Free Republic

When homicides surged across America during the pandemic, murders of Black women and girls rose more dramatically than other groups. At the same time, the proportion of those killings solved by police fell faster than other demographics in nearly two dozen cities. Some 2,077 Black women and girls were killed in 2021, a 51% increase over 2019 and the largest jump of any racial or gender group during that period, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, the number of killings nationwide increased 34% during that time frame. Meanwhile, the number of unsolved homicides of Black women...

John 1:1-18 Friends, today’s Gospel comes to its climax with the magnificent phrase: “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” The Gnostic temptation has tugged at the Church, on and off, for nearly the past two thousand years. This is the suggestion, common to all forms of Puritanism, that the spiritual is attained through a negation of the material. But authentic Christianity, inspired by this stunning claim of St. John, has consistently held off Gnosticism, for it knows that the Word of God took to himself a human nature and thereby elevated all of matter and...

Few online platforms were better poised than Twitter to serve as a clearinghouse of insight and discovery during the dizzying early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the world scrambling to make sense of the rapidly spreading new virus, commenters and investigators around the globe were turning to Twitter's real-time public forum to share information and speculation regarding the disease. Monitors at Twitter, however, ended up interpreting the circumstances differently.Driven by a pervasive fear of "misinformation" combined with unrelenting pressure from government officials, Twitter embarked on a heavy censorship campaign, suppressing entire narratives in the crucial early first year of...

Who will complete the trilogy? 1. Barbara Walter's 2. Pope Benedict (GODS Rottweiler) 3. ???

Russia fired more than 20 cruise missiles at targets in Ukraine on Saturday, killing at least one person in the capital Kyiv and injuring more than a dozen in what one official described as "terror on New Year's Eve." Moscow's second major missile attack in three days badly damaged a hotel south of Kyiv's center and a residential building in another district. A Japanese journalist was among the wounded and taken to hospital, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Russia has been attacking vital infrastructure in Ukraine since October with barrages of missile and drones, causing sweeping power blackouts and other outages...

Authorities in Scotland can’t seem to stop getting themselves into trouble when it comes to wrestling with issues involving gender and sex offenders. First, they passed the Gender Recognition Reform Act only days before Christmas, making it easier for people to legally “change their gender” for official purposes. Now, in an end-of-the-year report issued by the head of Police Scotland, they have referred to pedophiles as “minor-attracted persons.” (MAPs) The news was immediately met with protests from child welfare groups as well as gay rights groups. But Chief Constable Iain Livingstone is defending the language, saying that he was only...

The last of the Middle Class Tax Refund payments will be going out by January 14, which is the final cut off for the program. The California Franchise Tax Board said it expected about 90% of direct deposits to be issued in October and 95% of all MCTR payments — direct deposit and debit cards — by the end of the year. According to their website, the final payout period ends January 14. As of Dec. 9, more than 25.7 million California taxpayers and their dependents have benefited, according to the Franchise Tax Board. The state has issued more than...

Let's get it on!

It is folly to believe that the US should engage in a repeat of the Cold War with the rising world power that is China, reflecting the maxim that “Generals always fight the last war.” That implies that the current military strategy focuses too much on what happened before rather than what will happen next. Rather than repeating the Cold War, the US should rethink how it views its place in the world and work to partner with China on high-priority issues that affect both countries, like nuclear weapons, trade policies, natural resources, economics, etc. This necessarily requires that the...

Pope Emeritus Benedict XIV, who died today at the age of 95, is remembered in the press for ... well, resigning, being the first German pope in centuries, and overseeing the rectification of some of the worst Church sexual abuse scandals, which doesn't say much about him. For those who look a little closer, he is known for for opening up for Catholics the traditional style of the Latin Catholic mass, known as the Tridentine mass, which has brought in many converts. And of course, he was known for opposing the radical leftist ideas such as liberation theology running rampant...

The media has been seeking to destroy President Trump since he began running for office. They spread the known lie about Russian collusion for years. They lied about what he said in Charlottesville and now they lie about his taxes. Here's their latest ball of wax: Trump's charitable giving dropped to $0 by the time he left office, returns showWhich is fake news.Either they don't understand the tax code and the nature of tax returns at all, or they are intentionally lying.If they don't understand taxes they should shut up instead of spouting lies and ignorance. I am an accountant...

Dec 31 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin devoted his annual New Year's address on Saturday to rallying the Russian people behind his troops fighting in Ukraine and pledging victory over Ukrainian "neo-Nazis" and a West supposedly intent on "destroying Russia". In a stern and combative recorded video message, broadcast on national television, Putin cast the war - which he calls a "special military operation" - as a near-existential fight for the future of Russia. Its soldiers, he said, were fighting for "our motherland, truth and justice ... so that Russia's security can be guaranteed". .....

In 2016, Donald Trump accomplished the most significant political win in American history. He defeated Hilary Clinton – the ultimate Washington insider as former First Lady, senator, and Secretary of State. For Clinton fans, the victory was unthinkable, but Trump’s forthright speeches, confident , demeanor, America First agenda, and most significantly, his determination to fight put him over the top.His campaign staff let Trump be Trump, and that’s the Trump we all love. We applauded as Trump needled his opponents in both the Republican primary and the presidential election. Nothing was more satisfying than seeing him castigate the politicians who...

The text was prepared based on a speech by Grigory Golosov at a conference titled “Russian realities 2022: politics, economics, civil society” organised by “About the country and world” Telegram channel with the support of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation and Memorial. Novaya Gazeta Europe thanks them for the opportunity to publish this text with slight changes. From pragmatism to dictatorshipWhat happened in Russia on 24 February 2022 is very well illustrated by the idea voiced by classic authors that the worst evil in this world is trivial in its source. This tragedy indeed is rooted in the routine, in...

Lung cancer is a leading cause of death. Among all the cancers, lung cancer has one of the lowest five-year survival rates. "Sarunashi" (Actinidia arguta) is an edible fruit cultivated in Japan's Okayama Prefecture. Using a mouse model, researchers have shown that sarunashi juice and its constituting component isoquercetin (isoQ) help prevent and reduce lung cancer. A. arguta is one of the richest sources of polyphenols and vitamin C. Previously, the researchers had demonstrated the inhibitory effect of sarunashi juice (sar-j) on mutagenesis, inflammation, and mouse skin tumorigenesis. They had identified the components of A. arguta responsible for the anti-mutagenic...

Jeffrey Younger has lost his court case to prevent his ex-wife from taking their son to California, where he could be medically transitioned. Younger has been trying to stop this from happening for years, and has now reached the end of the line. He is prevented by the courts of Texas from protecting his boys from medical mutilation at the hands of their mother, who is a pediatrician. Younger has accused her of using the children to help advertise her "inclusive," "gender affirming" practice. "The Supreme Court of Texas denied my Mandamus, effectively terminating my parental rights. My children are...

In a new study carried out by Chinese researchers, almost half of a group of people who fasted intermittently experienced remission of their Type 2 diabetes. The research found that people who fasted for five days, then ate a normal diet for 10 days, were much more likely to see their condition go into reverse than individuals who did not fast. The findings may be of particular interest in the UAE because the country has one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world. 90 day experiment The researchers in China looked at 72 people with Type 2 diabetes,...

10,000 x 1,000,000 jobs created by Bidet&Co, just in August. This is astounding and dwarfs anything done by POTUS45. This idiot needs another, new Bomar Calculator. The Philadelphia FED fact-checked it and it's really 10,500 jobs; far lower than Bidet&Co projected.

We begin this episode with an examination of how free speech has fallen from the place it had always occupied in U.S. history, a universally held value, to one that half the country now aggressively rejects. We will then speak with the independent journalist at the heart of one of this year's most important stories, Matt Taibbi, and we will conclude the program with a specific look at a glaring and common conflict of interest and how a major journalistic outlet has been covering what it incessantly claims is Twitter's imminent downfall. Monologue: Now, while this is our debut show...

Dietary nitrate intake is associated with a lower risk for progression of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to a study. Geoffrey K. Broadhead, M.D., Ph.D., from the National Eye Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues examined the association between dietary nitrate intake and AMD progression using data from the prospective Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS) and AREDS2 randomized clinical trial cohorts and extended follow-up studies. Data were included for 7,788 participants in the combined AREDS/AREDS2 cohort, with 13,511 eligible eyes. The researchers found that in the combined AREDS/AREDS2 cohort, dietary nitrate intake was associated...