Free Republic

A reclusive tribe in the Amazon finally got hooked up to the internet, thanks to Elon Musk — only to be torn apart by social media and pornography addiction, elders complain. Brazil’s 2,000-member Marubo tribe has been left bitterly divided by the arrival of the Tesla founder’s Starlink service nine months ago, which connected the remote rainforest community along the Ituí River to the web for the first time. “When it arrived, everyone was happy,” Tsainama Marubo, 73, told The New York Times. “But now, things have gotten worse. Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet, they’re learning...

Whether it is the fountain of youth or the elixir of life, men have travelled the world looking for the key to increasing their longevity. They should be looking a bit closer to home, according to one leading researcher – although after they do, they might end up taking the years God intended for them. When it comes to increasing the lifespan of any male mammal, “there is one way you can intervene”: castration. Cat Bohannon, the celebrated author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, said men went through life “smuggling two little...

A court in Switzerland sentenced a writer and commentator to 60 days in jail for calling a journalist a “fat lesbian,” and the decision is being lauded by LGBTQ+ groups. On Monday, French-Swiss polemicist Alain Bonnet, who goes by Alain Soral, was sentenced by the Lausanne court for the crimes of defamation, discrimination and incitement to hatred after he criticized Catherine Macherel, a journalist for Swiss newspapers Tribune de Geneve and 24 Heures, in a Facebook video two years ago. “This court decision is an important moment for justice and rights of LGBTQI people in Switzerland,” said Murial Waeger, co-director...

An unusual sight drifted into South Korean skies on Wednesday: Large white balloons carrying plastic bags of North Korean trash. Some contained something even more vile. The air deliveries from North Korea were detected the prior evening, Seoul’s military said, triggering emergency warnings around 11:30 p.m. to border-town residents to avoid going outdoors because of “suspicious objects” floating in the sky. All told, around 260 balloons were found scattered across a country roughly the geographic size of Indiana. Some journeyed more than 180 miles. One landed gently on a street—the pair of balloons and a clear plastic bag left intact....

Mitt Romney may have infamously tied a dog in a kennel to the roof of his car for a cross-country trip but at least he didn’t shoot it, the Utah Republican senator said, as outrage over the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, telling her story of killing a 14-month-old hunting dog continued to ripple through US politics. “I didn’t eat my dog. I didn’t shoot my dog. I loved my dog, and my dog loved me,” Romney said, on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, as reported by HuffPost. Noem’s story of killing Cricket the dog – and an unnamed goat –...

President Biden made a surprise nighttime visit to the Delaware home of Hallie Biden on Sunday — just before she’s due to serve as one of the most important witnesses at first son Hunter Biden’s federal trial for alleged gun crimes. Biden stopped by Hallie’s home around 8 p.m. for a brief private talk eight days before the 54-year-old first son’s trial is scheduled to stand trial beginning June 3. Hallie dated Hunter at the time of his alleged gun crimes and is one of a dozen expected witnesses. Prosecutors allege Hunter lied about his drug use on gun purchase...

As he campaigned for president of Argentina last year, Javier Milei brandished a chainsaw as a symbol of the ferocity with which he intended to slash the country's massive public sector. Again and again he told voters that Argentina's economy had been wrecked by corrupt and irresponsible left-wing governments and warned that there was no easy fix to the chaos caused by decades of unaffordable state spending financed by endlessly borrowing and printing money. A trained economist, Milei outlined what he called his "Chainsaw Plan" — a drastic reduction in the cost and scope of the government and a frontal...

There’ll be no lovemaking in the City of Love. “Anti-sex” beds have arrived in Paris ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games, with their materials and small size allegedly aimed at deterring athletes from getting kinky during the competition. The beds’ twin size means there’s no room for the competitors to sidle up together. The beds are manufactured by Airweave, which also made the products for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan. According to Inside the Games, sustainability is cited as the primary reason why Olympic officials opted for the beds this year. The mattresses and cardboard frames are 100%...

The owner of the now-defunct Diaper Spa in Atkinson went before state regulators again on Friday, describing client services like “The Christmas Special” — featuring cookies, eggnog and a reading of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” — during a nearly three-hour disciplinary hearing in Concord. Colleen Ann Murphy of Atkinson testified before the New Hampshire Board of Psychologists at the New Hampshire Office of Professional Licensure and Certification in Concord. The disciplinary hearing was her third in two months. She testified before the New Hampshire Board of Medicine and Board of Mental Practices last month. According to its website, the...

The ceremonial first pitch is an honor usually bestowed upon a certain class of celebrity. But when the Arizona Diamondbacks were set to start their game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Tuesday, after a lengthy delay, they didn’t trot out a famous musician or a beloved retired player to lob the ball in the direction of home plate. Instead, the man standing on the mound was dressed in the full ballooning arms and flapping headgear of a beekeeping suit. That’s because Matt Hilton, a Blue Sky Pest Control manager in Phoenix, was the only reason baseball could be played...

The anti-Israel demonstrations at Columbia University, among other colleges and universities, may be, for many involved, simply about venting anger or rage. But at Columbia, they do make a specific demand: that the university divest its endowment from firms involved in the Israeli economy. A December 1 document signed by 89 student groups—ranging from the Young Democratic Socialists of America to the Sexual and Reproductive Health Action Group at the Mailman School of Public Health—made divestment the explicit focus: Columbia’s current investment portfolio enables and lends legitimacy to Israel’s violations of international law. Columbia is both morally obligated and compelled...

The U.S. State Department is warning travelers about strict new laws in Turks and Caicos Islands that carry a mandatory minimum sentence of 12 years for bringing guns or ammunition to the island. An Oklahoma woman was reunited Tuesday with her young children after being detained for almost two weeks in Turks and Caicos Islands for allegedly violating their strict guns and ammunition law. Her husband is being held in the British Overseas Territory near the Bahamas. Ryan and Valerie Watson, who live in Oklahoma, left for Turks and Caicos Islands on April 7 to celebrate the 40th birthdays of...

Outraged Papua New Guinea academics have slammed President Joe Biden for his 'unacceptable' suggestion that his uncle was eaten by cannibals in the country after his plane was shot down during World War II. Biden implied on two occasions Wednesday that his maternal uncle 2nd Lieutenant Ambrose J. Finnegan had met a grisly end at the hands of cannibals after his plane was shot down by the enemy over New Guinea in 1944. But the White House and official defense records confirmed that Finnegan died when the military plane he was in experienced engine failure and crashed into the Pacific...

Uri Berliner, the veteran NPR editor who accused the outlet of liberal bias earlier this month, announced his resignation on Wednesday. NPR suspended Berliner after he criticized the public radio network in an op-ed and interview with The Free Press. “I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” he wrote in his resignation, which he posted to X, formerly Twitter. “I don’t support calls to defund NPR,” Berliner wrote. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a...

NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had "lost America's trust" by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset. Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported. Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner's essay for the online news site The Free Press. It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including...

My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. “You are invited to join the Northeastern community for a special celebration honoring Michael S. Dukakis.” But someone eventually did send it along to me, and tomorrow’s “celebration” will of course be the social event of the season – NOT! M. Stanley Dukakis is 90 years old now, 33 years after his retirement from politics due to ill health – the voters got sick of him. But how can we miss the Duke when he won’t go away? The featured session, as it’s described, is entitled “Succession: Governors’ Reflections on the...

Forget black-tie dinners or summits at picturesque locales. The irascible leaders of some of Latin America’s biggest countries are instead taking a decidedly disdainful approach to diplomatic relations. In a region far from global conflicts, presidents here are instead embroiled in the kind of verbal spats commonly found on schoolyards—a war of words playing out on television and via posts on X. “Ignoramus,” Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, said last week of his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “Fascist,” López Obrador shot back. And Venezuela’s government—never apprehensive about issuing put-downs—had caustic words for those criticizing strongman Nicolás Maduro, who last...

This Easter Sunday is the 33rd anniversary of what the late Sen. Ted Kennedy would soon be describing as his family’s “traditional Easter weekend” in Palm Beach. And indeed it was traditional, in the Kennedy meaning of the phrase, which is to say rape accusations, cruelty and epic drunkenness, not to mention entitlement and depravity of the sort that characterized the entire squalid life of Sen. Ted Kennedy. But before recounting Ted Kennedy’s lost Easter weekend, consider that his fondest dream, our worst nightmare, is finally on the verge of being realized. I refer, of course, to the fundamental transformation...

A 62-year-old man suffering from end-stage kidney disease received a genetically modified pig kidney in an unprecedented transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, a step forward in the effort to help people waiting for organs. The pig kidney was genetically edited by eGenesis, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company, which removed pig genes that can harm people, including the gene that produces a sugar molecule on the surface of pig cells that can trigger the human system to attack pig organs. The company added human genes to try to improve the odds that the patient won’t reject the transplant. The patient,...

OCALA, Fla. (WCJB) - A man was arrested for stealing more than $800,000 from a business owned by John Travolta in Jumbolair Aviation Estates, and Marion County Sheriff’s deputies are putting out a call for his co-pilot. Marion County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Jean Lacruz-Romero, 28, of St. Cloud, on charges of money laundering more than $100,000, organized fraud of property of more than $50,000, and grand theft of more than $100,000 on Friday. They also have an arrest warrant for Jorden Coursey, who is wanted for grand theft. MCSO deputies say on Dec. 29, they made contact with an employee...