Free Republic

Journalist Grant Wahl’s cause of death has been revealed following an autopsy after his sudden passing while reporting at the World Cup in Qatar. Wahl’s widow, Dr. Celine Gounder, told CBS News on Wednesday that her husband’s death was due to a heart condition. “He had an autopsy done here in New York by the New York City medical examiner’s office, and it showed that he had an aortic aneurysm that ruptured,” Gounder said during the interview. “It’s just one of these things that had been likely brewing for years, and for whatever reason it happened at this point in...

Jesus went up to Jerusalem at Passover and entered the temple (see John 2:13-17). What he saw appalled him. Merchants had taken over the house of God! He came seeking a house of prayer, and what he found was a preoccupation with the promotion, display and sale of religious merchandise. The religious leaders were counting their profits. Men of God had become peddlers of religious merchandise, running about promoting their goods. Tables had been set up everywhere in God’s house to promote and sell sheep, oxen, doves, candies, incense and other merchandise for religious purposes. Money changing hands made the...

NEW YORK (AP) — Dusting off old musical instruments, appreciating the outdoors more meaningfully, dumping the hair dye and letting the gray fly forever. The pandemic disrupted our traditions, practices and pursuits, how we mark milestones, what we do with our time, what’s important in routines. It replaced old with new, a kind of new that just might stick. Nearly three years after the World Health Organization declared the deadly spread of COVID-19 a pandemic, there’s plenty of old life mixed with the new. And, yes, the latter includes a whole lot of Zooming still going on among families, colleagues...

Apparently, despite the denials from the Biden Administration, someone at Bureau of Labor Statistics or someone in Congress or the Federal Reserve or the Biden Admininstration itself likely tipped the wink on the soft CPI report on Tuesday. Treasuries were well on the front-foot in the lead up to the below-estimate November CPO print, as a surge of buying took place seconds before the official 8:30 am New York release time. Over a 60 second period before the data, 13,518 March 10-year futures traded as the contract moved from 114-04+ up to 114-22. Gains were then extended up to 115-11...

This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case that will reignite a continuing conversation about what to do when long-established religious convictions clash with gay people’s civil rights. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, a Colorado web designer, Lorie Smith, wants to create websites for clients’ weddings. She is a Christian, and because of her religious beliefs, she does not want to offer these services for same-sex weddings. However, she serves L.G.B.T.Q. customers for other design projects. This week’s legal arguments will most likely focus primarily on questions around free speech: Can the government compel artists or designers to...

The Department of Energy finally fired Sam Brinton after he was accused of stealing luggage in Las Vegas and Minneapolis. He was arrested for the Minneapolis crime and has a felony arrest warrant out for the Vegas crime. “Sam Brinton is no longer a DOE employee,” a Department of Energy said in a statement. “By law, the Department of Energy cannot comment further on personnel matters.” .....

There's a new chatbot in town, OpenAI's ChatGPT. It is a robot researcher with good communication skills; you can ask it to answer questions about various areas of knowledge and it will write short documents in various formats and in excellent English. Or write bad poetry, incomprehensible jokes, and obey a command like "Write Tetris in C." What comes out looks like it could be, too. ... Ask it how Gödel's incompleteness theorem is linked to Turing Machines – it being software, it really should know this one – and you get back: "Gödel's incompleteness theorem is a fundamental result...

… Pot farms across the state are shutting down as wholesale cannabis prices have crashed by as much as 95% since California voters legalized weed in 2016, according to SFGATE interviews with over a dozen California cannabis farmers, who could get as much as $2,000 for a pound of pot in 2016. Today, they’re lucky to get $400 — and some pot is selling for as little as $100 a pound. Economists have been predicting that legalization would cause a drop in wholesale pot prices since states first began discussing the pot reform. But cannabis farmers say that California’s government...

A two-year-old boy in the western Kasese District of Uganda survived an attack from a wild hippopotamus after it swallowed him and then threw him back up. The boy was playing at home in Katwe Kabatoro Town Council on Sunday when the hippo attacked him, swallowing him head first, according to local police reports cited by Newsweek. Locals saw the attack and threw stones at the hippo, causing the semiaquatic mammal to regurgitate the young boy and dash back to Lake Edward, which was half a mile away from the boy’s home. The boy, reportedly identified as Paul Yiga by...

Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration has funneled millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to a Chinese Communist Party-linked green energy company, according to reports. Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) gave millions in taxpayer-funded grants to the Beijing-backed carbon capture company LanzaTech. The tax dollars were pumped into LanzaTech in the months after the company partnered with a Chinese state-owned entity. The move comes despite the DOE acknowledging that the company could face business-crippling sanctions. Since April 2021, LanzaTech has received more than $10 million in grant payments from the Biden admin, federal spending disclosures show. Sinopec is a Chinese state-owned...

Over the last few days, Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari have all reported out pieces of Donald Trump’s deplatforming, which is easily the most famous digital unpersoning in history. It is also the least compelling story in the series. While it’s good to finally know exactly what happened, it really just was what everyone assumed: Trump was not banned for violating policy. Trump was banned because Twitter employees, who donated literally 99% of their political contributions to the Democratic Party, demanded it be done regardless of their own rules. Altogether, the Twitter Files — an ongoing story — paint a...

Incoming Oversight Committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) announced the launch of the committee’s investigation into the origins of the Chinese coronavirus Tuesday by requesting interviews from Dr. Anthony Fauci and dozens of other virologists and government officials. Comer and committee member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who will also serve on the Judiciary Committee next year as chairman, launched their investigation by sending nine separate letters to various top officials, including Fauci and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra, naming other individuals within those letters as well. 🚨BREAKING🚨@RepJamesComer & @Jim_Jordan are pressing senior Biden admin officials, EcoHealth, &...

Paris (AFP) – French prosecutors said Wednesday that they had searched the headquarters of President Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance party in their investigation into the use of consulting firms by the government since 2017. The Paris offices of US consulting giant McKinsey were also searched on Tuesday, the National Financial Prosecutors' Office said, confirming a report in Le Parisien newspaper. The use of consultants by Macron's governments came under the spotlight in March after a French Senate inquiry concluded that public spending on them had more than doubled from 2018 to 2021, during Macron's first term. "It's normal for the judiciary...

A prominent ally of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with unprecedented access to local authorities and reportedly under investigation for alleged sexual misconduct has died in what is being investigated as a suicide.Kent Stermon, 50, of Jacksonville, was found dead in a truck parked outside the Atlantic Beach post office around 8 p.m. Thursday, the Florida Times-Union reported.Stermon had been reported missing by his wife, Christie, after his heart monitor stopped earlier that day, the First Coast News reported.Shortly after the discovery of his body, police announced they were investigating his death as a suicide.Stermon was under investigation for alleged sexual...

EMBEDDED LINKS AT SITE...................... It is estimated that one in three Veterans had toxic exposures during their active duty. From burn pits and Agent Orange to nuclear waste and contaminated groundwater, these environmental hazard exposures can adversely impact Veterans’ health long after their service. The PACT Act, signed into law Aug. 10, 2022, expands VA health care and benefits for Veterans exposed to burn pits and potentially toxic substances. It is the most significant expansion of benefits and services for toxin-exposed Veterans in more than 30 years. The act ensures Veterans exposed to toxins are screened and get the best...

Republican primary voters have high interest in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a potential 2024 presidential nominee and view him more favorably than they do former President Donald Trump, a new Wall Street Journal poll shows. In a hypothetical contest between the two, Mr. DeSantis beats Mr. Trump, 52% to 38%, among likely GOP primary voters contemplating a race in which the first nomination votes will be cast in just over a year. The poll found that Mr. DeSantis is both well-known and well-liked among Republicans who say they are likely to vote in a party primary or nominating contest,...

Claim: Wages have been rising faster than consumer prices for several months, President Joe Biden said on Tuesday. “And all of this means that, for the last several months, wages have gone up more than prices have gone up. Wages have gone up more than prices have gone up,” Biden said in remarks made at the White House. Verdict: False. Average hourly wages and average weekly wages rose in November by more than the rate inflation—but this was the first time they have done so significantly since August. In September and October, wages and inflation rose at almost the same...

The fire started at around 1:15 p.m. at Kreider Farms on the 1400 block of Mt. Pleasant Road in South Annville Township. According to Annville-Cleona fire Chief Philip Snavely, the fire caused $12 million in damages and has killed an estimated 250,000 chickens. Fire officials say the fire began in the middle of a poultry barn row. The middle barn became fully enflamed, but crews were able to keep the fire neutralized to the one building. Fire crews continue to work the scene of the fire as of 10:09 p.m.

One of the most important and under-reported struggles under the radar is the politicization of administrative agencies, and the effort to cement via those agencies policies that Congress will never vote for, but that once enshrined will be very difficult for any administration or Congress to overturn. One central part of that is the "whole of government" climate policy, centered around stopping fossil fuel development and subsidizing electric cars, photovoltaics and windmills. Never mind that large scale storage remains a pipe dream, never mind the lessons of Europe. SEC As reported by James Freeman in the WSJ the courageous Hester...

If you passed on getting the COVID vaccine, you might be a lot more likely to get into a car crash. Or at least those are the findings of a new study published this month in The American Journal of Medicine. During the summer of 2021, Canadian researchers examined the encrypted government-held records of more than 11 million adults, 16% of whom hadn’t received the COVID vaccine. They found that the unvaccinated people were 72% more likely to be involved in a severe traffic crash—in which at least one person was transported to the hospital—than those who were vaccinated. That’s...