Free Republic

A man who lives across the street from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was held without bail Tuesday after prosecutors accused him of beating a woman to death with a baseball bat inside his home and dumping her body in the alley. Arnel Smith, 64, is charged with first-degree murder and concealing a homicidal death. A medical examiner who handled the 41-year-old victim’s case said they had “never seen so many injuries on someone’s body,” Assistant State’s Attorney Anne McCord said during Smith’s bail hearing.

On Tuesday, members of the House Freedom Caucus held a press conference to express their disapproval of the debt ceiling agreement and urge their fellow Republicans to vote against it. Chip Roy (R-TX 21st District) lambasted the McCarthy spending deal. “Not one Republican should vote for this deal. It is a bad deal. No one sent us here to borrow an additional 4 trillion dollars to get absolutely nothing in return… There will be a reckoning about what just occurred unless we stop this bill,” he said. Chip Roy on fire: “Not one Republican should vote for this deal. It...

Some lottery winners have described their situation as being at the right place at the right time to receive their fortuitous ticket to wealth. Their windfall immediately changes their lives, making them responsible for managing an amount of money they’d never dreamt of having. People believe money changes a person, but I believe it only accentuates what was already within: The money just makes it easier to exhibit it. The national Black Lives Matter organization got its golden ticket off the corpses of black people and leveraged their unfortunate deaths against the emotional turmoil of a nation for profit.

An exploratory analysis of the LoDoCo2 (Low-Dose Colchicine 2) randomized, controlled, double-blind trial found that daily therapy with a low dose of colchicine was associated with lower incidences of both total knee replacement and total hip replacement surgeries. Osteoarthritis is an increasingly common joint disease that can be associated with low-grade inflammation in response to weight-bearing traumatic injury. Previous studies have demonstrated an association between the use of anti-inflammatory therapies and the slowing of osteoarthritis disease progression. Colchicine is effective in many inflammatory and fibrotic conditions, but it is not currently recommended for treatment of osteoarthritis. Its long-term effects have...

The world’s most famous life-saving rescue technique could be worse than death in many cases, according to a new report. Administering CPR — or cardiopulmonary resuscitation — to a cardiac arrest sufferer might seem like a no-brainer. However, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation could paradoxically cause more harm than good, according to a disturbing new NPR investigation. “The bad experiences far outnumber the good ones, unfortunately,” Holland Kaplan, a physician and bioethicist, told the outlet about the so-called dark side of CPR. Not only is this revival method not as successful as portrayed on countless televised medical dramas — but it can leave...

Drones Strikes In Moscow - Missile Strikes In Ukraine Today the Russian government revealed some numbers and information about its 'Special Military Operation'.Today's 'clobber report' by the Ministry of Defense leads with this (machine translation):During the day, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation carried out group strikes using long-range high-precision air-launched weapons at central decision-making points where, under the guidance of specialists from Western intelligence agencies, terrorist acts were planned on Russian territory.All assigned objects are hit.'Central decision-making points' are ministries and main headquarters. These had so far not been targets. More to that below.Defense Minister Shoigu had a...

Florida cops are asking for the public’s help identifying two men caught on camera brandishing guns as shots rang out on a crowded boardwalk Monday, leaving nine people shot and frantic crowds running for their lives. The footage shows a scuffle breaking out along a crowded stretch of the popular Hollywood attraction before a man in a yellow hoodie pulls out a pistol and begins firing. Another suspect in a gray hoodie and black pants can also be seen squeezing off several shots before sprinting away from the late evening bedlam. Several children ranging in age from 1 to 17...

Things are not going particularly well for Toronto Blue Jays reliever Anthony Bass this season, on or off the diamond. If his on-field endeavours (-0.1 WAR and 4.50 ERA in 2023) failed to capture your attention, you'll probably remember Bass as the player who sparked a wild social media firestorm back in April when he called out an United Airlines employee after they refused to clean up popcorn spilled by his young children. Well, Bass was back at it again on Monday, making himself the villain once more with his latest Instagram post. The 35-year-old reliever shared a "reel" from...

Bud Light sales declines are accelerating, and shares of parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) are falling alongside them. New data from Nielsen revealed Bud Light sales declined 24.3% year-over-year in the week ending May 20 while Budweiser sales were down 20.4% during the same period. Last week sales were down 21.6% and 17.6% respectively. Driven by backlash from an advertising campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light sales have now declined for six weeks, per Nielsen. Shares of AbInBev fell nearly 5% on Tuesday, the worst intraday action on the stock since Mulvaney's post on April 1. Since the...

In a study involving more than 12,000 individuals with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), researchers found a significantly increased risk of severe infections requiring hospital admission. NAFLD is considered a manifestation of the metabolic syndrome in the liver and with the global rise in obesity, NAFLD has emerged as the most common chronic liver disease affecting around one quarter of all adults worldwide. It has also become the fastest growing cause of end-stage liver disease, primary liver cancer and liver transplantation. In a study (the ESPRESSO study) involving 12,133 individuals with biopsy-proven NAFLD, and 57,516 matched controls from the general...

[Catholic Caucus] Crocodile: Diocese Presents Conformism as "Courage"Until June 4, a large crocodile is hanging in the baptistery of San Giovanni Battista Church in Cremona. The church is a masterpiece of Lombard Romanesque-Gothic architecture, reports MessaInLatino.it.The figure was created by Maurizio Cattelan in 2019 and is called "Ego". Cattelan explained that crocodiles are protagonists of rituals, religions, magical beliefs and urban legends.Cremona Diocese considers the exhibition of 'Ego' in the Baptistery a "courageous [= conformist] choice", calling Cattelan "one of the most appreciated and controversial [= approved by the oligarchs] artists in the art world".Courage would have been to put...

A FanDuel Sportsbook bettor missed out on a potentially life-changing payday of over $71,000 when they decided to cash out their three-leg futures parlay early. The parlay included three championship bets: the Kansas City Chiefs to win the Super Bowl, UConn to win the National Championship and the Denver Nuggets to win the NBA Finals. SNIP Whether Denver wins the NBA Finals is irrelevant primarily because, at the minimum, the bettor would be wise to hedge this bet on Miami, potentially guaranteeing him or herself $30,000 or more.

An arrest has been made in the case of murdered New Jersey councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour, who was gunned down outside her home in early February, according to reports. The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office, which has led the investigation, has been notoriously tight-lipped about its progress, but it will hold a 4 p.m. press conference to update the public, ABC7 reported Tuesday. The 30-year-old Republican was killed Feb. 1 after an unknown gunman pumped several rounds into her SUV — while Dwumfour’s 12-year-old daughter sat inside their Sayreville home. Witnesses said they saw a man dressed in black running from the...

This version of CRISPR doesn’t actually change DNA. A biotech startup has successfully lowered the cholesterol levels of monkeys using a version of CRISPR that doesn’t permanently alter DNA — suggesting a safer way to take advantage of the groundbreaking technology. The challenge: Most genes are instruction manuals for making proteins. Those proteins dictate what your cells look like and do, trigger or stop chemical reactions, and influence almost everything else about your body. Using CRISPR, researchers can edit genes to change these proteins — a CRISPR treatment for sickle cell anemia, for example, corrects a genetic mutation that causes...

Their faces were twisted with hatred as they jabbed their fingers at me. They waved placards denouncing me as a hate-speaker, a bigot, someone unfit for public life. This was Oxford University in 2018, where I had been invited to give an after-dinner speech at Queen’s College. When I arrived, however, I was greeted not by the reasoning intellects you would expect to find at one of the world’s great universities, but by a mob of blue-haired, red-faced woke censors. They were assembled outside the building where I was due to give my speech, hurling all manner of abuse. I...

A lawyer for former President Donald Trump reportedly said he was “waved off” of searching his Mar-a-Lago office for classified documents after the feds issued a subpoena demanding their return. Attorney Evan Corcoran told two colleagues he was barred from looking for secret documents in Trump’s personal office at the Florida resort club as he sought to respond to the subpoena, the Guardian reported Tuesday. The new report did not say whether it was Trump himself or some other aide who told Corcoran not to search the office, or why he complied with the request. Corcoran wound up searching only...

The top Chinese official who led Beijing’s COVID-19 response admits he can’t rule out that the deadly virus leaked from a lab. “You can always suspect anything. That’s science,” Dr. George Fu Gao, who was China’s equivalent of Dr. Anthony Fauci, told the BBC when asked about the ongoing theory about his own nation’s scientists. “Don’t rule out anything,” he told the podcast “Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin.” The scientist’s admission, no matter how vague, is stunning given how forcefully Beijing has always denied the possibility that researchers at the now-notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology may have leaked the...

Count Dodgers legend and future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw among those upset about the team’s bungling of their Pride Night. Kershaw recently announced and publicized that the team would be re-launching their “Christian Faith and Family Day” after the team invited, then un-invited, then re-invited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a queer and trans group that uses religious imagery and mocks Catholicism to call attention to sexual intolerance. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kershaw admitted that the timing of the announcement was, in some part, related to the Pride Night controversy. “I think we were always...

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) declined to run for U.S. Senate, clearing the path for the Donald Trump-aligned businessman and candidate Bernie Moreno.Davidson told supporters he would run for the House again instead of running for higher office.Davidson’s decision not to run for Senate clears the path for businessman Moreno to seize the Republican nomination.Recently, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) endorsed Moreno’s bid for the U.S. Senate.Vance said the Ohio businessman was an outsider “committed to securing our southern border, getting tough on China, and taking the fight to the woke corporations waging war against our conservative values.”Former President Donald Trump has...

One Michigan school official admitted his district’s move to using electric buses was less than the government has touted it to be. Emile Lauzzana, the environmental sustainability director of Michigan’s fourth-largest school district, recently told the Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education that the district’s electric bus fleet has had “a lot of downtime and performance issues.” “It’s been a tough 2 1/2 years with this program,” Lauzzana said. “We’ve been learning a lot about this technology,” Lauzzana also said. “Electric buses are approximately five times more expensive than regular buses, and the electrical infrastructure, which was originally estimated...