Free Republic

One of the first memories I have of news and people discussing news is of my parents trying to figure out whether the president was dead. This is because in Portugal in the early sixties, the news of course couldn’t publish anything that the regime disapproved of. When they announced Salazar was dead, and who his successor was, mom’s answer was “he’s been dead for x months” (aka since he’d disappeared form in public/or they’d noticed a shift in governance) “they just finished the behind the scenes power struggle and can announce it now.” Also much was made of the...

I remember how over a decade ago, it was fashionable to point out "the media never tells the good news" of what our soldiers were doing over in Iraq. What did we get? Here's what we got every day: 10 US soldiers killed....... 3 US soldiers killed...... 10 US soldiers killed...... car bomb wounds 18 US soldiers....... attack leaves US soldiers....... 8 US soldiers killed.... This is no different than how the media covers Covid. You ever heard about the falling percentage rate? I know I haven't. What are we hearing? Covid kills 50......... State of New York sets record...

LONDON - France’s Total on Friday became the first major energy company to quit the largest U.S. oil and gas lobby because of differences over climate policies. Total said in a statement it would not renew its 2021 membership with the American Petroleum Institute (API) following a review of the lobby’s climate positions, describing them as being only “partially aligned” with Total’s. The points of difference include API’s support for the rollback of U.S. regulation on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas and how to assign a price to carbon, vital to any carbon trading system seen as critical...

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden must place environmental justice at the heart of his plans to tackle climate change by tailoring policies to address the global inequalities at the root of the crisis, guests in a Reuters Next panel said on Thursday. The United States now had an opportunity to heed calls from climate justice movements around the world to push for a fundamental transformation of the global economy, said Osprey Orielle Lake, founder and executive director of the California-based Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network International. “The climate crisis really emerged from interlocking systems of capitalism, resource extraction, racism, patriarchy...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a terrible mistake Tuesday night when he released word that he was in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump. This mistake goes well beyond a simple political miscalculation. It is the physical manifestation of Washington Republican hubris, wrapped in a fog of frightened groupthink.Announced the eve of the House impeachment vote in the pages of The New York Times, McConnell’s plan reportedly rested on the belief that impeaching the outgoing president “will make it easier to purge Mr. Trump from the party.” Published just after the No. 3 House Republican, Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney,...

Jay Gamel, 76, still talks about his Northern California home in the present tense, as if nothing had happened. “The place is a paradise by any measure,” says Gamel, who is semiretired. “The mountains are beautiful, the surroundings are gorgeous. It’s a postcard.” “That place is everything to me,” he says. “It has been my life. It’s the center of my being.” Or it was, until last October, when hot, dry easterly winds known as Diablos drove a fierce wildfire across the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. Known as the Glass Fire, the flames tore through more than 67,000 acres of...

Rising temperatures caused by climate change are contributing to low diet quality and malnutrition among young children in many parts of the world, researchers say. Warmer temperatures now equal or exceed the impact of traditional causes of child malnutrition and low quality diets, such as poverty, poor sanitation and low levels of education, according to investigators from the University of Vermont. "Certainly, future climate changes have been predicted to affect malnutrition, but it surprised us that higher temperatures are already showing an impact," study co-author Meredith Niles said. The researchers assessed diet diversity among 107,000 children, 5 years and younger,...

Baby sharks are being born small, exhausted and undernourished as a result of rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change, according to a new study. Researchers looked at the effects of warming waters on juvenile epaulette sharks (Hemiscyllium ocellatum) — a small, egg-laying species of shark found in the Great Barrier Reef, that spends most of its time on the seafloor. Studying their egg sacs in a laboratory at the New England Aquarium in Boston, the researchers discovered that warmer waters led to premature births of the baby sharks inside. "The hotter the conditions, the faster everything happened, which could...

LONDON - Half of the world's climate change financing should go to helping poorer nations adapt to the effects of global warming, such as droughts, rising seas and floods, the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) said on Thursday. Extreme weather last year such as torrential rains in Africa, record heat waves and warmer temperatures on tropical oceans is consistent with climate change, scientists say. Last year was one of the warmest on record and as impacts intensify, governments around the world must adapt better or face serious costs, damages and losses, the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2020 said. The 2015 Paris...

Paris (AFP) - A Paris court will begin hearing a complaint brought by NGOs backed by two million citizens on Thursday accusing the French state of failing to act to halt climate change. The NGOs want to the court to hold the state responsible for ecological damage and say victory would mark a symbolic step in the fight to persuade governments to do more. An international accord signed in Paris five years ago aims to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, and preferably to 1.5 degrees. The French case is part of a mounting...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated that he believes that impeaching President Donald Trump will make it easier to get rid of the President and Trumpism from the Republican Party, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. Another person with direct knowledge told CNN there's a reason McConnell has been silent on impeachment as other Republicans have pushed back: he's furious about last week's attack on the US Capitol by the President's supporters, even more so that Trump has shown no contrition. His silence has been deliberate as he leaves open the option of supporting impeachment. McConnell...

There's a better than 50-50 chance that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would vote to convict President Trump in an impeachment trial, sources tell Axios. What they're saying: "The Senate institutional loyalists are fomenting a counterrevolution" to Trump, said a top Republican close to McConnell. Why it matters: This would represent one of the most shocking and damning votes in the history of American politics, by the most powerful Republican in Congress. McConnell's vote would open the door to the possibility that Trump could be convicted and prohibited from running for president again.

For Vice President Mike Pence, the moment of truth had arrived. After three years and 11 months of navigating the treacherous waters of President Trump’s ego, after all the tongue-biting, pride-swallowing moments where he employed strategic silence or florid flattery to stay in his boss’s good graces, there he was being cursed by the president. Mr. Trump was enraged that Mr. Pence was refusing to try to overturn the election. In a series of meetings, the president had pressed relentlessly, alternately cajoling and browbeating him. Finally, just before Mr. Pence headed to the Capitol to oversee the electoral vote count...

Freshman representative Ashley Hinson (R., Iowa) petitioned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) to stop distributing a Chinese Communist propaganda paper to House offices on Capitol Hill, according to a letter sent late last week and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Hinson, who was elected in November, said she is "appalled" that lawmakers receive unsolicited copies of China Daily, a Chinese state-controlled newspaper that has been designated as Communist propaganda by the State Department. China Daily has been delivered to congressional offices each morning for many years despite outrage among some members who view its circulation as inappropriate. "Frankly,...

US greenhouse gas emissions tumbled below their 1990 level for the first-time last year as a result of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. A preliminary assessment from research group Rhodium says that overall emissions were down over 10%, the largest fall since World War II. Transport suffered the biggest decline, with emissions down almost 15% over 2019. Energy emissions also fell sharply, due to a decline in the use of coal. With stay-at-home orders in place, economic activity ground to a halt in March and April and this had significant implications for greenhouse gas emissions. In transport, the restrictions...

WASHINGTON — The National Park Service is shutting down public access to the Washington Monument until Jan. 24, citing threats surrounding Joe Biden’s inauguration. The agency said Monday that it was implementing the temporary closure “in response to credible threats to visitors and park resources.” Meanwhile, the National Guard says it will increase troops in DC to at least 10,000 by Saturday to boost security ahead of inauguration. Park officials say that groups involved in last week’s riot at the U.S. Capitol are continuing to “threaten to disrupt” Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20. As a result, officials are shutting down...

AUSTIN, Texas — Sorry to break it to you, but Texas is one of the worst states to raise a family, according to a study conducted by WalletHub. WalletHub compared all 50 states across 52 metrics of family-friendliness. The metrics ranged from the median annual family income to housing affordability to the unemployment rate. Overall, Texas ranked in the bottom half, at number 28. Here's how the Lone Star State fared in the 5 categories: Family Fun: 5 Health and Safety: 37 Education and Child Care: 33 Affordability: 41 Socio-economics: 38

There was a time when racism could be funny. On Jan. 12, 1971, a skittish CBS television network premiered an unusual television show as a mid-season replacement in its primetime lineup. The sitcom, modeled on a successful British version, starred veteran actor Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker, a bigoted dockworker living in Astoria with his dimwitted wife, feminist daughter and liberal son-in-law. “The program you are about to see called ‘All in the Family,’ ” read a text advisory before the show (it would now be termed a trigger warning). “It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on frailties, prejudices,...

LONDON - Companies must listen to scientists and align their plans to reach net zero targets with a global pact to fight climate change, executives told a Reuters Next conference on Monday. But time is running out and scientists have delivered stark warnings that society as a whole needs rapid and unprecedented change to curb global warming and avoid catastrophic climate change. “Governments and companies need to be thinking about what the scientists are telling us. COVID-19 teaches us that,” said Sean Kidney, Chief Executive Officer, Climate Bonds Initiative. “Look at the mess made in Britain and the United States...

From unprecedented wildfires across the US to the extraordinary heat of Siberia, the impacts of climate change were felt in every corner of the world in 2020. We have come to a "moment of truth", United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in his State of the Planet speech in December. "Covid and climate have brought us to a threshold." BBC Future brings you our round-up of where we are on climate change at the start of 2021, according to five crucial measures of climate health. 1. CO2 levels The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached record levels in...