Free Republic

Researchers have begun drilling into a mysterious, boat-shaped formation in the mountains of eastern Turkey, hoping an underground robot will unearth the answer to one of biblical history’s biggest mysteries. Members of the Noah’s Ark Scans expedition believe the Durupinar formation, located in eastern Turkey near Mount Ararat, could mark the final resting place of the vessel described in Genesis. “Good morning from the outer rims of Noah’s ark,” the project’s marketing and fundraising director, divisive Christian activist Lauren Witzke, wrote in a Tuesday update. “Core drilling has begun and the big bang evolutionists are already in damage control mode,”...

(The Center Square) - Medicare Part D sponsors made $587.7 million in ineligible payments to pharmacies for five drugs carrying obsolete prescription-only labeling more than a year after the corresponding brand-name drugs switched to over-the-counter status, a federal watchdog found. The money won't be recovered, because the payments complied with Medicare guidance in place at the time, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Inspector General, which made the finding in an audit covering calendar years 2021 through 2023. Medicare Part D, the federal prescription drug benefit, is delivered through private "sponsors," including Medicare Advantage...

In a 2-1 vote, the Texas Railroad Commission approved ExxonMobil’s application for its Rose Carbon Capture and Storage permit, to be sited in Jefferson County. Lone no vote Wayne Christian calls program the “Green New Scam.” Commissioner Wayne Christian, who said he is a fan of ExxonMobil, was the lone no vote against Commissioners Christi Craddick and Jim Wright. “We are moving toward a socialist type system of government rather than free market,” Christian said. Jason Isaac, CEO of American Energy Institute, told commissioners that ExxonMobil’s Jefferson County project is “heavily influenced by government incentives,” and the company’s recent quarterly...

Drive from Buffalo into Genesee County and you will pass fields that have grown corn and soybeans for generations. Soon, thousands of those acres will be covered by steel and glass. New York state is forcing industrial-scale solar plants onto rural communities that never asked for them, and the people who live there are discovering just how little their voice counts when a governor decides differently. The Mandate Behind The Mess.. New York is tearing up rural communities, wiping out wildlife sanctuaries, and burying prime agricultural soil under solar installation in the name of green energy. The root of this...

I live in New York, which is a very expensive city, so I have become somewhat desensitized to paying stupid amounts of money for normal things. I don’t regularly experience sticker shock because, to some extent, I live inside the sticker shock. But lately, even I have been losing the plot. A few months ago, I paid $35 for tortellini at a restaurant and received four pieces of tortellini. I recently saw supermarket strawberries listed for $15. The other day I was shopping for a trash can and discovered that a distressing percentage of them cost more than $100. And...

The city of Pittsburg was the victim of a phishing scam that resulted in a loss of nearly $1 million, the city said Wednesday. In February, a single unauthorized payment of $913,839.81 was sent to a fraudulent account pretending to be a known city vendor, the city said. Staff noticed the issue on Feb. 12 and informed the Pittsburg Police Department, which brought in both county and federal investigators. "The instant this incident was identified as fraudulent by City staff, the City's Police Department acted quickly and immediately froze the account to which the funds were electronically wired," said Pittsburg...

Medicare and Medicaid are losing billions of taxpayer dollars to criminals because they can’t keep pace with their high-tech scams, a Post investigation has found. International criminal networks employ hackers who steal sensitive patient data then sell it on the dark web or use it to then bill for fake medical equipment or services in people’s names. Scammers even use AI voice bots to coax info out of seniors on the phone, posing as US healthcare workers, often from thousands of miles away in Europe or Asia. They use the same techniques on the insurance companies, with one Philippines-based outfit...

A New York City building owner is trying to get out of paying an eye-watering $35 million verdict to an ex-JPMorgan banker who claimed a shattering glass door left her with permanent brain damage, according to new court documents. Lawyers for the Madison Avenue building claim hours of new video surveillance of former banking analyst Meghan Brown taken over a nine-month period reveal her claims of incapacitation are a “fraud.” “Seldom is a farce of the magnitude orchestrated by [Brown] here captured on video and in court documents,” wrote Christopher Theobalt, attorney for 271 Madison Co — who argue the...

Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion. The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a $636 million payout on the same crypto bet, part of a haul of at least $2.2 billion from all of his business ventures in 2025. Once a crypto skeptic, Mr. Trump embraced the profit-making opportunity of digital currencies in 2024, while he was running for...

Temperatures on the ocean surface hit a record high in June, European scientists warned Wednesday, fueling fears of more dangerous heat waves this summer and fanning concerns over the escalating global climate crisis. Two separate services under the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation program — the Copernicus Climate Change Service and the Copernicus Marine Service — announced they had both independently confirmed the record temperatures. Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, warned that the rising temperatures could mark the “beginning of a new phase.” “With ocean temperatures at these levels and El Niño on the horizon, we...

Members of Congress are calling for increased oversight and reform after a Haitian national in Florida was convicted in a healthcare fraud conspiracy that prosecutors said involved more than $58 million in false claims targeting Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers using a federal drug discount program. Prosecutors accused Jean Jethro Alexandre and his co-conspirators in 2025 of recruiting fake patients and offering them financial kickbacks if they accepted fraudulent prescriptions — primarily for HIV and AIDS medication — written by nurse practitioners involved in the operation, according to court documents reviewed by Fox News Digital. Alexandre would then cash in...

The scientists have been right about climate change all along, says former Vice President Al Gore on the 20th anniversary of the release of "An Inconvenient Truth," the Oscar-winning documentary about Gore's campaign to educate people about climate change. When asked by ABC News chief meteorologist and chief climate correspondent Ginger Zee whether the film and its predictions on global warming hold up, Gore responded, "Unfortunately, yes." "The scientists were dead right on all the important elements of it, and it really is insane that we are continuing to use the sky as an open sewer and we're trapping so...

I have often noted that the climate scam and the associated forced energy transition would of necessity go away at some point because the proposals being advocated to “save the planet” could never possibly work. But the open question has always been, when that happens, what will it look like? Would all the big enviro groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club all go on national TV one night and admit that the whole thing was a fake scare from the beginning? In the real world, that’s not how these things...

Obama, whose roots are African rather than African-American, rose to power by hijacking the racial resentments and guilty left behind in America after a history of slave and segregation he was never part of. Now, the one trick pony is at it again, announcing the opening of the grim fortress of a museum in Chicago, on ‘Juneteenth’, trying to link his time in the White House as a notable event for black people up there with the end of slavery. It’s another cynical and despicable hijacking of American history to serve his own vanity and ego. The reality, as most...

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — After being told her Social Security funds were supporting terrorism, a widow was directed to buy $700,000 in gold — but an alert store owner intervened before crooks could make off with her money, records show. A young man, who was reportedly sent to Michigan from Illinois to fetch the gold, ended up with a bag of chocolate coins and a pair of 20-year felonies instead. “They didn’t know they were getting chocolate gold coins,” said Ben Soldaat, owner of Grand Rapids Coins, who alerted authorities to the suspected scam in early May. “It just...

Bill O’Reilly says that E. Jean Carroll must be criminally prosecuted It turns out she wasn’t paid a little bit to lie about Donald Trump and target him, she was paid a lot. $7 MILLION in funding for her lawsuits against Trump “The E. Jean Carroll fraud should be prosecuted. That is the most outrageous story — It's so outrageous that the woman testifies in a deposition under oath that nobody is helping her, no lawyer is helping her, no pro bono, and then we find out she got $7 million” The lawyer was connected to Jeffrey Epstein and is...

Officials in Northern Colorado are celebrating a new project to improve energy reliability and availability in their communities ... Platte River Power Authority CEO Jason Frisbie says the project is a major step toward reducing its carbon footprint ... The facility will strengthen the county's electric system by storing energy for later distribution during periods of high demand.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The California High-Speed Rail Authority (Authority) Board of Directors today approved the launch of the initial phase of the nation’s largest track and systems installation efforts. An American-led consortium of Kiewit, Stacey Witbeck, and Herzog will install the track, overhead contact system, train control and communications infrastructure needed to transform the 119 miles of guideway completed in the Central Valley into an electrified high-speed rail system capable of speeds up to 220 mph.

Almost every day now, there is another headline warning about the collapsing birth rate across the developed world, and along with it, another think piece attempting to diagnose why younger generations seem increasingly reluctant to build families. This week, new figures out of England and Wales showed that the number of babies being born has fallen to the lowest level since 1977, with couples delaying parenthood until their thirties or deciding against children altogether. The total fertility rate dropped to 1.39 children per woman, the lowest level ever recorded. The explanations offered for this phenomenon tend to revolve around economics,...

‘It is standard practice for immigration attorneys representing illegal aliens to assert that virtually every illegal alien is going to be persecuted or tortured in his or her home country.’The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is starting to dismantle the legal industrial complex pushing for mass migration by cracking down on immigration lawyers who file fraudulent asylum claims.DHS directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Tuesday to develop policies to go after the attorneys who aid and abet illegals obtaining legal entry and status in the United States fraudulently, under a law already establishing penalties for document fraud. DHS said...