Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Gray DC) - The Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case on Monday that challenges Louisiana’s congressional map after it was redrawn to include a new majority-black district. The case began years ago, when Louisiana’s state legislature drew a congressional map following the 2020 census. It included one majority-Black district out of the state’s six. The map was challenged because roughly a third of the state’s population is Black. “After years and years of litigation, the legislature was finally compelled to do the right thing and pass a map that provided black voters with a fair opportunity to...

A liberal elected official in Michigan claims she has sterilized herself in order to avoid a pregnancy under what she believes will be Donald Trump's crackdown on abortion. Laurie Pohutsky, 36, has represented the 19th District in the Michigan House of Representatives since 2019. Michigan significantly changed its abortion laws in response to the 2022 repeal of Roe vs. Wade. In In November 2022, the state passed a citizen-led ballot initiative that enshrined the right to abortion in the state's constitution. However, speaking to hundreds of protestors at the state capitol in Grand Rapids, Pohutsky expressed no confidence that those...

It's dawn on Darwin Harbour and government ranger Kelly Ewin - whose job is to catch and remove crocodiles - is balancing precariously on a floating trap. Heavy rain clouds from the storm that has recently passed are overhead. The engine of the boat has been cut so now it's mostly silent – that is, apart from the intermittent splashing coming from inside the trap. "You get pretty much zero chances with these guys," says Ewin as he attempts to loop a noose around the jaw of the agitated reptile. We're in Australia's Northern Territory (NT), home to an estimated...

Two Portland men lost their lives while searching for Sasquatch in eastern Skamania County, Washington. The Skamania County Communications Center received a report on December 25, 2024, around 1 a.m., about two overdue individuals who had planned to return home on December 24, 2024. When the pair did not return, a family member reported them missing and endangered. A recently installed Flock camera helped locate the vehicle associated with the missing men, allowing the Skamania County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue Coordinator to find the vehicle off Oklahoma Road near Willard, Washington. Over three days, more than 60 volunteer search...

The Greek Atomist Epicurus (341-270 BC) is the father of contemporary scientific Darwinian materialism. The principal tenet of Atomism teaches that the world was not created by any deity, or with any design, but came about by a chance movement of physical atoms of various sizes and magnitude that cemented together and so formed the world. The world and everything in it were not created but instead the accidental emergent or evolved products of a great cosmic event (exploding Cosmic Egg/Big Bang) that spontaneously generated mystically animated physical matter pregnant with life from nothing. This way of thinking excludes everything...

Mazda is facing a class action lawsuit in the US, with the owner of one of its cars claiming it has a major defect… that’s actually just an extremely common safety feature. Filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California, Pennsylvanian Mazda CX-50 owner Joshua Meltzer is attempting to sue the carmaker for US$5 million (A$7.35 million) following an incident which resulted in his daughter jumping out of the moving vehicle. The feature in particular is the requirement for drivers to press the brake pedal when switching the car on, which is shown in the instrument...

A California doctor has tragically died “suddenly” after suffering a stroke at just 32 years old. Dr. Maddie Giegold’s tragic sudden death came just five days before completing her residency. According to reports, the young doctor was “fully vaccinated” for Covid and received an mRNA “booster” shot shortly before she died. “I’ve never really met anyone else like her, she’s incredibly goofy,” said friend Hannah Trautner. Trautner said Giegold would do anything to make people laugh and inevitably become her friend. Those closest to Maddie say she loved cats, trail running, and sunflowers, and was described as being very active....

A Gillette 18-year-old who had a bucket of gasoline in a car was burned early Wednesday morning. After gas had sloshed out of the bucket inside the car, a teen lit it on fire thinking it would burn off the spilled gas but not damage the car. ============================================================ An 18-year-old man was badly burned after he transported a bucket of old gasoline to a bonfire overnight Tuesday and his friend lit some gas that had spilled from the bucket, police in Gillette, Wyoming, report. Gillette Police Department officers responded to the intersection of North Burma and West 4th avenues at...

Over the last 30 years, 14 people, including three University of California, Santa Barbara, students, have fallen to their deaths from the same stretch of cliffs in Isla Vista, a neighborhood along the coast in Santa Barbara. Jacob Parker, a 23-year-old UCSB alumnus who graduated last spring, became the 14th victim to fall off the cliffs' edge while he was attending an afternoon party April 20 at one of the many houses that back up onto the bluffs. "He had so much potential. I was just looking forward to seeing what he would accomplish in life. This was just the...

Biological males may have a latent capacity to produce small amounts of milk THE MALE breast is an evolutionary enigma. Human males are born with nipples and milk ducts—traits that appear early in embryonic development, before sex differentiation. What is more mysterious, however, is why male mammals of all kinds have not evolved to use this equipment to feed their offspring. The plumbing is intact: human males are known to be able to produce a milky nipple discharge in rare circumstances. That phenomenon is now in the spotlight after one trust in England’s National Health Service (NHS) stirred controversy in...

KANAWHA COUNTY, W.Va. (WSAZ/Gray News) - Two brothers were killed in a head-on crash Saturday night in West Virginia, WSAZ reports. According to the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Office, two motorcycles collided in a head-on crash, and brothers Shawn Dakota Roseberry, 24, and Michael Lee Roseberry, 26, both died at the scene. Deputies said they believe that speed and wet roadways played a role in the crash, but noted the motorcycles were not street legal, had faulty equipment and neither driver was wearing a helmet. No other vehicles or people were involved in the crash.

The taking of selfies is now considered legitimately dangerous. A review by the University of New South Wales concluded that taking selfies could actually pose a "public health problem." Referencing data from multiple peer-reviewed studies in both the U.S. and Australia since 2011, the review was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in September of this year.

In a recent discussion on The Discovery Institute’s ID the Future podcast, geologist Casey Luskin explained that the original “98-99%” figure was derived from a single protein-to-protein comparison before the chimp genome was sequenced. Since then, we’ve gained a great deal more precision. According to Luskin, humans and chimps have about 35 million single base-pair genetic differences and five million insertion-deletion differences. Humans also have 689 unique genes not found in chimps. And while there are different ways of quantifying the differences, almost none of these ways yield the famous “98-99%” number. For example, in 2018, Queen Mary University of...

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — As uninviting as it sounds, Death Valley National Park beckons. Even as the already extreme temperatures are forecast to climb even higher, potentially topping records amid a major U.S. heat wave, tourists are arriving at this infamous desert landscape on the California-Nevada border. Daniel Jusehus snapped a photo earlier this week of a famed thermometer outside the aptly named Furnace Creek Visitor Center after challenging himself to a run in the sweltering heat. "I was really noticing, you know, I didn't feel so hot, but my body was working really hard to cool myself,"...

Esra Haynes chroming death: Ally Langdon holds back tears on A Current Affair The heartbroken parents of a 13-year-old girl who died after a chroming accident spoke on TV, bringing host Ally Langdon to tears. The heartbroken parents of a 13-year-old girl who died after inhaling dangerous chemicals from a deodorant can are on a mission to make their daughter’s life count. Esra Haynes, a Year 8 student at Lilydale High School in Melbourne’s outer east, went into cardiac arrest and sustained irreparable brain damage after taking part in increasingly popular trend called ‘chroming’ while at a friend’s sleepover on...

Artificial intelligence could gain the upper hand over humanity and pose "catastrophic" risks under the Darwinian rules of evolution, a new report warns. Evolution by natural selection could give rise to "selfish behavior" in AI as it strives to survive, author and AI researcher Dan Hendrycks argues in the new paper "Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans." "We argue that natural selection creates incentives for AI agents to act against human interests. Our argument relies on two observations," Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, said in the report. "Firstly, natural selection may be a dominant force in...

On Oct. 12, Melike Gün Kanavuzlar was on the fourth floor of a building in Ortaca, a city in southwestern Turkey about 115 miles from the scenic resort town of Bodrum, when she tried to recover the device. She lost her footing and plummeted four stories to the pavement below, Cumhiryet reported. The local newspaper said the young girl had been taking a selfie before she slipped.

The American Left, as a political force, relies on deception. At the macro level, the Left lies about pretty much everything. They do this because they are acutely aware that if they told the truth about their policies, very few people would support them. But there are also smaller fibs. Call them micro-deceptions, ones that betray select issues at the edge of the Left’s radar that are irritating them at the moment. I received one such micro-deception the other day from Amazon. After purchasing a book from Amazon a few days earlier, (I heartily recommend the Autobiography of Josiah Henson)...

Fearfully and wonderfully madeESSAY | Elegant molecular machines at the center of life belie Darwin’s theoryAt a recent conference, I watched a computer simulation of the most important machine in the world: ATP synthase. Without it, no life can exist. In the cells of every organism on Earth, from bluebird to blue whale, from amoeba to alfalfa to Aunt Millie, this molecular machine packages energy for cells to use, like AA batteries for so many game systems.No batteries, no game.I sat halfway back in the room on the center aisle, amid the hundred-odd scientists and casually dressed grad students watching...

The suspect who attempted to breach an FBI office in Cincinnati was killed by law enforcement during an hourslong standoff, Ohio police announced Thursday afternoon. The man was identified as Ricky Walter Shiffer, and he was also at the Capitol on Jan. 6, sources told CNN. The suspect was shot and killed by officers after he raised his weapon at law enforcement after unsuccessful negotiation tactics, police said, according to NewsNation's Evan Lambert.