Free Republic

President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and their youngest daughter, Sasha, kicked off the holiday season by lighting up National Christmas Tree for the last time on Thursday evening. President Obama and the crowd in President’s Park counted down from five before the first family--minus Malia--pressed the button that lights the tree, which is located on the Ellipse south of the White House.

PORTLAND, MAINE - Portland police arrested 30-year-old Asher Woodworth after he walked back-and-forth slowly through downtown traffic dressed as a tree. When he refused to comply orders, police took him to jail on a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a public way. Police say Woodworth's motivation was to "see how people would react to his performance" and how it would "impact people's natural choreography."

Find your tree today and keep it close in your heart and soul no matter what is to come before, during and after November 8, 2016 Surpassing all stories pressed upon us in these most troubling of times, are the rarely discovered true ‘Stories of the Soul.’ These are the stories that are most easily overlooked because in the mainstream media malevolent maelstrom of lies, their call for attention comes only in the most easily missed humble whispers.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- The 53-year-old driver of a Tesla Model S electric car died Wednesday when the vehicle smashed into a tree in the central Dutch town of Baarn and burst into flames, police and firefighters said. ... .. firefighters did not immediately recover the man's body because of fears that emergency service workers could be electrocuted. "The car was so badly damaged that the firefighters could not operate its security systems," he said.

This may seem frivolous, but I assure you it is real. I'm on a small committee to select a tree for planting to honor a good man's memory who passed away 2 years ago. He was a moral man, a Christian, a father, and a good husband.

For the eighth time, Peruvian actor and environmental activist Ricardo Torres has symbolically married a tree as part of an ecological awareness campaign to urge others to care for the environment. The wedding took place at a landmark location, the town of Santa Maria del Tule, which is home to an ancient 2000-year-old cypress tree. The tree's estimated weight is more than 544.3 million kilograms. Torres left the house of his godmother, accompanied by a committee of village elders, friends and family, and walked down the Sabino street towards a cluster of Cypress tree leaves to start with the ritual...

A woman had to be rescued by police and firefighters after she became stuck inside a giant banyan tree in Key West. According to the Key West Police Facebook page, Officer Scott Standerwick and Fire Rescue helped the local woman after she somehow got stuck in the tree. Police also posted a photo of the woman with part of her legs and body sticking out of the tree with officers nearby. "Protect and serve!" the Facebook post proclaimed.

KEY WEST, Fla., - Police in Key West helped to rescue a woman who had become stuck in a giant banyan tree. Officer Scott Standerwick worked alongside firefighters to rescue the woman, who happened to be a Key West local, from the tree. "They popped her out like a cork," a Key West Police Department spokesperson told ABC 10. The woman had reportedly been trying to climb the tree before she became stuck.

SEATTLE - Police and firefighters spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday morning trying to coax down a man who climbed to the top of downtown Seattle's iconic 80-foot-tall Sequoia tree and has refused to come down. Crews brought a ladder truck to the scene, at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Stewart Street, after receiving reports of a man stuck in the upper branches of the tall tree, just after 11:30 a.m. Tuesday. The fire truck's ladder was extended to within a few feet of the man, then negotiators climbed up and tried to speak with him. So far he...

A Chicago-area driver, whom police suspect was drunk (you’ll never guess HOW), crashed into a tree and wedged it into her engine bay. But instead of stopping like a normal human being might have, the trunk driver inexplicably just kept on going. The Roselle Police Department posted two pictures on its Facebook page depicting a car with a 15-foot tree sticking out of its grille. The car had been driving in suburban Chicago late at night on the 23rd of January when another driver spotted it and called the cops. An officer did eventually spot the car, possibly from a...

Scientists have grown a tree from what may be the oldest seed ever germinated. The new sapling was sprouted from a 2,000-year-old date palm excavated in Masada, the site of a cliff-side fortress in Israel where ancient Jews are said to have killed themselves to avoid capture by Roman invaders. Dubbed the "Methuselah Tree" after the oldest person in the Bible, the new plant has been growing steadily, and after 26 months, the tree was nearly four feet (1.2 meters) tall.

I want one!

In New York City, even sidewalk space is coveted real estate. Street vendors sometimes spend a fortune or languish for years on waiting lists to acquire one of the permits that allow them to sell goods in tightly regulated locations. But once a year, there's an exception, laid out in an artfully worded city ordinance: During the month of December, anyone may sell "coniferous trees" just about anywhere - no license required. It's a rare tree-for-all. Peddlers flock in from across North America. Big trucks carrying huge loads of trees arrive in the dead of night. Stands selling coniferous trees...

It came down to the addition of a single word for the a tree lighting ceremony, but that word carried enough significance for borough Councilwoman Charlene Storey to resign. Minutes after the council voted 4-2 Thursday night to change the name of the ceremony from A Tree Lighting to A Christmas Tree Lighting, the councilwoman-at-large, left the meeting. She later submitted her letter of resignation with the municipal clerk's office. "I cannot in good conscience continue to be part of a council that is exclusionary or to work with a Mayor who is such," Storey said in her letter. When...

A British tree thought to be up to 5,000 years old has started to change sex, a "rare and unusual" phenomenon not fully understood by scientists, a botanist said Monday. The Fortingall Yew, in Perthshire, central Scotland has for hundreds of years been recorded as male, but has recently begun sprouting berries, suggesting that at least part of the tree is changing gender. "It's a rare occurence ... rare and unusual and not fully understood," said Max Coleman of Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, who spotted the berries. "It's thought that there's a shift in the balance of hormone-like compounds that...

The global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere. We provide the first spatially continuous map of forest tree density at a global scale. This map reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.39 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.61 trillion in temperate regions. Biome-level trends in tree density demonstrate the importance of climate and topography in controlling local tree densities at finer scales, as well...

Every so often you will see articles warning that some species is going extinct. And usually it's not really a species -- you never hear about "leopards" going extinct, usually it's "purple dotted left handed bisexual Nepalese leopards" or some subvariety.  We are assured they are going extinct because fewer have been seen recently. But the Earth is so big, how can we really be sure that some subspecies is going extinct just because we see fewer of them? After all, only three percent of the land mass of the Earth is urbanized. Animals could easily be hidden in...

It seems that scientists were a little off in calculating the number of trees on the planet. You remember trees: they turn CO2 into oxygen and water. In fact, if you buy a “carbon credit,” you are paying to plant trees to buy an indulgence for your private jet travel -- just like Al Gore and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supposedly do. Well, all those calculations of doom over purported CO2-caused global warming may be a little more unsettled. The Wall Street Journal reports:

There are just over three trillion trees in the world, a figure that dwarfs previous estimates, according to the most comprehensive census yet of global forestation. Using satellite imagery as well as ground-based measurements from around the world, a team led by researchers at Yale University created the first globally comprehensive map of tree density. Their findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. A previous study that drew on satellite imagery estimated that the total number of trees was around 400 billion. The new estimate of 3.04 trillion is multiple times that number, bringing the ratio of trees...