Free Republic

Texans bought land in Brazoria County looking for solitude. Then they heard about the monkeys. Last year, a $12 billion biomedical research firm quietly bought more than 500 acres of land in a sleepy corner of the county and shared a plan to house up to 43,200 monkeys on the property. Now, the neighbors want them out. “How much racket does 43,000 monkeys make?” asked Jason Robert, a shrimper who owns about 1,100 acres near the plot. “I’m sure they’re not quiet.” “I thought this would be a place to get away from everything,” said John Stern, a retired veterinarian...

As of 11 a.m. Mountain Time today, rescue helicopters were expected to be en route to help extract occupants of a de Havilland Twin Otter twin turboprop on a private charter flight, operated by Air Tindi of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. The aircraft went down for unknown reasons on a frozen lake near its intended destination some 300 kilometers (162 nautical miles) northeast of Yellowknife, around noon yesterday (Dec. 27). All 10 on board, eight passengers and two crew members, survived, some with minor to “moderate to serious” injuries, later said to be possible broken bones. Three rescue technicians parachuted...

The Osage Nation won a massive ruling in Tulsa federal court on Wednesday that requires Enel to dismantle a 150-megawatt wind project it built in Osage County despite the tribe’s repeated objections. The tribe’s fight against Rome-based Enel began in 2011 and is the longest-running legal battle over wind energy in American history. As reported by Curtis Killman in the Tulsa World on Thursday, the ruling grants the United States, the Osage Nation, and Osage Minerals Council permanent injunctive relief via “ejectment of the wind turbine farm for continuing trespass.” The decision by U.S. Court of International Trade Judge Jennifer...

It may be no coincidence that colleges are abandoning SATs at the same time three university presidents were flunking questions in public about genocide. After receiving Fs for insisting that the answer to any direct question is “It depends on the context,” University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill lost her job and Harvard’s board of governors retained Claudine Gay with a limp vote of confidence—“she is the right leader to help our community heal.” Uh-huh. This may be the moment to bring back vocabulary tests. Question: What six-syllable word describes the three university presidents who testified before Congress? Answer: Pusillanimity....

The most important question about Mayor Michelle Wu’s no-whites-allowed Christmas party at the Parkman House Wednesday night is obvious: What if the reverse had happened – what if a white mayor had held a whites-only party at a city-owned building, after specifically disinviting all the non-white members of the City Council? Related Articles Poll: What’s your opinion of Boston’s ‘electeds of color’ party? We all know the answer to that question. It would have been the end of the world, a national story for days if not weeks on end. On the night of the party, there would have been...

Whether you’re a morning person has long been tied to personality, but new research suggests DNA inherited from our extinct Neanderthal cousins ups the chance we’re early risers. Our circadian rhythms—the biological clocks inside our cells that time when we sleep and wake—are linked to countless genes. Now researchers say they have found that bits of genetic code passed down to some of us from Neanderthals relate to our sleeping habits in the present day. The study was published Thursday in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution. “We’ve found many Neanderthal variants that consistently associate with a propensity for being...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it received 31 pages of records in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit from the Department of Homeland Security that show the identity of the companion of Obama’s chef Tafari Campbell as a woman named “Ms. Taylor,” who reported that “[Campbell] fell in the water and struggled for a couple of seconds before giving up and sinking underwater.” The records also show that the Secret Service could not get the first two boats they tried to use to search for Campbell to function and had to use the groundskeeper’s boat. Also,...

If there’s one principle that Dementia Joe Biden cares about more than any other, it’s that all Americans should pay their “fair share” of taxes. As he sternly tweeted last January: “We’re making corporations and the super-wealthy start to pay their fair share in taxes.” Because, you see, these tax-cheating rich bastards aren’t paying a damn thing, as he so often points out, as in June 2022: “They don’t pay a penny so if we had a minimum tax of 15 percent, a minimum 15 it doesn’t hurt them at all. They make a lot of money still and we...

Children who grow up in politically liberal households are more likely to suffer mental health problems than their conservative peers, according to a new study. An Institute for Family Studies-Gallup report found that "political ideology is one of the strongest predictors" of which caregiving styles a parent adopts, and conservative parents are associated with the best mental health outcomes for their children. "Conservative and very conservative parents are the most likely to adopt the parenting practices associated with adolescent mental health," study author Jonathan Rothwell, who is also the principal economist at Gallup and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings...

A U.S. Air Force CV-22B Osprey tiltrotor crashed yesterday (U.S. time) off the southern coast of Japan. One body has been recovered, and the remaining seven crew members were still missing as of 4 p.m. EST Wednesday (Nov. 29), according to the Japanese coast guard. According to the USAF Special Operations Command statement, the Osprey was assigned to the 353rd Special Operations Wing at the Yokota Air Base. The tiltrotor departed along with a second Osprey from the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Yamaguchi and was bound for Kadena Air Base on the island of Okinawa. Six Ospreys...

A passenger suffering an apparent “mental health emergency” popped an overwing emergency exit on a Southwest plane in New Orleans and jumped to the ramp Sunday evening. Airport police were called to the gate after ground personnel detained the passenger. No one was hurt but the passenger was described as being “incoherent.” “When deputies made contact with the man, they found he was incoherent and not fully aware of his surroundings,” a news release from the police said. He was still in the hospital on Monday for evaluation. Southwest said everyone did everything right in the incident. “We commend our...

Dave Chappelle criticized Israel's bombing of Gaza at a performance in Boston in which the comedian accused the U.S. of aiding the slaughter of innocent civilians. In the show at TD Garden on Thursday, Chappelle first condemned the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas militants, but criticized what he said were war crimes in Gaza, according to people in attendance. The comments came up when Chappelle said he didn't think students should lose job offers for supporting Palestinians. An audience member's command for the comedian to shut up drew an emotional response from Chappelle, who criticized the Israeli government...

Hamas has always repelled most of the civilized world. But the world was either too scared or too woke to say just that. But now Hamas’s premodern violations of all human norms have relieved most nations of any pretense of having to support it—at least for now. “Necklacing” and “baby burning” were its most recent contributions to its standard terrorist repertoire of hostage-taking, raping, beheading, and executions. Most people will now hope Hamas gets what it deserves, while elites offer empty platitudes about “ending the cycle of violence” and “proportionality”. As for the “world community” of the UN, the Davos...

If wild reports are true that the inhuman Hamas will execute dozens of civilian hostages, and if it is further accurate that there are rumored Americans among them—and if Americans then are to be executed by Hamas—aside from a military response, the United States will have to change radically its policies in the Middle East. In the last 32 months they have been proven utterly disastrous. Hamas has gone full ISIS, and is now in addition reportedly beheading captured Israeli soldiers. < SNIP > That gambit was designed to fuel Biden in the upcoming debate and indeed warp the election...

The Biden administration is furiously trying to contextualize its past, unsupportable policies that have sown global chaos, especially in the Middle East. But the more it spins, the clearer its culpability. Does it really believe that the long-agreed-upon U.S. green-lighting of $6 billion in sanctions relief to Iran has had no role in Iran’s terrorist support of Hamas, whether psychological or material or both? Do they think we are that stupid? < SNIP > Americans should not listen to what Biden’s team now conveniently says, but instead to what it actually does in the upcoming weeks when it is under...

<p>Why did Hamas stage a long-planned, carefully executed and multifaceted attack on Israeli towns, soldiers, and civilians—one designed to instill terror by executing noncombatants, taking hostages, and desecrating the bodies of the dead?</p><p>And how were the killers able to enter Israeli proper in enough numbers to kill what could be hundreds and perhaps eventually wound what could be thousands?</p>

The Russian Air Force has dusted off a 60-year-old relic to meet a thoroughly modern threat. A Beriev BE-12 amphibious patrol aircraft has been spotted over the Black Sea and it’s apparently looking for Ukrainian boat drones. The uncrewed boats have had some success in carrying loads of explosives to damage Russian warships. The drones are apparently more than a match for the gangly Soviet-era flying boats, which lack the modern sensor systems needed to track the stealthy little floating bombs. “Except for some very lucky sightings, the handful of Be-12s the Black Sea Fleet has available should not be...

Let’s call the whole thing off. The GOP presidential race is over, can we all agree on that? Spoiler alert: Trump won. It wasn’t even close. Yeah, I know the old saying, it’s never over ‘til it’s over, but you know what? It’s over. Could anything have been clearer after the Wednesday night debate on the RINO Fox Business Channel that nobody watched among the also-rans, has-beens and never-weres? What did the headlines all say about the seven – seven! – candidates who showed up at the Reagan library in southern California? They “sparred.” They “duked it out.” That’s the...

“I’m calling to celebrate the demise of Maxwell,” said Rupert Murdoch down the phone to me on the morning Robert Maxwell’s private effects were being auctioned in a bankruptcy sale. I acknowledged that Maxwell had been a frightful scoundrel, but that he was an unforgettable character and I didn’t like to think of him floating around dead in the Bay of Biscay. “I do,” was the reply. Murdoch, as I was often reminded over many years, was a fierce competitor. Rupert Murdoch, who has retired after 69 years at the head of News Corporation, is indisputably the foremost and boldest...

Thank you, Rupert Murdoch, for saving this newspaper so many years ago. He kept Boston a two-newspaper town, back in those long-gone days when newspapers actually mattered. If you’re depressed about how everything has been going steadily downhill in Massachusetts for decades now, all I can tell you is that if the Boston Globe had been allowed to have a monopoly on public discourse since 1982, the situation would be even more dire. Any city with two newspapers, no matter how bad, is better served than any city with one newspaper, no matter how good. Rupert Murdoch “stepped aside” the...