Free Republic

A California man who mocked COVID-19 vaccines has died after becoming infected with the virus. Stephen Harmon, 34, died on Wednesday at Corona Regional Medical Center, about an hour east of Los Angeles. Prior to his hospitalization, Harmon shared a series of jokes on social media about vaccines. “I got 99 problems but a vax ain’t one,” he wrote in June on Twitter.

Reporting from Washington— ­The Obama administration is proposing to make it easier for illegal immigrants who are family members of American citizens to apply for legal permanent residency. On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security will post for public comment an administrative change intended to reduce the time illegal immigrants would have to spend away from their families while applying for legal status, officials said. The current system requires the applicant to first leave the U.S. to seek a legal visa, but under the proposed change illegal immigrants could claim the time apart from a spouse, child or parent would...

BERKELEY — Two Berkeley City Council members want to rescind an official statement that the U.S. Marines and their recruiting station are "uninvited and unwelcome intruders" in the city after the action sparked a national uproar. But Betty Olds and Laurie Capitelli, who wrote the proposal, did not move to rescind three other related items the council passed last week: calling on residents to impede the work of any military recruiting station in the city; asking the city attorney to investigate whether the Marines violate city laws banning discrimination based on sexual orientation; andgiving the protest group Code Pink a...

OTTAWA–Fearing the effects of forest fires and tree-destroying insect infestations, the federal government has decided against using Canada's forests in the calculations for totalling up the country's greenhouse-gas emissions. Instead of forests being used as a credit to offset other emissions, the government is now afraid that including forests in the formula could drive up Canada's climate-change burden. Government scientists made the call after learning of the damage that could come to forests from 2008 to 2012 and realizing the forests could become another source of emissions, pushing Canada even further from its Kyoto targets. In addition to destroying trees,...

WHILE the international community readies itself for gradual global warming over the next century, a growing number of scientists are beginning to worry that climate change might come much sooner - and be much more catastrophic - than previously thought. They point out that, in the past, climate change has not been gradual. Europe's climate has switched from arctic to tropical in three to five years and, they warn, it can happen again. Fred Pearce, of the New Scientist, has spent the past two years speaking to climate experts who are studying the possibility of "type 2" climate change -...