Free Republic

Over a week after Gail Seiler’s physician had given her a terminal diagnosis, her husband, Brad Seiler, wheeled her out of the back door of the hospital where she had been admitted for COVID-19 on Dec. 3, 2021. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Seiler, but you are going to die,” she recalled her physician telling her on Dec. 5. On Dec. 15, despite resistance from hospital staff, Brad extracted Seiler from Medical City Plano hospital in Plano, Texas, where the couple lives. Seiler is one of the few patients who has lived to tell her story about what she said she...

Kazakhstan Interreligious Congress Adopts Declaration Calling Religious Pluralism ‘God’s Will’NUR-SULTAN, Kazakhstan — The interreligious congress in which Pope Francis participated this week in Kazakhstan adopted a declaration calling religious pluralism an expression “of the wisdom of God’s will in creation.”The 35-point declaration was “adopted by the majority of the delegates” of the Seventh Congress of the Leaders of World and Traditional Religions Sept. 15 in the capital city of Nur-Sultan.Pope Francis participated in the opening and closing ceremonies of the interreligious summit during his Sept. 13-15 visit to the Central Asian country.Almost 100 delegates from around the world, representing the...

Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras sharply criticized the Toronto and Venice film festivals Tuesday for programming documentaries connected with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, suggesting the decision bordered on a “whitewashing” of history. Her remarks came at the Toronto Film Festival’s Doc Conference, a day after Poitras’s new documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, made its North American premiere in Toronto. The film about artist Nan Goldin and her crusade against OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, won the Golden Lion at Venice. Poitras attended Venice, as did Clinton, the latter in support of her...

Rising chess star Hans Niemann has admitted to cheating in online chess in the past as he rejected any suggestions he had used computer assistance in a major tournament. The American made an impassioned statement during an interview with St Louis Chess Club commentator Alejandro Ramírez after allegations swirled on social media. World champion Magnus Carlsen stunned the chess world yesterday by suddenly withdrawing from the Sinquefield Cup following his shock defeat to Niemann with the white pieces.

A Chicago reporter who filed a federal lawsuit against Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot for revoking his press credentials accused the city of trying to silence him after a series of contentious exchanges with the mayor's office where he repeatedly questioned her "failures in performance." The suit, filed by journalist William J. Kelly in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in late August, alleges Lightfoot and Chicago Police Department Superintendent David Brown violated his First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights, saying, "They have done this for the most cynical and contemptible reason that can be imagined, to...

Two journalists surface today with two different aspects to the same big picture story. First, Julie Kelly notes the DOJ is using social media chat messages as evidence in court against J6 detainees: “DOJ and Big Tech are working seamlessly to excavate private messages and info from deleted accounts to use as incriminating evidence for J6ers.” (link) Second, Miranda Devine is writing in the New York Post about Facebook spying on private messages to identify people who questioned the outcome of the 2020 election (link) This ‘surveillance system‘ has been of great interest to CTH for several years, in part...

A college volleyball player alleged spectators hurled racist abuse at her, but the claims were never proven — and it took a student newspaper to expose the truth as major left-wing media outlets ate up the tale. The racist saga involving Brigham Young University first made national headlines late last month when Duke University sophomore Rachel Richardson went public with allegations that she had been subjected to racist slurs every time she served during a volleyball match in Provo, Utah, on Aug. 26. But BYU dropped a bombshell last week when it revealed that its “extensive” investigation into the matter,...

The Justice Department and former President Donald Trump's legal team have found rare agreement in a potential candidate to serve as the special master tasked with reviewing the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago. Judge Raymond Dearie, whom Trump's legal team put forward, is an acceptable option to serve as the third-party attorney to independently review the seized materials, the Justice Department said in a court filing Monday evening. While it remains unclear when US District Judge Aileen Cannon will decide who will serve as the special master, here's what you need to know about Dearie and the role he could play...

Recent Icelandic rifting events have illuminated the roles of centralized crustal magma reservoirs and lateral magma transport, important characteristics of mid-ocean ridge magmatism. A consequence of such shallow crustal processing of magmas is the overprinting of signatures that trace the origin, evolution and transport of melts in the uppermost mantle and lowermost crust. Here we present unique insights into processes occurring in this zone from integrated petrologic and geochemical studies of the 2021 Fagradalsfjall eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland. Geochemical analyses of basalts erupted during the first 50 days of the eruption, combined with associated gas emissions, reveal...

Twitter’s former security chief told Congress Tuesday there was “at least one agent” from China’s intelligence service on Twitter’s payroll and that the company knowingly allowed India to add agents to the company roster as well, potentially giving those nations access to sensitive data about users. These were some of the troubling revelations from Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, a respected cybersecurity expert and Twitter whistleblower who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to lay out his allegations against the company. Zatko told lawmakers that the social media platform is plagued by weak cyber defenses that make it vulnerable to exploitation by...

Former Disney CEO Bob Iger said on Wednesday the entertainment giant had determined that a “substantial portion” of Twitter’s users were “not real” in 2016, when Disney was weighing a purchase of the social network. Iger said the Walt Disney Co. and Twitter Inc. boards were prepared to enter negotiations when he got cold feet. He said that, with Twitter’s help, Disney had learned that “a substantial portion — not a majority -” of users were fake. “I remember discounting the value” as a result, Iger said, in remarks at the Code Conference in Beverly Hills, California. Iger did not...

Judge didn't nix the idea of signing with the Red Sox as a free agent, but that doesn't mean a whole lotYankees slugger and likely AL MVP Aaron Judge is having a season for the ages. He clubbed two more homers on Tuesday night to move him to 57 with 20 Yankees games left to play. He's on pace for 65 this season and, well, we know all about the context behind getting to 61 and beyond. Another aspect worth consideration here is Judge hits free agency after the season. He and the Yankees were unable to reach an extension,...

A woman whose DNA from a rape kit was used by cops to arrest her for an unrelated burglary filed a federal lawsuit against San Francisco on Monday, alleging the police invaded her privacy. The DNA of the woman, known as Jane Doe, was stored by the SFPD as part of a domestic violence and sexual assault case in 2016. According to her lawyer, Adanté Pointer, the same sample was used to charge her with retail theft five years later. The lawsuit claims that the victim’s DNA was entered without her knowledge or consent into a database used to identify...

ALMATY -- Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Kazakhstan for a state visit on Wednesday, his first known trip abroad since COVID-19 exploded in January 2020. Xi landed in Nur-Sultan, the Kazakh capital, in the afternoon, China's state media reported. A statement on Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's website offered few details but said the two sides discussed a range of cooperative projects. It also quoted Xi making a strong statement in support of Kazakhstan -- one that seemed likely to resonate in the context of neighboring Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "No matter how the international situation changes, we will continue...

After years of less than normal rainfall and terrible management by the State of California and the federal government, water has been CUT OFF to many Northern California water agencies and farms.

The San Francisco Public Defender’s office has accused a Latino police officer of racially discriminating against Latino drug dealers in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood. According to public defense attorneys for one of the neighborhood’s alleged drug dealers, Sgt. Daniel Solorzano arrested 53 people for drug sales over a roughly two-year period, all of whom were Latino. Meanwhile, they claim he declined to arrest 43 other people who the police had detained or surveilled, all but two of whom were non-Latino. Solorzano is of Mexican and Nicaraguan heritage and his first language is Spanish.

My Email to Governor Desantis Dear Governor Desantis, with all the controversy about sending newly arrived Illegal Aliens to these bastians of liberalism and sanctuary cities and States, I would implore you take a different approach, Offer Every last Illegal Alien in your Jails and Prisons in your State a Conditional FULL PARDON if they agree to be shipped to Delaware, DC, or Martha's Vineyard and promise in writing to never come back to your State or their Pardon will be Revoked and they will be rearrested and serve the remainder of their sentence.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had a meeting today with fellow autocrat Xi Jinping of China. Putin made a point of siding with China on the issue of Taiwan. Given that many observers have drawn a connection between what Russia is doing in Ukraine now and what China would like to do in Taiwan as soon as possible, you might expect that President Xi would return the favor by offering some support for Russia. But that didn’t happen. On the contrary, Putin himself indicated that China had “concerns” and Xi completely avoided the topic.

The emir of Qatar on Wednesday made an urgent appeal to Russia and the West, saying his nation will not be able to re-supply Europe with enough liquefied natural gas to stave off an energy crisis this winter, and urged both parties to bring a speedy end to the war. In an exclusive interview with French news outlet Le Point, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani emphasized that although gas and oil supply chains struggled before the Kremlin's invasion in February, the war has taken a severe toll on the industry. "We want to help Europe, and we will supply...

by Samantha Foster | 24NewsOn Thursday morning two busloads of over 100 illegal aliens were dropped off at 'Border Czar' Kamala Harris’s residence in Washington DC.Since Kamala won’t visit the border, the border was brought to her doorstep.Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent the illegals to Kamala Harris’s front lawn after she absurdly claimed the border is secure on Meet the Press on Sunday: Fox News interviewed some of the illegals standing outside of Harris’s residence and even they said the border is wide open. “Vice President Harris said that the border is closed. Is the border closed? Do you believe...