Free Republic

We have said that Adam West is the best Batman ever. A big reason for that is the gallery of rogues that popped up on the television series from 1966–68. Celebrities lined up for the chance to play nefarious baddies on William Dozier's camp classic. In fact, Frank Sinatra and Mickey Rooney almost played the Joker and Penguin, respectively. While that casting never came to fruition, the actors who eventually filled the roles came to define these comic book villains in the flesh

Major General Sir Nils Olav III, Baron of the Bouvet Islands, is now the most highly decorated penguin in the world - probably even the universe. A penguin has been promoted to the third highest rank in the Norwegian Armed Forces. Sir Nils Olav III, a resident of Penguin's Rock in Edinburgh Zoo, was given the honorary title of Major General in the King's Guard of Norway on Monday, as their official mascot. Some 160 uniformed soldiers visited the Scottish zoo to bestow the unique honour upon the king penguin, involving much military pomp and circumstance. The decorated bird, already...

In recent weeks, Democrats have ramped up criticism of conservative Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, alleging corruption and using that as a pretext for congressional oversight of the court. However, these accusations are baseless and lack legal or ethical standing. Justice Thomas was accused of not reporting free travel expenses received from a friend that he was not even required to report and a minor technical error in income reporting. Justice Gorsuch was accused of selling land to an executive of a law firm that had business before the Supreme Court, but he actually sold the...

Emperor penguins need sea ice to breed and are located in areas that are very difficult to study because they are remote and often inaccessible and can experience temperatures as low as −76°F (−60°C). Previous discoveries of emperor penguin colonies show gaps between them, leading scientists to suspect that groups like to keep at least 60 miles (100km) between themselves. They spotted 11 new emperor penguin colonies, three of which were previously identified but never confirmed. At the time it was estimated the continent had between 265,500 and 278,500 breeding pairs.

A same-sex penguin couple has become foster parents to a newborn hatchling in a first for an upstate New York zoo. Humboldt penguins Elmer and Lima first got together this past mating season, and built a nest together in the fall, which they have both defended from incoming predators. Their devotion to each other led officials at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo to test how the two would be as parents, using a dummy egg, before letting them take care of a fertilized egg of their own. Before giving the couple an egg of their own, zoo officials tested Elmer and...

A little African penguin named Rosie is making a big impact on children with special needs. Veterinarians at Arizona's Odysea Aquarium first noticed Rosie's skeletal abnormalities when she was hatched in 2019. "We knew very early in Rosie's development that she was a little bit different," Jessica Peranteau, director of animal control and education at Odysea Aquarium, told KNXV. "Penguins are able to sit up on their own when they get ready to start to walk, but Rosie was not showing us she could do that on her own. So we decided as a team we needed to give her...

A swarm of bees killed more than 60 penguins on a beach near Cape Town, South Africa, officials said Saturday. South Africa National Parks said in a Facebook post that 63 African penguins were found dead at Boulders Beach, noting the deaths “occurred suddenly some time between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning.” The penguins were transported to the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) to conduct post mortems, which found that all of the penguins had “multiple bee stings.” Officials also found numerous dead bees at the site of the incident. Officials will continue to monitor...

A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss. Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived...

This is the type of story that would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad. Actually, you know what? It’s hilarious anyway. A new report shows that employees of Penguin Random House Canada aren’t too happy about the publisher’s release of a new book by clinical psychologist and author Dr. Jordan Peterson. On Monday, he announced that he was releasing a new book titled “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life,’ which will come out in March of next year. On Tuesday, Vice reported that the release of Peterson’s book has caused controversy at the publishing company. Workers became emotionally...

There is no more sacred room for military officers than 2E924 of the Pentagon, a windowless and secure vault where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet regularly to wrestle with classified matters. Its more common name is “the Tank.” The Tank resembles a small corporate boardroom, with a gleaming golden oak table, leather swivel armchairs and other mid-century stylings. Inside its walls, flag officers observe a reverence and decorum for the wrenching decisions that have been made there. Hanging prominently on one of the walls is The Peacemakers, a painting that depicts an 1865 Civil War strategy session with President...

Pearson PLC said Wednesday that Chief Executive John Fallon plans to retire next year, and that it has agreed to sell its remaining 25% stake in Penguin Random House to Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA for $675 million. The London-based education publisher PSON, -0.46% said Fallon will retire in 2020 once a successor has been appointed. The company will consider both external and internal candidates as part of a succession process, it said. Pearson said the sale of its remaining stake in Penguin Random House to its partner is in line with the company’s simplification strategy and follows the disposal...

Book includes how Steele was commissioned to write dossier Robert Reich: Trump is an international mobster The former journalists Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch are to publish a book on Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia, including an account of how they commissioned the British ex-spy Christopher Steele to write his dossier on the future president. Crime in Progress: The Secret History of the Trump-Russia Investigation will be published in December by Penguin Random House in the US and UK. Simpson and Fritsch founded the Washington intelligence firm Fusion GPS. In summer 2015, it began investigating Trump and Moscow. It hired...

The co-founders of political research firm Fusion GPS plan to release a book next month on the "never-before-told inside story" about President Trump's relationship with Russia. The book, entitled "Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump," will tell the story of how Fusion GPS helped put together the infamous "Steele dossier," The Associated Press reported on Monday. Co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch's book, which is due out Nov. 26, is being called an " 'All the President's Men' for the Trump era" by publisher Penguin Random House. "After four years on...

President Trump on Friday lashed out at Democrats over their ongoing investigations into his administration, suggesting there should instead be probes into former President Obama's book deal and other activities under his predecessor. "They want to investigate, they want to go fishing and I watched Bob Mueller and they have nothing," Trump said of Democrats during an Oval Office gathering to announce an agreement with Guatemala. "It's a disgrace," he continued. "We want to find out what happened the last Democrat president. Let's look into Obama the way they've looked into me. From day one they've looked into everything we've...

Anyone visiting the Gdansk Zoo in Poland reportedly now has the opportunity to observe a most uncommon creature – an albino penguin. The rare bird, who came into the world in December, is unlike many others in its breed in that it does not bear the traditional "tuxedo" black markings associated with the animal, according to The Associated Press. Its atypical look reportedly would’ve proved to be problematic had it lived in the wild because others penguins would not have accepted it and the likelihood of its survival would’ve been low.The baby penguin "would have become the very first to be attacked...

You can give your cat the flu. You can also pass pneumonia to a chimpanzee or tuberculosis to a bird. This kind of human-to-animal disease transmission, known as reverse zoonosis, has been seen on every continent except one: Antarctica. Now, human-linked pathogens in bird poop reveal, for the first time, that even animals on this isolated, ice-bound landmass can pick up a bug from tourists or visiting scientists. This newly identified infection route could have devastating consequences for Antarctic bird colonies, including population collapse and even extinction. “[We’re] obsessed about the potential for novel diseases to jump from wildlife to...

It turns out that these elusive seabirds had lived on the islands undetected for at least 2,800 years, according to new, unpublished research presented Dec. 11 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington, D.C. It all started when a group of researchers spent 10 months doing what they thought was a pan-Antarctic survey of Adélie penguins by looking through every single cloud-free satellite image that they had of the southern continent. "We thought that we knew where all the [Adélie] penguin colonies were," said Heather Lynch, an ecologist at the Stony Brook University, during the news conference.That is, until...

All but two Adelie penguin chicks have starved to death in their east Antarctic colony, in a breeding season described as "catastrophic" by experts. It was caused by unusually high amounts of ice late in the season, meaning adults had to travel further for food. It is the second bad season in five years after no chicks survived in 2015.

Former President Barack Obama and his wife Michele have signed a multi-million book deal with Penguin Random House. Terms of the deal were not released but Financial Times reported bidding for the two-book deal had reached more than $65 million, a record amount for presidential memoirs.

Monopoly is making changes: The boot has been booted, the wheelbarrow has been wheeled out, and the thimble got the thumbs down in the latest version of the board game. In their place this fall will be a Tyrannosaurus rex, a penguin and a rubber ducky. …