Free Republic

Japanese police arrested three people on Wednesday in connection with an unsanitary prank at a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant, according to the Japanese state broadcaster NHK. The viral videos from early February showed one of them — 21-year-old Yoshino Ryoga, dubbed a "sushi terrorist" by the Japanese public and media — putting his saliva on utensils and sushi and licking the spout of soy sauce bottles at a Kura Sushi restaurant in Nagoya City. The restaurant chain filed a complaint for damages with police on Tuesday and received an apology from Ryoga. Police also arrested two teenagers on suspicion of obstructing...

A House subcommittee today chaired by Republican Rep. Jim Jordan is holding a hearing on the weaponization of the federal government as shown in the Twitter Files. The witnesses are journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, who have faced some frankly idiotic lines of questioning from some Democrats, and least one of which didn’t even bother to study the subject matter.While trying to protect the narrative on behalf of the government, Democrat Rep. Daniel Sachs Goldman (those names might sound familiar, and yes, he’s one of the richest members of Congress) claimed there’s “no actual evidence” of the government ever...

For more than two years, Democrats and the media have been completely and totally fixated on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, using carefully selected clips from more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage to tell their story of a violent insurrection. But now that Fox News has gained access to the complete video record and is providing the public with a far more complete picture of what happened that day, we fully expect the left to suddenly decide that Jan. 6 isn’t worth talking about any more. Shortly after Republicans took control of the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy decided...

A Florida pastor faces 12 charges related to fraud and theft after authorities say he sold his church property for $600,000 to support his drug habit. Police arrested James Edward Smith II, the pastor of New Jerusalem Baptist Church in Pompano Beach, on multiple charges for allegedly defrauding the church to support his drug habit. An investigation began in April 2020 after parishioners and church founders complained that Smith deceptively gained control over the church and its funds by forging a transfer of property ownership. Authorities discovered Smith had filed the forged quit claim deed that allowed him to take...

Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist and the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), testified under oath Wednesday that he believes U.S. tax dollars paid for the research that created COVID and that the funds came from several agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Defense (DoD). So far, COVID has killed 1.1 million people in the United States and 6.8 million worldwide. Dr. Redfield testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. Redfield was the director of the CDC from 2018-2021. There, he "oversaw the agency's response to...

"And Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd: and he began to teach them many things." "Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection." "Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead...

(This story originally published in Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment.)Like many Angelenos, I spend a lot of time behind the wheel of my car. I drive from my Westside apartment to Dodger Stadium near downtown and farther east to hike in the San Gabriel Mountains. I take the 405 Freeway north to the San Fernando Valley to see friends, or occasionally south to the L.A. Times office — or to the airport, where I grow my carbon footprint even further. So I couldn’t help but consider my own complicity while reading a new study...

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. (AP) — California on Thursday sued one of its picturesque coastal cities and accused it of refusing to build more affordable housing, an issue Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom called the “original sin” of the state’s housing shortage. Attorney General Rob Bonta sued Huntington Beach, a city of about 200,000 people along the Southern California coast where the median home sales price is $1.1 million — or more than $300,000 higher than the state average. Bonta is asking a judge to order Huntington Beach City Council to comply with state housing laws and to punish councilmembers by making...

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...