Free Republic

A film provocateur meets the global elite Amid the crowd gathered at the World Economic Forum, Oliver Stone — an unexpected attendee — easily stands out. The filmmaker behind “Wall Street” and “Platoon” has a history of jabbing the political, business and social elite with projects that advance controversial ideas: Think about his films focused on Vladimir Putin, Edward Snowden, John F. Kennedy and more. Mr. Stone came to Davos with another provocative movie, which advocates for an issue long whispered about here but rarely said aloud: nuclear power as a force for good. In “Nuclear Now!,” which premiered at...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A surge in Cuban and Nicaraguan arrivals at the U.S. border with Mexico in December led to the highest number of illegal border crossings recorded during any month of Joe Biden’s presidency, authorities said Friday. ...U.S. authorities stopped migrants 251,487 times along the Mexican border in December, up 7% from 234,896 times in November and up 40% from 179,253 times in December 2021, Customs and Border Protection said. Cubans were stopped nearly 43,000 times in December, up 23% from November and more than quintuple the same period a year earlier. Nicaraguans were stopped more than 35,000 times,...

Tensions between Elon Musk and Senate Democrats are heating up ahead of former President Trump’s expected return to Twitter, which comes amid reports that the popular social media platform has seen a rise in hate speech since Musk’s takeover last year. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is raising concerns about Twitter’s opaque financing and whether foreign interests could gain enough influence over the “digital town square” ahead of the 2024 election to pose a national security threat. Musk, anticipating more criticism from Democratic lawmakers, on Wednesday predicted the Biden administration “may try to weaponize federal agencies against Twitter.” ...

The Faiyum Oasis is a depression in the desert, west of the Nile River, or just 62 miles south of Cairo, Egypt.Faiyum was known to the ancient Egyptians as the twenty-first nome of Upper Egypt, Atef-Pehu ("Northern Sycamore"). Around the Oasis are the ruins of many ancient villages, and nearbye is the Ancient Egyptian city of Crocodilopolis/Arsinoe, which was dedicated to the crocodile god Sobek.Archaeologists from CEI RAS have been excavating a necropolis at Fayoum for several years, revealing burials that date from the 4th century BC until the 7th century AD.In recent excavations, the researchers found a burial of...

Business for the legal prostitutes is booming One escort said that girls were mainly students in their 20s paying for university Escorts can charge as much as £3,000 for a six-hour booking at a client's hotel Nearly 3,000 conference delegates have attended for the five-day jamboree Prostitution is legal in Switzerland, with sex workers expected to pay taxes The Grandhotel Belvedere sits majestically on a hill overlooking Davos. It's aptly named. The Belvedere resembles a magnificent Alpine stately home. 'Five-star plus with old-school charm' is how one recent guest described their stay here. How much does a room cost? It's...

A Los Angeles-area teenager who ran over a mother walking her child in a stroller in Venice in 2021 and received just a few months of diversionary camp as punishment was found dead of a gunshot wound in Palmdale, California this week. Kristopher Baca, 17, was found fatally shot on Wednesday on a driveway, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Baca was not previously identified in connection in the Venice hit-and-run case as he was a juvenile at the time. He pleaded guilty to the hit-and-run offense last year.

AbstractPleistocene archaeology records the changing behaviour and capacities of early hominins. These behavioural changes, for example, to stone tools, are commonly linked to environmental constraints. It has been argued that, in earlier times, multiple activities of everyday life were all uniformly conducted at the same spot. The separation of focused activities across different localities, which indicates a degree of planning, according to this mindset characterizes later hominins since only 500,000 years ago. Simbiro III level C, in the upper Awash valley of Ethiopia, allows us to test this assumption in its assemblage of stone tools made only with obsidian, dated...

The price of eggs has skyrocketed in recent months, up 138% year-over-year last month. A dozen eggs now averages about $4.25, due in part to avian flu, which is tearing through poultry farms across the U.S.—wiping out some 58 million birds in the last year. But there’s another culprit, says a farm advocacy group: price gouging. America’s largest egg producer saw a 600% jump in profits in the last quarter... ...“Avian flu is not manufactured—it’s real,” says Joe Maxwell, the co-founder of Farm Action. “But the dominant firms are using that supply chain disruption to gouge the consumers...” ...Overall, U.S....

Archaeologists working in Egypt's Saqqara region have unearthed a 16-meter-long ancient papyrus for the first time in a century...Scientists initially believed the ancient scroll measured only nine meters, but after it had been fully restored and translated, it became clear that it actually measured 16 meters!...Waziri added that the papyrus was restored in the restoration laboratory of the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir, and has been dubbed the "Waziri Papyrus".This papyrus is the first one ever to be discovered by an Egyptian and is named after an Egyptian...The discovery of a 16-meter-long papyrus containing Book of the Dead spells could shed...

mRNA technology pioneer and prominent critic of the COVID-19 establishment Dr. Robert Malone declared that he cannot support former President Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House as long as the candidate continues to stand by the COVID-19 vaccines his administration oversaw.

With low fertility, higher mortality, population aging and rising illegal immigration, it’s time for America to pay the demographic piper. The U.S. fertility rate is now well below the replacement level of about two births per woman. The country’s fertility rate in 2021 was 1.66 births per woman or less than half the peak rate of 3.7 births per woman in the late 1950s. America’s fertility rate has been generally below the replacement level since 1971 and consistently less than the replacement level for more than a decade. Population projections do not envisage the country returning to the replacement level...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a tragedy and a crime, but it does not threaten American security. Even the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan, who has yet to find a war he doesn’t want the U.S. to fight—his new book blames America for not having stopped Adolf Hitler—admitted that Ukraine is not important for this country’s defense. Kagan was categorical: “There is no way that Putin’s conquest of Ukraine has any immediate or even distant effect on American security.” Yet he still supports Washington’s proxy war against Russia, like many others. Those who, like Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of...

The pandemic is spreading like wildfire again across China. Since December, an estimated 900 million people in China have been infected, according to Peking University. The number could reach as high as 80 to 90 percent of the population, according to prominent Chinese infectious disease experts. Ever since the first wave of the virus in Wuhan in 2019, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has done everything in its power to cover up the true extent of the outbreak and its death toll. In reality, the spread of the virus in China continued over the past three years, resulting in an...

A college professor believes that he has a solution to put men without college degrees back to work in blue-collar jobs – particularly those who “feel out-of-place in the modern service economy.” Professor Bryan Caplan, a George Mason University economist, wants to see a deregulation of the building and construction industry, which he argues will boost job opportunities for men without college degrees without requiring massive government subsidies. He laid out his ideas in a Substack article and provided further commentary to The College Fix via email. Caplan regularly writes and talks on the problems in the housing industry and...

On Thursday, posts on social media showed video footage of Bank of America customers standing in line at the Bank, frantic to get information about their bank accounts that had been reduced by large sums of money- with no explanation of what was happening to them.The footage prompted fears that the United States is entering a time of financial crisis.One Independent Media source said Americans need to get ready for a ‘bail in’ and offered a laundry list of things Americans need to be thinking about as we enter some very tumultuous times.“Bail-ins are where they just take some money...

The U.S. Supreme Court made some key rulings on immigration this week, as the nation’s highest court found that illegal aliens, who have been detained for six months, do not have the same civil liberties as American citizens do- and they do not have the legal right to a bond hearing for release. “The decision addressed two separate cases involving three illegal aliens, two Mexican nationals that entered the U.S. illegally after being previously deported. After they were detained, they filed a putative class action for a bond hearing after six months of detention. The third illegal alien was from...

Viganò Homily on the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter in RomeCATHEDRA VERITATISDeus, qui beato Petro Apostolo tuo, collatis clavibus regni cælestis, ligandi atque solvendi pontificium tradidisti: concede; ut, intercessionis ejus auxilio, a peccatorum nostrorum nexibus liberemur.Praised Be Jesus ChristToday the Church in Rome celebrates the feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, with which the authority that Our Lord conferred on the Prince of the Apostles finds in the Chair its symbol and ecclesial expression. We find traces of this celebration since the third century, but it was in 1588, at the time of the Lutheran heresy, that...

The neurotransmitter serotonin can adversely affect the heart's mitral valve, contributing to a heart disease known as degenerative mitral regurgitation, according to a study Degenerative mitral regurgitation is one of the most common cardiac valve diseases. Although patients initially are asymptomatic, over time the mitral valve becomes thickened and deformed, and patients progressively feel tired and short of breath. As pumping becomes less efficient due to this leak, the heart needs to work harder. This extra work for the heart eventually causes congestive heart failure. The researchers found taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)—the most commonly-prescribed antidepressants—was associated with severe...

The US will designate Russia's Wagner private military company as a transnational criminal organization and will impose additional sanctions against it next week MOSCOW, January 20./TASS/. The founder of the Wagner private military company, Yevgeny Prigozhin, called the Americans "colleagues" after the US announced its intentions to impose sanctions against the group designated as "a transnational criminal organization". "At last, now the Wagner PMC and the Americans are colleagues. Our relationship from now on can be called 'a showdown of criminal clans.'" Prigozhin said in a comment published on the Telegram channel of his press service on Friday...

One of five Missouri jail inmates who broke out from a detention center this week has been captured, authorities said Friday, as the manhunt continues for the other escapees. Michael Wilkins was reportedly seen at a bar in Poplar Bluff drinking water by himself when someone called authorities. He was taken into custody and transferred back to the St. Francois County Detention Center where he is currently being held without bond, the St. Francois County Sheriff's Department said. The group, which includes inmates Kelly McSean, 52; Dakota Pace, 26; Aaron Sebastian, 30; and 37-year-old LuJuan Tucker, busted out of the...