Free Republic

BEIJING, Dec 22 (Reuters) - More than 5,000 people are probably dying each day from COVID-19 in China, health data firm Airfinity estimated, offering a dramatic contrast to official data from Beijing on the country's current outbreak. The UK-based firm said it had used modelling based on regional Chinese data to produce figures that also put current daily infections in the country at above a million. Its estimates were "in stark contrast to the official data which is reporting 1,800 cases and only seven official deaths over the past week," it said in a statement.

To create some gravity, you could hollow a decent-sized asteroid out...and spin it up like a ring-station, using centrifugal force to create that 0.3g. Then, you could build your city entirely within the spinning asteroid; sure, it'd be dark in there, but the rock would protect people from harmful space radiation. That might have a chance of working if the asteroid was made of solid rock with high tensile strength throughout. The team looked into the composition of our local "flying mountains" and found that most are more or less giant piles of rubble, collections of big and small rocks...

WASHINGTON, Dec 22 (Reuters) - The United States faces "dangerous and threatening" storms in the days before Christmas, President Joe Biden warned Thursday from the White House, and Americans who plan to travel to visit family or friends should leave right away. “It’s dangerous and threatening, it’s really very serious weather and it goes from Oklahoma all the way to Wyoming and Maine. ... So I encourage everyone to please heed local warnings," Biden said in the Oval Office.

A federal appeals court on Friday dismissed a challenge to Connecticut’s policy of allowing transgender girls to compete in girls high school sports, rejecting arguments by four cisgender runners who said they were unfairly forced to race against transgender athletes. A three-judge panel at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City ruled in favor of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC), the state’s governing body of high school sports, and several local school districts sued by the cisgender girls and their families. The court found the lawsuit to be moot and ruled the girls who brought...

President Joe Biden delivered a Christmas address on Thursday but did not speak the name of “Jesus” or “Christ.” “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given,” Biden began, as he delivered his address to reporters at the White House. The president spoke about a “child” born on Christmas but did not speak the child’s name.

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Two suspects are in custody after an smash-and-grab robbery at the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, after Marine recruiters at nearby military recruitment center at the mall jumped into action. The robbery happened Tuesday, at a jewelry store in the mall. According to Torrance police, four people wearing hoodies and covering their faces used hammers to smash the glass of the display cases and grab as much jewelry as they could. Two of the suspects were able to escape, but the other two were taken to the ground by Marine recruiters and bystanders who heard the robbery unfold, and...

"Gender Queer," a "graphic memoir" – as Fleishman described it – containing illustrations of "sexual acts between a boy and a man" and other "obscene" material, has courted major controversy among America’s parents for being in public school libraries throughout the U.S. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, R., Fleishman noted, has referred to the book as "pornographic." In a letter he also said it was "likely illegal under South Carolina law." Fleishman began by characterizing Kobabe’s work as an "insightful and moving coming of age discovery of identifying as nonbinary (using the pronouns e, em and heir)." Fleishman acknowledged that...

[Catholic Caucus] Christmas Address: Francis Exorcises His Own ShadowIn his December 22 Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia, nostalgic Francis praised the outdated Vatican II as "a great opportunity for conversion [= secularisation] for the whole Church" and an attempt to make the Gospel "current, alive, operative in this historical moment [of the 1960s]."The disgraced Cardinal Angelo Becciu was present (video below). Francis pretended that the "current reflection on the Church's synodality [= Roman centralism] stems from the conviction that the path of understanding Christ's message is never-ending and continually challenges us." Synodalism, however, is an old heresy.He railed against...

EL PASO, Texas -- A group of migrants were caught on camera crossing the border through a hole cut into a fence late Tuesday night. ABC-7 photojournalist Jerry Najera recorded the video, which you can see in the Youtube video player above. The clip shows several migrants crawling through a hole cut into a fence that's adjacent to the Border Highway near Fonseca Drive. The fence is right next to a canal that's also next to the border wall.

"Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;) And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works." "For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise. John, Chapter 9 1 And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. 2 And...

After a series of “Twitter Files” detailed Twitter’s extensive collusion with the FBI and federal agencies to control public discourse before Elon Musk took over the tech giant, the FBI on Wednesday tried to salvage its reputation by spinning the revelations as normal procedure. “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the FBI said in a statement to Fox News. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector...

A woman is being held without bail for the stabbing death of her roommate at a Midtown homeless shelter during an argument over loud music. Charmaine Crossman, 42 — who went on the run after the Dec. 16 slaying of Victoria Goode, 27 — was arrested four days later, NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig said at a press briefing. “They were arguing over loud music and smoking marijuana in the room,” Essig said. The dispute escalated with Crossman allegedly spraying air freshener on the victim — and Goode threw a blanket at her, according to a criminal complaint filed...

A pro-life volunteer has been arrested and charged after silently praying outside an abortion facility in Birmingham, U.K. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the director of March for Life UK, was arrested on Dec.6 and charged on Dec. 15 with four counts of breaking a Public Space Protection Order (PSPO). A PSPO is intended to stop antisocial behavior. Police were responding to a complaint from a member of the public who believed that Vaughan-Spruce was praying silently. As part of her bail conditions, restrictions have been placed on her participating in public prayer. Another requirement of her bail, later dropped, banned her from...

Netflix is reportedly poised to cancel the widespread user practice of "password sharing," limiting accounts to one single household in a move to shore up its struggling bottom line. The streaming company several years ago "identified password sharing as a major problem eating into subscriptions," the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, but did not move to address it until this year due to significant gains in subscribers during the COVID-19 pandemic. That boom in subscribers "masked the extent of the password-sharing issue," Co-Chief Executive Reed Hastings reportedly told executives earlier this year, with company sources telling the Journal that...

More Google employees will be at risk for low performance ratings and fewer are expected to reach high marks under a new performance review system that starts next year, according to internal communications obtained by CNBC. In a recent Google all-hands meeting and in a separate presentation last week, executives presented more details of its new performance review process. Under the new system, Google estimates 6% of full-time employees will fall into a low-ranking category that puts them at higher risk for corrective action, versus 2% before. Simultaneously, it will be harder to achieve high marks: Google projects 22% percent...

Arecently published study from the Cleveland Clinic has questioned COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and posited that additional doses may in fact increase one's likeliness of contracting the disease. Conducted between September and December of this year, the clinic examined 51,000 of its employees to test the "bivalent" vaccine, created to protect against the original COVID-19 strain and its Omicron variants. It also sought to determine the effectiveness of subsequent vaccine doses. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed. The survey ultimately discovered an association between higher risk of COVID-19 and those individuals who had previously received a greater number of vaccine...

Stanford University is scrambling to respond to backlash following reports that an internal guide of removing "harmful language" from the school's online materials included the term "American." Seeking to "eliminate many forms of harmful language, including racist, violent, and biased... language in Stanford websites and code," the guide labelled the term "American" as "imprecise" given it "often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the Americas." The term "American" is a common shorthand for people from the United States and no other country in the Western Hemisphere frequently...

In 2009 the Obama administration decided to abandon a missile defense system initiative that would have protected Eastern Europe. The decision to shift the focus away from defending Eastern Europe was apparently made to get Russia on board regarding discussions of Iran’s nuclear program. """""""""""""" ...in that decision by the Obama administration to shift the focus from defending Eastern Europe to working with Russia on discussions about Iran’s nuclear program, in that decision can be found the origins of today’s tragedy in Ukraine and the Middle East.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — America's government was thrown into turmoil last night after a small band of insurrectionist traitors stormed the Capitol building while waving the flag of a foreign power. "This is a dark day for the country," said Representative Thomas Massie, watching in disbelief as the events unfolded on TV. "Not only did these lunatics make it all the way into the sacred House Chamber — they waved the flag of a hopelessly corrupt foreign nation and made off with $50 billion. How did we let this happen?" Sources say the plot to attack democracy was spearheaded by conspirators...