Free Republic

Peloton reached a settlement with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission Thursday over its defective treadmills that caused injuries and the company’s failure to report the concerns to the commission. Peloton recalled all of its treadmills in 2021 after the death of a child and dozens of other injuries occurred while using the product. In the commission’s press release published Thursday, it announced that Peloton agreed to pay a $19 million civil penalty because the company “knowingly failed” to report that its Tread+ treadmill had a “substantial” hazard that could serious injury to the consumer. Peloton received reports of injuries...

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Shubham Chandra knows how dangerous the coronavirus can be: He lost his dad during the pandemic. So when he cleared customs at Newark Liberty International Airport and saw people offering anonymous COVID-19 testing, he was happy to volunteer. “It’s a minimum amount of effort to help a lot of people,” said the 27-year-old New York City man, who had just stepped off a plane from Cancun, Mexico. The airport testing is part of the government’s early warning system for detecting new variants, which began expanding recently in the wake of a COVID-19 surge in China.

Climate change -- and the drastic need to curb greenhouse gas emissions -- has been at the forefront of international conversation in 2022. Governments and businesses this past year have devoted more resources to getting countries to net-zero emissions by 2030 by enacting legislation to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and encourage the use and development of renewable energy. This effort is to avoid the disastrous outcomes scientists have been predicting for decades about global warming. Despite those efforts, the impact of climate change was evident in the number of devastating natural disasters that plagued the planet this year, according...