Free Republic

The Boy scouts of America, the 108-year-old organization synonymous with traditional values in the US, is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, according to the Wall Street Journal.The report comes amid news of sinking membership and various controversies surrounding the traditional organization, including its decision to change its program name from Boy Scouts to 'gender natural' Scouts BSA allowing girls to enter the program.

ABC’s big, pricey Conners gamble appears to have paid off. TVLine has learned exclusively that the Alphabet net is eyeing a second season of the Roseanne spinoff, with preliminary talks underway between the network and the series’ primary on-camera players, including John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert and Lecy Goranson. Following a long summer that included Roseanne‘s abrupt cancellation, assorted Roseanne Barr explanations/apologies, cast reactions and industry speculation, The Conners debuted in October to 10.6 million total viewers and a 2.4 demo rating, down just a hair from where the Roseanne revival left off with its May finale (which did...

The concept of time travel has always captured the imagination of physicists and laypersons alike. But is it really possible? Of course it is. We're doing it right now, aren't we? We are all traveling into the future one second at a time. But that was not what you were thinking. Can we travel much further into the future? Absolutely. If we could travel close to the speed of light, or in the proximity of a black hole, time would slow down enabling us to travel arbitrarily far into the future. The really interesting question is whether we can travel...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responded Wednesday after CNN accused President Donald Trump of making up statistics about illegal immigration. Trump claimed during a meeting with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer this week that terrorists are illegally immigrating to the United States. “People are pouring into our country, including terrorists. We caught 10 terrorists over a short period of time,” Trump said. CNN anchor Jim Sciutto asserted multiple times that Trump was incorrect, writing, “DHS did not provide evidence of a single terrorist caught at the southern border over the very last short...

All your activity are belong to us Updated A feature introduced in the April 2018 Update of Windows 10 may have set off a privacy landmine within the bowels of Redmond as users have discovered that their data was still flowing into the intestines of the Windows giant, even with the thing apparently turned off.In what is likely to be more cock-up than conspiracy, it appears that Microsoft is continuing to collect data on recent user activities even when the user has explicitly said NO, DAMMIT!First noted in an increasingly shouty thread over on Reddit, the issue is related to...

You can give your cat the flu. You can also pass pneumonia to a chimpanzee or tuberculosis to a bird. This kind of human-to-animal disease transmission, known as reverse zoonosis, has been seen on every continent except one: Antarctica. Now, human-linked pathogens in bird poop reveal, for the first time, that even animals on this isolated, ice-bound landmass can pick up a bug from tourists or visiting scientists. This newly identified infection route could have devastating consequences for Antarctic bird colonies, including population collapse and even extinction. “[We’re] obsessed about the potential for novel diseases to jump from wildlife to...

Apollo 8 and Intelligent Design, Then and Now Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC December 13, 2018 Public violence, politically motivated and otherwise, is a common occurrence. Sports figures stage public protests against racism. Women rally against exploitation and abuse. Young people push for radical cultural and social changes. Belief in God is declining. Americans are deeply and bitterly divided. These summary headlines certainly describe 2018, but they would just as well apply to 1968. To be sure, 2018 also has its share of positive headlines. The economy is booming. Unemployment levels are at historic lows. Our country is no longer energy-starved....

Technology is now evolving at such a rapid pace that annual predictions of trends can seem out-of-date before they even go live as a published blog post or article. As technology evolves, it enables even faster change and progress, causing the acceleration of the rate of change, until eventually it will become exponential. Technology-based careers don’t change at that same speed, but they do evolve, and the savvy IT professional recognizes that his or her role will not stay the same. The IT worker of the 21st century will constantly be learning, out of necessity if not desire. What...

One of my very favorite Holmes actors. Nuttin' for Christmas - Hippos for Christmas. A funny Christmas piece for Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes. And if you'd like to think of it as a Wassail song, Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes in All About Berries by Julia Ecklar. Boys Night Out!

Trackways. Credit: Anthony Shillito. Our understanding of when the very first animals started living on land is helped by identifying trace fossils—the tracks and trails left by ancient animals—in sedimentary rocks that were deposited on the continents. Geoscientists Anthony P. Shillito and Neil S. Davies of the University of Cambridge studied the site of what has widely been accepted as the earliest set of non-marine trackways, in Ordovician (ca. 455 million-year-old) strata from the Lake District, England.What they discovered is that the trackways occur within volcanic ash that settled under water, and not within freshwater lake and sub-aerial sands...

The Israeli company Aleph Farms aims to make cuts of environmentally friendly meat that resemble the real thing using animal cells, also called "lab-grown" or "clean" meat. Aleph has now created a prototype steak, the first produced publicly in the world, the company said on Wednesday. While several companies have made prototypes of lab-grown meats, none are available in restaurants or grocery stores. Aleph got its start with help from an Israeli research institute and an incubator that is part of the food giant that owns Sabra — the most popular hummus in America. For the first time in its...

A South Dublin community is “appalled” and “in shock” after money was stolen from two church collectors at knife point in the grounds of a Tallaght church, with one of the men being slashed in the arm. Gardaí confirmed that they were investigating the theft of a sum of money and an assault in Balrothery, Tallaght yesterday morning. They said a man in his 70s had money stolen from him and received a slash wound to his arm. The man was taken to hospital with minor injuries and no arrests have yet been made. Speaking to TheJournal.ie, local councillor Mick...

The key issues cited by the group are costs and communication problems with the Pentagon Police Department. WASHINGTON — One of the nation’s most iconic displays of support for military veterans, those missing in action and prisoners of war is coming to an end. The annual Rolling Thunder ride — which has brought thousands of bikers to the D.C. area for decades — is putting the brakes on. They won’t be riding after their May 2019 run, group officials confirmed to WTOP. The key issues cited by the group are costs and communication problems with the Pentagon Police Department. “We...

An armored truck spilled cash all over Route 3 West near Route 17 in East Rutherford Thursday and had motorists out of their vehicles, picking up money off the road, according to police. The bills apparently dropped from a Brink’s armored truck about 8:30 a.m., police said. Video posted to social media shows cash flying and people picking the bills up off the highway. “One-hundred dollar bills flying everywhere, and people are making BANK,” wrote one person who posted video to Instagram. At least one car was on the shoulder with front end damage from a crash with airbags deployed....

I'm going to import and sell yellow vests as I see it as a booming market. Should my first order be 1,000,000 or 5,000,000 vests? Just askin'.

A Florida woman has been arrested for stuffing four Chihuahua puppies and their mother into a backpack and then swinging it wildly around an Irish pub. Broward Sheriff's Office deputies said Gardner stuffed the mother Chihuahua and the 4-week old puppies into the bag and then sealed it. Witnesses said she then swung the bag around and smashed it against tables and benches inside the bar. Deputies who rescued the puppies said they were 'shaken and tormented'. They are now being treated and cared for by the Broward County Animal Care and Adoption Center.

Police officers in San Francisco may no longer demand that suspects – whether handcuffed or not – sit on the ground or sidewalk at a crime scene, the city’s police chief writes in a department memo. The practice is viewed as “demeaning” to suspects, city police Chief William Scott has determined, according to the Bay Area’s FOX 2. The change is “aligned with 21st century policing, our department values and our commitment to providing safety with respect to everyone whom our officers encounter,” a police department spokesman told FOX 2. “In order to carry out duties respectfully and professionally, sitting...

Ever since researchers first got a good look at a Neanderthal skull in the 1860s, they were struck by its strange shape: stretched from front to back like a football rather than round like a basketball, as in living people. But why our heads and those of our ice age cousins looked different remained a mystery. Now, researchers have found an ingenious way to identify genes that help explain the contrast. By analyzing traces of Neanderthal DNA that linger in Europeans from their ancestors' trysts, researchers have identified two Neanderthal gene variants linked to slightly less globular head shape in...

Last January, Case Keenum threw 20 incompletions, threw two picks, and threw away what felt like a Super Bowl in the cold of the NFC championship game in Philadelphia. The Minnesota Vikings saw their quarterback get outdueled by Eagles backup Nick Foles, dashing the dream of hosting the Super Bowl. Afterward, the franchise focused on a single thing – get a quarterback, just about any quarterback, at just about any price. All the other pieces were there, they believed. So they went out and got Kirk Cousins, for $84 million over three years, convincing him to come to Minnesota because...

Here are some generally agreed-upon facts about religious trends in the United States. Institutional Christianity has weakened drastically since the 1960s. Lots of people who once would have been lukewarm Christmas-and-Easter churchgoers now identify as having “no religion” or being “spiritual but not religious.” The mainline-Protestant establishment is an establishment no more. Religious belief and practice now polarizes our politics in a way they didn’t a few generations back. What kind of general religious reality should be discerned from all these facts, though, is much more uncertain, and there are various plausible stories about what early-21st century Americans increasingly believe....