Free Republic

On Wednesday, Netflix announced its subscriber base in the United States declined for the first time since 2011. ... Netflix blames the decline on its most recent price increase... Perhaps there’s another factor that Netflix is missing, or evening ignoring .... For more than a year now, Netflix has made some controversial moves that undeniably alienated a large portion of its U.S. subscribers: conservatives. Back in March of 2018, Netflix named former Susan Rice, the former National Security Adviser and Ambassador to the United Nations under Barack Obama, to their Board of Directors. ... Rice’s placement on the Board of...

Transgender adults may be more likely to have unhealthy habits and medical issues that negatively impact their quality of life than people whose gender identity matches what it says on their birth certificates, a U.S. study suggests. Researchers examined survey data from 3,075 transgender adults as well as 719,567 adults who are cisgender, meaning their gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Compared to cisgender Americans, transgender individuals were more likely to be sedentary, current smokers, and uninsured, researchers report in JAMA Internal Medicine. Transgender people were also 30 percent more likely to report being in “fair”...

Americans cast votes on Tuesday to decide whether Donald Trump’s Republicans maintain their grip on the U.S. Congress, or if Democrats gain the power to slow the president’s agenda after a divisive campaign marked by clashes over race, immigration and trade. The first national elections since Trump captured the White House in a stunning 2016 upset are a referendum on the polarizing president and a test of whether Democrats can turn the energy of the liberal anti-Trump resistance into victories at the ballot box. The Democrats have a good chance of winning at least the U.S. House of Representatives, but...

A new study out of Harvard—the first randomized controlled experiment designed to examine the effects of trigger warnings on individual resilience—may indicate that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were right about trigger warnings.In the fall of 2015, Greg Lukianoff, First Amendment Lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (for which I work), and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business, published an article in The Atlantic. In it, they detailed how college campuses may inadvertently promote mental habits identical to the “cognitive distortions” that cognitive behavioral...

Congressional investigators find irregularities in FBI's handling of Clinton email case

In a wide ranging interview with The New York Times, Trump threw his Attorney General Jeffrey Sessions under the bus for deciding to recuse himself from the Russia probe. A decision Trump called “very unfair” to the president. But, maybe even more shocking, he claims that FBI Director James Comey tried to hold the salacious dossier over his head, in order to gain “leverage” over him. It had previously been reported that when administration officials briefed the president at Trump Tower in January, Comey pulled him aside and told him about the details of the now infamous dossier which included...

A new study by the Wesleyan Media Project has found that the 2016 presidential campaign run by Hillary Clinton is without a doubt one of the worst-run political operations in years. Interestingly, the directors of the study dispute the argument that “advertising doesn’t matter” in elections. Clinton’s failure to advertise in certain key states, they argue, was the biggest reason for her defeat by Donald Trump.

Blue lives matter — now as much as ever. It was Dec. 20, 2014. As New York City Police Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu sat in their squad car in Brooklyn, suddenly and without warning, they were ambushed by gun-wielding assassin Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28. The madman had driven from Baltimore to the city, ranting on Instagram that he planned to put “wings on pigs” to avenge the deaths at the hands of police of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. The deranged murderer then fled into a nearby subway station, where he committed suicide by gun as cops closed in....

Snow and powerful winds swept into the Northeast on Monday as a storm predicted to grow into a major blizzard prompted mass transit shutdowns, highway closures, thousands of airline flight cancellations and a ban on driving in New York City and on major roads across the region. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the closure of New York City’s subway and bus system as of 11 p.m. Monday, the first such closure since Superstorm Sandy hit the region in the fall of 2012. With the closure of all mass transit, and the citywide driving ban as of 11 p.m., Cuomo’s...

Conservatives are growing worried, and Democrats gleeful, about Obama’s lead in the polls, basically for the same reason: it is late in the season (or so it seems), and the incumbent president has a lead. That is a good thing for Obama. Perhaps, but three fundamental points need to be kept in mind.First, Obama is weaker than previous incumbents who went on to victory. When we are looking through history, the only poll we can really utilize is Gallup if we want an apples-to-apples comparison. For better or worse, Gallup is the only polling organization consistently doing polling of registered voters...

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the international media have been unhesitant in criticizing the Jewish state on almost everything. This has evolved into a media culture by itself, to the point that many internationally renowned newspapers would have a button labelled “Israel” or “Israeli-Arab conflict” on their Web sites including very little positive content about Israel. Media hostility toward Israel has been mainly focused on its military operations and, in more quiet times, on the living conditions of the Palestinians in Israel. Amazingly enough, the international media, and particularly the Western ones, pay very little attention to...

Failing to refute charges that Bush lied us into war has hurt our country. Seven years ago today, in a speech on the Iraq war, Sen. Ted Kennedy fired the first shot in an all-out assault on President George W. Bush's integrity. "All the evidence points to the conclusion," Kennedy said, that the Bush administration "put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth." Later that day Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told reporters Mr. Bush needed "to be forthcoming" about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Thus began a shameful episode in our political...

Boulder, Colo. -- The Earth has about 16.2 million square miles of forests but scientists say research is needed to understand the forests' impact on climate change. "As politicians and the general public become more aware of climate change, there will be greater interest in legislative policies to mitigate global warming," said atmospheric scientist Gordon Bonan of the National Science Foundation's National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "Forests have been proposed as a possible solution, so it is imperative that we understand fully how forests influence climate." The complex relationships within forests both add and subtract from the...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - While John McCain is practically assured the Republican presidential nomination, many party members are having a hard time accepting him -- and showing it with symbolic votes against him in primary contests. The Republican nomination battle has been all but decided for over two months. Still, some Republicans used the April 22 Pennsylvania primary and last week's votes in Indiana and North Carolina to register their unhappiness with the de facto victor. Some vote for libertarian Texan Ron Paul, who has refused to quit the race and has racked up more than one million votes, according to...

Domestication Of The Donkey May Have Taken A Long TimeAn international group of researchers has found evidence for the earliest transport use of the donkey and the early phases of donkey domestication, suggesting the process of domestication may have been slower and less linear than previously thought. (Credit: iStockphoto/Andrea Laurita) ScienceDaily (Mar. 13, 2008) — An international group of researchers has found evidence for the earliest transport use of the donkey and the early phases of donkey domestication, suggesting the process of domestication may have been slower and less linear than previously thought. Based on a study of 10 donkey...

Fibres may be more important than viral load in determining transmission rates. A component found in semen can enhance HIV transmission by as much as 100,000-fold, researchers have found. The results, if verified in a clinical setting, could identify a new way to help prevent the spread of the disease. "I think this is tremendous," says Christopher Pilcher, an HIV researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not affiliated with the study. "It raises a lot of really fundamental questions about how HIV is transmitted." Over 80% of HIV infections are acquired through sexual intercourse, primarily via...

NEW YORK -- A former Nassau County judge pleaded guilty Friday to trying to launder more than $400,000 for members of the Genovese crime family. David Gross, 45, admitted he agreed to try to launder the cash he knew was the result of a jewelry heist. What Gross did not know is that one of the men he was making the deal with was an undercover FBI agent. Federal prosecutors said Gross planned to keep up to 20 percent of all cash he agreed to launder. He also agreed to try to sell more than $280,000 worth of stolen diamonds....

Berlin (dpa) - Police have arrested a 32-year-old Berlin woman, on suspicion of murdering her own daughter in a busy park in Germany's latest case of shocking violence against children. Residents found the body of Amani, 8, still warm and sprawled on a park bench Saturday in the city's Wilmersdorf neighbourhood. A prosecutor, Michael Grunwald, said the mother refused to answer questions about the child's death and the murder weapon had not been found yet. Police said an autopsy showed Amani died of injuries to the throat. They were not specific if her throat was cut or crushed. Amani, who...

Enter the Shooter Alley strip club in Doraville, Ga., and you'll find plenty of naked young women entertaining their male clients, writhing and shaking only inches away from their faces. It was there that two dancers, Ashley Miller (known as "Adrienne") and Heather Johnston (who went by "Charlie"), met recently and became fast friends. The pairing proved ill-fated. Both were reportedly on a destructive tear. Johnston, 19, was heavily using drugs, according to a fellow stripper at the club. And Miller, 18, had struck up with a reputed drug dealer. The two reached a nadir last week when they robbed...

Its scope was ruthlessly ambitious, causing destruction officials say would have been "unimaginable." The alleged plot to take down several U.S.-bound planes with liquid explosives appears to be unlike anything the world has seen in years. Counterterrorism officials said Thursday the London plot appears to bear the fingerprints of al-Qaida, and may have been "the Big One" they have been dreading since Sept. 11, 2001, particularly as the five-year anniversary of the carnage approaches. More than 20 people have been jailed, terror threat levels have been raised to some of their highest levels, and hundreds of flights have been canceled...