Free Republic

Three years and counting since the pandemic shuttered schools and tethered students to their laptops, new data shows that enrollment in the vast majority of the nation’s largest school districts has yet to recover.Kindergarten counts continue to dwindle in many states — evidence of falling birth rates and an ever-growing array of options luring parents away from traditional public schools. Experts fear those trends, as well as a possible recession and the looming cut-off of federal relief funds, amount to a perfect storm for U.S. education.The $190 billion in pandemic aid that was provided to schools allowed many districts to...

The Biden administration announced plans Wednesday to invest up to $1 billion in “clean hydrogen,” an expensive fuel source that requires significant infrastructure to support it that would be unlikely to get significant private investment if not for government intervention in the energy sector, industry experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Department of Energy (DOE) announcement stated the administration’s intent to invest the funds into Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs for the widespread deployment of the technology, with a particular focus on providing “demand-side support” to encourage buyers to come forward and support hydrogen projects, according to the agency’s...

Renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden slammed a four-year Department of Justice report examining the prison death of Jeffery Epstein - calling its finding “ridiculous” for ignoring the clear-cut evidence of a homicide, RadarOnline.com can exclusively reveal. The DOJ’s Inspector General’s 128-page report concluded the August 2019 death of the billionaire sex trafficker was the result of “negligence and misconduct” by jail guards who failed to monitor the convicted pedophile. But Dr. Baden, who has investigated hundreds of prison suicides over his 50-year career as the pathologist for the New York State Correction Medical Review Board that monitors ALL prison...

A leader of the QAnon conspiracy cult died last weekend in a dirt bike accident — though his minions believe his death is fabricated and part of a larger plan. Michael Protzman, 60, known to his followers as Negative 48, died Friday in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota a week after an accident at the Meadow Valley Motocross track in Millville, Minnesota, VICE News confirmed. According to the medical examiner, Protzman succumbed to his “multiple blunt force injuries” after he “lost control of his dirt bike.” Protzman served as a god-like figure to his thousands of cult followers since...

FOX hasn't done itself any favors by canning Tucker. So FOX News has decided to replace Tucker Carlson with Bill O’Reilly’s one-time man-on-the-street interviewer, Jesse Watters--someone whose gravitas rating hovers in the same abysmal neighborhood as the network’s late-night darling, Greg Gutfeld. What attracted folks like me to Tucker’s program was his unpredictability, his willingness to let guests talk, his repeated calls to spend time with family and loved ones, and his apparent devotion to a moral vision rooted in religious tradition---all of which informed his tagline opposition to “lying, pomposity, smugness, and group think.” The “group think” moniker wasn’t...

Doughty, a conservative nominated to the federal bench by former President Donald Trump, issued an injunction Tuesday blocking multiple government agencies and administration officials from meeting with or contacting social media companies for the purpose of “encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” The order also prohibits the agencies and officials from pressuring social media companies “in any manner” to try to suppress posts, raising questions about what officials could even say in public forums.

The Crown season 6 will be tackling Prince Andrew’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein by completely ignoring it. The final instalment of the juggernaut Netflix series, which has gripped viewers since 2016, will concentrate on the British monarchy in the 1990s and will see James Murray reprise his role from season 5 as the royal. While plot details are being kept under wraps, it is expected the long-running drama will depict Princess Diana’s death and King Charles and Queen Camilla’s wedding, as well as paying tribute to the late Queen. But The Crown will not include Andrew’s 12-year friendship with vile...

7 July 2023Friday of week 13 in Ordinary TimeSt Maelruan's Church, TallaghtReadings at MassLiturgical Colour: Green. Year: A(I).First readingGenesis 23:1-4,19,24:1-8,62-67 ©'Choose a wife for my son Isaac'The length of Sarah’s life was a hundred and twenty-seven years. She died at Kiriath-arba, or Hebron, in the land of Canaan, and Abraham went in to mourn and grieve for her. Then leaving his dead, Abraham spoke to the sons of Heth: ‘I am a stranger and a settler among you,’ he said. ‘Let me own a burial-plot among you, so that I may take my dead wife and bury her.’ After this,...

VIENNA, July 7 (Reuters) - Germany opposes sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, its foreign minister said on Friday, a day after U.S. officials said Washington was planning to provide Kyiv with the weapons, widely denounced for killing and maiming civilians. Human rights organisations oppose such a move and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that Germany, as one of 111 states party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), did as well. The United States is not a party to the convention.

With our country more divided than most everyone alive has ever seen it, we’re keenly aware that Leftists seem to live in an entirely separate reality from our own. In their world, it’s perpetually the hottest year evuh, Klansmen rove the streets in gas-guzzling trucks, murdering unarmed black youth, women are both superior and oppressed, and men have babies. So we shouldn’t be too surprised when one of them says something that manifestly isn’t so. Nonetheless, occasionally one of the luminaries of the Left will utter something so extraordinarily stupid that I am compelled to call it out. Today’s honoree...

Gallium and germanium are silvery-white metals that can be found in a wide variety of electronics, such as semiconductors, smartphones, pressure sensors, transistors and fibre optics, as well as solar panels, camera lenses and space systems. Invoking "national security interests," the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said on Monday that companies that intend to sell products containing the two targeted materials would need to first obtain an export licence. In practice, this means that if the central government refuses to issue the licence, the company will be outright banned from exporting. The government will treat the merchandise as a "dual-use" item,...

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell acknowledged Thursday that contrary to the idea that a random tourist left cocaine in the White House in what officials have described as a “heavily trafficked” area, the cocaine was actually found in a “limited access place” near the Situation Room. “It was found, by my observation, in a much more secure place — limited access place than that West Wing reception area there,” Mitchell said. “It is still a publicly-trafficked, frequently-trafficked place, but it’s down near the Situation Room right off West Executive [Drive] down below. And normal people — just average people just can’t get...

WARTON, United Kingdom — BAE Systems executives this week expressed confidence that the Global Combat Air Platform (GCAP), currently in development with Italy and Japan, will achieve its projected in-service date of 2035, with a “manned, supersonic and low observable jet” demonstrator taking flight within the next five years. And more than that, the company leaders believe they can find an export market of “several hundred” jets globally. Meeting with the media at BAE Systems’ assembly plant in Warton, Lancashire, Herman Claesen, BAE Systems’ Future Combat Air System Managing Director, called the international export of GCAP a “key feature” in...

As more anonymous leaks muddy the waters on where the cocaine was found in the White House, one thing becomes clear: Biden’s handlers are divided on how to handle the scandal that now deserves the moniker “Cocainegate.” It’s panic time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The most intriguing leak went to NBC News, always willing to broadcast propaganda meant to guard the interests of the ruling class. Host Andrea Mitchell and White House correspondent Kelly O’Donnell casually let drop a shot across the bow of VP Kamala Harris -- whose unpopularity is a huge problem for Dems worried about maintaining control...

Pray For The Peace of JerusalemLuke 19 Jesus at the Temple 45 When Jesus entered the temple courts, he began to drive out those who were selling. 46 “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be a house of prayer’[c]; but you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’[d]” 47 Every day he was teaching at the temple. But the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the leaders among the people were trying to kill him. 48 Yet they could not find any way to do it, because all the people hung on his words....

"You . . . are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ" (1 Pet. 2:5). Christians share common spiritual characteristics with Old Testament priests. Peter identified believers as holy priests, but many Christians don't really know what that means because priests aren't part of our culture as a whole. The primary purpose of an Old Testament priest was to offer acceptable sacrifices to God on behalf of the people. Priests were chosen by God Himself, specially cleansed through prescribed ceremonies, clothed in a prescribed manner,...

A dangerous and highly contagious disease with no vaccine is spreading across Australia in record numbers this winter. Experts have warned cases of RSV...recorded at 10 times the number than the same time last year. ..... It is a similar story for other states and territories, with the exception of Queensland, which reported 16,332 confirmed cases of RSV from the start of the year to June 26. Here, Daily Mail Australia reveals everything you need to know about RSV. RSV stands for respiratory syncytial virus that targets the lungs and respiratory tract. It is one of the major causes of...

... In a model using nonhuman primates, researchers administered THC in a daily edible and compared its effects to a group receiving a placebo. Specifically, researchers evaluated the epigenetic changes in several key areas that indicate healthy prenatal development: the placenta -- the disc of tissue that connects the umbilical cord and uterus -- and fetal lung, brain and heart. When looking at these areas, analyses showed that THC exposure altered the epigenome, meaning a process in which the information encoded in a gene is turned into a function or observable trait. Genes -- the segments which make up DNA...

Refugees bring very little across borders, but they cling to their stories. These days they mostly want to talk about the weather. The refugees I work with often say the same thing: It got hot. Then hotter. Then the jobs dried up and eventually the food did too. Add in political, racial or religious tensions, or a natural disaster that was the final straw. It all led to the same conclusion: There is no future here. And these are from the “lucky ones” who made it out. Today there are millions of climate refugees — people who have fled their...

Just over a year ago, on July 5, 2022, I had a post titled “How To Think Like A Liberal Supreme Court Justice.” The post was occasioned by the then-brand-new issuance (June 30, 2022) of the biggest decision of the Court’s last term, West Virginia v. EPA. Justice Kagan had authored a dissent on behalf of herself and the other two liberal justices (Breyer and Sotomayor). My post also discussed two other significant decisions of the 2021-22 term where the three liberals had again dissented as a bloc: Alabama Association of Realtors v. HHS and NFIB v. Department of Labor....