Free Republic

"Omari Garland, the man accused of pistol-whipping and robbing a 70-year-old Asian man in Fairfield last month, allegedly picked a fight with another Asian man at a gym in California."

[Catholic Caucus] Pope Francis praises Fr. James Martin’s pro-LGBT conference as promoting ‘the culture of encounter’Faithful Catholics had protested the LGBT conference organized by Fr. Martin, an event which Pope Francis said ‘enriches us with our differences.’Pope Francis and Fr. James Martin SJ(LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis has once again written to dissident, pro-LGBT Jesuit Father James Martin, praising the priest for a scandalous LGBT conference he recently hosted and for the “culture of encounter” he promotes amongst “LGBT Catholics.”Fr. Martin S.J. announced that Outreach – “a new LGBTQ Catholic resource” he recently set up – had sent the Pope details...

Today, the “Big 3” Blue States, New York, California, and Illinois, all announced a State of Emergency to address the “Monkeypox Crisis”. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/chicago/news/gov-pritzker-monkeypox-virus-outbreak-illinois-public-health-emergency/ You’ll notice Newsome and CA are already mobilizing for mass vaccination, and trying to encourage the rest of the States to do the same. The vaccine and fear campaign is now in motion. Soon, the remaining states with Dem governors, will likely declare a State of Emergency as well. The Red States probably won’t play along, but this won’t stop the DNC from trying to justify a National State of Emergency and lockdowns. Is this based on...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was slurring his words and unsteady on his feet in the moments after he allegedly injured another driver in a drunken California crash earlier this year, newly obtained court documents reveal. Paul Pelosi, 82, also reeked of alcohol and failed his sobriety test in the wake of the May 28 crash in Napa, according to a complaint obtained by The Post on Tuesday that sheds new light on the incident. Pelosi, who is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday on a pair of DUI charges related to the crash, was taken into custody at the scene...

<p>New York in the summer is a noisy place, especially if you don’t have money. The rich run off to the Hamptons or Maine. The bourgeoisie are safely shielded by the hum of their central air, their petite cousins by the roar of their window units. But for the broke—the have-littles and have-nots—summer means an open window, through which the clatter of the city becomes the soundtrack to life: motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another out to play, and music. Ceaseless music.</p>

Alignable's July Rent Report is being released right now, based on a poll that concluded this morning, conducted among 3,553 small business owners . It shows that rent struggles are severe for several small business sectors, including transportation (trucking companies & car services), restaurants , retail shops, and beauty salons. What's the cause according to SMBs? Rent hikes, labor costs/the ongoing labor shortage, the high price of gas, and reduced consumer spending are all combining to create economic instability.

Chinese officials summoned U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns in the middle of the night for a meeting to protest Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trip to Taiwan. Burns was summoned to appear by Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng, who is specifically in charge of managing China's relationship with the United States. Pelosi's visit infuriated Beijing, who repeatedly warned Pelosi not to make a stop there during her South Asia tour. Chinese officials called the visit a 'violation of the one-China principle.' In the summons, Xie stressed the 'nature of Pelosi's visit is extremely vicious and the consequence is very grave. The Chinese...

With energy prices set to rise to unprecedented highs, we are approaching one of the biggest geopolitical earthquake in decades. Carnage has already arrived in the developing world, with power outages from Cuba to South Africa. Sri Lanka is just one of a cascade of low-income countries where leaders face being driven out of power in an ignominious blaze of petrol droughts and loan defaults. In Europe and America, a technocratic elite system built on mythology and complacency is crumbling. People are left wondering why their leaders failed to make contingency plans, given that they sit on vast untapped reserves...

...A couple of years ago while hunched over her microscope at the University of Haifa, graduate student Rikva Chasan began to notice on the inside rims of countless stone bowls a plethora of previously undocumented, methodically incised small triangles.Chasan is working as part of a multi-year international interdisciplinary project conducted by the university’s laboratory for ground stone tools research that is tracking the provenance of these basalt vessels across the ancient Levant in order to show socioeconomic changes in the Chalcolithic period, circa 4,500 BCE – 3,900 BCE...Chasan postulates that the clearly coordinated decorations depict the start of a crafts...

The SpaceX Dragon capsule was observed breaking apart above the area of Australia where the farmers found the debris. Its re-entry was seen and heard by people from Canberra to Bendigo, with many sharing it on social media. ‘At first it kind of looks like a burnt tree … and then you come up to it, it’s like this alien obelisk almost,’ says astrophysicist Brad Tucker of the space debris that he believes to be from a SpaceX mission. Photograph: Brad TuckerSpaceX has not yet confirmed to Tucker that the debris belonged to SpaceX Dragon, and has not yet responded...

“If elections are conducted outside of the law, the people have not conferred their consent on the government. Such elections are unlawful, and their results are illegitimate.” — Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley, writing for the Wisconsin Supreme Court majority in Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections CommissionA court of law has finally confirmed it: The 2020 election was “illegitimate.” And all the demands for sufficient evidence of voter fraud to reverse the outcome were a red herring.The truly dispositive factor, as stated by a Republican Wisconsin state legislator in a March hearing and affirmed in the opinion: “If a vote is cast...

Teachers’ unions are pushing a radical Marxist-inspired agenda that is destroying public education in America. Over the past several years, the left has aggressively infected the minds of the youngest children with the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology, while academic excellence has been shoved to the back of the bus. As a result, public schools are hemorrhaging students. In my home state of Minnesota, 2022 “marks the second consecutive year the state’s public school system has lost thousands of students,” the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota think tank, reported in February. Why should parents...

Disney is once again affirming its commitment to woke-ism. The company, built on providing entertainment for children, appears to be more committed to indoctrinating children than entertaining them. In March, Disney crusaded against parents by publicly opposing Florida’s Parental Rights Bill. In April, their desire to insert themselves into politics led Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to sign a bill removing Disney’s tax privilege and self-governing status. Disney’s woke history has picked up steam in recent years. A Disney executive admitted to routinely adding queerness to children’s programming. They have made it clear that their desire is to ‘transform culture.’ A...

[Catholic Caucus] How Goodwill Was Squandered This week our eyes were graced with the scandalous spectacle of Father Mattia Bernasconi, vicar of the pastoral care for young people of the parish of San Luigi Gonzaga in Milan, celebrating Mass on an air mattress in the water at the beach at Alfieri in Italy's Crotone region—for no reason save that "it was hot." The source for the story can be found here.I do not draw attention to this for the purposes of making another tired old "Look how bad the Novus Ordo is" post. We all know how bad the...

Country star Wynonna Judd is planning to formally contest her late mother’s will which left her entire $25million fortune to her husband. Naomi Judd, who was the long-time singing partner of her daughter Wynonna as The Judds, left her two daughters out of her will in a baffling move. Both Wynonna, 58, and Ashley, 54, did not feature in the will, and did not get any part of her estate, with the Nashville superstar leaving everything to her widower Larry Strickland. The couple had been married for 33 years, with Naomi making Strickland the executor of her estate in a...

According to the largest study of its type, brain scans of individuals obtained as they engaged in different activities or even did nothing accurately indicated whether they were politically conservative or liberal. .... snip...

Celsius Network, once a titan of the crypto lending world, is in bankruptcy proceedings and facing down claims that it was running a Ponzi scheme by paying early depositors with the money it got from new users. Some of the 1.7 million customers ensnared by the alleged fraud are now directly pleading with the Southern District of New York to help them get their money back. Christian Ostheimer, a 37 year-old living in Connecticut, wrote in a letter included in court exhibits that he trusted Celsius with his retirement savings and has lost more than $30,000, which has brought him...

Remember, you are not trying to establish an environment of tolerance and mutual-understanding. Like Isabella and Ferdinand, you are trying to recover the territory. Treat the new Left like people who hate you, because they do. Let’s face it, conservatives are lousy when it comes to activism. We don’t see ourselves as activists, and we’re not very good at adopting such an approach, even as all that is most dear to us is swept away by ideological mischief-makers who know little more than the thrill of repudiating what they do not understand. The reason, of course, that conservatives are poor...

Days before the Capitol riot provoked a years-long effort to impeach, prosecute, and politically malign former President Donald Trump, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney coordinated efforts to deter the very actions she now claims haunt the former president. Cheney has blamed Trump for not ordering the National Guard to defend the Capitol complex, even though multiple sources confirm that he authorized their deployment days prior to the Jan. 6 rally at the White House and riot at the Capitol. Security officials in charge of the Capitol declined to call up troops to protect it, government records show. Yet Cheney herself seems...

Nervous pundits warn that for the good of the country, the Justice Department ought not to indict Donald Trump, since prosecuting a former president is the sort of thing “banana republics” do. That’s wrong on two grounds. First, it is not up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide what’s in the country’s long-term democratic interests. The decision whether to “spare the country” the turmoil surrounding a past president’s criminal trial rests with the chief executive, as was the case under President Gerald Ford. The closest the Justice Department’s prosecutorial guidelines come to that concept is the requirement that a...