Free Republic

Barack Obama may be the pride of University of Chicago, but a lot of heavy hitters there are strongly opposing current plans for his library. More than 100 U of C faculty members who say they support the location of an Obama Center near the campus nevertheless are opposing plans for it on economic and preservation grounds. They say the center’s proposed location lacks room to jump-start economic development, and its footprint will consume parts of historic Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance. “Not only are public lands being given to a private entity but the public will pay to...

Jeff Bezos, the newly minted richest man in the world, is now the wealthiest person of all-time after his fortune soared to new heights. Shares in Amazon hit an all-time high on Monday, which lifted Bezos’ net worth to a record $105.1billion, according to Bloomberg. That figure eclipses the $100billion worth that Microsoft boss Bill Gates amassed back in April 1999. In the last 12 months, Amazon’s stock has climbed by nearly 57 per cent. So far in 2018, the e-commerce giant’s shares have jumped 6.6 per cent. Amazon continued its dominance over the recent holiday period, grabbing 89 per...

A week-long stay by the University of Wisconsin football team at a Florida resort owned by President Trump is providing new potential fodder for a lawsuit alleging that the president's private business has put him in violation of the Constitution. During a visit to Miami to play in last month's Orange Bowl, the University of Wisconsin — a public university — put up about 250 players, athletic department staff, senior university officials and board members at the Trump National Doral golf resort. The university's stay may provide new ammunition to the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia, which...

A licensed firearm owner from the Outback area was arrested after local police found that he had far more guns in his home than he had registered. Police in New South Wales reported that an unidentified 56-year-old man was arrested in the Cobar area, a small copper mining town about 450 miles northwest of Sydney, on weapons charges. Officers visited the man on New Year’s Eve for the purpose of conducting an audit of his registered guns. “During a subsequent search of the property, officers located and seized 118 firearms, including revolvers, rifles, shotguns and shortened rifles,” said the agency....

Garbage is piling up on city streets across all five boroughs after Thursday’s winter storm, and many residents complain their trash hasn’t been picked up since Christmas. As CBS2’s Lisa Rozner reported, the Department of Sanitation says around 40,000 tons of garbage has gone uncollected in the last week. Monday’s trash sat on the curb, adding to mounds of bombogenesis snow and even more garbage dating back to the holidays. “It’s grungy and it’s dirty and it stinks,” Murray Hill resident Dan Kaufman said, “just like this administration.” “It’s horrible, this is disgusting,” another Murray Hill resident told WCBS 880’s...

January 9, 2018What, Indeed, Is the Quran?Rev. James V. Schall, S.J. Most people know that the Quran (Qur’an, Koran) is the holy book of the Muslim religion, hence of about a fifth of the world’s population. But knowing this much, we still must grasp the peculiar nature of this famous book, if, indeed, because of its origins, it can be called precisely a “book.” If we ask just when this book was written, or even, who exactly wrote it, we soon run into difficult issues.First, we have to ask: “What do Muslims think the book is?” Then we have to...

Cardinal Caffarra “Suffered Terribly” Because of Pope Francis An unnamed ex-journalist who is a Catholic, writes on Marco Tosatti's blog (January 6) that the late Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, one of the four Dubia cardinals, “suffered terribly” because Pope Francis had not deemed him worthy of an answer. The ex-journalist adds, “The light-headed Bergoglio, who makes phone-calls to the right and to the left, who gives interviews like an actor, who appears at the birthdays of prelates close to him, who does not hesitate to take pen and paper in order to punish Cardinal Robert Sarah, never found half-an-hour to speak...

[T]ime has often been considered as the fourth dimension of space, with three spatial dimensions where one can go up or down, left or right, or forward or backward. But two new papers published in the journal Nature suggest that there might be a fourth spatial dimension, one that could possibly suggest previously undiscovered directions of motion. As detailed in a report from Gizmodo, two separate teams of researchers created their own two-dimensional setups, with one team using ultra-cold atoms and the other one working with waves of light. While the studies produced varying results, the findings complemented each other,...

PHOENIX (KSAZ) - Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced he is running for U.S. Senate.

James Franco’s Golden Globe lost some of its luster after several women went on Twitter and accused him of inappropriate behavior. Almost immediately after the actor scooped up a trophy for "The Disaster Artist" Sunday, on a night the industry spoke out against sexual harassment, Franco came under attack. Actress Violet Paley claimed the actor once sexually assaulted her and tried to lure her 17-year-old friend to his hotel room.

Republican-led committees reportedly are investigating whether FBI officials once involved in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe helped leak to the media, based in part on text messages they exchanged mentioning news outlets. The Hill reported that House and Senate panels are looking anew at the text messages exchanged between agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page, who were romantically involved and exchanged anti-Trump views in their now-public texts. They also discussed news articles and strategized on how to react. One set of texts in late October 2016 suggests they knew about a Wall Street Journal article in advance. After Page alerted...

Stedman Graham misheard question about Oprah running and DIDN'T mean she 'would absolutely' go for the White House, claims best friend Gayle King When Oprah Winfrey's longtime partner Stedman Graham said she 'would absolutly' seek the White House if prompted, he misheard the question Gayle King, Winfrey's best friend, explained on CBS This Morning that Graham told her he thought the reporter asked him if she would make a good president Graham's comments added fuel to the fire that Winfrey might launch a presidential bid in 2020 to take on President Trump, another entertainer On CBS This Morning, King said...

"A sanctuary in New York with extensive expertise in managing and caring for dogs like Rusty has agreed to take Rusty at no expense to the City of Dallas or its residents. Once at the sanctuary, Rusty will not be adopted out but will live out the remainder of his life in a safe and positive environment."

NASA’s AIM spacecraft is monitoring a vast ring of electric-blue clouds circling high above Antarctica. These are noctilucent clouds (NLCs), made of ice crystals frosting specks of “meteor smoke” in the mesosphere 83 km above the frozen continent. Here is an animation from the past week: This is the season for southern noctilucent clouds. Every year around this time, summertime water vapor billows up into the high atmosphere over Antarctica, providing moisture needed to form icy clouds at the edge of space. Sunlight shining through the high clouds produces an electric-blue glow, which AIM can observe from Earth orbit. “The...

Newscom The U.S. government uses secret evidence to build criminal cases, according to a report released today by Human Rights Watch. The report offers one of the most comprehensive looks yet at "parallel construction," a tactic where federal law enforcement hides classified or sensitive methods from courts by building a parallel chain of evidence after the fact. The report shows that numerous federal law enforcement agencies send requests to local police to find reasons to perform traffic stops and searches on criminal suspects. Unless something goes wrong, defendants will never know the origins of the government's case against them. Although...

In their recent ( article in The Hill), John Solomon and Alison Spann reported on the Obama Justice Department’s slow-walk investigation of Moscow’s “bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States.” Obama administration figures involved in the 2009-15 investigation include Robert Mueller, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe — all of whom are involved in some fashion in the current investigation of President (Donald Trump’s) alleged collusion with Russia.Despite extensive information as early as 2009 that Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm and that Russian nuclear officials...

A Japanese astronaut who is living on the International Space Station says he has grown 9cm (3.5in) since arriving there just over three weeks ago. Norishige Kanai wrote on social media he was worried he would not fit into the seat of the Russian Soyuz vehicle that is due to bring him home in June. Astronauts grow an average of between two and five centimetres in space. This is because of the absence of gravity which allows the vertebrae in their spines to spread apart. Mr Kanai tweeted: "Good morning, everybody. I have a major announcement today. We had our...

Pray For the Peace of Jerusalem Meditating Upon The Names and Attributes of God 

"Refuge (Stronghold)" (Old Testament) Nahum 1:7 7 The Lord is good,     a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in him, (End of Scripture Passage) 



"Refuge (Stronghold)" There is a hidden treasure in this Passage. It is enough to say that God is Our Stronghold. That, in itself, is Wonderful. How Comforting it is to know that he is a place where we are safe, where we can be sheltered from the enemy, and be able to make a stand, as in...

As the stock market soars to new highs, here's some sobering statistics to consider. The stock market is at an all-time high but Americans Owe More, Save Less, and are Poorer Than in Decades. Negative Wealth Percentage On the Rise Net Worth Going Nowhere Sobering Stats A greater share of Americans have more debt than money in the bank than at any point since 1962, according to Deutsche Bank economist Torsten Slok.30.4% of US families have negative net worth despite the recovery in housing and the stock market.Median net worth is below where it was in 1989. But perhaps the...

On December 19, an Amtrak train in Washington State killed three people and injured 100 others when it derailed and crashed into traffic lanes on a nearby highway. The day before, Atlanta's international airport suffered a disastrous power outage: the whole airport, the world’s busiest, went dark for 11 hours. Thousands of flights were disrupted. For many hours nobody in authority attempted to explain—or even seemed able to explain—what had happened. Both cases have been used to bolster claims that the US federal government needs to spend more on infrastructure. In the wake of the Washington derailment, President Trump quickly...