Free Republic

The US mortgage market is like Mussgorsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Where are the paintings are bad. US mortgage rates fell for a fourth week in a row, the longest such stretch of declines since May 2019. The contract rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage eased 8 basis points to 6.41% in the week ended Dec. 2, still the lowest since mid-September, according to Mortgage Bankers Association data released Wednesday. Rates have retreated for the past month as the Federal Reserve has signaled it will soon slow down the pace of interest-rate hikes, likely at next week’s policy meeting. Even...

NATIONAL COTTON CANDY DAY National Cotton Candy Day celebrates the spun sugar treat that delights candy fans of all ages. On December 7th get your favorite flavor of this sweet delight that dates back to the 1400s. #NationalCottonCandyDay Originally called spun sugar, cotton candy is still a staple at carnivals, fairs, and the circus. While it may be reminiscent of childhood days, fairy floss also reminds us of fluffy clouds. Since the heated sugar gets spun into thin strands of fine sugar and blown into fat puffs twirled onto paper sticks, it’s a bit like magic. We associate it with...

The popular American Girl doll brand is facing backlash for pushing kids into changing their gender in a recent book marketed to young girls. The recently released book, titled A Smart Girl's Guide: Body Image, contains lines that give advice to prepubescents on how to change their gender - seemingly without their guardians' blessing. Parents have since based the book's contents as 'deceptive and dangerous,' citing the messages it looks to sending to its impressionable demographic. The 96-page handbook - billed as a 'guide' - is marketed to girls aged 3 to 12, and instructs them on how to make...

Computer Generated TRANSCRIPT posted to FR here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0g8YWux1mUDescriptive Text below video on YOUTUBEDW News4.33M subscribers98,081 views Dec 7, 2022In a nationwide raid, 25 suspected members and supporters of a terrorist organization were arrested early Wednesday. Officials said the network, part of a wider right-wing movement, was already well established with a concrete plan to overthrow the German state by force and install a new government.The raids were announced by Germany's federal prosecution agency and German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann. Buschmann said the investigations were directed against a suspected terrorist network with known ties to the Reichsbürger movement. He said that...

Ex-FBI lawyer James Baker, who Elon Musk fired from Twitter Tuesday, had the “biggest motive” to “suppress” the report on Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election, a New York Post reporter told Tucker Carlson. “It was pretty obvious that the Twitter files that had just been released were missing a crucial element,” Miranda Devine of the New York Post told Carlson. “And that was the FBI. So, we surmised that somehow Elon Musk had redacted it or someone had withheld the information about the FBI.” Matt Taibbi published documents Friday about Twitter’s actions with regards to an October 2020...

Janitors hired to clean at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, California, protested after 20 employees were fired, so the social media company bought by Elon Musk fired the rest of them. Critics of Musk are outraged that he would fire the workers just weeks before Christmas. “Our cleaning contractor at Twitter was told by Twitter that they are cutting the contract,” said Olga Miranda, union president for the janitors. “So we have about 48 families out of work. And it just so happens that it's three weeks before Christmas.” A representative from SEIU Local 87 told the New Republic that...

Twitter’s janitors called a strike outside the company’s headquarters, causing new boss Elon Musk to fire them all and cancel their contract. The janitors were protesting outside the HQ in San Francisco, California after 20 of their colleagues were fired during the company’s recent major workforce culls. However, when the remaining janitors in the SEIU Local 87 union called a strike on Monday, they were all fired. Twitter also terminated its contact with the company that hired the janitors. “Our cleaning contractor at Twitter was told by Twitter that they are cutting the contract,” said Olga Miranda, union president for...

MAINZ, Germany — Authorities in Germany arrested 25 people on Wednesday who are suspected of planning to violently overthrow the government in a far-right extremist plot. More than 3,000 police officers, including special forces, made 130 early morning searches across 11 of Germany's 16 federal states in one of the biggest counterterrorism operations in the country's history. Suspects from the so-far unnamed group include a nobleman with a historic royal title and various armed forces veterans. It is centered on the so-called Reichsbürger, or Reich Citizens, movement which is motivated by conspiracy theories about the role and legitimacy of the...

Commentary An EpochTV special report entitled “Border Deception: How the US and UN Are Quietly Running the Border Crisis” reveals that what Americans are being told about the border crisis is an illusion. In the report, which aired Sept. 29, Joshua Philipp, editor and senior investigative reporter for The Epoch Times and host of the EpochTV segment “Crossroads,” uncovers alarming details about what is really happening at our nation’s border. Philipp says his investigation found “a coordinated effort, with the cooperation of foreign governments, financing from the United States, and a pervasive program being run by various NGOs and the...

It’s really past the time that people recognize that the elite capture, influence, and control from Chinese communists and that of the clubby cult of Klaus Schwab and the WEF are two fronts of the same irregular war. For decades Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF) has been recruiting and cultivating corporate and political leaders from all over the world to embrace a vision and plan for a complete social, political, and economic transformation -- a “Great Reset” -- which is nothing short of a communist “New World Order.” This plan calls for the end of sovereign states; the end...

Now, using a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, a team from Yale University in the US may have figured out why the patches of protein seem relevant without necessarily being directly responsible. "We found that hundreds of axons develop [swelling] around each amyloid deposit," Yale University neurobiologist Peng Yuan and colleagues write in their paper. They found the swelling is formed by a buildup of lysosomes – little bin-bag-like compartments created by cells to break down waste and contain it until it can be removed. These lysosomes clump into spheroid structures along the axons of brain cells – the long...

A former Gainesville preschool teacher has been sentenced to 120 years behind bars after being convicted on multiple counts of producing child pornography. The U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday that Trevor Alec Hruby, 24, of Gainesville, pleaded guilty to four of his original five charges for producing imaging of children within his care. In July, Hrubry was indicted for the crimes after being arrested a year earlier for sexually battering and molesting multiple children around 3 to 6 years old.

JUST IN - Ukraine's Zelensky named TIME Person of the Year.

Part 2 of the discussion of current events in the middle east and how it fits with long-term goals of various countries, ethnic groups and religious factions. Too many topics covered to easily summarize. The video is 1 hour long and went by very quickly when I watched it last night.

Neil Patel, operator of a Karco gas station at Broad and Clearfield streets in North Philadelphia, recruited Pennsylvania S.I.T.E Agents clad with Kevlar vest and AR-15s or shotguns. "They are forcing us to hire the security, high-level security, state level," Patel told FOX 29. "We are tired of this nonsense; robbery, drug trafficking, hanging around, gangs."

CAIRO, Ill., Saturday, Dec. 6. From the Memphis papers we learn that Gen. HOVEY'S Expedition, twenty thousand strong, which left Helena, Ark., some days ago, landed at Friar's Point, some fifteen or twenty miles below, marched to Grenada. Miss., and took possession of that place last Monday. A large number of the citizens of Grenada fled on the approach of our troops. The proprietor of the Appeal removed his newspaper establishment to Marietta, Ga. Before the National occupation of Grenada the rebels burned some fifteen or twenty locomotives, and about a hundred cars.FROM GEN. BURNSIDE'S ARMY.A Demonstration Against Our Gunboats...

We are now experiencing the inevitable results of giving power to men and women who don’t deserve it. After over two centuries, the Declaration of Independence remains the most perfect instrument of human government ever devised by mankind. Its foundation (that our rights come from God, not men), its principles (that men only consent to be governed if their God-given rights and freedoms are protected by such government, and not diminished) are as applicable to our urban, post-modern technological society as they were in a rural, agrarian one. But the Founders were prescient in their understanding of mankind. Ben Franklin’s...

Video: "Ukraine's future is being sold to finance a proxy war that's tearing it apart."

Every single day our electrical grid remains vulnerable, we are in grave danger. Almost 50,000 Duke Power customers in Moore County, N.C. were left in the dark on Sunday night in what has been called a domestic act of terrorism. A curfew is running from 9 P.M. to 5 A.M. as schools close and crime spikes. Most customers remain without heat, refrigeration, and water. Duke Energy spokesman Jeff Brooks said, "We are looking at a pretty sophisticated repair with some fairly large equipment and so we do want citizens of the town to be prepared that this will be a...

German police staged nationwide raids on Wednesday and arrested 25 people suspected of belonging to a far-right "terror cell" plotting to overthrow the government and attack parliament. Around 3,000 officers including elite anti-terror units took part in the early morning raids and searched more than 130 properties, in what German media described as one of the country's largest police actions ever against extremists. The raids targeted alleged members of the "Citizens of the Reich" (Reichsbuerger) movement suspected of "having made concrete preparations to violently force their way into the German parliament with a small armed group". Those arrested are accused...