Free Republic

A groundbreaking lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas accuses financial giants BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street of colluding to manipulate the U.S. coal market. The case, spearheaded by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and supported by 10 other state attorneys general, alleges that these firms have used their substantial ownership stakes in major coal producers to suppress competition and artificially raise energy prices. The states listed as plaintiffs are” Texas Alabama Arkansas Indiana Iowa Kansas Missouri Montana Nebraska West Virginia Wyoming According to the 108-page complaint, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively...

I picked up what I suspect are the last of the summer peaches at the farmer’s market on Friday.Local pears, as has been the case for the past decade or so, were in very short supply. I fear they have fallen out of favor with the consuming public over the years and that as the trees die off they are replaced with more marketable fruit such as peaches or apples. For the life of me I can’t imagine why, I personally would choose a perfectly ripe, juicy Bartlett pear over a peach any day of the week. The problem may...

The earth: Now it's all going pear-shaped American scientists say the earth has suddenly become fatter round the middle in the last four years. Like a pumpkin, the planet is a little bit wider around the equator than a perfect sphere would be. For 19 years its waistline shrank, but since 1998 it has been expanding, according to a study in the journal Science. Christopher Cox and Benjamin Chao noticed the bizarre phenomenon after studying space-based observations from the past 25 years. They found that a measurement of the Earth's width called J2, which excludes tidal effects, has generally been...