Free Republic

Diagnosis rates of autism among children have more than tripled over the past 15 years. One reason, which Minnesota’s welfare scandal lays bare with shocking details, is Medicaid fraud and abuse. Medicaid pays healthcare providers big bucks to diagnose and treat children with autism—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a month for a single child. Yet states rarely verify that kids who are diagnosed actually meet the medical criteria for the disorder or that they get appropriate treatment from qualified specialists. The result: Children covered by Medicaid or the government-run Children’s Health Insurance Program are 2.5 times as likely as...

At a private home in the West Village on Tuesday evening, a cryptocurrency billionaire, a Qualcomm heir and a son of George Soros hosted a sold-out fund-raiser for Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s incoming mayor. The next morning, Mr. Mamdani was off to TriBeCa, where a Hunt oil fortune heiress and a major cryptocurrency advocate held another fund-raiser for the mayor-elect. Next week, he is slated to appear at a star-studded reception on the Lower East Side featuring Hollywood royalty, including Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef, Tituss Burgess and the director Mira Nair, who is Mr. Mamdani’s mother. The...

This writer remembers being in kindergarten when her teachers started talking about the hole in the ozone layer. It was going to get bigger, we were told, and the world would begin boiling from heat, crops would burn from acid rain, and cities would be uninhabitable thanks to smog. That was 1988, and now — 37 years later — this writer is staring at a foot of snow outside her window, and there's nary a drop of acid rain in sight. Cities are uninhabitable, but that's because of Democratic Party policies and not smog. Ah, so we didn't have to...

Classrooms across the European Union are about to change. A new decision folds climate education into the EU’s 2025 climate plan, from kindergarten through the end of high school in all 27 member countries. Students will not just hear about distant ice melt or heat waves. They will learn how climate science, local impacts, and job skills fit together as part of the European Union’s official response to the climate crisis. For young children, future lessons are likely to connect local weather, food, and energy use to simple climate ideas, instead of treating the subject as a one off event...

Opponents of a pair of radical California “green” mandates were handed a mixed bag in court last week as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily paused implementation of one state law but allowed another to remain in place for now. The brewing court battle could have serious implications for businesses nationwide – and the entire U.S. economy. The first law in question, SB 261, titled “the Climate-Related Financial Risk Act,” requires companies operating in California with more than $500 million in annual revenue to publish a report outlining their “climate-related financial risks.” Critics argue that SB 261 effectively compels...

3.6 million in tax dollars on lavish vacations at 5-star hotels and overseas trips. Much of it was without approval. Hotel rooms costing $945 per night. Anniversary trips to Las Vegas. South African safaris. Nearly $5,000 for trips to Hawaii. Grand total: $23.6 million in six years. All at taxpayer expense. All by Chicago Public Schools employees and students. Much of it was never approved. Because of “lax, vague, inadequate and unenforced CPS travel rules, training and procedures,” CPS employees excessively spent taxpayer money, in many instances without approval. Luxurious vacations were veiled as professional development conferences, according to the...

"Squad" member and congresswoman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has reportedly tied a turkey giveaway to political campaign donations, according to a report from the New York Post. The outlet reported that an email was sent out by Ocasio-Cortez that stated, “Thanksgiving is two weeks away. Will you chip in $5 or anything you can today to help us bring the joy of the holiday season into homes around NYC this year?” However, clicking on the contribution link sends those who read the email to a campaign fundraising page on the Democrat donations platform, ActBlue. Those submitting donations were prompted to...

This fundraiser is for the birds. Power-hungry “Squad” member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) cooked up a new way to have her cake and eat it too this Thanksgiving – by tying her annual turkey giveaway to her massive reelection campaign enterprise. And critics are crying fowl. “Thanksgiving is two weeks away,” the self-described “Bronx girl” wrote in an email pitch last week. “Will you chip in $5 or anything you can today to help us bring the joy of the holiday season into homes around NYC this year?” But clicking on the contribution link sends people directly to a campaign...

BELEM, Brazil (AP) — United Nations climate talks in Brazil reached a subdued agreement Saturday to deliver more money to countries hit hardest by climate change to help them adapt to extreme weather’s wrath. But the agreement doesn’t include an explicit detailed map to phase out fossil fuels or strengthen inadequate emissions cutting plans.

Las Vegas isn’t what it used to be… and we’ve learned that the hard way. We thought we understood how Vegas works — how to spot the tricks, avoid the traps, and still love the chaos. But after years of living in Las Vegas, something shifted. And we couldn’t ignore it anymore. Things that used to feel exciting… now feel off. And one day, we looked around and realized the biggest lie Las Vegas still gets away with — and how easy it is to fall for it.

For nearly two years the Office of Inspector General investigated travel spending at Chicago Public Schools. The report found 'questionable, excessive and even exorbitant' travel spending across the district. Inspectors say it's fueled in part by federal COVID relief money and a broken travel expense process with no official oversight, according to a new report. The report found eight schools used more than $142,000 of CPS funds to pay a vendor for 15 staff trips to Finland, Estonia, Egypt and South Africa. However 13 out of the 15 trips were not pre-approved as required. One trip was even rejected, but...

Skepticism about climate change has resurfaced, as some experts claim the exact causes of global warming remain unclear and that the policies addressing it are motivated more by money than by science. Richard Lindzen, Professor Emeritus of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has spent decades studying atmospheric science. He told the Daily Mail that the public hysteria surrounding global warming isn't actually based on realistic data. Climate change is the term used to describe Earth's warming, mainly as a result of human activity, such as burning coal, oil and gas. Scientists and climate activists have warned that...

Countries are gathering in Brazil at the COP30 summit to take stock of climate change. As in past summits, the negotiations are starting on the back foot: countries already aren't meeting their goals to cut heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels. The world has barely budged in its efforts to combat climate change compared to one year ago, according to a new report from the United Nations. If countries stay on that track, the planet will warm by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, compared to the pre-industrial temperatures of the mid-1800s. That's slightly better than...

BELEM, Brazil (AP) — U.N. climate negotiations were expected to begin Monday at a meeting on the edge of the Brazilian Amazon, with leaders pushing for urgency, cooperation and acceleration after more than 30 years fighting to curb global warming by drastically reducing the carbon pollution that causes it. André Corrêa do Lago, president of this year’s conference, known as COP30, emphasized that negotiators engage in “mutirão,” a Brazilian word derived from an Indigenous word that refers to a group uniting to work on a shared task. Complicating the calls for togetherness is the United States. The Trump administration did...

This year's pivotal UN climate summit in Brazil faces a tidal wave of fake news and disinformation that aims to deflate any unified front on a rapid energy transition away from fossil fuels. COP30 comes at a time when US president Donald Trump, the leader of the world's largest historical carbon polluter, has launched an unprecedented assault on climate and renewable energy programs. Meanwhile, the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition (CAAD), a global climate watchdog, is asking media and Big Tech to screen "harmful false content" about climate for their audiences, and to be transparent about the source of any...

Let’s say you paid top dollar to go to a fancy, five-star restaurant, and the waiter served you warmed-over McDonald’s. Would you ever go back? Maybe, if you didn’t know any better. I started thinking about that after I recently changed my residency from Virginia to California (for reasons I won’t go into) and noticed that my state income taxes had gone up by more than 33%. Over the course of the year, I will pay California $2,115 more than I’d been paying in Virginia, which is hardly a low-tax state (Virginia has the 14th highest income tax burden in...

'You can't just destroy small communities along the way'An impassioned and oftentimes angry cohort from a small California city turned up ready for a fight this week in opposition to the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s proposal to bisect the town. On Monday, residents of Shafter, a rural town of 22,000 just about 20 miles northwest of Bakersfield, showed up en masse to provide almost two hours of unanimous testimony opposing the plan to their city council. Individual pleas from community members often began calmly and then crescendoed into yelling (or even escalated to holding back tears) following a presentation by...

Back in the late 1970s there was a popular wine commercial with the film director Orson Welles reminding us that “some things can’t be rushed,” and concluding with what became a famous catchphrase: “We will sell no wine before its time.” One of the biggest yet least discussed problems with the race to establish the solar industry before the subsidies run out is that the product has arguably been rushed to market before it is perfected. The construction is getting ahead of the expertise – meaning that billions of dollars could be invested in solar devices that are soon to...

On the surface, the town of Jamtara appeared no different from neighbouring districts. But, if you knew where to look, there were startling differences. In the middle of spartan villages were houses of imposing size and unusual opulence. Millions of Indians knew why this was. They knew, to their cost, where Jamtara was. To them, it was no longer a place; it was a verb. You lived in fear of being “Jamtara-ed”. Over the past 15 years, parts of this sleepy district in the eastern state of Jharkhand had grown fabulously wealthy. This extraordinary feat of rural development was powered...

Hurricane Melissa – the most powerful storm in Jamaica's history – was made four times more likely by climate change, according to a study. The catastrophic category 5 hurricane struck the island on Tuesday, bringing sustained winds that peaked at 185mph, flash floods and landslides. Now, experts have warned that our over–reliance on oil, gas and coal increased both the likelihood and intensity of the storm. Looking ahead, hurricanes like this will only get worse unless global warming is urgently curbed, they added. 'Man–made climate change clearly made Hurricane Melissa stronger and more destructive,' Professor Ralf Toumi, director of the...