Free Republic

A rush of people jumping online to see a list of names associated with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Wednesday crashed the web page of a Bay Area nonprofit. The documents, unsealed Wednesday afternoon as part of a December court order, are expected to include hundreds of names — including those of accusers and some public figures. A viral link to the unsealed documents goes to CourtListener.com, an archive of court data run by the Oakland-based nonprofit Free Law Project. But when SFGATE checked the site, it appeared as if the crush of visitors had overwhelmed it. “Hmmm, something didn’t...

[Catholic Caucus] Fiducia supplicans: Between a rock and a hard placeThe reported influx of requests for papal blessings on parchment sheets for same-sex couples puts Pope Francis is a very difficult position.Two developments—both entirely foreseeable, one so easily avoidable as to be in essence an unforced error—are making the already improbable management of the Fiducia supplicans fiasco almost entirely impossible.The first is the reported influx of requests for papal blessings on parchment sheets for same-sex couples. Italy’s Il Messaggero newspaper had the story over the weekend.On paper, it oughtn’t be too difficult to turn them down. Fiducia supplicans, after all,...

McCann also discovered Roberta Flack, while his music has been sampled by hip-hop stars such as Nas, Snoop Dogg and A Tribe Called Quest.Les McCann, the Grammy-nominated jazz pianist, composer and vocalist who discovered a young Roberta Flack, and whose own works have been sampled by countless hip-hop artists, died on Friday, December 29, at the age of 88. Born Leslie McCann on September 23, 1935 in Lexington, Kentucky, the musician would become one of jazz’s “most gifted and influential artists,” according to a statement from Kevin Gore, president of Global Catalog, Recorded Music for Warner Music Group. McCann’s family...

Louis Freeh. Pal to Mueller and Comey and Wray.

Ibram X. Kendi is a racist, not an antiracist, because he thinks black plagiarists should not be held to the same standard of accountability as white ones. This is called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

A planet is a planet wherever it resides, right? Dave Eicher examines the case of the icy world.In 1930 a young astronomer from Kansas, employed as an observer at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, discovered Pluto. It was the first planet in the solar system to have been discovered since 1846, when astronomers in Germany detected Neptune. Clyde Tombaugh, just 24 at the time, was hailed as a hero, Disney named a cartoon dog after the new planet, and for 76 years the solar system was a happy place. And then, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) reconsidered Pluto’s status....

A strange brew of astronomical oddities awaits you and your telescope.Two years ago, our special January issue brought forth a popular package, 101 Must-See Cosmic Objects. Now we follow it up in a very different direction. My thought this time was to produce something covering not the brightest, but some of the strangest celestial objects you can see or image with amateur telescopes. Some of the present 101 objects have strange names — Gyulbudaghian’s Nebula, Purgathofer-Weinberger 1, or Gomez’s Hamburger. Some are weird stars — Tabby’s Star, Eta Carinae, or FU Orionis. Some are strange regions of the sky...

NEW-ORLEANS, Sunday Morning, Dec. 27. The steamship Evening Star, Capt. BELL, from New-Orleans Dec. 27, and Havana Dec. 29, arrived at an early hour on Sunday morning. In Western Louisiana all is quiet. Our army is encamped, and the enemy are equally inactive. Our forces in Texas are making steady progress, occupying one place after another, and meeting with no opposition whatever. Gen. MAGRUDER has issued a proclamation, dated at Houston, in which he says: "The defence of Western Texas will not be given up, as reported." He urges minute men, exempts and all others capable of bearing arms to...

The study, published Wednesday in Science Advances, was based on data from more than 450,000 people of European descent who signed up for the UK Biobank, a long-term genomics project that has proven a major boon for health research. It builds on growing research including a seminal 2019 paper in Science that found genetic variants influenced to some extent whether a person engaged in same-sex behavior, though environmental factors were more important. "We realized that in the past, people lumped together all homosexual behavior...but actually there's a spectrum," Zhang said, explaining part of the motivation for the new work. By...

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) on Wednesday welcomed the reopening of a key port of entry at the border with Mexico, but she warned against future closures. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials are due to reopen four ports in Arizona, California and Texas on Thursday, after they shut down or severely restricted operations for weeks, citing manpower shortages due to migrant crossings between ports of entry.

The Associated Press, in an article on Wednesday, not only claimed conservatives were responsible for Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation after she was found to have plagiarized her academic work almost 50 times, but it also claimed that “white colonists” practiced scalping on Native Americans — a claim it stealth-edited later. The article, when it first published, said that conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who had looked into Gay’s plagiarism, celebrated Gay’s resignation by posting on X, “SCALPED” — a term often colloquially used by journalists when their reporting leads to someone’s resignation or firing.

A call for change in the way congressional districts are drawn has emerged, emphasizing a focus on the population of U.S. citizens alone. The proposition suggests that the Census should specifically count U.S. citizens for the apportionment of representation, contending that only U.S. citizens should be directly represented in the U.S. Congress.

Hundreds of pages of unsealed documents from a lawsuit connected to accused sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein were publicly released on Wednesday. The documents are expected to include nearly 200 names, including some of Epstein’s accusers, prominent businesspeople, politicians and potentially more.

How going for a hike can start a life in the outdoorsIn a world increasingly dominated by screens and urban landscapes, the call of the wild has never been more important. Hiking, often referred to as the gateway drug to the outdoors, serves as a transformative experience that can awaken a dormant appreciation for nature. While some may dismiss it as a mere recreational activity, the benefits of hiking extend far beyond the physical realm, acting as a catalyst for a deeper connection with the natural world. Hiking, with its accessibility and simplicity, has the power to ignite a passion...

Global energy developers Equinor and BP announced Wednesday they are canceling the contract for a massive wind project slated for construction off the coast of New York. The two companies said they had reached an agreement with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to terminate the offshore wind renewable energy certificate for their Empire Wind 2 project. Equinor and BP explained that commercial conditions, namely inflation, interest rates and supply chain disruptions, prevented its contract for the project from remaining viable. "Commercial viability is fundamental for ambitious projects of this size and scale. The Empire Wind...

The Biden administration this week will reopen four ports of entry at the southern border that had been closed because of a record influx of migrants, senior administration officials said Tuesday. The four ports of entry that will be operational again Thursday are in Eagle Pass, Texas; San Ysidro, California; Lukeville, Arizona; and Nogales, Arizona. They were closed for much of December as U.S. Customs and Border Protection shifted resources to respond to the influx of migrants traveling to the U.S. The planned reopenings come after a record-setting month in which Customs and Border Protection agents encountered more than 300,000...

On the Los Gatos Creek Trail, right next to Highway 17, the sun dapples between willows and sycamores. I’ve reported on beavers for nearly a decade, including in my book Water Always Wins, yet I’m amazed to find them here, and not just because we’re surrounded by miles of suburban sprawl. I grew up in Los Gatos in the ’70s and ’80s, when it was still semirural: the high school had an agriculture program, our yard was sprayed with pesticide by helicopter to combat the Mediterranean fruit fly, and friends lived on unpaved streets and kept horses and chickens. Still,...

BREAKING: Over 1,000 pages of documents containing 150+ names related to a lawsuit brought against Ghislaine Maxwell have been unsealed

A 46-year-old woman from South Glens Falls nearly fell off a cliff while hiking in the Town of North Hudson after slipping off the summit of South Dix Mountain around 5:30 p.m. on December 26, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The woman slid down hundreds of feet of steep snow and a rockslide before grabbing onto a tree to prevent falling off a vertical cliff face, the DEC said. According to the DEC, it was pouring rain, and there was deep snow and slippery ice at the time of the incident, which could've led to...

A Las Vegas judge was pounced on and attacked by a criminal during a hearing after she denied him bail. Judge Mary Kay Holthus from the Clark County District Court was mid-sentencing when convicted criminal Delone Redden launched at her on Wednesday morning. Video footage shows the wild moment Redden leaped out from where he was standing and hopped into the judge's bench to tackle her. As he throws himself at the shocked judge, Redden is heard saying 'nah f*** that b*tch.' The marshal along with the judge attempt to dodge the attack, but Redden threw himself on top of...