Free Republic

We already learned that a majority of Americans find Hunter Biden’s sweetheart deal with Ukranian energy giant Burisma to be problematic at best. Despite nearly all of the mainstream media providing as much cover for the Bidens as possible, you have to wonder how everyone is feeling about the unfolding story of a very similar series of deals that the younger Biden landed in China. The closer you look at Hunter’s incredibly “fortunate” affairs in that nation, the worse it smells. And it also raises questions about Joe Biden’s very friendly attitude toward an increasingly aggressive country that’s rife...

If Democrats hope to narrow the field in their presidential primary, they’ll have to look past Nevada’s caucuses. With a week to go — and with early voting set to start today — six candidates now poll in double digits in the latest Review-Journal/AARP survey. Bernie Sanders leads with 25%, but Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren are not far behind, with Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar all getting 10% or more as well.Anyone else see the train wreck coming? Sanders led the pack with 25 percent of respondents expressing support, followed by former Vice President Joe Biden...

LONDON, England, February 14, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – A UK High Court judge ruled today that it was “unlawful” for police to investigate a man for writing tweets critical of men who say they’re ‘women’ and to record it as a “hate incident.” Mr. Justice Julian Knowles stated that for a member of Humberside Police to go to the workplace of Harry Miller and upbraid him for his political opinions was a “disproportionate interference" with Miller’s freedom of expression. Last January, Humberside police officers went to Miller’s business to investigate a third-party complaint that Miller had posted “transphobic” tweets... When Miller...

What is Covid-19...? It is a member of the coronavirus family that has never been encountered before. Like other coronaviruses, it has come from animals. Many of those initially infected either worked or frequently shopped in the Huanan seafood wholesale market in the centre of the Chinese city, which also sold live and newly slaughtered animals. Is the virus being transmitted from one person to another? China’s national health commission has confirmed human-to-human transmission, and there have been such transmissions elsewhere... Why is this worse than normal influenza, and how worried are the experts? We don’t yet know how dangerous...

The Bureau of Land Management has announced plans to fund 11,000 miles (17,703 kilometers) of strategic fuel breaks in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada and Utah in an effort to help control wildfires. The fuel breaks are intended to prop up fire mitigation efforts and help protect firefighters, communities and natural resources, The Oregonian reported Saturday. According to the BLM, wildfires are becoming bigger and more frequent across the Great Basin states. Between 2009 and 2018, more than 13.5 million acres of BLM land burned in the project area.

San Francisco's mayor [London Breed, 45] has admitted to having an affair with the city's disgraced former homelessness chief, as well as accepting thousands of dollars in unreported gifts from him. The man known as 'Mr Clean'   [Mohammed Nuru, San Francisco's former Director of Public Works], who was tasked with cleaning up the streets of San Francisco and tackling its homelessness crisis, was charged with one count of wire fraud for allegedly attempting to bribe an airport commissioner to win a bid for a restaurant contract at San Francisco International Airport.

Andrew Napolitano, who is hardly a cheerleader for Team Trump, told Tucker Carlson Thursday evening that Tomeka Hart, the woman who served as foreperson on the jury during Roger Stone's trial, could face jail time if it's determined she lied about her bias when she was selected to serve on the jury.... ....Tomeka Hart's Twitter page, which hasn't been active since November 2019, is full of anti-Trump tweets and links. It's obvious this woman was a hardcore partisan who was set on convicting Stone and lied in order to get on the jury to ensure that happened.

A standalone security update released as part of the February Patch Tuesday cycle has created headaches for some owners of PCs running Windows 10. After investigating reports of those issues, Microsoft has yanked KB4524244 from its update servers. Update 15-Feb-2020: The mess gets messier: Judging from a series of cryptic tweets by security experts, this update and its revocation are tied to a situation involving Kaspersky Rescue Disk and a signed bootloader that can circumvent the Secure Boot feature that is the bedrock of security on modern PCs. I'm still trying to figure out the sequence of events here. Stay...

Scientists examining the genomes of West Africans have detected signs that a mysterious extinct human species interbred with our own species tens of thousands of years ago in Africa, the latest evidence of humankind's complicated genetic ancestry. The study indicated that present-day West Africans trace a substantial proportion, some 2% to 19%, of their genetic ancestry to an extinct human species – what the researchers called a "ghost population." "We estimate interbreeding occurred approximately 43,000 years ago, with large intervals of uncertainty," said University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) human genetics and computer science professor Sriram Sankararaman, who led the...

Both the corrupt democrats and corrupt republicans will do anything to get Trump out of office so they don’t lose their lifetime cushy corrupt jobs or end up in jail! Their impeachment coup is another way Dems showing just how desperate they are. But ait the end it could turn very bad for the people that planed the coup against President Trump. President Donald Trump last month sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a raging, six-page letter in which he tore into the impeachment process which was underway at the time, calling it an “illegal, partisan attempted coup.” He wasn’t far...

What are the symptoms caused by the virus from Wuhan in China, how does it spread, and should you call a doctor? How to protect yourself from infection It is a member of the coronavirus family that has never been encountered before. Like other coronaviruses, it has come from animals. Many of those initially infected either worked or frequently shopped in the Huanan seafood wholesale market in the centre of the Chinese city, which also sold live and newly slaughtered animals. Have there been other coronaviruses? New and troubling viruses usually originate in animal hosts. Ebola and flu are other...

News that billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg is considering a run for the presidency is no surprise. He has toyed with the idea in the past, most notably during the 2008 cycle.As potential presidential timber, he ticks most of the boxes. Having served for twelve years as New York mayor, he knows something about politics. He left office moreover with an enhanced reputation for can-do pragmatism and general low-key likability. That said, his record is less than perfect. He strongly backed the Iraq war in 2003, for instance, and the following year he endorsed the now toxic George W. Bush for...

SANTA FE – On the surface, there’s been little debate and no formal action on abortion-related issues during this year’s 30-day legislative session. But the uneasy stalemate could be broken after this year’s election cycle, and both abortion opponents and abortion rights advocates have traveled to the Roundhouse to rally support for their respective positions – and keep the pressure on lawmakers. Then there’s Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who recently told attendees at a Planned Parenthood event that a long-dormant state abortion ban will be “gone” as soon as there are enough votes in the Senate to pass a repeal...

'Pope Francis said yesterday the Amazon is his, the world's, everyone's. Well, the pope may be Argentinian, but God is Brazilian.'February 14, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has seemingly criticized Pope Francis for asserting in his exhortation released this week that the Amazon region belongs to people other than the nations among which the territory is spread. Speaking yesterday, Bolsonaro said: “Pope Francis said yesterday the Amazon is his, the world’s, everyone’s. Well, the pope may be Argentinian, but God is Brazilian.” In section 5 of Querida Amazonia, published on Wednesday, Pope Francis stated that he was addressing...

SANTA FE — A prospective candidate in the race for the 3rd Congressional District seat who was disqualified by the New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office for using the wrong form to collect petition signatures is vowing to contest the decision through legal means. In an inculpatory statement provided to the Journal, the campaign for Republican Anise Golden-Morper accused Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse-Oliver, a Democrat, of playing politics and using “dirty tricks” to eliminate the leading fundraiser among GOP candidates. “Anise is being targeted by a hyper-partisan witch hunt similar to what just happened to President Trump in Washington...

The next two weeks are crucial to suppress the epidemic, says Cardinal John TongThe threat of spreading the coronavirus has forced Catholic officials in Hong Kong to suspend all church programs for the next two weeks and cancel the Ash Wednesday liturgy that marks the beginning of the Lent season. Cardinal John Tong, the apostolic administrator of Hong Kong, said the “disappointing” decision had been taken “because the next two weeks will be a crucial time to suppress the epidemic.” The diocese has decided to suspend all public Masses on Sundays and weekdays from Feb. 15-28 and to cancel the...

The three Louisiana churches went up in flames in a span of 10 days, each doused in gasoline and torched with oily shop rags in the middle of the night. Each Baptist congregation was predominantly black, causing church leaders to fear that white supremacists may target their parish next. But as the fears swirled, the arsonist, 22-year-old Holden Matthews, was busy planning his next album cover, according to text messages obtained by prosecutors He burned down the three churches in St. Landry Parish, federal prosecutors said Monday, because he wanted “to raise his profile as a ‘Black Metal’ musician.” Matthews,...

The world knows Kirk Douglas as Spartacus, and as one of the greatest movie stars of the greatest generation. I know him as my hevruta — the Aramaic word for study partner. For almost 25 years I met with Kirk Douglas, born Issur Danielovich, once a week to study Torah. After we read through the Bible and hit up all the greats — “That’s a role I was born to play,” he said of King David — we moved on to other books: the Mishna for rabbinical wisdom; “The Prophet” by Khalil Gibran; Walt Whitman’s poetry; and modern theology from...

Socialist candidate says execution device a ‘symbol of the work we have to do’  A Democratic Senate candidate has unveiled the guillotine as her campaign’s new logo to symbolize the “very serious problems with our government” that must be addressed “before a violent uprising becomes inevitable.”Yes, really.Bre Kidman, the Senate candidate of Maine challenging Susan Collins in November, and a self-described “non-binary” socialist, said the execution apparatus was the perfect symbol to represent her party’s upcoming war with the Republicans and the wealthy.“We’re not going to start a guillotine in Monument Square (in Portland) and start beheading people,” Kidman told the Portland...

China’s Communist Party uses “corporate America [and] Wall Street” as proxies in its war against America, said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding, author of Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, in a Friday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Ed Martin. China procures the political support of American companies and institutions through financial incentives, explained Spalding, who reflected on his time in the Trump administration as a national security advisor to President Donald Trump. “The real challenge that the...