Free Republic

A six-year-old boy who shot and wounded his teacher constantly swore at staff, tried to whip other students with his belt and once choked another teacher 'until she couldn't breathe', a lawyer has claimed. The incidents were described in a notice sent to the Newport News school district by Diane Toscano, a lawyer for teacher Abby Zwerner who was shot by the same boy earlier this year. The lawyer informed the district that Ms Zwerner intends to sue. Ms Zwerner had just finished reading a story to her class, who were about to head to an art lesson, when the...

American Lab RatsIn January 1790, President George Washington wrote to London author Catherine Macaulay, “The establishment of our new government seemed to be the last great experiment, for promoting human happiness, by creating a reasonable compact, in civil Society.”Since then, any number of writers have referred to the American experiment—often in terms of politics, as Washington did.In our country today, the word experiment has acquired other connotations.For almost 70 years, bureaucrats have made laboratories of our schools. To counter Soviet accomplishments in space, in the 1960s they introduced the New Math, which focused on concepts and principles, and ditched memorization....

The date: January 28, 1972. The occasion: a White House gala celebrating the 50th anniversary of Reader's Digest magazine. The entertainment that night: the wholesome Ray Conniff Singers. The president quipped, "And if the music is square, it's because I like it square!" But what happened next was anything but square. One of the women on stage held up a sign reading "Stop the Killing," and said, "President Nixon, stop bombing human beings, animals and vegetation. You go to church on Sundays and pray to Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ were here tonight, you would not dare drop another bomb....

Is America dying before our eyes? All societies eventually collapse – from the classical civilizations of Ancient Rome and Greece to the ever-alarming decline of modern America, could the past be hinting at what's in store? With skyrocketing inflation, political division, social unrest and a relentless effort to wipe away the fundamental principles of the nation, historians and scholars in Fox Nation's "American Requiem" series offer an elegy for what the country used to be and warn of what it has become.

In the old days of the USSR, Kremlinologists used to figure out who was in and who was out in the power struggles at the top by looking at the reviewing stand for the May Day military parades. Proximity to the leader was the criterion. With today’s Democrats, an equally shadowy gaggle of power-hungry operatives controlled by hidden hands, we must rely on signals coming from a few semi-official media organs, but preeminently the New York Times. That’s why a major article in the big circulation Sunday edition of the Times on Kamala Harris is so interesting. After an introduction...

A substitute teacher at the King Middle School in Portland was removed from the classroom last week and banned from teaching at the school after parents discovered the sub had shared inappropriate sexualized TikTok videos with students.“On Thursday I was made aware of concerns that students were accessing videos late Wednesday on TikTok,” King Middle School Principal Caitlin LeClair said in an email to parents Friday.“As a result of our investigation the employee will not return to King,” said LeClair.The teacher in question was a substitute teacher named Lydia Lamere.The teacher has also gone by Chris Lamere, Lydia Moon, Clodagh...

Black History Month is a time to honor triumphs of African Americans throughout history, but students and parents at Nyack Middle School raised the alarm after a racially insensitive meal was offered on the first day of the month.

Frivolity is killing America. That’s an overstatement, but it’s not too far from the truth. While the neglect of morals, absolute truth, and traditional sex roles is clear from even a cursory glance at society, the slow degradation of the mind often hides in the background. Frivolity is worth considering, if only because it’s so often forgotten.Prophecies of DoomAldous Huxley, philosopher and author of Brave New World, seemed to believe that frivolity would be the world’s doom. Contrary to George Orwell, writer of Animal Farm and 1984, Huxley “prophesied” (via implication) that the world would not necessarily be ruined by...

I'm just wondering what might have happened if it had a nuclear payload and it was set to go off after dropping to 75,000 feet or so?

Would you rather be a front-desk clerk or "Director of First Impressions"? A barber or a "Grooming Manager"? How you answer could mean a significant difference in annual earnings. That's because companies routinely inflate workers' titles to avoid paying them in full for overtime work, according to researchers from the University of Texas and Harvard Business School. It's no secret companies go to great lengths to keep their labor costs down. What the new working paper reveals is that firms save a total of $4 billion in overtime payments a year simply by getting creative with titles. For employees, however,...

OpenAI, the maker of Artificial Intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, announced on Tuesday that it has released a new software tool to help detect whether someone is trying to pass off AI-generated text as something that was written by a person.The tool, known as a classifier, comes two months after the release of ChatGPT, a chatbot that generates human-like responses based on the input it is given. Schools were quick to limit ChatGPT’s use over concerns that it could fuel academic dishonesty and hinder learning, as students have been using the chatbot to create content that they are passing off as their...

Geography is the study of places and the relationships between people and their environments. Geographers explore both the physical properties of Earth’s surface and the human societies spread across it

Once in a while, we just have to stand back in awe of our government: The Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture is proud to be distributing the greatest number of free meals and food stamps ever - to 46 million people. Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Dept. of Interior, asks us to "Please Do Not Feed the Animals." Their stated reason for the policy is that "the animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.” Thus, this ends today's lesson. Thank you.

Bubbles Red Arrow Five centuries ago, Leonardo da Vinci observed air bubbles deviating from a straight path in a zigzag or spiral motion. However, the cause of this periodic motion remained unknown until now. Researchers from the universities of Seville and Bristol have solved the mystery surrounding the unsteady path of an air bubble rising in water. Professors Miguel Ángel Herrada of the University of Seville and Jens G. Eggers of the University of Bristol have uncovered a mechanism that explains the erratic movement of bubbles rising in water. The findings, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National...

A Native American teenager who died while attending a Utah boarding school for at-risk youth had been sick in the weeks beforehand, but staff members had been trained to assume students would lie about being ill and did not try to bring her to the hospital until the day she died, former staff members said in interviews. Taylor Goodridge, 17, collapsed at Diamond Ranch Academy in Hurricane, Utah, on Dec. 20. While an official cause of death has not yet been determined, her family said in a lawsuit that they believe she died of sepsis, a life-threatening condition that arises...

I must admit that I have grown fond of this new adjective, woke. It saves me the time of pointing out how delusional, disingenuous, intolerant, illiterate, and religiously fanatical the woke minions tend to be. Ultimately, to be woke means both "deceived" and "deceiving," and for these reasons, it slides nicely into a linguistically fun Scottish phrase, jiggery-pokery, used to describe dishonest behavior. Taken together, jiggery-pokery wokery is amusing enough to belittle the woke legions' cult-like comportment and cut it down to size for its mindless silliness. Yet it is not silly, is it? As amusing and bemusing as its...

Various studies have found an association between severe vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19-related outcomes. Vitamin D plays a crucial role in immune function and inflammation. Recent data have suggested a protective role of vitamin D in COVID-19-related health outcomes. 4. Conclusions The current evidence supports the benefits of vitamin D interventions in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 due to the protective effect provided by vitamin D against ICU admission and mortality. A meta-analysis per se does not allow us to state whether the results are truly positive or false-positive. In addition, the inclusion of studies with large effect sizes and significant...

CLEVELAND — It is no secret that Cleveland rocks. Just ask anyone who lives here. But our hometown is in the national spotlight earning top marks when it comes to the real estate market and people looking to buy a home. Real estate website "Zillow" just named the CLE one of the hottest housing markets in the United States. Cleveland ranked number 2 in the top 10. Charlotte nabbed the number 1 spot. Pittsburgh took third place (Check out the full list here: https://www.zillow.com/research/2023-hottest-market-31982/). According to Zillow, the factors behind the rankings include expected home value growth, projected change in...

Elon Musk only scheduled meetings with conservative leaders during his first visit to the U.S. Capitol as the CEO of Twitter. On January 26th, Musk met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Ky.) and House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). In addition, Musk met with Representative Steve Scalise (R-La.), Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), and Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.).

Scientists are scrambling to explain why the continent of Antarctica has shown Net Zero warming for the last seven decades and almost certainly much longer. The lack of warming over a significant portion of the Earth undermines the unproven hypothesis that the carbon dioxide humans add to the atmosphere is the main determinant of global climate.Under ‘settled’ science requirements, the significant debate over the inconvenient Antarctica data is of necessity being conducted well away from prying eyes in the mainstream media. Promoting the Net Zero political agenda, the Guardian recently topped up readers’ alarm levels with the notion that “unimaginable...