Free Republic

Orders for manufactured goods dropped 0.2 percent in August, following a notable increase the previous month, as reported by the Commerce Department on Thursday. This decline marks the third decrease in orders within the last four months, signaling ongoing difficulties within the manufacturing sector. Economists had predicted that orders would remain unchanged in August, reflecting a cautious outlook amid a mixed economic environment. The data revealed that orders for durable goods were adjusted to show no change for the month, a significant shift from July’s remarkable gain of 9.8 percent. This revision was a downgrade from an earlier estimate suggesting...

Teacher Daphne Halkias has been barred from her own school despite winning a court order for her reinstatement after refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. The Queen’s educator, who has 30 years of teaching experience, was fired last year for refusing the jab on religious grounds. However, she was blocked from entering her school on Tuesday despite a judge’s ruling reinstating her, The New York Post reported. The single mother of four won her court battle when Queens Supreme Court Justice Chereé Buggs ruled in her favor last month. The court found the New York City Department of Education (DOE)d wrongfully denied...

A former Minnesota bar owner who now commutes two hours a day to sling suds in neighboring Wisconsin said Gov. Tim Walz’s restrictive pandemic-era lockdowns in the state “decimated” local businesses — and caused financial ruin for those who stood up for their livelihoods. “I think he’s an evil man who overstepped his role as the governor. He took small businesses and ripped them up. He destroyed us,” Lisa Zarza. ... She said when shelter-in-place and business closures first went into effect in March, 2020, “I did everything I was supposed to do. I wore my mask, I social distanced....

A Colorado university’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate violates the U.S. Constitution, a federal court has ruled. The Sept. 1, 2021, mandate “clearly violates the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause as interpreted by our precedents,” a majority of a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit said in the May 7 decision. While the mandate was later updated, the newer version also violates the Constitution, the judges said. The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in 2021 required COVID-19 vaccination of all students and employees. It initially offered religious exemptions to anyone who checked a box, but later said...

We just passed the fourth anniversary of “15 Days To Slow the Spread,” the start of the COVID lockdowns that did damage from which we still haven’t recovered. ... Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi and Bill de Blasio were telling us not to worry, to take cruises and go visit Chinatown ... They reversed course like a week later. ... Neither the lockdowns nor the masking requirements did any good, though they caused a lot of trauma, inconvenience and colossal economic destruction. ... Then there were the deaths caused by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s program of moving still-contagious COVID patients into old-folks’...

World-renowned infectious-disease epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff is no longer a professor at Harvard Medical School after refusing the COVID vaccine because he had infection-acquired immunity. Refusing the vaccine is a decision that lost him his appointment at a Harvard-affiliated hospital at the time several years ago — and this month led to his termination from the Ivy League school. “Harvard Medical School has affiliation agreements with several Boston hospitals which it neither owns nor operationally controls. Hospital-based faculty, such as Dr. Kulldorff, are employed by one of the affiliates, not by HMS, and require an active hospital appointment to...

Corporation cited for illegal religious discrimination.. A hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich., has agreed to pay a settlement to a job applicant who had been offered a position, but then was arbitrarily rejected because he declined to take a flu shot hospital officials demanded. ... The fight involved Trinity Health Grand Rapids, which previously was known as Mercy Health St. Mary's. The resolution includes a consent decree that allows paying of some $50,000 to the worker who was rejected. The case originally was filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and charged the hospital improperly denied a job applicant’s...

Whilst Hypocritically Insisting That the Public Be Vaccinated.. ... “From 13 November 2021 to 26 September 2022, a total of 478 applications for Significant Service Disruption exemption (SSD) were received. 103 applications were granted, covering approximately 11,005 workers ... 95 consultants in the Dunedin region alone benefitted from vaccine exemptions. Another source has pointed to a group of doctors working in Northland who arranged among themselves to remain unvaccinated. The total appears to run to hundreds and possibly more. It seems that those granted exemptions were restrained by gag orders. In other words, they could not tell anyone that they...

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that House Republicans were criticizing the border deal because they are “following orders” from former President Donald Trump. While discussing the Senate immigration bill, Jeffries said, “It should not be dead on arrival. See, you know, we need more common sense in Washington, D.C., less conflict and less chaos.”

One of the nation’ top children’s hospitals must pay $45,000 to settle a religious discrimination lawsuit filed by a maintenance worker who refused to get a flu shot for religious reasons. DeMaurius Jackson worked at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) in Georgia as a maintenance assistant. According to court documents, Jackson’s duties primarily consisted of groundskeeping in outdoor parking lots, which required minimal interaction with the public. Jackson said his work involved no close proximity to patients, visitors, or staff. According to Jackson’s complaint, he converted to Judaism in November of 2016. In 2017 and 2018, Jackson requested and received...

While Covid-19 has all but disappeared from the national discourse, lawsuits tied to vaccination mandates are hitting courts in North Carolina. Jenna Johlin-Thompson, a former account executive at television station WSFX in Wilmington, is suing the company over her refusal to get vaccinated. Johlin-Thompson, who filed her lawsuit in federal court Nov. 17, relocated to North Carolina from Ohio in 2021 to work at WSFX, which is owned by Charlotte-based American Spirit Media. Within months of her hire, she received an email regarding mandated Covid-19 vaccinations. While she was told to “trust the science,” Johlin-Thompson believed her “body is a...

A restaurant that refused to shut down during COVID-19 restrictions and didn't require documentation of vaccination had its charges dropped after finally getting its day in court. The crown dropped charges against Jesse Johnson, owner of Without Papers Pizza, after just 10 minutes of action in the courtroom, Media Bezirgan reported. The Calgary, Canada, business faced shutdowns and charges from the Alberta provincial government after it refused to close while also declining to participate in Canada's vaccine passport program, which required two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to eat indoors at restaurants. "These bastards, they literally tried to break me...

Because COVID-19 vaccines are no longer being distributed by the federal government, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped printing those little white vaccine cards that were once so ubiquitous during the COVID pandemic. The cards' discontinuation isn't expected to be a big change, as experts say it’s unlikely we’ll return to the era when COVID vaccine cards functioned like IDs to enter restaurants, see a show or board an international flight. So can we now finally clean out our wallets and say sayonara to those little white cards? Here's what experts told Yahoo Life earlier this summer....

everyone is running from the lockdowns they once supported, and that includes former presidents and governors, and probably mayors too. Apologies would be better so we can at least have an honest accounting rather than an attempt to rewrite the history that everyone knows. Jack Phillips of Epoch Times alerts readers in his article of August 31, 2023, of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds’ recent statement on the subject of lockdowns. The Iowa State Government’s website says the following: “Since news broke of COVID-19 restrictions being reinstated at some colleges and businesses across the U.S., concerned Iowans have been calling my...

As flames tore through a West Maui neighborhood, car after car of fleeing residents headed for the only paved road out of town in a desperate race for safety. And car after car was turned back toward the rapidly spreading wildfire by a barricade blocking access to Highway 30. One family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their four-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape. One man took a dirt road uphill, climbing above the fire and watching as Lahaina burned. He later picked his way through the flames,...

As more details emerge about what really happened in Maui, one thing is unmistakable: the government has completely surrendered its delegated charge as the guarantor of unalienable rights, and in its current form, it is wholly unsuited to have any sort of authoritative role. A report out yesterday at The Hill detailed that Maui residents fleeing the blaze were barricaded in by several road closures, established by local authorities; those who heeded the orders died, and those who didn’t, escaped the flames. From the article:Those who disobeyed the barricaded road closures during the Maui fires survived the disaster, while many...

Those who disobeyed the barricaded road closures during the Maui fires survived the disaster, while many of those who heeded orders to turn around perished in their cars and homes with no way out... At least 114 people were killed in the fires earlier this month, and the FBI is estimating that up to 1,100 more are unaccounted for. Officials are facing increased scrutiny for the emergency response, including why the emergency sirens were not set off and whether closing the roads prevented people from getting to safety. ... Officials closed Lahaina Bypass Road due to the fires, blocking the...

An Albertan court ruled on Tuesday that lockdown orders enacted in response to Covid were invalid. The ruling in Ingram v. Alberta will likely force prosecutors to withdraw charges against individuals, churches, and other organizations in several other standing cases. Justice Barbara Romaine ruled in favor of the applicants because the Chief Medical Officer of Health (CMOH) delegated her decisions to the cabinet, which she was not authorized to do under Canadian law. The CMOH herself testified at trial that she provided only advice and recommendations to politicians but did not make the decisions herself. Justice Romaine did conclude that...

Fast-food giant Wendy’s is set to automate its drive-through service by employing an AI chatbot powered by Google, replacing human employees who normally take orders. One Wendy’s executive gave the chatbot high ratings, saying, “It’s at least as good as our best customer service representative, and it’s probably on average better.” The Wall Street Journal reports that fast-food chain Wendy’s plans to automate its drive-through service by using an AI chatbot and Google’s natural-language processing technology.

The German government’s top health officials have admitted that no evidence exists to suggest that the use of face masks was effective during the pandemic. Pressure has been mounting on Germany’s Health Ministry to provide evidence that supported the nation’s mask mandates. Until now, health officials have refused to provide studies that show masking helps stop the spread of Covid or similar viruses. However, Bundestag Vice-President Wolfgang Kubicki has just used his parliamentary prerogatives to put a question to the Health Ministry and compel officials to answer. Kubicki demanded to know what study results the Ministry could cite to demonstrate...