Free Republic

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid. In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent...

Could a recently discovered "super-Earth" have the potential temperature and conditions to sustain life? The new exoplanet is situated "fairly close to us" -- only 137 light-years away -- and orbits within a "habitable zone," according to NASA. Astronomers say the planet, dubbed TOI-715 b, is about one and a half times the width of Earth and orbits a small, reddish star. The same system also might harbor a second, Earth-sized planet, which, if confirmed, "would become the smallest habitable-zone planet discovered by TESS [the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite] so far," NASA said in a Jan. 31 press release.

President Biden addresses the nation on the United States' response to the ongoing Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars from the White House’s Oval Office.

Chaos ensues in the White House briefing room after @JamesRosenTV asks Biden spokesman John Kirby about the explosive whistleblower allegations in the Hunter Biden criminal investigation. Kirby refuses to comment and walks out of the room.

INDIANAPOLIS — In what has been termed an “update to the City’s gun violence reduction strategy,” Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett is prepared to challenge the Indiana General Assembly in its next session to curb access to firearms in Marion County. During an address at the IMPD Academy this afternoon, Hogsett said that an ordinance will be introduced before the City-County Council June 5 that would ban semi-automatic rifles in Marion County, raise the age to purchase a firearm to 21 and rollback the 2022 law banning gun permits. A city ordinance in of itself would not affect change overnight, however,...

Federal prosecutors have considered charging Hunter Biden with three tax crimes and a charge related to a gun purchase, said two sources familiar with the matter. The possible charges are two misdemeanor counts for failure to file taxes, a single felony count of tax evasion related to a business expense for one year of taxes, and the gun charge, also a potential felony. Two senior law enforcement sources told NBC News about "growing frustration" inside the FBI because investigators finished the bulk of their work on the case about a year ago. A senior law enforcement source said the IRS...

Dozens of Cook County employees have resigned or been fired in ongoing investigations of fraud in COVID-19 relief programs. Forty-eight employees of Cook County Clerk of Court Iris Martinez “no longer work” for the office after they were found to have defrauded the federal Paycheck Protection Program, which was enacted to provide forgivable loans to help struggling businesses stay in business in 2020 and 2021 during the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic. Nationally, most of the loans in the federal Small Business Administration’s fraud-plagued program were forgiven, meaning the businesses’ owners didn’t have to pay back any of...

The Biden administration is looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chatrooms after U.S. intelligence agencies failed to spot classified Pentagon documents circulating online for weeks, according to a senior administration official and a congressional official briefed on the matter. The possible change in the intelligence-gathering process is just one potential shift as officials scramble to determine not only how the documents leaked but also how to prevent another damaging incident. President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were briefed about the disclosure last week, administration officials say, but the secret documents appeared online in early...

WASHINGTON — The Democratic National Committee selected Chicago to host the 2024 Democratic National Convention, the Sun-Times has learned, with the city beating bids from Atlanta and New York. The convention will take place Aug. 19-22 next year. It is expected to draw between 5,000 and 7,000 delegates and alternates and attract up to 50,000 visitors to Chicago. Evening events will be at the United Center — the main site of the 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago — with daytime business to be conducted at the McCormick Place Convention Center, the location of the 2012 NATO Summit. Delegates will be...

DALLAS -- San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich's pregame media availability Sunday opened with the NBA's all-time wins leader declining to discuss whether he would consider retirement this offseason and ended with an unprompted, passionate speech lobbying for gun control legislation in America and criticizing "cowardly legislators who are selfish." Popovich, 74, has expressed strong opinions on gun control and other political issues frequently in recent years. He made a point to bring up the subject as his media session before the Dallas Mavericks game seemed to be wrapping up, asking whether anyone in the room was carrying a firearm....

WASHINGTON, DC – Walter Reed National Military Medical Center has issued a “cease and desist order” to Holy Name College, a community of Franciscan Catholic priests and brothers, who have provided pastoral care to service members and veterans at Walter Reed for nearly two decades. The government’s cease and desist order directed the Catholic priests to cease any religious services at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. This order was issued as Catholics entered Holy Week, the most sacred of days in the Christian faith, in which they participate in liturgies remembering Jesus’ passion, and leading the Church to celebrate...

WASHINGTON – A new batch of classified documents that appear to detail U.S. national security secrets from Ukraine to the Middle East to China surfaced on social media sites Friday, alarming the Pentagon and adding turmoil to a situation that seemed to have caught the Biden administration off guard. The scale of the leak — analysts say more than 100 documents may have been obtained — along with the sensitivity of the documents themselves, could be hugely damaging, U.S. officials said. A senior intelligence official called the leak “a nightmare for the Five Eyes,” in a reference to the United...

A “coherent” radio signal has been detected from an alien planet, suggesting it could be more likely to be habitable. The signal suggests that the planet has its own magnetic field, which is thought to be central to sustaining life on a particular world. On Earth, our magnetic field helps protect us from the high energy particles and plasma that are blasted from the Sun. As such, any alien life is likely to depend on being protected by a similar field. But until now researchers have struggled to confirm whether distant rocky planets have magnetic fields of their own, and...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved its first opioid reversal drug, Narcan, for over-the-counter, nonprescription use. "Today's action paves the way for the life-saving medication to reverse an opioid overdose to be sold directly to consumers in places like drug stores, convenience stores, grocery stores and gas stations, as well as online." U.S. Food and Drug Administration Narcan, the brand name of the nasal spray naloxone, will switch from prescription to over-the-counter status within the next several months, the agency said. Prescriptions will still be required for other formulations and dosages of naloxone.

Deputy U.S. marshals assigned to guard Supreme Court justices last year were directed to try not to make arrests, according to documents a U.S. senator revealed Tuesday, contradicting Attorney General Merrick Garland’s assurances to Congress. Sen. Katie Britt, Alabama Republican, confronted Mr. Garland with the training package used for the marshals deployed to protect justices. It said arrests were “not” to be a priority. Mr. Garland told senators earlier this month that his prosecutors couldn’t bring cases unless the marshals made arrests, and the marshals on the scene didn’t think there was a reason to do that. ‌ Ms. Britt...

Nine boxes of documents were taken from President Biden's attorney Patrick Moore's Boston office, but have yet to be reviewed, the National Archives disclosed in a response letter to Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, this week first obtained by Fox News Digital. The Archives had not previously publicly disclosed the number of boxes taken from Boston. It had been reported that Moore had shipped boxes of documents from the Penn Biden Center to his Boston office before discovering the initial trove of classified documents at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank. In response to questions by Johnson and...

Texas Tech has suspended men's basketball coach Mark Adams for what the school is calling an "inappropriate, unacceptable, and racially insensitive comment." According to the school, Adams was encouraging a player to be more receptive to coaching and "referenced Bible verses about workers, teachers, parents, and slaves serving their masters." Adams apologized to the team after he found out the player was upset about the use of the Bible verse, a source told ESPN. Athletic director Kirby Hocutt was made aware of the incident. He issued Adams a written reprimand but then made the decision to suspend the coach to...

New York(CNN) Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, acknowledged in a deposition taken by Dominion Voting Systems that some Fox News hosts endorsed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Murdoch's remarks were made public in a legal filing as part of Dominion's $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News. In his deposition, Murdoch rejected that the right-wing talk network as an entity endorsed former President Donald Trump's election lies. But Murdoch conceded that Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, and former host Lou Dobbs promoted the falsehood about the presidential contest being stolen. "Some of our commentators were...

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos hired an investment firm to evaluate a possible bid for the Washington Commanders, according to two people familiar with the situation. Bezos is working with Allen & Company, a New York-based firm that is prominent in transactions involving professional sports franchises, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the confidential nature of the deliberations. It remains unclear whether Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, will make a bid to purchase Washington’s NFL team from owner Daniel Snyder. But his association with Allen & Company represents a concrete sign of his...

BEIJING (AP) — A 6.8 magnitude earthquake shook part of Tajikistan early Thursday near China’s far western Xinjiang region. It was 67 kilometers (41 miles) west of Murghob, Tajikistan and 20 kilometers (12 miles) deep, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The area is remote and lightly populated.