Free Republic

San Diego Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano is reportedly facing a lifetime ban from baseball for violating MLB's gambling policy, according to ESPN's Jeff Passan and Jared Diamond and Lindsey Adler of the Wall Street Journal. Per the WSJ's report, "Marcano, 24 years old, has been accused of betting on games involving the Pittsburgh Pirates last season while he was on the injured list for that team." Four other players are also reportedly facing punishments for betting on games at the minor league level, according to Diamond and Adler.

Spirit Airlines agents traded blows with unruly passengers as they were boarding a flight in a wild video obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com. The vicious fight erupted at Philadelphia International Airport Monday night when a mom, 39, and her 17-year-old daughter were hit with extra fees because their carry-on luggage was too large. The shocking footage begins with the two travelers grabbing and clawing at gate agents in the entrance to the jetway as the Fort Lauderdale-bound flight prepares to board.

Before Covid, four types of pneumonia added together were the highest cause of death in the UK. In a newly implemented Medical Examiner System to certify deaths, the Medical Examiner was certifying all types of pneumonia deaths as covid-19 deaths, a former Director of End-of-Life Care has said. On Saturday, Sai, a former NHS Director of End-of-Life Care, wrote a Twitter thread which, amongst other things, gave a personal account of the changes to the system of reporting deaths implemented in the NHS: “When four different diseases [are] grouped and now being called covid-19, you will inevitably see covid-19 with...

It’s easy to see why, according to a new Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans said they do not want Joe Biden to run for re-election. As Americans face record gas prices and the highest inflation in 40 years, President Biden admits he could not care less. His Administration is committed to fight a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine and Americans just need to suck it up. Last week a New York Times reporter asked Biden how long he expects Americans to pay record gasoline prices over his Administration’s Ukraine policy. “As long as it takes,” replied the president...

HOUSTON – A Houston couple has been indicted for capital murder in the death of 8-year-old Keyontae Holzendorf, who died in a motel room bathtub after being severely beaten, handcuffed, and bound with duct tape in March 2021. “The way this little boy died is almost unthinkable and absolutely horrifying” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said. “We believe he was handcuffed, bound at the ankles and legs with ligatures and duct-tape, had his mouth taped shut and was beaten so severely that he either died from blunt force trauma or suffocated on the blood from his broken teeth.” The...

The White House has enlisted veteran actor Bill Murray to get the word out during the final days of open enrollment to receive health insurance next year under the Affordable Care Act. In a video tweeted by the official White House account Sunday evening, Murray and President Obama take turns putting into a glass in the Oval Office as the president reminds viewers that open enrollment for the health care exchanges ends on December 15. So Bill Murray walks into the Oval Office… #GetCovered https://t.co/X4R4hhC5Fe — The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 12, 2016 “Generally, I don’t let Cubs fans into...

law-enforcement official tells The Associated Press that tests show Prince died of an opioid overdose.

Actress Lena Dunham, who has been aggressively campaigning for Hillary Clinton, privately doubted the Democratic presidential candidate for discrediting women who made sexual assault allegations against her husband, former President Bill Clinton, according to a report Wednesday. Dunham, a fierce advocate for Planned Parenthood and other liberal causes, reportedly made the comments at a dinner party on New York’s Upper East Side months ago. The New York Times reported: She told the guests, at the Park Avenue apartment of Richard Plepler, the chief executive of HBO, that she was disturbed by how, in the 1990s, the Clintons and their allies...

ATLANTA, Georgia, December 10, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – The Centers for Disease Control's "National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey" (NISVS) has found that homosexuals disproportionately suffer violence, and inflict violence on one another. The CDC survey is the first of its kind to present comparisons of victimization by sexual orientation for men and women. Its data indicate that homosexuals experience sexual violence at much higher rates than heterosexual men and women. Twenty-six percent of homosexual men and 37% of bisexual men experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner. Forty-four percent of lesbians and 61% of bisexual women...

AUG 23 2015 Pell Grants: Billions Go to Students Who Don't Graduate, Analysis Finds by ELIZABETH CHUCK Billions of taxpayer dollars go to college students who never end up with a diploma in their hands, a new report found. Pell grants — which are given to low-income families and, unlike student loans, do not need to be paid back — are the costliest education initiative in the nation. But little official data exists on whether they are a good investment, according to the education watchdog Hechinger Report. Education Department Undersecretary Ted Mitchell last month lauded Pell grants as "one of...

Major League Baseball has hired openly gay former ballplayer Billy Bean as their new Ambassador For Inclusion. Bean's job will be to assure all MLB stakeholders of an inclusive and equitable workplace and provide awareness and educational resources that help mandate the league's workplace code of conduct. "It's ironic that I am returning to baseball to help erase the same reason I left," Bean told Outsports in an exclusive interview. Bean left baseball in 1995 shortly after his then-partner passed away. Bean skipped his partner's funeral to play in a game for the Padres, lest someone discover he was gay.

Malcolm X, who ranted against the White men most of his life, apparently had no qualms in sharing carnal pleasure with one of them, it has emerged. Malcolm was bisexual and had an affair with a white male, according to a biography of the legendary black radical activist of the 1960s. The unseemly love affair of Malcolm X, who ferociously championed black supremacy and argued that blacks were the original people of the world, has been brought to light in a biography, 'Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention'. The biography was written by Manning Marable, an established African-American scholar. The...

There is no limit to the depravity of the cultists who worship at the altar of multiculturalism. 100 to 140 million girls and women around the world have been subjected to genital mutilation. And now, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is embracing this barbaric expression of misogyny in the name of cultural sensitivity and immigrant outreach. Equality Now is stunned by a new policy statement issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which essentially promotes female genital mutilation (FGM) and advocates for “federal and state laws [to] enable pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ‘ritual...

Inspired for the most part by an article written by Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample, some by an article by Pulitzer Prize op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times, as well as others I've read over the past couple of years, I decided to try my hand at environmental journalism. Feel free to leave a comment to let me know how I'm doing. Just remember – it's all about science. The most exalted of the world's eminent scientists – ever – are predicting a new warm period set to begin in the very near future, which...

Former Oklahoma congressman J.C. Watts says he's thinking about voting for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. The last black Republican to serve in the U.S. House, Watts says he criticizes his party for neglecting the black community

NEW YORK - The worst of the United States’ housing market slowdown is over, economists forecast by nearly 2-to-1 in a Wall Street Journal online economic survey, the paper reported on its Web site on Tuesday. But the economists still predict that the average selling price of a house will fall somewhat next year, it said.

A confidential analysis of Internet search queries and a random sample of Web pages taken from Google and Microsoft's giant Internet indices showed that only about 1 percent of all Web pages contain sexually explicit material. The analysis was presented during a federal court hearing last week in Philadelphia in a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and obtained on Monday by the Mercury News. The ACLU said the analysis, by Philip B. Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, did not appear to substantially help the Department of...

If you're planning to expand your fall wardrobe, somber colors and '80s rock 'n' roll apparel should top your list. That's the style reflected at Colonial Mall-Decatur's fall fashion show Saturday. The mall's Teen Board strutted favorite cool-weather clothes from Sears, Parisian, Rainbow Fashions, Dillard's, Maurices, J.C. Penney, Pac Sun, Gap and Aeropostale. "All of our stores have really cute and casual back-to-school items," said Tammy A. Burks, marketing director at Colonial Mall-Decatur. Since the late '90s, most fashion trends have trickled down from adults to teenagers. Fall 2006 breaks this routine. Trends are starting with teenagers and trickling up...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Oil fell nearly 2 percent to below $70 for the first time in two weeks Thursday after the death of al Qaeda'a leader in Iraq, where crude exports have been curbed by frequent sabotage attacks and instability. The plunge deepened losses from a day ago, when data showed rising crude and fuel inventories, easing concerns about summer supplies in the world's biggest consumer. Al-Zarqawi is seen in an image from a video aired in April by the Al-Jazeera network. U.S. crude oil fell $1.12 to $69.70 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after losing $1.68,...

New statistics suggest San Francisco has the highest percentage of gay men among major cities in the world, with a quarter of them HIV-positive, a top city health official said on Friday. "Despite an overall loss in the population in San Francisco in the last five years, we think there has been an absolute gain in gay men," William McFarland, head of HIV/AIDS statistics at San Francisco's Department of Public Health, said in an interview. "From all the data I have seen ... it's the gayest city in the world." McFarland has compiled the city's first survey in five years...