Free Republic

On a balmy night in Austin, against the backdrop of the glittering high-rises of the city’s booming downtown, Beto O’Rourke is laying out his audacious plan to change the face of Texas, and America. In front of him, packed into an open-air park, a largely young crowd of 40,000 is thrumming with scarcely contained glee. Even in the liberal bubble of Austin they have never experienced anything like this: a Democrat seriously in the running for a Senate seat, vying to topple Ted Cruz, the Tea Party fanatic whom even fellow Republicans call “Lucifer in the flesh”. “We are not...

Shell joins BP in corporate exodus from membership of the conservative, free-market lobbying group, which continues to deny the science of climate changeRoyal Dutch Shell have announced they will end their membership of the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) because of its continuing denial of the science of climate change. In a statement released on Friday, a Shell spokesman said: “Alec advocates for specific economic growth initiatives, but its stance on climate change is clearly inconsistent with our own.” Shell joins fellow oil major BP in a corporate exodus from the conservative, free-market lobby group. Shell’s decision comes...

At least 4.1% of all defendants sentenced to death in the US in the modern era are innocent, according to the first major study to attempt to calculate how often states get it wrong in their wielding of the ultimate punishment. A team of legal experts and statisticians from Michigan and Pennsylvania used the latest statistical techniques to produce a peer-reviewed estimate of the “dark figure” that lies behind the death penalty – how many of the more than 8,000 men and women who have been put on death row since the 1970s were falsely convicted. The team arrived at...