Free Republic

World number one Novak Djokovic outclassed Carlos Alcaraz 6-3 6-2 on Saturday to reach his ninth ATP Finals title clash where he will face local favourite Jannik Sinner. In a rematch of this season's Wimbledon final, the winner of an all-time record 24 men's Grand Slam titles capitalised on the Spaniard's inconsistency to continue his quest for a seventh trophy this year and become the most successful player in 2023. The 20-year-old Alcaraz, who also has won six titles this season, missed out on becoming the youngest finalist in the season-ending tournament since Pete Sampras in 1991.

resident Joe Biden will use special wartime powers to boost US production of heat pumps, by funding nine manufacturing projects with $169 million from last year's climate bill, the Energy Department said on Friday. The awards were granted under the emergency authority of the Cold War-era Defense Production Act (DPA), which Biden invoked on the basis of climate change to boost spending on clean energy technology. 'The President is using his wartime emergency powers under the Defense Production Act to turbocharge US manufacturing of clean technologies and strengthen our energy security,' said Biden's National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi in a...

More electric vehicles are heading to car dealerships across New Mexico. The New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board approved a new set of regulations – commonly known as the ‘Clean Car Standards’ – in a 3-2 vote. The regulations were first developed in California and have been adopted by 19 other states including New Mexico. The new rules require car manufacturers to deliver more zero-emission vehicles to car dealerships. Starting in 2026, 43% of all new vehicle deliveries must be electric or hybrid vehicles. Only 15% of new commercial trucks must be electric. The requirements are scheduled to quickly increase each...

The endangered southern cassowary, a giant flightless bird native to Australia and New Guinea, was spotted by onlookers on Oct. 31 along the shores of Bingil Bay in the Australian state of Queensland, according to the local government. Beachgoers in Australia last month initially thought it was a turtle or a shark’s dorsal fin in the ocean. But upon closer inspection, they were stunned to see a cassowary – sometimes dubbed "the world’s most dangerous bird" – emerge from the ocean and shake itself off. The endangered southern cassowary, a giant flightless bird native to Australia and New Guinea, was...

Can an economy in which 10% of the households qualify as middle class claim to offer widespread opportunities for secure prosperity? No, it cannot.Defining the middle class is a perpetually popular parlor game because it's well-known that the foundation of widespread prosperity is a broad-based middle class and a sturdy ladder of social mobility that enables those below the middle class to work their way up to middle class security.Here's an example of a typical trope on the subject: What Does It Take To Be Middle Class?The topic is also a perennial favorite because the middle class is losing ground....

It took Megan Rice just three weeks to go from first opening the Quran to professing her belief that Muhammad is the one true messenger of God. It all started on October 20, when Rice, a black American millennial-aged activist, announced on TikTok that she was reading the holy book for the first time. Perched on her couch in a gray sweatshirt, she said to her then-400,000 followers in a video that has since been viewed more than 5.3 million times: “It just seems that Palestinians have this ironclad faith even in the face of losing quite literally everything.” Three...

According to a new Pew report, a growing number of U.S. adults admit to regularly getting their news on TikTok. “This,” notes the report, “is in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.”This should concern all readers who care about the United States. As this piece clearly demonstrates, TikTok is an incredibly dangerous app that is most likely being weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). More specifically, it's being used by the CCP to further divide a country that is already dangerously divided.The Pew report...

(Reuters) -Israel, the United States and Hamas have reached a tentative agreement to free dozens of women and children held hostage in Gaza in exchange for a five-day pause in fighting, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing people familiar with the deal. As part of the detailed, six-page agreement, all parties would freeze combat operations for at least five days while "an initial 50 or more hostages are released in smaller groups every 24 hours", the Post reported. Hamas took about 240 hostages during its Oct. 7 rampage inside Israel that killed 1,200 people. The newspaper said overhead surveillance...

Arizona State University (ASU) canceled a pro-Palestine event on campus that was to be held Friday. The cancellation came Thursday night and surprised organizers with the last-minute notice.Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) was scheduled to be a featured speaker at the “Palestine as an American Issue” event. Event organizers said they have been working with the university for months while planning the event. An ASU spokesperson wrote in an email that the event was canceled due to procedural issues. Tlaib was censured by her colleagues in the House of Representatives last week. The resolution declared she was “calling for the destruction...

For the sixth year in a row, the Department of Defense (DOD) has failed a self-audit of 29 standalone entities controlling $3.8 trillion in assets and responsible for $4 trillion in liabilities. Seven of the 29 audited entities achieved a passing score. The Medicare-Eligible Retiree Health Care Fund received a "qualified opinion" indicting auditor found "misstatements" (if you do this when talking to an FBI agent you go to prison) that allegedly did not change the bottom line. Three audits are still in progress. The remaining 18 failed, including money sumps like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National...

Israel and Poland’s under-21 national soccer teams played a match on Friday, but its start was interesting. No one played for the first minute of the game. They remained in their starting positions, responding to the Union of European Football Associations’ decision not to hold a moment of silence for the Israelis massacred in the October 7 attacks committed by Hamas. It’s not a good look for UEFA, but the players found a workaround (via The Guardian): UEFA refused to organize a minute of silence before the start of the match between #Israel and Poland (under-21 team). In response, the...

Over 100 Harvard faculty members signed a letter to the university president declaring that labeling Israel an "apartheid state" and accusing the country of committing genocide against Palestinians should not automatically be considered anti-Semitism. The letter, published on Medium.com on Tuesday, accused Harvard University President Claudine Gay of enforcing a "one-sided" debate about Israel by preventing students and faculty from criticizing the Jewish state. Harvard did not immediately respond to The Christian Post's request for comment."As Harvard faculty, we have been astonished by the pressure from donors, alumni, and even some on this campus to silence faculty, students, and staff...

You’ve undoubtedly heard that Republicans have found themselves, as Caroline Vakil relates over at The Hill, in “political quicksand when it comes to abortion,” evidenced by underwhelming performances at the polls since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The end of Roe was a pyrrhic victory for Republicans, say both forlorn conservative squishes and giddy leftist pundits. The suggestion by both is that Republicans underestimated Americans’ appetite for laws allowing babies to be slaughtered in the womb by the tens of thousands each year. SNIP>>>>>>>>>> Among these voices is Jon A. Shields at The Atlantic. He suggests that “abortion...

The vast majority of people living in the Netherlands support expanding assisted suicide for older citizens who are not facing a serious or life-threatening illness.The English-language Dutch news outlet NL Times reported last week that a recent poll conducted by Kieskompas of nearly 200,000 people found that 80% of the Dutch supported enabling elderly people who feel they've reached the end of their lives to obtain assisted suicide. In other words, a supermajority of respondents favor allowing assisted suicide regardless of whether the person requesting it is terminally ill. While a supermajority said they support expanding assisted suicide, 10% of...

Our “Justice” Department is irredeemably corrupt, which is why Vivek Ramaswamy’s idea of firing half the employees there (along with prosecuting those who engaged in illegal acts) is a great idea. We’ve seen this corruption daily on display with the DOJ’s obsessive focus on destroying Donald Trump to deny Americans their right to vote for the candidate of their choice. Now, news has broken about the flip side: The same DOJ that is prosecuting Trump for allegedly “mishandling” classified documents, even though, as President, it was impossible for him to have done so, will be giving a pass to Joe...

A disheartening new poll conducted by the Echelon Insights research institute purports to show that 72% of American voters would not be willing to volunteer to fight for their country if the United States faced a major conflict. The poll of 1,029 likely voters, obtained by Newsweek, was conducted October 23-26, in the days following the heinous Hamas terror attacks against Israel on October 7.That the overwhelming majority of U.S. adults apparently would not be willing to serve in the United States military if the country faced another major war is concerning to say the least, especially given extreme tensions...

Within hours of House Speaker Mike Johnson releasing the videos of events in the Capitol on January 6, it became clear that the official narrative was a lie. With police officers welcoming in their unexpected guests, showing them around, and fist-bumping those from whom they’d just removed handcuffs…well, it was clear that the FBI and Justice Department were gaslighting Americans, whether about how the incursion into the Capitol happened or what took place once Americans were in there. This new information is another reminder that our federal bureaucracy is corrupt and that Vivek Ramaswamy is correct that we need to...

Joel C. Rosenberg@JoelCRosenberg Finally — an Arab leader has publicly and unequivocally condemned Hamas, calling their October 7th slaughter of Israelis “barbaric and horror.” May the moral courage of Bahrain’s Crown Prince be echoed by other Arab leaders.

It is crystal clear now that Blinken is exploiting the war against Israel to destroy the existing state of Israel by using pressure, threats, blackmail, leaks, the media, diplomatic backstabbing, the Arab states, the EU, and the UN. Read the Blinken memo I have included in this post. Here's a pull paragraph: “…. As I said in private and in public, we believe Palestinian people's voices and aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza. We believe in Palestinian-led governance of Gaza, with Gaza unified with the West Bank. Gaza's reconstruction must be supported with a sustained...

The Framers structured the Constitution to lead the new Republic to the ultimate end of slavery but were unable to set a time frame for its abolition. The story comes to us from James Madison’s classic Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787.The discussion on slavery at the Federal Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 centered on two issues: 1. how to count the slaves in the apportionment of members in the popularly elected House of Representatives and; 2) setting an end date for the slave trade.Three distinct groups clashed on the assignment of House...