal Ministry of Health posted a stunning tweet, admitting that 1 out of every 5,000 Covid jabs cause “serious side effects.” This figure is likely a sharp underestimate, given the fact that side effect reporting systems for drugs and vaccines are largely voluntary. Nonetheless, it implies that almost 300,000 Americans and Europeans have suffered severe side effects after receiving mRNA shots from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. (It...

For workers who use machine-learning models to help them make decisions, knowing when to trust a model's predictions is not always an easy task, especially since these models are often so complex that their inner workings remain a mystery. Users sometimes employ a technique, known as selective regression, in which the model estimates its confidence level for each prediction and will reject predictions when its confidence is too low. Then a human can examine those cases, gather additional information, and make a decision about each one manually. But while selective regression has been shown to improve the overall performance of...

Concerned about 2024, Democrats begin to circle a weak and wounded president. But beyond Biden’s fate, bigger questions loomNineteen months into his first term as president, Joe Biden appears to be the lamest of lame ducks. The rapidity and completeness of his political collapse is unprecedented in my long life as an observer of such things, and possibly in our history. It’s as if the death scene that wrapped up an elaborate plot happened 15 minutes into the movie. What on earth can we expect for next two hours? Similarly, with Biden disappearing into a tar pit of irrelevance, the...

Scientists measured the impact of high doses of Vitamin B6 on young adults and found that they reported feeling less anxious and depressed after taking the supplements every day for a month. Dr. David Field, lead author, said: "The functioning of the brain relies on a delicate balance between the excitatory neurons that carry information around and inhibitory ones, which prevent runaway activity. "Vitamin B6 helps the body produce a specific chemical messenger that inhibits impulses in the brain, and our study links this calming effect with reduced anxiety among the participants." While previous studies have produced evidence that multivitamins...

Mariana Mazzucato warns that shutdown may be needed unless we 'do capitalism differently' The novel coronavirus shutdowns and restrictions are slowly being lifted in most areas, but already warnings of a “climate shutdown” have begun reverberating on the environmental left. A leading U.N. economist who advises European governments last week sent up a trial balloon via an article titled “Avoiding a Climate Lockdown,” arguing that in “the near future, the world may need to resort to lockdowns again — this time to tackle a climate emergency.” “Under a ‘climate lockdown,’ governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat,...

California pro-family organizations are sounding the alarm over a proposed bill they say could give the power to state courts to take "temporary emergency jurisdiction" of children if they come to California for transgender drugs, surgery, or mental healthcare. The California Family Council and the Pacific Justice Institute are warning about the bill known as SB 107, which calls these gender-altering treatments "gender-affirming health care." The measure passed the Assembly Public Safety Committee on June 28 even after hearing testimony from a teenager who had undergone transgender procedures and regretted them.

A new study found a link between depression, diet, and the development of frailty. Frailty, defined as a recognizable state of increased vulnerability resulting from a decline in function across multiple physiological systems, affects 10–15% older adults and often co-occurs with other health conditions, like depression. Diet is thought to be a major contributor to frailty development. While previous studies established a link between an inflammatory diet—including artificial trans fats (like partially hydrogenated oil), refined carbohydrates, and saturated fats—and the risk of development frailty, this is one of the first studies to try to understand the impact of depression on...

On this day 200 years ago, Johann Mendel was born. He would come to be known as Gregor (the religious name he received upon entering St. Thomas's Abbey in Austria-Hungary as an Augustinian Friar) and later as the "father of modern genetics." Mendel studied math, physics, and eventually botany in school. While conducting experiments breeding hybridized pea plants in the monastery garden and greenhouse, he discovered the principles of heredity. As one article on his life explains: He chose to study the inheritance of seven traits (seed shape, seed coat tint, flower color, flower location, pod shape, unripe pod color,...

Genetic liability to rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is associated with an increased risk for coronary artery disease (CAD) and intracerebral hemorrhage, according to a study. Shuai Yuan and colleagues used a Mendelian randomization approach to examine the causality of the associations of RA with CAD and stroke. Seventy independent single nucleotide polymorphisms strongly associated with RA were selected as instrumental variables from a genome-wide association meta-analysis involving 14,361 RA cases and 43,923 controls. From meta-analyses of genetic studies, international genetic consortia, the U.K. Biobank, and the FinnGen consortium, summary-level data for CAD, all stroke, any ischemic stroke and its subtypes, intracerebral...

Air Force Gen. John Raymond, chief of the newly created Space Force, says he supports efforts by the Biden administration to reach a U.N.-sponsored agreement on military activity in space, something past administrations have rejected as an arms control ploy by China and Russia to limit the American power in space. The four-star general also endorsed the Biden administration’s recent unilateral declaration of a ban on anti-satellite tests that create debris in space. Gen. Raymond said he backs the idea of trying to deter conflict in space through arms agreements to establish international “norms” for military space operations.

A vicious beating at the Bellevue Transit Center sent a disabled man to the hospital with a fractured skull...Sixty-three-year-old Eric Larson, who was sitting in his wheelchair when he was attacked, died from his injuries Tuesday...Police tracked down the suspect [Gabriel Vargas-Garcia] and discovered he was just released from prison on July 8 on a sexual assault conviction.