Free Republic

San Francisco police have arrested a man accused of defacing the famed Pink Triangle, a symbol of LGBTQ+ rights that is installed annually during Pride Month on top of the city’s landmark Twin Peaks.

A new, highly transmissible COVID subvariant has been detected in California — heightening the risk of a potential summer wave as recent moves by the Trump administration threaten to make vaccines harder to get, and more expensive, for many Americans, some health experts warn. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week that he was rescinding the federal government’s recommendation that pregnant women and healthy children get immunized against COVID, effective immediately. Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, also said the agency will no longer routinely approve annually formulated COVID-19 vaccinations...

Users who download the app will be sending data to scientists when an earthquake as small as a magnitude 5 hits. By harvesting information from hundreds of phones closest to the earthquake, scientists will be able to test a computer system that could, in the future, dispatch early warnings that shaking is seconds or minutes away to people farther away from the earthquake’s origin. For instance, if a quake started in San Bernardino, cell phones there could register the quake and quickly help send warnings to smartphone users in Los Angeles. "This is a citizen science project," said Richard Allen,...