Free Republic

A violent criminal who tried to murder a Florida cop has been sentenced to life in prison after shooting the officer four times. Now, video footage from inside the courtroom has gone viral after the cop showed up to deliver a special "going away gift" for the smug thug.The officer’s car Kevin Rojas was just 19 years old when he tried to kill an undercover Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office officer who was in his car with his teenage son. When the off-duty officer, who was taking his son to school, saw Rojas driving erratically, the cop decided to make a traffic...

An encrypted letter from a correspondence with Mary, Queen of Scots. (BnF) A trio of codebreakers has accidentally stumbled upon a lost series of secret letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots in the years before her execution in 1587. The incredible, seven-year-long correspondence was encrypted so successfully, the documents were archived in an unmarked file and mistakenly placed in a part of France's national library involved with Italian affairs. When researchers randomly stumbled upon the 57 letters, however, it was clear none of them had anything to do with Italy. They were written in French and appeared to contain...

Peatland at Linnunsuo in North Karelia, Finland A peatland site at Linnunsuo in North Karelia, Finland. Legacy peat mining has degraded the wetland, as visible in the degraded soil in front. Credit: Rob Jackson A Stanford-led study finds global wetlands losses are overestimated, despite high losses in many regions. Sometime this spring or summer, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a case ruling that will legally define whether federal protections should be extended to wetlands outside of navigable waters. The justices might consider reading a new Stanford-led study that finds, although wetlands remain threatened in many parts of the...

President Joe Biden tried to sound tough on Chinese President Xi Jinping during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday but ended up blurting out a nonsensical demand and confusing viewers. During a section of the speech addressing foreign policy and China, Biden tried to diss Xi by implying there is no other world leader who would trade places with him. “Look. Let’s be clear: Winning the competition [with China] should unite all of us. We face serious challenges across the world. But in the past two years, democracies have become stronger, not weaker. Autocracies have grown weaker, not...

Ted Cruz’s presidential ambitions were no secret even before he became the first Republican to jump into the 2016 race. As 2024 approaches, though, he’s playing it uncharacteristically cool. The Texas senator isn’t explicitly ruling out another White House run. But asked about his considerations, Cruz described the Senate as “the battlefield right now,” with his seat up next year and a closer margin in his last reelection bid than is typical for the red state. “I have no doubt that Democrats will dump a whole lot of money into it,” Cruz said in an interview. “In 2018, it was...

The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday is holding a full committee hearing on government suppression of speech in regard to the Hunter Biden laptop report. The icommittee called in fired top Twitter officials James Baker, Vijaya Gadde, and Yoel Roth to the hearing. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) took the microphone early into the hearing and RIPPED INTO the fired Twitter officials who censored free speech on COVID and Hunter Biden’s laptop. Rep. Nancy Mace said she now suffers from asthma and tremors following her second COVID shot! Rep. Nancy Mace: I along with many Americans have long term effects from...

OCALA, Fla. (FLV) – Gov. Ron DeSantis responded to former President Donald Trump’s ‘ReTruth’ of a post claiming the Florida governor is a “groomer,” in reference to a photo from left-wing media outlet MeidasTouch. The response is one of the most direct ones he’s offered since Trump’s criticism began in late 2022, sparking with the former president’s nickname of the DeSantis being “Ron DeSanctimonious.” “Governor, former President Trump yesterday made a series of posts on TRUTH Social directed at you some were insinuating that…” a reporter asked. DeSantis chimed in, “I get it, I get you guys want the controversy.”...

Vice President Kamala Harris stumbled while trying to push back Wednesday against critics of President Biden’s likely re-election bid as she took a post-State of the Union tour of morning TV. Harris, 58, told ABC “Good Morning America” anchor George Stephanopoulos that Biden, 80, is fit to serve another term, even as polling shows most Democrats think the party should nominate another candidate in 2024. “I mean, George, I think that age is more than a chronological fact, to be very frank with you,” Harris told Stephanopoulos while touting Biden’s purported accomplishments. “It’s about, um, thinking about, ah, whether we...

While Joe Biden may not have a wooden heart, he definitely has a wooden head. Particularly given the number of whoppers he told during the State of Joe Biden’s Mind speech last night. Biden took credit for creating more jobs in two years than any administration had in four years. Well, that is incredibly misleading (but it is Joe Biden after all). The US economy saw an economic shutdown in 2020, then a “revival” after the government shutdowns ended. What Biden failed to mention in his SOTU address was that 12,539k jobs were added under Trump from May 2020 through...

The RISC-V architecture looks set to become more prevalent in the high performance computing (HPC) sector, and could even become the dominant architecture, at least according to some technical experts in the field. Meanwhile, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has just announced a project aimed at the development of HPC hardware and software based on RISC-V, with plans to deploy future exascale and post-exascale supercomputers based on this technology. RISC-V has been around for at least a decade as an open source instruction set architecture (ISA), while actual silicon implementations of the ISA have been coming...

[Catholic Caucus] What Lasting Impact Will Pope Francis’ Condemnation of Criminalization Laws Have?Pope Francis has made headlines twice in as many weeks over his public denouncement of laws that criminalize LGBTQ+ people, including at the end of an apostolic visit to two African nations. But what impact will the pope’s insistence that “being homosexual is not a crime” have in regions with criminalization laws and in the wider church?Francis reiterated his condemnation during an in-flight interview returning from the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, with the latter nation criminalizing same-gender relationships. The New York Times reported on how...

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday praised President Biden over his back-and-forth with Republicans on Social Security and Medicare during the State of the Union address one night earlier, saying that they walked into a “trap” he laid for them. “Joe Biden was so deft. He let them walk into his trap. He rope-a-doped them,” Schumer told “Morning Joe.” “And now all of America has seen the Republican Party say, ‘No, we’re not going to cut Social security and Medicare.’ He did a service.” During one of the most contentious points in the speech, Biden accused some Republican...

The new wage measure, often referred to “supercore” wages, pertains specifically to the services sector without housing, which includes for labor-intensive businesses like restaurants and salons. The Fed has been concerned about how many non-housing businesses in the service sector are still struggling to fill open jobs and keep employees from taking other gigs with better pay and benefits. Fed officials believe this dynamic has put too much pressure on wages and prices in those industries, which has kept inflation higher than the bank would like. The Fed seems likely to impose more economy-slowing rate hikes after the unemployment rate...

In the latest TV show ratings, ABC (as it did last year) led broadcast-TV’s coverage of President Biden’s second State of the Union address, averaging 3.2 million total viewers. CBS was close behind with an average audience of 3 million, followed by NBC’s 2.7 million and Fox’s 1.5 million. Compared to last year’s Big 4 cume, this year’s SOTU audience was down 18 percent. (Cable news ratings trickle in much later in the day, and will be folded in once available. Probably.)

Patrick Mahomes is going to enjoy a cold one with a side of foot sweat if the Chiefs win the Super Bowl on Sunday ... 'cause the K.C. star said Monday he'll chug a beer right outta Cooper Manning's boot if they get the dub over the Eagles!!! The quarterback made the promise to the oldest Manning brother during a fun interview at Super Bowl week's opening night -- after Cooper had asked him a series of questions about cowboy boots. Eventually, Mahomes said as long as Cooper joined him in the beer guzzling, he'd drink one down out of...

25 years, my how time flies!

[…]He followed the pro-abortion remarks by urging Congress to “also pass the bipartisan Equality Act to ensure LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity.” That bill would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include “sex,” “sexual orientation,” and “gender identity” among expressly recognized “non-discrimination” categories in “public accommodations.”Conservatives argue that it would not merely protect homosexual or gender-confused Americans from actual harm but rather force religious adoption agencies to place children in same-sex homes; force the likes of photographers, florists, and bakers to participate in same-sex “weddings”; force employers and businesses to accommodate cross-dressing...

Mike Lindell was on the War Room with Steve Bannon when he went off on Ron DeSantis and the Dominion lawyer he’s palling with. ..... Snip...... Lindell went about destroying Ron DeSantis for aligning himself with Dominion over the American voter. He hosted…six lawyers or so in this little round table. Well, one of them is Libby Locke [Elizabeth “Libby” Locke] who represents Dominion Voting Machines against Mike Lindell, Rudy Giuliani and many others. And he called her in this opening statement when he introduced her. “Libby is an extrodinare at First Amendment defamation law.” Well, I’m telling you Ron...

[Catholic Caucus] Francis Wants Ratzinger's MoneyArchbishop Gänswein’s January 9 audience with Francis was less about Gänswein's memoirs, and more about the fact that Francis wanted Benedict’s money, reports AffarItaliani.it (February 7).Benedict has named Gänswein as the “sole designated heir.” The legacy consists mainly in large revenues from the rights to the many Ratzinger books. Some of which have sold millions of copies. This money is channelled into the Ratzinger Foundation.But Francis told Gänswein that the patrimony belonged to the Holy See. The rigid Francis is said to have even warned Gänswein of the risk of “excommunication for revealing Church secrets”...

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that “nothing is off the table” in terms of sending fighter jets to Ukraine after demands from both President Volodymyr Zelenksy and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday. Following a speech delivered in the historic Westminster Hall by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy in which he cheekily thanked the United Kingdom “in advance” for shipments of “powerful English planes” to fight the Russians, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s official spokesman attempted to play down the prospect of sending fighter jets to the country for now, noting that Ukrainian soldiers are not currently trained in how to...