Free Republic

The collapse took place around 9 a.m. at the site of the former Killen Generating Station along U.S. 52. Officials said the building was in the middle of a demolition when the awning of the plant collapsed. Adams County Sheriff Kim Rogers said, initially, five people were unaccounted for following the collapse. Three of the five people have since been located and taken to the hospital for treatment. Two were taken to the hospital early on, and a third was taken to an area hospital after being buried under the rubble for hours. The first two are expected to be...

Longtime Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly says cable news networks are going to “collapse” after President Donald Trump leaves office. In an interview with Sinclair Broadcasting’s “America This Week” on Wednesday, O’Reilly said “something’s going on” already at Fox News. “NBC News, CNN, and the other networks are going to collapse almost entirely,” O’Reilly said after Trump leaves office and a Joe Biden administration begins. “They don’t have any credibility,” he said, adding “everybody knew… they were trying to destroy Trump.” “Now you’re going to tell the truth,” he scoffed. “It’s over.” Trump himself has blamed O’Reilly’s former network, Fox...

A Chinese cryptocurrency trading platform recently collapsed, prompting speculation that the site was running a scam.On Oct. 15, the platform, Aishang, saw the cryptocurrency traded on its site named Tether plummet from 0.268U (USDT, equivalent to $0.28) to 0.05U within 3 minutes of opening.Aishang is one of three Chinese crypto exchanges that crashed around the same time, according to local media.An investor named Liu Qing (alias) told the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times that Aishang was a Ponzi scheme. He said that if this was a normal trading site, the low costs to enter the new market would cause...

The accident in the makeshift mine occurred on Friday about 3pm local time (13:00 GMT) following heavy rains in the town of Kamituga in South Kivu province. The mine was not located on the Kamituga gold concession owned by the Canadian miner Banro Corporation, the company's chief executive said. Thousands of informal miners operate in and around mines in DRC, which produces more than half of the world's cobalt, a key component in electric car batteries. Mining accidents are common, with dozens of deaths every year in mines where often ill-equipped diggers burrow deep underground in search for ore. Last...

Once other countries even covertly begin supporting the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, there will be no turning back. Modern Turkey arose nearly one hundred years ago against the backdrop of European efforts to divide the Anatolian Peninsula. This fact drives both Turkey’s collective paranoia and its xenophobia. Its nightmare is a Kurdish secession. While the PKK and its offshoot groups long ago abandoned this goal in favor of localized autonomy, Turkish president Recep Erdoğan’s penchant for instigating fights with neighbors and regional states may soon make Turkey’s fears a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Turkey’s problem with its Kurdish problem has existed almost...

They are already calling the current pandemic-induced economic crisis, “The Great Depression of 2020.” The paradigm is, of course, the Great Depression of 1929 that substantially changed the world’s model of development, signaling the onset of State intervention in the economy (the welfare state). Analysts are also calling it “The Great Jump Backwards,” because it will push the world back in time by canceling three decades of economic development. International agencies estimate the contraction in GNP worldwide at -5.2%. The Eurozone with be the hardest hit with -9.1%. “It is the worst economic recession since 1870, a devastating blow for...

With the trajectory of the U.S. economy uncertain, Americans saved a record portion of their monthly income in April. The savings rate for that month hit an all-time high of 33.5 percent, according to USA Today, citing Commerce Department data. In the months after, that rate fell, but the June rate of 19.5 percent remained nearly triple the normal rate. The average monthly rate of savings was 7.5 percent of income before the pandemic began. “We’ve never had this much savings,” Tom Porcelli, chief economist of RBC Capital Markets, told the newspaper. “It’s uncharted territory.” An analysis by Moody’s Analytics...

Despite the desperate attempts by the increasingly irrelevant media to call them "peaceful protests", they are riots and they're occurring in most of America's large cities. Either order will be restored or we will see the re-emergence of what we've seen throughout history when life is precarious. While history is out of fashion and no longer taught in school, the lessons of history are clear - the Gods of the Copybook Headings did not get their name by accident. So what happens when people live precariously, under continual threat of violence? They flee to safer places. This is an entrance...

A week ago, on Sunday the 2nd August 2020 at 1:43pm the State of Victoria was declared to be in a State of Disaster. This was of course due to Covid-19. Between the start of February and the 2nd August, 123 people have died with Covid-19 in their body in Victoria. 123! A State of Disaster basically means that the government can use all government resources, including financial to help to alleviate any disaster. Are we in a disaster? In 2018 there were 158,493 recorded deaths in Australia, that works out to 434 deaths a day. As of the 6th...

Briggs & Stratton Corp., billed as the world’s largest manufacturer of small gas engines, has filed for bankruptcy protection citing challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic, the company announced Monday. As part of the Chapter 11 filing, the Milwaukee-area company said Monday it has secured secured debtor-in-possession financing of $677.5 million from KPS Capital Partners LP, the private equity firm purchasing its assets, and its existing lenders to allow it to continue operating ahead of the closing of the deal. “Over the past several months, we have explored multiple options with our advisors to strengthen our financial position and flexibility,”...

As the weeks have worn on, however, the incessant drumbeat of commercials, public service announcements and local news hairdos declaring that "we are all in this together" and imploring everyone to "stay inside" have become insufferable. Often these directives are conjoined with salutes to the "heroes" in masks who are credited with saving our secluded backsides from a dreaded plague. (Yes, health professionals almost exclusively in the New York City area have done heroic work, but hospitals around the country have been laying off employees and suffering huge financial losses due to a shortage of patients.) Another flood of commercials...

If the U.S. economy were to collapse, it would happen quickly. No one would predict it. The surprise factor is, itself, one of the causes of a collapse. The signs of imminent failure are difficult for most people to see.

During an interview aired on Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” 2020 Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden stated President Trump has “no competence” on handling the coronavirus and that the market is falling because people don’t trust what the president says. Biden stated, “[T]his gets down to competence and capability. And the — unfortunately, the president has very — no competence in how to handle this crisis. Not that there’s any clear answer that you’re just going to make this all go away, but the idea that he shows up at the CDC and says that...

About 30 people remained trapped early on Sunday after a five-storey hotel being used for coronavirus quarantine collapsed in the southeast Chinese port city of Quanzhou, state media said. About four hours after the collapse, the Quanzhou municipality said 38 of the 70 or so people who had been in the Quanzhou Xinjia Hotel had been rescued. A video stream posted by the government-backed Beijing News site showed rescue workers in orange overalls clambering over rubble and twisted steelwork carrying people towards ambulances. The hotel collapsed at about 7:30 p.m. (1130 GMT) on Saturday evening. “I was at a gas...

The economic indicators all show the economy is booming. Unemployment is at record lows. The stock market is seeing record highs. Wages are up, and taxes are down. Stifling regulations are being lifted. Everything seems to be working just fine. There is much truth in this perception of a boom. Part of this can be attributed to less government interference and taxation. Unnecessary government regulation and spending always hurt the economy. When markets are freer, profits tend to come galloping back. And much has galloped back. However, beneath the surface, major problems threaten the boom. These problems have long plagued...

Some of the New Orleans city building inspectors who signed off at key points of the construction of the Hard Rock Hotel before it pancaked and collapsed on Oct. 12, killing three laborers, do not appear to have been properly certified for the work, records show. One inspector, Bryan Cowart, appears to be certified only for residential inspections. Inspector Julie Tweeter, whose whereabouts during inspections she claimed to have completed at the Hard Rock on several days last year are now under investigation, did not receive her commercial building inspector’s license until July 2018. By then, she’d signed off on...

The decade that just ended saw a period of uninterrupted economic growth. In the decade to come, we'll pay for squandering it. Since the so-called Great Recession officially ended in the third quarter of 2009, the United States has enjoyed 42 consecutive quarters of solid if unspectacular economic growth. That's the longest run of uninterrupted growth since government economists began tracking the business cycle in the 1850s, far outpacing the average economic expansion of 18 months. Employment has increased by 12 percent, the jobless rate reached record lows, and America's gross domestic product (GDP) has increased by more than 25...

A brutal business climate and societal breakdown have brought major changes to America. In response, many Americans, especially conservatives, are soul searching for something more compassionate for those left behind. Unfortunately, they are looking in the most unlikely places: business and government. They will likely be searching for a long time. The controversy over this shift in mentality erupted with the publication of a Wall Street Journal advertisement in which major firms pledge a commitment to “stakeholder” capitalism, which holds businesses should be run having all society, not just shareholders, in mind. Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) stirred the pot with...

At the end of 2009, the total federal debt was $12.3 trillion—a staggering amount of money. Now, it stands at an astonishing $23.1 trillion. That’s roughly $180,500 of debt for every U.S. household. It is important for Americans to understand how we got here, and what lawmakers can do to bring back fiscal sanity. Poor Handling of the Financial Crisis The federal government entered the 2010s with sky-high annual deficits. This had two primary causes. First, the Great Recession reduced incomes and profits, which meant a sharp decrease in tax revenue. A slow economic recovery kept tax revenue relatively low...

Some politicians running for federal office make it sound as if the biggest problem facing our country is that we don’t send enough of our paychecks to Washington, D.C. They propose increasing or creating new federal taxes on income, payrolls, business profits, carbon emissions, financial transactions, wealth, and more. Before they start trying to spend more and more of our money, they would do well to consider just how much they’re already spending. Looking back over the last decade, it’s clear they’ve already entered the “drunken sailor” stage. From 2010 through 2019, U.S. households sent an average of $228,000 to...