Free Republic

On Thursday, the San Geronimo B substation in the center of the country, which supplies electricity to four out of five Venezuelans from the massive Guri hydropower plant, went down. No date has been set to restart the plant and most workers were told to stay home on Monday ... Other experts, including Mr. Aguilar, said the magnitude of the blackout indicated the problem was caused by a major failure inside Guri’s turbines. A Corpoelec supervisor involved in dispatching Guri’s power said he was told by the plant’s managers on Thursday that the plant’s equipment was damaged. ... Mr. Aguilar...

This particular corridor carries three 765 kV (kilovolts) power lines, which are the largest and most important lines of the country. One of these lines, apparently the one between San Geronimo B and Malena, went out and overloaded the other two, so all three died. When all of a sudden the lines went off and power wasn’t getting through, not only all those TVs, blenders and lights went off: the water wheels started to spin out of control (in the industry we call this scenario a “load rejection”). Protections systems kicked in and the turbines shut themselves off, hopefully with...

Venezuela ground to a halt Friday as a national power blackout entered its second day, stalling public transportation, decimating already scarce food supplies, crippling the vital oil industry and threatening the lives of thousands of chronic patients.

President Trump announced Saturday he intends to sign an executive order mandating colleges and universities take steps to guarantee free speech to attain federal research grants. “We reject oppressive speech codes, censorship, political correctness and every other attempt by the hard left to stop people from challenging ridiculous and dangerous ideas. These ideas are dangerous,” Trump said. “Instead we believe in free speech, including online and including on campus.”

The Verizon division formerly known as Oath is laying off 7 percent of its workforce, which amounts to roughly 800 employees. Oath was created after Verizon acquired AOL, followed by Yahoo, bringing them together two years ago as a combined digital media entity with a new name. However, it seems that the organization hasn’t performed as well as Verizon executives had hoped, with layoffs, the departure of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Verizon’s recent $4.6 billion writedown on the media business

President Trump Delivers Remarks on the Humanitarian Crisis on Our Southern Border and the Shutdown

Last May, T-Mobile promised to stop selling its subscribers’ location data after reports surfaced that it was being funneled to law enforcement officers who’d otherwise need a warrant to get it. But that hasn’t happened so far. ... AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint have reportedly all agreed to do this. But at this point, who can believe them? ... Now, almost every major teleco is being forced to reckon with their own negligence by severing all ties to these so-called “location aggregators,” which have paid god knows what for access to our whereabouts.

Shares of the ailing department store chain JCP, +6.10% crashed on Thursday, dipping as low as 92 cents before closing down 7.5%, at 97 cents — the first time they’ve ever closed below a dollar since the company went public in the late 1970s. [Shares remained below $1 Friday morning.]

actual LOOOOOOOOOONG title: "Climate change will make us more likely to wet the bed and may trigger a plague of ticks, snakes and VOLES as 'devastating' droughts and flooding send nature haywire by 2100"

Cleveland, OH Mon, November 05, 2018 03:00 pm (EST) Cape Girardeau, MO w/Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, & Lee Greenwood Mon, November 05, 2018 09:00 pm (CST)

Sen. Lindsey Graham: "I know I'm a single white male from South Carolina, and I'm told I should shut up, but I will not shut up, if that's okay."

In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan website, one of the most extreme message boards on the internet, banded together and plucked out of obscurity an anonymous and cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website's message board. Over the next several months, they would create videos, a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of “Q,” the pseudonym of a person claiming to be a high-ranking military officer. The theory they espoused would become Qanon

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, upheld President Donald Trump's restriction on travel to the United States from a handful of Muslim countries on Tuesday, giving the White House its first high court victory on the merits of a presidential initiative.

Lopez said he couldn’t really find any policies he didn’t like [about Trump] — “I think he’s doing a great job,” Lopez said about Trump — but said he would like to see a different approach to NAFTA and dealing with Canada and Mexico.

The House sent “right to try” legislation on experimental drugs to President Trump’s desk Tuesday — a measure Trump, Vice President Pence and groups backed by mega-donors Charles and David Koch have repeatedly urged Congress to pass. The House passed the bill largely along party lines by a 250-169 [actually 267-149] vote.

Wells Fargo will pay two federal regulators a total of $1 billion to settle an array of investigations into its mortgage and auto-lending practices. Customers were forced to pay for extending the length of so-called interest rate locks on mortgage applications even when the bank was responsible for delays in the application process. Thousands of customers who bought cars with loans from Wells Fargo were forced to buy unnecessary insurance policies from the bank with premiums that topped a $1,000 a year. The bank said the policies could have contributed to about 27,000 customers having their cars repossessed after defaulting...

Speaker Paul D. Ryan announced Wednesday that he will not seek re-election in November, ending a brief stint atop the House and signaling the peril that the Republican majority faces in the midterm elections.

It slashed IBM’s U.S. workforce by as much as three-quarters from its 1980s peak, replacing a substantial share with younger, less-experienced and lower-paid workers and sending many positions overseas. ProPublica estimates that in the past five years alone, IBM has eliminated more than 20,000 American employees ages 40 and over, about 60 percent of its estimated total U.S. job cuts during those years. In making these cuts, IBM has flouted or outflanked U.S. laws and regulations intended to protect later-career workers from age discrimination, according to a ProPublica review of internal company documents, legal filings and public records, as well...

Obama nominated Michael Horowitz in July of 2011 to fill a vacancy left open by the resignation of Glenn Fine in February. Mr. Horowitz was confirmed in March the following year, and sworn in on April 16th, 2012. It was a nomination Obama would come to regret. Horowitz inherited a position that was effectively neutered in 2011 by Eric Holder's interpretation of § 6 of The Inspector General Act of 1978. (Authority of Inspector General) Holder and his legal team determined that the IG had to request information. This allowed Holder (and other agency heads) to bog down IG requests...

President Trump's tweet today indicates that he may release the Democratic memo, but only once the authors of the document make the suggested changes. Trump alleges that the Democrats "would have blamed the White House for lack of transparency" had he decided to release a redacted memo.