Free Republic

We’d like to have the DeSantis of yesteryear; the one fresh from his first Governor’s race who defied partisan worries by championing the environment and other bygone middle-of-the-road-type policymaking. But what it seems we’re getting is the vengeful, angry DeSantis who will be the public official equivalent of a drunk dad returning from a all-night bender itching to kick the family pooch. Sources have told me that DeSantis has implemented a new edict that departures from his administration are on hold until at least Summer, if not next year. Anyone who leaves would be blacklisted, according to sources. After DeSantis...

"I'm a federal agent."

Rep. Mo Brooks, a one-time ally of former President Donald Trump, said he's willing to testify before the January 6 panel investigating the Capitol riot if subpoenaed. Thompson told The Hill that Brooks wasn't served his earlier subpoena because he had been on the campaign trail. Until this point, Brooks has not cooperated with the January 6 panel, having rejected a letter from the committee in May that called for him to testify. In July 2021, Brooks told a reporter that he wore body armor to the pro-Trump rally at the Ellipse just before the January 6 Capitol riot. At...

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), projected to lose Alabama’s GOP Senate primary runoff against rival Katie Britt after a full slap in the face from ex-President Donald Trump, concluded his rocky campaign with some bitter words in his concession speech on Tuesday night. “The voters have spoken,” but “they might not have spoken wisely,” Brooks complained to supporters at his election night party, per the Washington Post. The ultra-MAGA congressman took a shot at Britt, who won a last-minute endorsement from Trump, and her apparent lack of MAGA-ness. “It’s always appropriate to congratulate the winners, and some of these winners might...

A Massachusetts construction worker’s love of black licorice wound up costing him his life. Eating a bag and a half every day for a few weeks threw his nutrients out of whack and caused the 54-year-old man’s heart to stop, The problem is glycyrrhizic acid, found in black licorice and in many other foods and dietary supplements containing licorice root extract. It can cause dangerously low potassium and imbalances in other minerals, principally electrolytes. Eating as little as 2 ounces of black licorice a day for two weeks could cause a heart rhythm problem, especially for people over the age...

Reddit users have begun a campaign titled #SendEmSalt where they send The New York Times offices large bags of salt, ridiculing the publication for their angry (or “salty”) reaction to the election of Donald Trump. Users in /r/The_Donald, Reddit’s largest Donald Trump supporting community, posted a thread three days ago titled, “#SendEmSalt: An attempt to deliver 1 ton of salt to the New York Times”. Within the thread, user /u/njmksr writes, “While I was viewing the frontpage today, I was inspired by one ‘Pede’s [a term short for centipede that refers to Trump supporters] act of sending the NYT 25...

Trump’s win also delivers a well-earned rebuke of unparalleled magnitude to many on the Left. They worked hard to earn this rebuke throughout 2015 and 2016. There are many, but here are the top 12 liberals who deserve Election Day’s results the most.

On Tuesday, a blogger in Taiwan was sentenced to a month of detention and two years probation for writing that a restaurant's beef noodles were "too salty." "The Taichung branch of Taiwan High Court on Tuesday sentenced a blogger who wrote that a restaurant's beef noodles were too salty to 30 days in detention and two years of probation and ordered her to pay NT$200,000 in compensation to the restaurant." The Taichung District Court ruled that the blogger, surnamed Liu, made comments that "exceeded reasonable bounds." Apparently, she wrote that the food at a Taichung beef noodle restaurant was too...

Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) held a conference call with no questions to announce his retirement. Massa says he is retiring because of cancer and denied rumors that he sexually harassed a male aide.

ScienceDaily (May 30, 2008) — A new analysis of the Martian rock that gave hints of water on the Red Planet -- and, therefore, optimism about the prospect of life -- now suggests the water was more likely a thick brine, far too salty to support life as we know it. The finding, by scientists at Harvard University and Stony Brook University, is detailed May 30 in the journal Science. "Liquid water is required by all species on Earth and we've assumed that water is the very least that would be necessary for life on Mars," says Nicholas J. Tosca,...

The Dead Sea is dying as its dark salty waters retreat (Filed: 04/10/2003) Human exploitation is forcing the surface level down by three feet each year, reports David Blair The jagged cliffs of the Judaean desert mountains, where John the Baptist wandered and Jewish fighters made their last stand at Masada, once sloped directly into the Dead Sea. Today, many of those cliffs descend into ugly mudflats covering much of the basin marking the lowest point on Earth. For the Dead Sea is in retreat as human intervention forces the water level downwards by more than three feet per year....

They thrive without oxygen, growing in salty, alkaline conditions, and may offer insights into what kinds of life might survive on Mars. They're a new species of organism, isolated by scientists at the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, Ala. The discovery, published in the May 2003 issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, identifies a species named Spirochaeta americana by the two NSSTC scientists -- Richard Hoover and Dr. Elena Pikuta. They isolated this new organism from oxygen-deprived mud sediments from Northern California's Mono Lake - a salty, alkaline lake in an enclosed...

Obviously, if you view the page source you can probably figure out where this is pretty quickly. The challenge is to figure out where it is based on the keywords, and why this region is so important to scientists.