Free Republic

A fundraiser for a Texas teen accused of fatally stabbing Austin Metcalf garnered nearly $90,000 in donations from more than 2,400 donors on Sunday, as the teen claims he acted in self-defense. “The GiveSendGo campaign was purportedly set up by the family of Karmelo Anthony, 17, who cops say confessed to the horrific stabbing at a track meet in Frisco, Texas, last Wednesday,” the New York Post reported.

Can you remember the last customer service experience that left you fuming? Not too hard, right? We all want to be treated with a level of respect, and with so many people veering on the edge of a boiling rage these days sometimes all it takes is one nasty exchange with a company's representative to send you teetering over the edge. It happened to me recently when I made a call about an item I'd returned to a company for an exchange that had seemed to vanish. The agent on the phone interrupted me repeatedly and was actively unhelpful. Even...

The WNBA is coming off of its most-popular season in league history with the arrival of Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and the rest of the 2024 rookie class. It is still going to lose a lot of money and NBA owners are reportedly furious with the continued financial struggles. They are tired of paying to prop someone else up. According to the New York Post, the WNBA will lost $40 million this season. This is the 26th-straight year where it will fail to turn a profit. Never before has the professional women’s basketball league made a single dollar since it...

In the lead up to the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) operation to destroy Hamas and secure the release of over 100 hostages – including 8 Americas – believed to be in and around Rafah, leaders around the world from Joe Biden to the collective leftist leaders of the European Union to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi panicked and ordered Israel to forestall its necessary means to end the war.Why did world leaders clamor for Israel to do nothing?What are they hiding?It turns out they are hiding a lot.Over one million Gazans were said to be sheltering in humanitarian safe areas...

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said Tuesday that the company is moving its world headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, to be closer to a major health-care epicenter. CNBC reports: In a wide-ranging conversation with Bill Frist, a former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Ellison said Oracle is moving a "huge campus" to Nashville, "which will ultimately be our world headquarters." He said Nashville is an established health center and a "fabulous place to live," one that Oracle employees are excited about. "It's the center of the industry we're most concerned about, which is the health-care industry," Ellison said. The announcement was seemingly spur-of-the-moment....

VIDEOEverybody seems to love trees. They provide beauty, shade, and convert carbon in the atmosphere into oxygen. What's not to like? However, there seems to be one very bizarre HATER of trees on this planet. Bill Gates. Did he have some sort of childhood trauma such as falling out of a tree which could explain this very strange animus towards those plants? Or could it be what explains all of Bill Gates' motivations? Flat out greed. As you can see here, it turns out that Bill Gates is in the business of cutting down trees for profit and then just...

From a distance, the movie business might look pretty glamorous. Celebrities and producers glide down red carpets, clutch their Oscars, and vacation in St. Barts—just because they can. While there's a lot of money to be made in the film industry, the economics of making movies are far from simple. Something you’ll likely hear if you walk through the halls of any movie studio is “nobody knows anything.” And that’s true. The public can be fickle, and the industry is in flux. Just about any movie is an extremely risky investment, even a film starring big-name actors and actresses. According...

Pfizer’s latest quarterly results underscored the pressure the drugmaker is facing to sustain sales growth by hitting on drugs in development and recent acquisitions as demand wanes for its leading Covid-19 products. Pfizer’s first-quarter revenue and earnings were down by nearly a third from a year ago on plummeting demand for its Covid-19 vaccine, though the results topped Wall Street expectations. The company also faces sales declines for big-selling products in coming years due to expected patent expirations that will clear the way for lower-cost competition. Pfizer could lose $17 billion in sales from these patent losses.

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday proposed approaching COVID-19 vaccines like the annual flu shot many Americans receive in order to protect against mutations of the virus. The proposal aims to simplify future vaccination efforts. Under this strategy, most adults and children would get a once-a-year shot to protect against the mutating virus. They would no longer have to keep track of how many shots they’ve received or many months it's been since their last booster. In documents posted online, FDA scientists say many Americans now have "sufficient preexisting immunity" against the coronavirus because of vaccination, infection, or a...

Joe Biden’s office at his think tank, the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania, reportedly housed numerous classified documents. The scandal has sparked a review from the Biden regime’s own Department of Justice. Approximately ten classified documents are in question, and were found prior to the midterm elections by Joe Biden lawyers, according to a CBS report. NATIONAL FILE has reported shocking details about vaccine sale profits and an internal staff shakeup at the University of Pennsylvania related to foreign money including money specifically intended to increase Chinese enrollment at the university. University of Pennsylvania financial documents obtained...

A group of emergency physicians and consumer advocates in multiple states are pushing for stiffer enforcement of decades-old statutes that prohibit the ownership of medical practices by corporations not owned by licensed doctors. Thirty-three states plus the District of Columbia have rules on their books against the so-called corporate practice of medicine. But over the years, critics say, companies have successfully sidestepped bans on owning medical practices by buying or establishing local staffing groups that are nominally owned by doctors and restricting the physicians’ authority so they have no direct control. These laws and regulations, which started appearing nearly a...

President Joe Biden on Monday will raise the possibility of imposing a ‘windfall tax’ on energy companies, as his administration aims to combat high gas prices just days before the midterm elections. The White House said Biden will deliver remarks to respond ”to reports over recent days of major oil companies making record-setting profits even as they refuse to help lower prices at the pump for the American people." A person familiar with the matter said Biden will float imposing a tax on the profits of energy companies, as he seeks to pressure them to lower prices for consumers. The...

Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor of the Pediatric Transgender Clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) says "the surgeries we do on minors are labor intensive, require a lot of follow-ups, a lot of our time, and they make a lot of money for the hospital. They are a huge cash cow for the University." Vanderbilt health law expert Ellen Wright Clayton warned employees of the clinic that "any conscientious objection to participating in these lucrative procedures will be met with dire consequences. You probably shouldn't be working at VUMC if you don't want to participate in the trans surgeries on...

Visitors forced to spend 17% more last year as price of hotels, passes and even Mickey ears rocket Since reopening in April of last year, the company has made a host of changes to its preeminent parks in Florida and California, nixing perks and raising prices Those efforts, recent earnings reports reveal, have seen the parks' bottom lines swell - but has also alienated visitors been priced out by the increased costs Implementing changes such as a $15 a day pass on top of admission and a $32 charge for its airport shuttles, customers are complaining of Disney's practices The...

As Moderna's profits soared during the Covid-19 pandemic, their executives and even their employees have been reaping the benefits in the form of pricey real estate close to the company's headquarters in the Boston-area. According to a new feature in the Wall Street Journal, one unnamed Moderna executive put in an offer to buy a unit on the 17th floor of the St. Regis building overlooking Boston's harbor for $4.9 million on the same day a Pfizer exec bought a condo in the same building on the 16th floor for $4.8 million. The sales director for the building, Cathy Angelini,...

...It’s easy to look at the gas pump right now and think that station owners are taking you for a ride. But the business model of gas stations is a bit counterintuitive. Most gas stations barely turn a profit on their core product — and when the price of oil goes up they may even take a loss on it. Battling small margins, cutthroat competition, and the looming threat of electric vehicles, many gas stations are more reliant than ever on secondary revenue streams.... The profit pipeline Gasoline begins its journey as crude oil, largely sourced on home soil in...

“Whatever we did to make the Chinese angry, we have to stop doing it, because it’s hurting us.” That was an argument that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) heard from an executive at an airplane maker recently after China stopped buying their planes and switched to Europe. The company blamed the switch on U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. American companies’ dependence on the Chinese market is one leverage that the communist regime uses to pressure the U.S. administration to adopt policies friendly toward Beijing, according to Rubio. Beijing’s goal, he said, is to pursue its military ambitions, be it the takeover...

Imagine that you manage a chain coffee shop in, say, Kansas City. You’ve been working there for twelve years and have rolled with the changes—hell, you even got used to pumpkin spice. A few years ago, corporate started sending you a different kind of simple syrup, that silent sweetener used in drinks. One day, a customer comes back saying she’d gotten violently sick after buying some sweetened iced tea from your shop. She got three pumps of sweetener, rather than the standard single pump, at her request.

Goldman Sachs, the giant New York investment bank, is cashing in on the war in Ukraine by selling Russian debt to U.S. hedge funds — and using a legal loophole in the Biden administration’s sanctions to do it. As the Western world scrambles to defend Ukraine by locking down Russian money, the company is acting as a broker between Moscow’s creditors and U.S. investors, pitching clients on the opportunity to take advantage of Russia’s war-crippled economy by buying its debt securities low now and selling them high later, according to four financial world sources familiar with the strategy. Goldman’s effort...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reacted to President Joe Biden’s ban on U.S. imports of Russian oil and gas by stating that Congress should monitor the profits of oil companies and “profit margins should not go up. That’s just oil companies gouging when they do that. So, we’re going to be on them on this.”