Free Republic

The Kremlin on Friday confirmed a report that Russian leader Vladimir Putin will give his long-delayed 2022 annual address to the Federal Assembly on February 21, 2023, a date chosen to coincide with the anniversary of his attack on Ukraine. The address is reportedly to be followed up with a “large-scale concert and rally event at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium” the next day.

Estimates say it killed 830,000 people.Humans have documented earthquakes for nearly 4,000 years. Of those recorded, the deadliest occurred in China. On January 23, 1556, a powerful quake rocked the province of Shaanxi and the neighboring province of Shanxi, killing an estimated 830,000 people.Historical records often refer to the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake as the Jiajing Great Earthquake because it occurred during Emperor Jiajing’s reign in the Ming dynasty. The approximate death toll comes from local annals that also tracked 26 earthquakes in the region. In those records, the earthquake is starkly different from others: they describe leveled mountains, floods, fires...

[Catholic Caucus] The Word that is NEVER Spoken How stupid does Bergoglio think we are?After reading countless Bergoglio pronouncements over the last 10 years, one grows weary of this aging Argentine who insists on channeling aging New Agers like Marianne Williamson and Deepak Chopra. His empty and trite pablum denigrates the Church of Jesus Christ. Lest we forget, his earliest pontifical rants polluted church teaching with edicts that air conditioners are evil and eco sins are the new rage.And so it continues….Cardinal George Pell aptly described the Bergoglio 2023 Synod on Synodality documents as “this potpourri, this outpouring of New...

Armed with a wooden stick, a bucket and a headlamp, Philippine construction worker Johnny Manlugay hunts every night for the eggs of sea turtles on the pristine beaches of the northern province of La Union. The 55-year-old can easily spot nesting sites, having been trained in his youth by his grandfather how to track the animals and their eggs, which his family traded at the time or ate. But his egg-stealing days are over. Now Manlugay has turned his skills to helping protect marine turtles on the provincial beaches favoured by the endangered Olive Ridley species to build nesting sites.

At least 24,596 people have been confirmed dead after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck southern Turkey and north-western Syria on Monday, with multiple aftershocks. Griffiths said he was launching a three-month operation for Turkey and Syria to help pay for the costs of operations there. Griffiths also told Reuters he hoped in Syria aid would go to both government and opposition-held areas, but that things with this regard were “not clear yet”. Responding to criticism of the UN’s response to the urgent need in Syria after the earthquake, he added: “I think if I was standing in the middle of...

A Bank of England and HM Treasury publication The way we use money is changing. This Consultation Paper sets out our assessment of the case for a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) – a so-called ‘digital pound’. It has been overseen by the joint Bank-HM Treasury CBDC Taskforce that was announced in April 2021. At this stage, we judge it likely that the digital pound will be needed in the future. It is too early to decide whether to introduce the digital pound, but we are convinced preparatory work is justified. The digital pound would be a new form...

A GOP Florida congresswoman ripped a profile of her by the Washington Post as error-filled and “incredibly racist,” and the paper was forced to issue a correction — for claiming the lawmaker was once a Democrat. Freshman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who represents the state’s west coast, said the paper misrepresented basic facts about her life and falsely suggested she had leaned into her Hispanic heritage for political gain. “Holy s— the Washington post just tried to claim my dad was never incarcerated, left out comments from my mom, said I was a registered Democrat, and did not report a...

Super Bowl LVII: Live Thread Your home for all things Fool's Ball! In Memoriam Danny Lee (BENDER2)

A leak in a fuel pipeline facility in California forced a shutdown of deliveries of gasoline and diesel from the Los Angeles area east to areas including Las Vegas and Phoenix, but officials said Friday they believed supplies would not immediately be affected. Pipeline operator Kinder Morgan told The Associated Press the leak was discovered Thursday afternoon at a company station near Los Angeles and that its CALNEV and SFPP West pipelines were shut down while the Houston-based pipeline operator worked to resolve the issue. It did not say how much fuel leaked or when service would be restored. The...

[Catholic Caucus] Francis: No Rehabilitation for Innocent Cardinal ComastriThere was a huge uproar when, in June 2020, Francis commissioned the Fabric of Saint Peter, then under Cardinal Angelo Comastri, which is responsible for the maintenance of St. Peter's Basilica.With this act, Francis humiliated Comastri by presenting him to the public as a "thief."But two years and six months later, the Vatican prosecutor has still not found anything that was criminally relevant, writes SilereNonPossum.it (February 9).So, Cardinal Comastri turned to Francis and said: "Can I call the press, at least now, and explain that everything is clean?" But Francis categorically forbade...

The ability to solve problems with multiple tools is a rare talent in the animal kingdom, but according to new research, cockatoos are the first birds on the block to carry and use a tool kit to suit their needs. Using 10 Goffin’s cockatoos, researchers from Austria and the UK made their discovery after carrying out three experiments as published in the journal Current Biology Friday. Goffin’s cockatoos are small white parrots native to the Tanimbar Islands in Indonesia. They were chosen after the researchers spotted them using a “tool set” in the wild. In this study, cockatoos from the...

The Canadian women's national soccer team is on strike due to pay equity problems and budget cuts. Star forwards Christine Sinclair and Janine Beckie confirmed the news to Rick Westhead of TSN on Friday: The players also released a statement: "With the biggest tournament in women's football history less than six months away, our preparation for the World Cup and the future success of the women's national team program are being compromised by Canada Soccer's continued inability to support its national teams," the statement read, in part. "Despite our strong track record of success and history-making achievements for more than...

Japanese zookeepers believe they have solved the mystery of how a gibbon became pregnant despite living alone in her cage. Momo, a 12-year-old white-handed gibbon, shocked her keepers at the Kujukushima Zoo and Botanical Garden in Nagasaki in February 2021 when she gave birth despite having no known male companionship. Now two years later, following a DNA test on her baby, the zoo has worked out who the father is – and even has a theory about how the gibbons mated. The test showed the father to be Itō, a 34-year-old agile gibbon, who was in an adjacent enclosure to...

This week, House Republicans blocked a law that would have allowed non-citizens to vote in municipal elections in Washington, DC. This is a reminder of how important the midterm elections are. If the Novermber elections had only gone a little bit differently, this law would have passed. More than 150 Democrats voted for this measure. The Federalist reported: House Republicans Block DC Law That Would Allow Illegal Residents To Vote In a win for election integrity, the House of Representatives voted to overturn a D.C. law that would give noncitizens a right to vote in municipal elections Thursday. “I applaud...

In the context of another thread here at Free Republic, I chanced to use the term "moral elephantiasis," which I remember from a long ago reading of National Review. Out of curiosity, I typed those two words into Google, in quotes, and found a number of interesting things. One of the things I found was the full text of the original article which I read, at the age of 23 or so; that article had been read into the Congressional Record by then Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald. I transcribed the article (with significant help from the PDF OCR algorithm), and...

Young Australian actor Sariah Saibu, who starred in the award-winning film Beautiful They has died suddenly.Young Aussie actress Sariah Saibu, who starred in the award-winning film Beautiful They has died suddenly. Sariah’s family confirmed on social media that she passed on January 30th but didn’t share her cause of death. “This morning we lost our darling Sariah,” her aunt Cassandra Colvin wrote on Facebook. “I am struggling to find the words to express the grief that I and her family are feeling at this time. “RIP beautiful – all our love always.” Sariah starred in the short LGBTQI+ film Beautiful...

In less than two years, 11 people perished and 251 were injured in NYC fires sparked by lithium-ion batteries used to power e-bikes and e-scooters, the FDNY said. In 2021, four persons died and 79 were injured in 104 lithium-ion battery fueled blazes in homes, fire officials said. Last year, those numbers took a concerning climb: six people were killed and 142 hurt in 220 battery-related fires. Lithium ion batteries were the cause of the fourth most fire deaths last year, the FDNY said, behind electrical, portable heaters and smoking. In the first month of 2023, there have been 1,563...

A teacher says she received $116 after a parent picked up their child from her class late. The teacher, known as Kristin Evans (@mrs._evans) on TikTok, posted a 30-second video explaining what happened, and it racked up 3.5 million views as of Friday. In the video, Evans says the director of her school handed her $116 in cash. She says the director told her she got the money because one of her half-day students was picked up nearly an hour late, and teachers get paid $2 for every minute that they’re late. “So this parent was charged $2 a minute...

Hoover built the FBI and abused its power, which is why he's left behind a legacy controversial enough to warrant repeated calls for the “J. Edgar Hoover Building” that headquarters the FBI to be renamed. It never has, but the 10-year tenure for FBI directors is arguably a much more important impact of his time. Instead of serving 37 years like Hoover, each FBI director gets 10 unless an extension is proposed by the President and affirmed by the Senate.

Citing a Zerohedge report, The Gateway Pundit noted that the Chinese altimeter satellite ICESAT-2/43613, fired green laser bursts over Maunakea, Hawaii on January 28, 2023. That Chinese military operation occurred simultaneously with the arrival of a Chinese spy balloon, which entered U.S. airspace over the Aleutian Islands in Alaska also on January 28, 2023. After being allowed to fly over the entire U.S. mainland, including sensitive military installations, the Chinese spy balloon was finally shot down off the coast of South Carolina on February 4, 2023. Within the last 24 hours, a “high altitude object,” presumably another Chinese spy balloon,...