Free Republic

New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez was found guilty Tuesday of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes — including 1-kilogram gold bars — in exchange for using his powerful post to enrich and protect three businessmen and the Egyptian and Qatari governments. The bombshell jury verdict was delivered in Manhattan federal court after about 12½ hours of deliberations spread over three days. It capped a nine-week trial that revealed how the senator leveraged his position as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to cater to the whims of men who showered him and his wife with...

HOUSTON — Half a million Texans are expected to suffer through sweltering heat with no electricity into early next week after Hurricane Beryl knocked out power throughout the Houston area Monday, generating anger at the region’s large utility for failing to defend the grid from a predictable summer storm. Food is spoiling in dormant refrigerators days after the Category 1 hurricane tore through power lines and utility poles. Hospitals are swarming with patients struggling with heat stroke. Businesses can’t function as residents are ordered to stay home, and many residents faced at least three or four more days of continued...

I can't even imagine what this is like! A woman in Atlanta, Georgia, was on vacation when she got a phone call from a neighbor asking if she was having her home demolished while she was away, because it was BEING DEMOLISHED. Watch the local news story and you can see the aftermath and hear homeowner Susan Hodgson tell the story: VIDEO AT LINK......... The dude tried to tell the neighbor to leave him alone, not to get in his way, and when a family member came over and asked for proof the guy realized he had come to the...

Israel bombed areas of southern Gaza where it had told Palestinians to flee to ahead of an expected ground invasion, killing dozens of people on Tuesday in attacks it says are targeted at Hamas militants that rule the besieged territory. The Hamas-run Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip said at least 500 people were killed in an explosion Tuesday that it said was caused by an Israeli airstrike on a Gaza City Hospital. If confirmed, the attack on the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City would be by far the deadliest Israeli airstrike in five wars fought since 2008.

@RepGregSteube BREAKING: 97 of my Republican colleagues joined the Democrats in voting against my amendment that would stop sending YOUR tax dollars to LEBANON. 115 of my Republican colleagues joined the Democrats in voting against my amendment that would stop sending YOUR tax dollars to IRAQ. Year after year we send millions of American dollars to corrupt and failed states that can’t figure out a way to keep your money out of terrorists’ hands. How can sending money to places that are overrun by terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and ISIS possibly be in America’s interest?! All while our border is...

If you think back to when you were young (or even just back to a few years ago), it's obvious that many things in life that were once for the masses have become a whole lot more expensive. Well, redditor u/Lattethecoffeaddict asked, "What was ruined by rich people?" People had a lot of thoughts because the comments came pouring in, and here's some of what they had to say. 1. "Thrift shopping. I used to thrift a lot, but it's been ruined. I used to be able to go thrifting and come back with three new work shirts and a...

Relatives of those killed in a Loyalist massacre in Derry 50 years ago today will gather tonight to remember their loved ones. Charles Moore, Frank McCarron, Michael McGinley, Barney Kelly and Charlie McCafferty were shot dead as they enjoyed a drink in Annie's in the Top of the Hill area of Derry, just five days before Christmas in December 1972. There will be a special Remembrance Mass at 6pm this evening (Tuesday) at St Columb’s Church on Chapel Road. It was from this same church that some of the victims were laid to rest following Requiem Mass in the days...

While accepting her award for Best Director at this weekend’s Critics Choice Awards, Jane Campion began her acceptance speech beautifully… And then she said one sentence too many, and managed to drag two of the world’s greatest athletes into some needless drama. Venus and Serena Williams, also in attendance at the award show since the film about their father, King Richard, was nominated, at first received glowing praise from Campion in her speech. “It’s absolutely stunning to be here tonight among so many incredible women,” Campion said, praising Halle Berry, and then the Williams sisters. “What an honor to be...

In the superheated market for batteries, promising lab developments often get overhyped by startups. ‘Liar, liar, battery supplier.’ Given what’s at sake, it’s easy to chalk up exaggerated claims about new battery breakthroughs to the tech industry’s propensity for hyperbole and grandstanding. A typical example: Researchers invent a tweak to a type of battery that has long shown promise but has never come close to commercialization. That gets spun into claims that an electric car with a 2,000-mile range is within reach. “People like a breakthrough, but when we write papers we try to avoid using these kinds of words,”...

How did neoconservatives get their name?It started out as an insult. The founders of the movement were liberal intellectuals who became disenchanted with the direction of the American left during the 1960s and 1970s. Their original goal was to reform the Democratic Party from within. But mainstream leftists scoffed at these people who called themselves new, or neo-, liberals, saying it was more apt to call them neo-conservatives. The first neocons soon embraced the name. To them the prefix highlighted the fact that while they had once been leftists, they now had a new orientation. Irving Kristol, the godfather of...

Today was my first time experiencing the frozen door handle of doom. @elonmusk can we add an option to open the door from the app? pic.twitter.com/t8eBWnWFZD — Matt Smith (@MatchasmMatt) February 5, 2022 How do you drive a frozen Tesla.

Conservatives have enjoyed Elon Musk's behavior in recent weeks, blasting Elizabeth Warren, opposing lockdowns, and insulting CNN, but the giddiness spewing from conservatives about Musk is foolish. To those embracing Elon Musk's political conversion, remember that Musk has been one of the most prominent advocates of the continuous scam known as climate change. Like Bill Gates and Al Gore, Musk is an extremely wealthy man who fattens his own pockets through propagating climate change. And like those other rich guys, Musk doesn't refrain from using private jets to fly around the world to save it. In 2018, Elon Musk reportedly...

The Hallucigenia sparsa. (Caron et al., Proc. Royal Soc. B, 2013) We sort of take for granted the depictions of prehistoric beasties illustrated in the books of our childhood. But piecing together Earth's murky past is a lot harder than it sounds. Scientists have to rely on fragmentary bones, weathered footprints, impressions in rock – these don't always capture the fine details of the complex, living, breathing animal that passed through or died there. Sometimes, while doing this painstaking work, researchers get it wrong. And not just a little wrong! Here are some of our favorite fossil flubs, and what...

According to a new study, the COVID-19 pandemic may be harming the mental health and career prospects of female physicians, especially those with children and physician spouses. The study, published in JAMA Network Open, looked at gender differences in work-family responsibilities and emotional well-being among early-career physicians (N=215) since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.1 Elena Frank, PhD, and colleagues found that about 1 in 4 of the women surveyed were primarily responsible for providing childcare or schooling compared with less than 1% of the men. Similarly, 31.4% of women said they were likely to perform the majority of day-to-day...

It was buried during the Thanksgiving weekend, but CNN managed to commit a random act of journalism, detailing some new climate data that was found to show that the Earth warming actually began many decades earlier than stated. This revelation manages to both throw off climate modeling, as well as make the claim that mankind’s technology was the root cause of…well, everything going wrong.Joining in the fray now is NBC News, which has also surprised by delivering another inconvenient truth. A new report shows that the need for more raw nickel ore – driven by the explosive market for lithium...

Over the automotive industry’s 100+ year history, companies such as Ford, Chevrolet, and Mercedes-Benz have produced some truly iconic cars.Whether they’re designed for excitement, luxury, or just simple transportation, Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu notes that these vehicles offer a set of features that make them highly desirable to consumers. The most successful models will undergo numerous revisions over time, sometimes sticking around for many decades.To learn more, this graphic from Alan’s Factory Outlet lists the 35 vehicles with the longest production runs of all time. Here are the top 10 below.As we can see, successful models come in many shapes...

A pair of economists, one with the University of Calgary, the other, the University of California, along with a civil engineer from Carnegie Mellon University, is suggesting in a Comment piece in the journal Nature, that electric vehicles (EVs) need to be lighter if they are to replace gasoline-powered vehicles. In their paper, Blake Shaffer, Maximilian Auffhammer and Constantine Samaras suggest that the added weight of EVs makes them less safe and less efficient and therefore less economical. In their paper, the authors note that climate change has put EVs on a path to replace cars powered by gasoline. But...

A sizable blast has occurred in the Emam Bargha Ptima mosque in Kandahar, Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported. The explosion, caused by a suicide bomber, left at least 32 dead, a local health official said. Hafiz Abdul Hai Abbas, the director for provincial health directorate, told The Washington Post that the attack also wounded 45 others. “Dead bodies remain under the ruined mosque,” Abbas said, noting that the death toll is expected to rise. The bombing took place during Friday services, when the mosque would be at its most crowded. No group has yet taken responsibility for the incident. However,...

I can almost see Tacitus (55-117AD) weep as he wrote of Rome’s transition from a free republic to a despotic empire. Tacitus: After Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, and the people with cheap corn, he slowly concentrated in himself the powers of the senate, the magistrates, and laws. In this, he was unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle or been murdered in the proscriptions. The remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion. So aggrandized were they by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present...

A new Rasmussen Reports survey revealed that only 25% of American adults believe electric cars are practical. The survey also found that 52% of Americans think electric cars are not practical, and another 23% said they were not sure. Seven years ago, a similar survey found that only 19% of Americans believed electric cars are practical.