Free Republic

At a Nov. 15 hearing on cannabis reform at the federal level, House Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said President Joe Biden’s pardon of people convicted of “simple possession” of marijuana under federal law was “a good first step,” and added that the next step is that “cannabis must be decriminalized at the federal level as a matter of basic justice in the country.” Under current federal law, marijuana is classified as a Schedule 1 illegal drug, which means it has a “high potential for abuse” and is not a “currently accepted medical treatment in the U.S.,” according to Drugs.com. Other...

New York State issued a warning for residents to avoid shoveling snow in the upstate area, which has been pelted by 6-feet of snow, after two people died of heart attacks and a third died when their plow crashed. As the blizzard continued into Saturday morning, with a further 4 feet predicted to hit by Monday, the NYS Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Services urged residents to avoid overexerting themselves when shoveling snow. 'Take it slow!... don't work to the point of exhaustion,' the department warned following the deaths of two unidentified Erie County men who suffered heart attacks...

With 2022 coming to an end, the Cambridge Dictionary team has announced their Word of the Year for 2022. And it is 'homer', which is described as "short for home run : a point scored in baseball when you hit the ball, usually out of the playing field, and are able to run around all the bases at one time to the starting base," as per Cambridge Dictionary. Homer was the top searched word on Cambridge Dictionary in 2022. "It was looked up more than 79,000 times this year, and an amazing 65,401 of those views happened on May 5,"...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) went down to the House floor on Thursday to announce her farewell to the Democratic leadership and the American people. […] “My colleagues, I stand before you as Speaker of the House. As a wife. A mother. A grandmother. A devout Catholic. A proud Democrat,” said Pelosi. “And a patriotic American: a citizen of the greatest Republic in the history of the world.” …

The Light We Carry is supposedly a guide for all women, everywhere, in their 'ongoing journey to "becoming"'. We must embrace our true potential, she suggests, despite being thwarted by prejudice and, yes, dastardly men. Michelle offers such sage reflections as 'fear can keep us safe, but fear can keep us stuck'. Eh? 'We practise, we learn, learn and practise, we make mistakes then start over again,' she writes. If we 'recognise our light, we become empowered by it'. She also hails the joys of knitting to find lasting peace. The book is printed in 40 languages. Let's hope one...

The White House is offering discounts on groceries to Americans who get the new bivalent Covid booster in a desperate bid to boost uptake of the new vaccine. People who get the Omicron-specific shot at CVS, Safeway, Winn-Dixie, or Rite Aid will get up to $20 off their purchases this winter. It comes amid a soaring inflation crisis that has driven up the price of household staples. A recent American Farm Bureau report found Thanksgiving dinner this year will cost a whopping 20 per cent more than last year. The new booster incentive comes ahead of a potential spike in...

Sen. Mitt Romney (R.-Utah), who was the losing Republican presidential nominee in 2012, voted on Wednesday to move forward to a final vote in the Senate on the “Respect for Marriage Act,” which would recognize same-sex marriages in federal law. “While I believe in traditional marriage, Obergefell is and has been the law of the land upon which LGBTQ individuals have relied,” said Romney. “This legislation provides certainty to many LGBTQ Americans, and it signals that Congress—and I—esteem and love all of our fellow Americans equally.” “This legislation provides important protections for religious liberty—measures which are particularly important to protect...

A Canadian man facing eviction applied to be legally euthanized and die rather than face homelessness. Amir Farsoud, 54, applied for the drastic measure after the rooming house where he lives was put on the market. Farsoud lives with debilitating, untreatable back pain, which allowed him to qualify for Canada's controversial medical assistance in dying program, known as MAID. But it wasn't his pain that drove Farsoud's decision, but rather his prospects of homelessness after Canada's social services failed to provide him support. Farsoud received one of the two doctor signatures required to be accepted by the MAID program, and...

Disgraced Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison penned graphic blog posts about polyamory and masochism before the implosion of her FTX-linked cryptocurrency hedge fund. Ellison — who dated FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried — wrote candidly about her “‘foray into poly” on her now-deleted Tumblr account back in February 2020, according to the Daily Mail. The post — along with a series of other sexualized entries — was unearthed by the tabloid just days after CoinDesk claimed Ellison, 28, and Bankman-Fried, 30, were part of a 10-person “cabal of roommates” that managed operations for FTX and Alameda from a luxury penthouse in...

TRINIDAD – A 13-year-old corgi and her owner were viciously attacked Tuesday Saturday, Oct. 29 by a pack of poodles at Trinidad State Beach. Kathrin Burleson was walking her dog Emma and was with a friend at the beach when a pack of 10 standard poodles jumped out of a car about 50 feet away and ran towards them. Burleson said she reached down to pick up Emma, who was so scared that she wiggled out of her harness. Within seconds, the pack was on top of them. “Then they jumped us,” Burleson said. “We were at the bottom of...

The United States of America, unlike any other nation, maintains a massive network of foreign military installations around the world. How was this created and how is it continued? Some of these physical installations are on land occupied as spoils of war. Most are maintained through collaborations with governments, many of them brutal and oppressive governments benefiting from the bases’ presence. In many cases, human beings were displaced to make room for these military installations, often depriving people of farmland, adding huge amounts of pollution to local water systems and the air, and existing as an unwelcome presence. Please help...

Get ready for a baby bust. Sperm counts globally have fallen at an alarming rate – dropping by more than 62% between 1973 and 2018 – and could lead to a reproductive crisis, new research has found. During the same period, the concentration of sperm among men dropped by more than 51%, from 101.2 million to 49 million sperm per milliliter of semen, according to the peer-reviewed study published Tuesday in the journal Human Reproduction Update. That number is still above the World Health Organization’s cutoff, namely 15 million per milliliter, below which men are deemed to have a low...

CASPER, Wyo. — The record for the world’s longest uninterrupted chain of beard has been broken by at least 80 feet. Facial hair enthusiasts gathered at Gaslight Social, a bar in Casper, Wyoming, to see if they could beat the Guinness World Record set in 2007. With the required minimum 8-inch beard, the competitors stood side by side at the bar with beards attached. The completed beard chain measured 150 feet long,..

A German man who found a lost check worth more than $4 million...is disappointed with the company's "cheap" reward. The man, identified by Daily Mail as Anouar G., 38, of Frankfurt, said we was sent a box of gummies valued at just over $6 for returning the check worth $4,631,538.80 Euros ($4.05 million USD). The check was reportedly issued to Haribo from the supermarket group Rewe and was inexplicably misplaced. "There was such a large sum on it that I couldn't even pronounce it," Anouar told local media outlets via Daily Mail. Anouar contacted Haribo and was told by a...

Honeybees live for half as long as they did 50 years ago, a new study has found. Scientists at the University of Maryland kept bees in a controlled laboratory environment from the pupae up to the end of their life, and found they lived just 17.7 days on average. For comparison, honeybees had an average lifespan of 34.4 days in the 1970s. 'Standardised protocols for rearing honey bees in the lab weren't really formalised until the 2000s, so you would think that lifespans would be longer or unchanged, because we're getting better at this,' said PhD student and lead author...

We’re still waiting for the final results of the 2022 election. But it’s clear that Democrats decisively beat both expectations and the elections’s “fundamentals”—the incumbent party’s usual midterm losses, President Biden’s low approval rating, high inflation, voter negativity on the economy and the state of the country. Republicans look set to take back the House but only by a modest margin. And the Senate will remain in Democratic hands, albeit narrowly. The Democrats’ relatively good night is attributable, above all, to their secret weapon: Donald Trump. Mr. Trump’s ability to push Republican voters into picking bad, frequently incompetent candidates with...

The Miss Israel beauty contest will not be held this year, ending a run of annual competitions that started in 1950. As a result, Israel will not be sending a contestant to the international Miss Universe contest to be held January in the US. The move by organizers of the Israel contest, which was quietly announced last week, drew a range of responses from past winners, from lamenting the development to welcoming the event’s demise. In recent years the pageant has faced criticism for judging women on their physical appearance.

A new cold case investigation has been opened into the long unsolved murder of child beauty pageant star JonBenet Ramsey. Police in Colorado hope that new forensic techniques could finally solve the murder of the six-year-old girl found dead in the basement of her family home in Boulder almost three decades ago. Her body was found beaten and strangled on Boxing Day in 1996, hours after her parents, John and Patsy, reported her missing and a ransom note was found in the house. Her death has been ruled as a homicide, though nobody has ever been charged over her murder....

This old-timer has a libido bigger than his bank account. A former Wilhelmina model claims her on-again-off-again octogenarian beau persuaded her to ditch her career, rent-stabilized Chelsea apartment, and move into his sprawling Rye home — where he sometimes demanded sex a staggering 10 times a day, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court suit. Janet Bedin, 68, claims Vito Verni, 84, pulled an emotional bait-and-switch between the beginning of 2019 and end of 2021 “when they lived together as a couple” in the 5,000-square-foot Westchester manse, the suit says. Bedin is now suing Verni for $80 million, charging a laundry...

A photo of a hospital mattress has gone viral online because it appears to show a face, leading many to believe it's haunted by a supernatural being. A nurse shared the eerie image on Facebook this week, prompting widespread concern. Many questioned how it got there admitting it was "freaky". "This appeared at work after the cleaner washed the mattress," the woman wrote online, describing it as "creepy". "It kept reappearing every time she wiped over it".