Free Republic

A pair of women attacked a 64-year-old man with pepper spray Thursday night near the Powell Street BART Station in San Francisco and stole a bag — which contained the victim’s laxatives, police said. The irregular incident occurred about 9 a.m. when the man got into an argument with the two women, one of whom is estimated to be in her 20s, the other in her 60s, on Sixth Street between Market and Mission streets, according to the San Francisco Police Department.

We spoke to the author of 'The Ambivalent Internet' about the rise of the right online. Professor Whitney Phillips, author of This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a book about trolling, has teamed up with Professor Ryan M Milner to pen another book about internet culture. The Ambivalent Internet is about how we express ourselves online, the ways in which we do it, why we do it and how it ends up the way it does. The book was written on the eve of Donald Trump's ascension to the world's highest office, and deals, in part, with the...

Video...Comic relief. Public service announcement: the border wall is even more problematic because animals and birds might be impacted. I wish I was kidding, but MSNBC ran a segment with biologist Jeff Corwin, where the latter said jaguars, the Mexican gray wolf, bats, and some birds might be impacted by the border wall’s construction. VIDEO “It would be an unprecedented environmental catastrophe,” said Corwin to host Craig Melvin. Melvin began the segments discussing Rep. Raul Graijalva (D-AZ) and the Center for Biological Diversity’s lawsuit against the federal government over the border enforcement project. In California, the state legislature is considering...

Such a shield could leave Mars in the relatively protected magnetotail of the magnetic field created by the object, allowing the Red Planet to slowly restore its atmosphere. About 90 percent of Mars's atmosphere was stripped away by solar particles in the lifetime of the planet, which was likely temperate and had surface water about 3.5 billion years ago. According to simulation models, such a shield could help Mars achieve half the atmospheric pressure of Earth in a matter of years. With protection from solar winds, frozen CO2 at Mars's polar ice caps would start to sublimate, or turn directly...

Harvard scientists triumphantly announced that they'd created metallic hydrogen last month, but now it's suddenly gone. Scientists hailed it as the “holy grail” of high pressure physics when they finally produced it in the lab: metallic hydrogen, a century after it was first theorized to exist. And now that sample, which had been held in a hyper refrigerated laboratory, has vanished into thin air, and scientists can’t figure out why. Reports indicate that the metallic hydrogen had been kept between a vice of two diamonds at huge pressures while being stored at 80 Kelvin, but something happened in the lab...

"It's not very nice getting a 'gut bomb' on your face." The devastating mass stranding event that saw more than 650 pilot whales beach themselves in New Zealand over the weekend is finally over, with 17 survivors making it back to a large pod of more than 200 individuals seen 6 km (3.7 miles) offshore. But things are just getting started for the clean-up crew, because hundreds of carcasses are now strewn across Farewell Spit beach, and the public has been banned due to fears of spontaneous whale explosions caused by gas build-up. "These things explode from the stomach, and...

Trump was also considering General Mills, Cap'n Crunch. Donald Trump praised Kellogg's service, saying he's "terrrrific." The Left is furious that Trump is considering chiefly military men, slandering them as "cereal killers." Gen. Foods was not considered for the position, since it was known he would not be willing to leave his Post.

This arsenal of firearms is among the dozens of weapons that have been taken off London’s streets during the Met’s latest gun amnesty. Since Monday 45 weapons have been surrendered across the capital as part of the Give Up Your Gun campaign, including shotguns, revolvers, rifles and handguns, Scotland Yard said. Detectives from the Met’s gang unit today urged anyone still in possession of an illegal firearm to hand it in before the amnesty ends on Sunday night.

ALEXANDRIA, La. (KALB) -- A man has been arrested, and booked into the same jail for the 77th time. According to police in Alexandria, Louisiana, officers responded to the report of a man stuck in the chimney of a business early Friday morning. Employees told officers that when they arrived at the business, they could hear a man yelling. They found he was stuck. While officers were in route, police say the man was able to free himself from the chimney. He then reportedly threw a brick at an employee before running from the store. Officers were soon able to...

YANGON, Myanmar — A Buddhist monk has been arrested in Myanmar after authorities found more than 4 million methamphetamine pills in his car and in his monastery, police said Tuesday. The monk was stopped Sunday as he drove in northern Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh. Authorities had been tipped off that the monk was carrying an illegal haul, said Officer Maung Maung Yin. Maung Maung Yin said an anti-drug task force found 400,000 pills in the monk's car. A subsequent search of his monastery turned up 4.2 million pills — worth upwards of $4 million in street value — along...

Donald Trump made it an early priority to dismantle the top domestic and economic achievements of his predecessor's administration, pushing for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) and eschewing global trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But his most ardent supporters might have a surprise coming: Many Americans who would bear the brunt of Trump-administration policies are the same people who chose the GOP candidate for president in November. "I think you're going to get a disproportionate impact on people who supported Donald Trump but maybe don't realize that his policies may end up hurting them instead...

While Gaga did indeed do the leap without a stunt double's help, this part of the show was performed in advance. After it aired, the cameras cut to Gaga somersaulting as she soared swiftly through the air to a podium to continue the show. For those inside the arena the show began with Gaga hanging from her guide wires, in the dark. Footage shot from fans shows a motionless Gaga suspended from the wires. Suddenly a spotlight shines on her, and she starts her descent. Intel which was behind the drones used in the pre-recorded feat blamed the need to...

Two men gave Detroit police a fright of their lives as they entered a local station while wearing guns to file a complaint. The men, one of who is known only as 'Brandon', filmed themselves walking into Dearborn Police Station in Michigan to complain. In the video, which was filmed on a snowy day, one of the men, who is wearing a ski mask and glasses, says: 'We're going to go in and file a complaint because we were illegally pulled over about an hour ago.

A juvenile thought to be involved in the robbery of a pizza delivery man in Penn Township will be charged as an adult, according to an affidavit. Sheldon Isaiah Cheese, 17, of York, is one of two people allegedly involved in the incident. He and Logan Matthew Alexander, 18, of Littlestown, allegedly robbed the man on Jan. 24 as he was delivering pizzas to them, according to the affidavit filed with District Judge James Miner. Alexander is a senior at Delone Catholic High School, which was confirmed by Delone Catholic Principal Maureen Thiec. A member of the basketball team, he...

I wanted to invite everyone to greet our newest signup, whyareyoudumbandhateful. Do you think his or her first post will be to make a donation on the Freepathon thread?

Are you ready to shred some safe spaces? If you’re familiar with classic memes, you’ll likely recognize the theme upon which this video is based. “All your base are belong to us” is a broken English (“Engrish”) phrase found in the opening cutscene of the 1992 European release of the Mega Drive port of the 1989 arcade video game Zero Wing which became a popular Internet meme. The quote is included in the European version of the game, which features poor English translations of the original Japanese version.

Like spicy food? If so, you might live longer, say researchers at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, who found that consumption of hot red chili peppers is associated with a 13 percent reduction in total mortality - primarily in deaths due to heart disease or stroke—in a large prospective study. Going back for centuries, peppers and spices have been thought to be beneficial in the treatment of diseases, but only one other study—conducted in China and published in 2015 - has previously examined chili pepper consumption and its association with mortality. This new study corroborates...

Describe the USS Obama. Describe its primary mission.

A Maryville man was arrested Friday after he reportedly attacked his girlfriend with a taco for having a profile on an online dating site. Steven Erwin Stokes, 47, Ridgeview Road, Maryville, was arrested by Blount County Sheriff’s Office deputies on charges of domestic assault, aggravated domestic assault, failure to appear to address a misdemeanor charge and contempt of court. He was being held in lieu of bonds totaling $7,000 pending hearings at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday and 9 a.m. Thursday in Blount County General Sessions Court. Deputies responded to the situation around 9 p.m. on Friday, after Stokes’ girlfriend, a 46-year-old...

Decided to have some fun. I created a Wi-Fi SSID as shown below: I configured my Wi-Fi router to use a "captive web portal" whenever anyone first connects to the SSID. The login page looks like this: Once the Wi-Fi user enters their name and email, they are then redirected to a Success page: