Free Republic

The American ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, published a message of condolence on Thursday following the passing of Jiang Zemin, a former president of China responsible for the post-Tiananmen Square crackdown on anti-communist dissent and the live harvesting of organs from Falun Gong prisoners. Burns at press time is the only senior U.S. government representative to acknowledge Jiang’s death. The U.S. State Department has not published any official expression of lament for his passing. During a moment of silence and remembrance for Jiang at the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, America’s representative did not honor Jiang, nor did the...

Based on what we know about the Semi’s range and efficiency, the battery pack could have a capacity of 850 kWh. It's official: the first electric Tesla Semi has been delivered to PepsiCo and Frito-Lay. Tesla held a delivery event Thursday in Sparks, Nevada, to commemorate the event, complete with a load of snacks carried by one of the Semis. Even though I wasn’t there in person, the show still gave me something to chew on.During the event, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that the Semi is rated for 500 miles of range with a fully loaded trailer, which meant...

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is warning GOP House members to vote for him for Speaker or else. The GOP barely took over the US House of Representatives after this latest election steal but they somehow squeaked it out. The number of seats going to the GOP should have been 40 more based on history but we have a new way of electing people today and it’s based on whoever comes up with the most votes, legal and illegal. After winning the House, the GOP must select a Speaker. Normally this would be the Minority Leader but not this year....

The Swiss government announced its plan to deal with expected energy shortfalls this winter, and it sounds like a lot of fun — provided you’re a shut-in who likes reading by candlelight under multiple blankets. The alpine country — one of the wealthiest in the world — will severely restrict electric vehicles from its roads, according to a Daily Mail report. If the country runs out of power, EVs won’t be allowed out for anything but “essential” travel. But the restrictions don’t end there. The contingency plan calls for three levels of energy rationing. Under the least extreme, most buildings...

Last year, a test of cephalopod smarts reinforced how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence. Cuttlefish were given a new version of the marshmallow test, and the results appeared to demonstrate that there's more going on in their strange little brains than we knew. Their ability to learn and adapt, the researchers said, could have evolved to give cuttlefish an edge in the cutthroat eat-or-be-eaten marine world they live in. The marshmallow test, or Stanford marshmallow experiment, is pretty straightforward. A child is placed in a room with a marshmallow. They are told if they...

“Today” show co-anchor Hoda Kotb announced Thursday that Roker returned to the hospital and is in “very good” care. Al Roker is back in the hospital due to “complications” less than a week after being released during a blood clot scare. The longtime “Today” show meteorologist, 68, initially announced on Instagram Nov. 18 that he’d been hospitalized for some “medical whack-a-mole” after having a blood clot in his leg which traveled to his lungs. He was released from the hospital Thanksgiving Day and spent the holiday with family

The Chagos Islands may be little more than specks in the middle of the Indian Ocean, but they are at the center of a looming diplomatic row over a key American military base and the rise of Chinese power. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic have raised fears that the British government's decision to begin negotiations to hand over the islands to Mauritius could allow China the chance to build its own military facility on the archipelago — right under the nose of American forces at Diego Garcia. The issue is one of the most important strategic locations in...

Attn: Kari, Abe, and Mark: The Election Was Stolen From You By The Corrupt Maricopa County Machine-Here's How You Can Get It Back.For full disclosure: I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on television. However, through my extensive research of the Arizona Constitution, my studying of the past mistakes made by the Trump Campaign lawyers in 2020, as well as speaking with Constitutional legal scholars and about a half dozen retired Judges I have come to the conclusion that the only shot of nullifying this falsely certified uncertifiable election is to think way outside the box.

As a result of the ongoing energy crisis throughout Europe, Switzerland is considering a ban on the use of electric cars for non-essential purposes. Owners of Teslas, Volts, and other electric cars in Switzerland may soon find themselves taking the bus, with the country reportedly considering a partial ban on using EVs as part of a host of measures aimed at saving electricity. Like a whole host of other European nations, Switzerland’s energy situation is being significantly stressed as a result of Russia largely pulling out of Europe’s energy market, with the country seeming particularly concerned about its supply of...

VoterGA released supporting evidence showing Herschel Walker did have 20,000 votes vanish from the amounts being reported by the media during the recent November election. We reported previously on suspect reporting in the 2022 Senate race in Georgia. At one point in the evening, a large chunk of ballots was reported for Democrat Raphael Warnock that put him into the lead. We also reported today that Warnock benefited more than any candidate in the US in the 2022 election from millions in donations from unemployed actors over the past year. This is criminal. Today, VoterGA announced that they found evidence...

This week, the NYC Mayor's Office posted a job listing for a "citywide director of rodent mitigation," or as a city hall spokesperson dubbed it, "a rat czar." The director, who will receive an annual salary between $120,000 and $170,000, will be expected to develop strategies, manage projects and lead teams against the city's rodents. The role's listed requirements include a "background in urban planning" and a "virulent vehemence for vermin.""The ideal candidate is highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty, determined to look at all solutions from various angles, including improving operational efficiency, data collection, technology innovation, trash management, and wholesale...

The U.S. economy gained 263,000 jobs in November and the unemployment rate held even at 3.7 percent, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department. Job growth in November beat the expectations of economists, who projected the U.S. to gain roughly 200,000 jobs last month, according to consensus projections. The unemployment rate remained just 0.2 percentage points above its pre-pandemic level as the job market continued to push through high inflation and rising interest rates to grow at a sturdy clip. The U.S. had added an average 392,000 jobs per month since the start of the year despite high...

Full transparency, we didn’t know enough about the rail worker situation to comment … until now. Truth be told, when this editor saw ‘207 Republicans’ trending on Twitter and saw that it was the number of Republicans who voted against paid sick leave for rail workers it just didn’t make sense. We thought maybe it was not a stand-alone bill or something Democrats were holding hostage to pass other crap (as they often do), but nope. It was its own thing. Sooo … what the Hell? Turns out, as usual with these things, if Democrats are vilifying Republicans there’s a...

In May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed into law No. 7172-1 that will ban opposition parties and seize their property. The law targets opposition parties if they deny the armed aggression against Ukraine.The law includes actions that support the Russian Federation and Republic of Belarus, the two invading countries.The news was first published on the Ukrainian news website UKRinform. This news was reported the same day US GOP Senators paid him a visit in Kyiv to show their support.Zelenskyy also closed all of the TV stations and consolidated them into one state-run channel.“Ukraine has had to take extraordinary measures to...

Oliver Darcy had a sad announcement about CNN’s future. It involved a boatload of pink slips. Maybe if they hadn’t been so indifferent to the lives destroyed by shutdowns, people would be more sympathetic. You remember Oliver, don’t you? He and Brian Stelter were tip-of-the-spear in the Cancel Culture game and may have been the ones who personally kicked the deplatforming game into high gear by having Twitter put a hit out on someone who got an army of meme-lords to mock CNN’s remaining credibility into oblivion. ClashDaily covered THAT story long before nuking accounts from orbit had become an...

Elon Musk’s noble crusade to restore free speech to the global public square has so far been everything patriots dared hope for: a declaration of war against our corrupt regime and the censorship required to sustain it. So far Elon has met and exceeded our expectations, having restored President Trump, announced a “general amnesty for banned accounts,” and done away with the site’s old Orwellian Covid “misinformation” policy. We predicted in a now-classic piece (which Elon read) that the Regime would respond ruthlessly to such a provocation. Real free speech is simply too dangerous to be allowed, and any effort...

First Week of Advent Matthew 9:27–31 Friends, today in our Gospel, two blind men beg Jesus to heal them.Blindness in the Bible is very often a symbol of spiritual blindness: the incapacity to see what truly matters. Focused on the worldly goods of wealth, pleasure, power, and honor, most people don’t see how blind they are to the truly important things: giving oneself to the grace of God and living a life of love. If you have not surrendered to the grace of God, you are blind. How wonderful it is, then, that these men in the Gospel can cry...

The CDC took nearly two years to formally recognize distinctions between masks for mitigating COVID-19 spread, finally saying in January that cloth masks offer "the least" protection and N95 respirators, which meet strict federal standards, "the highest." The agency's slight nod to the largely symbolic value of cloth masks, predominantly worn in school settings, followed months of calls by onetime White House COVID advisers, among others, to promote masks actually designed to stop aerosolized transmission. It also spurred a run on N95s, sending prices skyward. But a new peer-reviewed, randomized controlled trial (RCT) of N95s versus surgical masks, considered the...

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) joined Jesse Watters on Thursday night to discuss the arrogant and misguided Dr. Fauci. Rand Paul, a medical doctor and US Senator, has never hesitated to call out Dr. Fauci on his numerous lies and dangerous policies. On Thursday Senator Paul weighed in on Dr. Fauci’s exit tour. Senator Rand Paul: There is no public figure or public health figure who has made a greater error in judgment than Dr. Fauci. The error in judgment was to fund gain of function rsearch in a totalitarian country. Fund research that allowed them to create super viruses that...

A missionary carrying a cross on his shoulder was arrested for getting into a fistfight with a Montana motorist after walking 5,000 miles across America. Jesse Michael Boyd, 46, was with his two children and two other missionaries, 27-year-old Eric Trent and 20-year-old Cater Phillips, when the group got into a scuffle with a man in Cameron, Montana, on November 12 that led the missionary to pull out a gun. The group had been on a journey from North Carolina to walk and drive to the Pacific Ocean to pass out a gospel-related book through Full Proof Gospel Ministries. They...