Free Republic

SEATTLE (AP) — At first, Henry Bridger II supported Kshama Sawant, Seattle’s combative socialist city councilmember. A liberal voter in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in an extremely liberal city, he liked her fresh outlook and support for a $15 minimum wage. Seven years later, Bridger is leading an effort to recall Sawant. With ballots due Tuesday night in Seattle’s Third District, the results could further shift power in the Northwest’s largest city and deal another setback to leftist activists who saw business-friendly candidates win a council seat and the mayor’s office in last month’s general election. At stake...

Switzerland has just legalized a new way to die by assisted suicide. The country’s medical review board has just given authorization for use of the Sarco Suicide Pod, which is a 3-D-printed portable coffin-like capsule with windows that can be transported to a tranquil place for a person’s final moments of life. Conventional assisted-suicide methods have generally involved a chemical substance. Inventor Philip Nitschke of Exit International told the website SwissInfo.ch that his “death pod” offers a different approach. “We want to remove any kind of psychiatric review from the process and allow the individual to control the method themselves,”...

The Federal Trade Commission said Monday that it is investigating the causes behind ongoing supply chain disruptions and how they are "causing serious and ongoing hardships for consumers and harming competition in the U.S. economy." The FTC said it is ordering Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, other large wholesalers and suppliers including Procter & Gamble Co., Tyson Foods and Kraft Heinz Co. “to turn over information to help study causes of empty shelves and sky-high prices.”

Nine U.S. House Democrats have asked the Justice Department to release American environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who spent decades battling Chevron Corp over pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest. The disbarred lawyer was handed a six-month imprisonment sentence in October for criminal contempt arising from a lawsuit brought by the oil company. The Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib on Monday said in a letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland that the lawyer was jailed for "petty contempt of court". "As the United States is a party to the District Court case against Mr. Donziger, we request that you...

Insider requested all flight-history data associated with four planes owned by Jeffrey Epstein. The FAA rejected the request but later provided the records in response to an unrelated request. The new FAA records include hundreds of previously unknown flights made by Epstein's jets. They corroborate Insider's reporting on Epstein's travel patterns as documented in court records and flight-signal data. A searchable database now contains 2,618 flights made by Epstein's private jets from 1995 to July 6, 2019. In January 2020, Insider asked the Federal Aviation Administration for all the agency's flight records, including departure and arrival data, associated with a...

Australia on Friday called for governments around the world to agree on "rules of the road" to fight the spread of misinformation and state-backed disinformation online. Foreign Minister Marise Payne said blocs like the Quad group - the United States, India, Japan and Australia - and global bodies like the United Nations were already working to strike a balance between harmful content and free expression online. But time was running out to agree on rules of what was permissable. "We should be starting yesterday," Payne told a panel at the Sydney Dialogue virtual event alongside Facebook Inc's global affairs boss.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told his colleagues this week top party donors were "furious" with the number of Republicans — including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, two sources familiar with his remarks tell Axios' Alayna Treene. Why it matters: Scott chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which relies on donors to help it elect candidates — and re-elect incumbents. The criticism highlighted how toxic the vote has become for the 19 Senate and 13 House Republicans who joined with Democrats to pass it. McConnell is already being lambasted by former President Trump...

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A New York trial judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the New York Times from publishing some materials concerning the conservative activist group Project Veritas, a rare step that the newspaper said violated decades of First Amendment protections for the process. The order by Justice Charles Wood of the Westchester County Supreme Court covers memos written by a Project Veritas lawyer and obtained by the Times. Wood scheduled a hearing for next Tuesday to consider a longer prohibition against publication, and whether the Times should remove references to privileged attorney-client information in a Nov. 11 article about Project...

John Cleese decided to cancel himself and call off a planned appearance at Cambridge University after a fellow attendee was "blacklisted" for doing an impersonation of Adolf Hitler. Taking to Twitter ahead of his planned appearance, Cleese, who is a Cambridge alumnus, noted that he was getting ahead of being "blacklisted" by calling off his appearance after art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon was blacklisted by Cambridge Union President Keir Bradwell for doing a mocking rant as Hitler to make a point in a debate about whether or not "good taste" exists. "I was looking forward to talking to students at the...

NEW YORK — Leaders of the city’s Black Lives Matter movement on Wednesday threatened “riots” and “bloodshed” in the streets if Mayor-elect Eric Adams reverses the abolition of the NYPD’s controversial anti-crime units. “If he thinks that they’re going to go back to the old ways of policing, then we are going to take to the streets again. There will be riots, there will be fire and there will be bloodshed because we believe in defending our people,” said Hawk Newsome, co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, after a heated meeting with Adams in Brooklyn Borough Hall.

An old video circulating on social media shows Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warning that even just “close contact” with those already afflicted with AIDS could result in infection. In the context of a conversation about childhood infections, Fauci speculates that “if the close contact of a child is a household contact, perhaps there will be a certain number of cases of individuals who are just living with and in close contact with someone with AIDS, or at risk of AIDS ----SNIP--- The clip was posted in response to Chasten Buttigieg, the...

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Monday that his agency would use a portion of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill to address racial inequities in U.S. highway design. Why it matters: Buttigieg's remarks at a press briefing come amid a broader discussion of racial and socioeconomic disparities in the U.S. and days after Congress passed the long-awaited infrastructure bill. The program, called "Reconnecting Communities," will focus on the "legacy of highway construction built through communities" and remove or repurpose infrastructure barriers. Buttigieg reiterated that whether a highway will be removed will be decided on a case-by-case basis, adding that "it's...

The world is facing the prospect of a dramatic shortfall in food production as rising energy prices cascade through global agriculture, the CEO of Norwegian fertilizer giant Yara International says. "I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest," said Svein Tore Holsether, the CEO and president of the Oslo-based company. "I’m afraid we’re going to have a food crisis." Speaking to Fortune on the sidelines of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Holsether said that the sharp rise in energy prices this summer and autumn had already...

A day after Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s monologue on opioid painkillers was leaked, conservative political commentator Jesse Watters replaced him on his talk show. Watters appeared as a guest host on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Thursday night, where he discussed how an alleged Russian claim “changed the course of United States politics.” Carlson reportedly underwent an emergency back surgery on Wednesday morning and then went to the studio to host his show at night, Fox News said. However, in a recording obtained by Motherboard, Carlson can be heard saying he took a huge amount of opioid painkillers after the...

Yahoo has shut down its services in mainland China, becoming the second Western tech giant to pull the plug on China over the past month.The company stopped providing content for mainland Chinese users as of Nov. 1, according to a statement from its official website. “Products and services remain unaffected in all other global locations,” it said.Yahoo made the decision “[i]n recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China,” a company spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email on Tuesday, adding that “Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open...

A man was enjoying the sun in his backyard in Windsor, southeast England when a passing plane dropped toilet waste over him and his garden furniture, a local councilor said during a recent meeting. "His whole garden was splattered in a very unpleasant way," Joshua Zitser Sat, October 23, 2021, 4:55 AM·2 min read A stock photo of a plane toilet. A parish councillor said that this unfortunate situation must have resulted from aircraft failure or a failure to adequately service the plane toilets. Getty Images A man was sitting in his backyard in Windsor, England, when raw sewage suddenly...

Candace Owens is back again in headlines for her unwarranted two cents and this time, Alec Baldwin is the culprit.The conservative pundit let off a few poorly timed and inconsiderate tweets regarding the incident calling Baldwin’s deadly mistake “poetic justice” for his previous criticism of Donald Trump.

A pair of alcohol-impaired elementary school P.E. teachers entered the wrong Florida home, and one eventually shot a man who lived there. Two Florida elementary school physical education teachers have been accused of entering the wrong apartment, and one of the intruders shot an actual tenant who lived there.

When Utah joined at least 25 other states in cutting off unemployed residents from federal jobless benefits early last summer, many Republicans, including Sen. Mitt Romney, thought it would drive people back to work. By Labor Day, millions of laid-off workers nationwide saw their benefits slashed when pandemic-era programs expired, but anecdotes of labor shortages persist. Plus, the number of workers quitting their job has reached near record-highs for the past five months. So, Insider caught up with Romney, whose state was one of the first to leave enhanced unemployment benefits behind, to see what he thinks is driving the...

Sean Penn and Leila George are calling it quits after one year of marriage. George, 29, filed the dissolution in Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday, TODAY confirms. The Oscar-winning actor, 61, and George, an Australian-American actor and daughter of veteran actor Vincent D’Onofrio, tied the knot last summer in a virtual “COVID wedding” after being linked together since 2016. The split marks the third time Penn’s been divorced.