Free Republic

Sixteen former Agape Boarding School students who sued for alleged abuse at the southwest Missouri school have settled their cases for undisclosed amounts. The number represents about two-thirds of the two dozen lawsuits filed against Agape Baptist Church, the organization that operated the now-closed school near Stockton in Cedar County. Court records show that the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their cases “with prejudice,” meaning the suits cannot be filed again. Four cases were dismissed in January and refiled in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri and four are pending in state court. The newly settled cases, filed since...

For the past year, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been greeted with open arms by awards shows, film festivals and even the New York Stock Exchange. But when it comes to landing airtime on the most coveted telecast of all — the Oscars — the Ukrainian leader is being met with a cold shoulder. For the second year in a row, the Academy has snubbed Zelenskyy, who was hoping to follow up his Berlin Film Festival (remote) appearance last month with a virtual spot on Sunday’s Oscar telecast on ABC. Sources say WME power agent Mike Simpson made a plea to the...

...There are still hundreds of diplomats and politicians around the world — including in Canberra — working openly and behind the scenes to ensure tensions between China and the US never escalate into war. Rising tensions or unforeseen circumstances that could lead to war, however, can sometimes overtake those working for peace. So to contribute to this discussion, I’ve sought analysis from four of Australia’s most experienced military strategists and asked them exactly what Australia’s involvement in a war with China could look like. The four have more than 100 years of high-level military and strategic experience between them. (snip)...

If there was any doubt that the Twitter Files have struck a nerve and deep fear in the Powers That Be, Thursday’s disgraceful behavior by Democrats in a hearing featuring journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger eviscerated it. Taibbi and Shellenberger had not even uttered a word yet when the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary subcommittee Del. Stacey Plaskett, D-U.S. Virgin Islands, referred to the witnesses as "so-called journalists" in her opening statement. The pair glanced at each other, clearly surprised and confused by the utterly unprovoked attack. From there it only got worse. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, asked...

Metropolitan Police Department Chief Robert Contee has a commonsense solution to rising homicides in Washington: “We need to keep violent people in jail.” Asked at a press conference Monday if he expected the Council of the District of Columbia to change its approach to crime now that homicides have risen 30% so far this year, Contee responded, “What we gotta do if we really want to see homicides go down is keep bad guys with guns in jail.”

Last Friday, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn (Ret.) filed a lawsuit against the United States government for malicious prosecution and abuse of process. Over the weekend, Tracy Beanz put out a detailed Twitter thread breaking down the entire filing that went viral. We will recap the thread here with some additional context.

Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who represented President Donald J. Trump after his loss in the 2020 election, admitted in a sworn statement released on Wednesday that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud led to Mr. Trump’s defeat. The admissions by Ms. Ellis were part of an agreement to accept public censure and settle disciplinary measures brought against her by state bar officials in Colorado, her home state. Last year, the officials opened an investigation of Ms. Ellis after a complaint from the 65 Project, a bipartisan legal watchdog group. The...

Deaths in England and Wales have remained above average post-Covid lockdowns, with NHS delays likely to ‘have had substantial impact’The crisis in the NHS is leading to continued higher-than-usual death levels in England and Wales, experts have said. Figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal that almost 170,000 more people than normal died in England and Wales between March 2020, when coronavirus was declared a pandemic, and the end of 2022 – 11% higher than the five-year average. However, the new data also shows that the number of excess deaths has continued, even as the virus’s fatality rate has...

President Joe Biden on Thursday proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, a scheme that will likely burden both large and small businesses. While the term “corporation” is widely used to depict large companies such as Microsoft, Walmart, and McDonald’s, C-corporations are both small and large businesses, the most prevalent of corporations. Individual shareholders of C-corporations already have profits taxed both on a corporate and personal level (double taxation). In addition, small businesses account for 65.1 percent of net new jobs created from 2000 to 2019 and comprise 99.7 percent of firms with paid employees,...

Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), pushed the idea that the COVID virus came from nature, a "wet market," instead of from a Chinese virology lab because "he felt guilty about funding the research in China that became COVID-19," said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Utah) in a March 7 interview with Newsmax. The narrative that Fauci created and spread to the American public while he worked for the government was "perhaps the most massive cover-up in modern medical history," added Paul. (In addition to his work at NIAID for many years, Fauci...

The Delaware General Assembly is considering a bill that would require Roman Catholic priests to break the seal of confession to report child abuse and neglect, prompting condemnation from the Diocese of Wilmington. House Bill 74, the sponsors of which include state Senate President Pro Tempore David P. Sokola, could be heard before the House Judiciary Committee within weeks, according to OSV News. The Diocese of Wilmington condemned the proposed law, noting that priests are bound by the sacrament of reconciliation from breaking the seal of confession, according to the outlet. Catholic canon law mandates that a priest who violates...

A recent college graduate in Utah was shot several times by police during a traffic stop in early March after officers allegedly saw him reaching for a gun, body camera video shows. Farmington, Utah, police department officers stopped 25-year-old Chase Allan after seeing an illegitimate license plate on the BMW car he was driving at 3:22 p.m. on March 1. Police Chief Eric Johnsen released body camera video relating to the incident on Wednesday. When the police officer told Allan that he was being stopped because there was no registration on the car, Allan said, "I don't need registration and...

To paraphrase Luke 4:23: MSNBC, heal thyself! On today's Morning Joe, discussing revelations that Fox News people said critical things in private about Donald Trump, but something very different on the air, David Ignatius said: "You have a sense that Fox is chasing what it imagines its viewers, the public on the right, want to hear. And that's just never a good position."Yes, Ignatius was talking about Fox News. But upon hearing it, you might have thought Ignatius had Joe Scarborough in mind.Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Explanation: On the first planetary defense test mission from planet Earth, the DART spacecraft captured this close-up on 26 September 2022, three seconds before slamming into the surface of asteroid moonlet Dimorphos. The spacecraft's outline with two long solar panels is traced at its projected point of impact between two boulders. The larger boulder is about 6.5 meters across. While the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft had a mass of some 570 kilograms, the estimated mass of Dimorphos, the smaller member of a near-Earth binary asteroid system, was about 5 billion kilograms. The direct kinetic impact of the spacecraft...

People living in the east of Russia have once again been targeted in a television and radio hack, apparently suggesting they had been subject to a nuclear attack. It is the third time media stations in the country have broadcast hoax warnings in just over two weeks. Today’s message, however, included a chilling new detail – an instruction for those listening to ‘take potassium iodide pills’, which are typically used in radiation emergencies. ‘Seal the premises. Use gas masks of all types. In the absence of gas masks, use cotton-gauze bandages.’ Screens also flashed up with a black and yellow...

President Joe Biden’s budget proposal for 2024 includes billions of dollars spread across federal agencies to combat climate change, with a bulk of the investment going toward boosting conservation and disaster resilience, cutting pollution and advancing clean energy technologies. Some of Biden’s spending areas on climate include: $24 billion for climate resilience and conservation $16.5 billion for climate science and clean energy innovation $6.5 billion for energy storage and transmission projects $4.5 billion for jobs building clean energy infrastructure $3 billion for advancing adaptation finance $1.8 billion for environmental justice initiatives $1.2 billion for the Energy Department’s industrial decarbonization activities...

The Republicans have a golden opportunity to do something about the weaponization of the FBI by making a petty, mean, and absolutely essential gesture – they can defund the billion-dollar new FBI building that would replace the decaying brutalist monstrosity of a building they currently infest. No new palace for you, bums.

New diet trends are taking on climate change, one plate at a time. You may have heard of "meatless Mondays" or maybe even "vegan before 6." Now, more consumers are making deliberate food choices and even altering entire dietary practices with sustainability in mind. "Young people are definitely concerned about the planet. They know they have many, many more years left and they want there to be a healthy and sustainable planet," says Brian Kateman. The author and documentarian decided to eat less meat after learning how damaging it is to the environment. Kateman even coined a term for it:...

The bloated agency is 0 for 5, but in the words of Michael McCord, the department’s own financial executive, “I would not say that we’ve flunked.” For context, the pass rate was a mere 39%, after a 28-year preparatory period; what’s he using, common core math? Clearly this guy is unqualified to run the corner lemonade stand, let alone an agency with a nearly $2 trillion annual budget.

SOUTH KOREA Economy Crashing as Unique Jeonse Rental Market Implodes & Population Decline Continues