Free Republic

A French man who is known for extreme sports is dead after falling off the 68th-story of Hong Kong residential. Remi Lucidi, 30, was climbing the Tregunter Tower complex when the man fell according to the South China Morning Post. Lucidi, known online as Remi Enigma, was pronounced dead at the scene. According to Hong Kong officials, Lucidi arrived at the building around 6 p.m. and told the security guard that he was visiting a friend on the 40th floor. A security officer attempted to apprehend Lucidi after the alleged friend confirmed he was not acquainted with Lucidi — but...

It turns out that the driving range of a fully-charged electric vehicle (EV) is shorter than advertised. The exaggerated range estimates are an artifact of testing procedures specified by the Environmental Protection Agency. Customers who have complained to the manufacturers have typically been rebuffed by the very useful "mileages may vary" escape clause. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm emphasized that "the key thing is that these EVs burn no gasoline. Given their massive positive contribution to the reduction of fuel consumption, the President's draw down of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve doesn't look as dangerous or stupid as the Republicans have...

If you ever thought of being a donor to your favorite college, or leaving an estate gift, I have one piece of advice: don't do it. This isn't out of a cold heart, or being ungenerous, but from practical concerns over university and college financial corruption. The same thing applies to making political contributions: the money just goes into a swamp, and both must be starved (or drained). Donations, if any, must be highly structured, with donor controls and institutional reporting. In both cases, you have to think and act like a shareholder and owner. Giving money to a university...

Donald Trump on Sunday vehemently denied directing a staffer to delete security footage at Mar-a-Lago. Special Counsel Jack Smith had lodged three additional charges against the embattled former president Thursday night, including over Trump allegedly telling an underling to have surveillance footage scrubbed after the Justice Department subpoenaed for it last year. “MAR-A-LAGO SECURITY TAPES WERE NOT DELETED. THEY WERE VOLUNTARILY HANDED OVER TO THE THUGS, HEADED UP BY DERANGED JACK SMITH,” Trump wrote in all caps on Truth Social. “WE DID NOT EVEN GO TO COURT TO STOP THEM FROM GETTING THESE TAPES. I NEVER TOLD ANYBODY TO DELETE...

Dialing the time machine back to 1972, we find a previous presidential scandal. Though not directly involved, Richard Nixon was the focus of blame. A handful of operatives in Nixon's campaign and administration performed a "third-rate burglary" at the opposition's headquarters. Several of those involved avoided using their first names. Instead, they were G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and L. Patrick Gray. Most curious in this affair was the lack of a serious motive. Nixon's re-election was a solid inevitability. Not all that long after the Watergate break-in hit the news, Nixon carried 49 states, and McGovern didn't even...

My isolation within the American College of Surgeons began over a year ago, on April 17, 2022. This was the day that Tyler Hughes, general secretary of the ACS and editor-in-chief of its online forum, informed me that I had been banned for life. I had inquired why I could not access the Communities, the online discussion forum of the ACS, for nearly two weeks. Neither could I access the members directory or my own private messages. Hughes made it clear that this was to be a permanent ban. Why was I banned? For questioning the ACS’s rush to embrace...

Who are they protecting here? What are they hiding? That's about all one can ask now that Democrats have quashed two measures to set up an independent Ukraine aid auditing office under one audit umbrella. According to Fox News, the plan was this: Amid the Democratic-controlled Senate’s ongoing National Defense Spending Authorization Act (NDAA) talks, GOP Sens. Josh Hawley, James Risch, Roger Wicker and John Kennedy drafted an amendment to create an exclusive Ukraine spending oversight office, led by the president’s choice. ...and according to the New York Post, it got this: Senate Democrats banded together Wednesday night to oppose...

More than eight million people in the U.S. experience psoriasis, a condition in which skin cells build up and form itchy dry patches. A person's vitamin D levels could play an important role in psoriasis severity, according to one of the largest studies to date. The analysis, which included almost 500 psoriasis cases from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), showed a linear relationship between increasing psoriasis severity and decreasing vitamin D levels measured through blood tests. "Topical synthetic vitamin D creams are emerging as new therapies for psoriasis, but these usually require a doctor's prescription," said Rachel...

Asurge in “quiet gun owners,” much like the so-called “silent majority” in political circles, is leading firearms analysts to believe that far more Americans own weapons than the accepted 30% cited in polls. At the highest end, it’s possible that up to 60% of Americans own guns, especially with the pandemic-era rise in gun buying among women and minorities, especially in suburban and urban areas. At the lowest end, it’s likely that at least 40% of Americans own guns, according to a groundbreaking study of those who lie to pollsters about firearms. The study from Rutgers University's New Jersey Gun...

The Florida Board of Education became the first state education agency to approve the use of PragerU’s conservative curriculum in public schools, the organization confirmed to The Capitolist on Friday. PragerU, a nonprofit organization, produces video, magazine, and book resources as an alternative to what they perceive as the dominant left-wing ideology prevalent in culture, media, and education. The group’s stated mission is to “provide a free alternative to the prevailing left-wing narratives in schools,” according to its website. According to the group, the current education system “prioritizes pushing radical activism over imparting factual knowledge, leading to concerns about students’...

The National Hurricane Center is monitoring two systems in the Atlantic with chances of tropical cyclone formation. In the central tropical Atlantic, one system — named Invest 96L — is expected to see favorable conditions for development as it makes its way northwest. As of its 8 a.m. update, the NHC gives the system a 70% chance to develop into a tropical depression in the next seven

Static isometric exercises—the sort that involve engaging muscles without movement, such as wall sits and planks—are best for lowering blood pressure, finds a pooled data analysis of the available evidence from clinical trials. In a bid to potentially update information on the best form of exercise for controlling blood pressure, they trawled research databases looking for clinical trials reporting the effects of an exercise training intervention lasting two or more weeks on resting blood pressure. The exercise interventions were classified as aerobic (cardio); dynamic resistance training; a combination of these; HIIT; and isometric exercises. Healthy resting blood pressure was defined...

NBC host Chuck Todd said Sunday on “Today” that when the Republican base realized former President Donald Trump’s legal cases make him unelectable “it may be too late” because he might “already have the nomination.” Todd said, “You know, one of the things we’re trying to focus people’s attention to is what this calendar is starting to look like in the first six months of 2024. We are literally going to be going back and forth. In fact, the day of the Iowa caucuses, a civil trial involving Donald Trump begins.” He continued, “That’s what we know for now, and...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Long-time congressional aide Mark Mathis has been tasked with slowly pushing a cart through the halls of congress to collect the dead bodies. "I'm getting better!" shouted Dianne Feinstein as her aides tossed her into the wheelbarrow. "I think I'll go for a walk!" With members of congress keeling over at an unprecedented rate, Mr. Mathis was pressed into collecting bodies full-time. "The dead body smell was getting overpowering," explained Mr. Mathis. "So, now I push this official Congressional wheelbarrow around to collect the corpses. Government work - am I right?"

A study shows that a diet containing suitable amounts of inulin can influence even the length and other macroscopic characteristics of the intestines. This beneficial action is possible only in the presence of bacteria that digest the fiber, however. Positive alterations in immunity are among the healthy interactions. "In mice that ingested a 10% inulin diet, the gut was larger than in mice that consumed only insoluble fiber [cellulose]. When we analyzed their intestinal tissue, we found more epithelial stem cell proliferation in the animals fed an inulin-rich diet. The epithelium is the layer that separates gut contents from other...

A 28-year-old man was stabbed to death during a scuffle at a Brooklyn gas station — with the caught-on-video slaying now being probed as a possible hate crime, sources said Sunday. Surveillance video footage obtained by The Post captured the heated exchange between two groups that turned deadly around 11 p.m. Saturday at a Mobil station on Coney Island Avenue, according to cops.

In the mid-20th century, a generation after the civil war, the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to rebrand the image of slavery. The group, composed of female descendants of Confederate soldiers, was fixated on returning the country’s social order to its antebellum racial hierarchy. It sought to reimagine slavery as a benign institution, and to glorify the “lost cause” of white southern insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow the government in slavery’s defense. The place that served as ground zero for the UDC’s revisionist-history effort? Schools. The Florida governor Ron DeSantis at an event in Des Moines, Iowa on...

Explanation: Admire the beauty but fear the beast. The beauty is the aurora overhead, here taking the form of a great green spiral, seen between picturesque clouds with the bright Moon to the side and stars in the background. The beast is the wave of charged particles that creates the aurora but might, one day, impair civilization. In 1859, following notable auroras seen all across the globe, a pulse of charged particles from a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a solar flare impacted Earth's magnetosphere so forcefully that it created the Carrington Event. This assault from the Sun compressed...

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who has sometimes raised the spectre of a nuclear conflict over Ukraine, said on Sunday that Moscow would have to use a nuclear weapon if Kyiv's ongoing counter-offensive was a success. Medvedev, who is deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, a body chaired by President Vladimir Putin, said in a message on his official social media accounts that Russia would be forced to fall back on its own nuclear doctrine in such a scenario. "Imagine if the.. offensive, which is backed by NATO, was a success and they tore off a part of our land...

Governor Chris Sununu (R-NH) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that former President Donald Trump did not have the energy or fastball he had in 2016. Anchor Jon Karl asked, “Alright, so you decided not to run for president, but you are also dedicating yourself to ensuring that the Republicans nominate somebody else, somebody not named Trump. What are you hearing in Iowa? You were there at the Lincoln Day dinner with all the candidates out there. Trump seemed to get a warm reception, at least from what we saw. What were you hearing from Republicans?”