Free Republic

Providing Donald Trump’s $175 million appeal bond when other insurers wouldn’t is business as usual for California financier Don Hankey. As chairman of the Los Angeles-based Hankey Group of Companies, which includes an insurer, a subprime auto lender and a commercial real estate investment firm, Hankey has amassed a fortune lending to borrowers other financial firms shun. Hankey’s assistance to Trump has brought the little-known billionaire into the spotlight. But in recent years, several of his companies’ operations attracted the attention of the U.S. Justice Department, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the California Department of Insurance. Since 2015, regulators...

Mark Wingate, a Fulton County Elections Board member, recently testified that he voted against the certification of the 2020 presidential election due to concerns he had regarding the integrity of the election. The Elections Board member claimed that Fulton County failed to verify the signatures of over 147,000 mail-in ballots. Independent journalist known on X, formerly Twitter, as “Kanekoa The Great” shared a video Monday Wingate’s testimony. The journalist explained that the Fulton County Elections Board member’s testimony was part of a disbarment hearing for Jeffrey Clark, a former United States assistant attorney general. Clark is one of the 19...

The discipline of medicine has changed. Its traditional cohesion and leadership have fractured into a multitude of disconnected specialty groups, allowing powerful commercial and political forces to increase control over both structure and function of medical practice. The Covid era burst through boundaries long taken for granted. By examining the manipulation of hydroxychloroquine to attain a political end, this article seeks to illustrate the destructive forces brought to bear on how medicine was practised in Australia, with shameless disregard for the health and survival of patients, or for the integrity of those charged to care for their well-being. I have...

The medical regulator failed to sound the alarm over Covid vaccine side effects and should be investigated, MPs have said. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is responsible for approving drugs and devices and monitors side effects caused by treatments.But the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on pandemic response and recovery, an influential group of MPs, has raised “serious patient safety concerns”. It has claimed that “far from protecting patients” the regulator operates in a way that “puts them at serious risk”.Some 25 MPs across four parties have written to the health select committee asking for an urgent investigation....

Another electric vehicle (EV) startup is touting “holy grail” charging technology. The news from UK-based Nyobolt might just rise to the billing, as it promises 155 miles on a six-minute charge, with production slated to start in 2024. Most EVs take much longer, sometimes even hours, to fully charge. “With our unique technology we have … developed smaller battery packs that can deliver more power and charge in less time,” Nyobolt CEO Sai Shivareddy told BBC Top Gear. The Nyobolt website doesn’t go into great detail about the tech inside the battery. The makers promise high power, a long life...

On August 9, 2023, Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia issued a final Memorandum Opinion in Cigar Association of America et al. v. United States Food and Drug Administration et al., vacating the decision of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to deem premium cigars subject to the agency’s regulatory authority under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as amended by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (TCA).The decision concludes a seven-year conflict between the cigar industry and FDA. As previously reported, FDA issued a Final Rule on August 8,...

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. It took 60 years but a postulator from the Vatican finally came to Richard, a lonesome patch of boggy farmland in southern Louisiana’s rice belt, last December. He arrived at St. Edward Roman Catholic Church, which stands at the closest thing the community has to a town center, cater-corner to Richard Elementary and opposite a pasture more than large enough for its dozen cows. He was greeted by the young parish priest, diocesan officials from Lafayette, a medical examiner, gravediggers, a pair...

The app reportedly causing all of these issues is MacKeeper. Ironically, MacKeeper is designed to keep Macs safe from malware by offering cleaning, security, privacy, and performance tools. Yikes. According to the Elastic Security Labs report, 48% of Macs end up being infected with malware from MacKeeper.

Christian Rap for your youthful friends and relatives. It is doubtful that if they like Rap that you can stop them from listening to it. Perhaps you can influence them to listen to Rap that is not damaging their soul.

If the GOP takes the House, Octogenarian Nancy Pelosi wants Joe Biden to appoint her as ambassador to Italy [where she can do more damage, especially with the Pope]. That’s according to Maria Bartiromo’s sources. Biden is allegedly holding the spot for Nancy, which is why he hasn’t filled the spot since taking office. It should be interesting to see if the new Senate will want her in the post.

On January 28th, 2022, Matt Hoover of the CRS Firearms YouTube channel was taken into custody by U.S. Marshalls after the ATF sought and obtained an indictment against him. He is charged with helping to sell and distribute machine guns illegally by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. This case is little-known outside of the Second Amendment community, but its result will have big repercussions. Let’s get into the weeds and explore just what is happening. Prior to being arrested, Matt Hoover entered into a business deal with Kristopher Ervin, the owner of a business called ‘Auto Key...

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, except when it's a "premium cigar." But what does "premium" mean, and do premium cigars affect people's health differently than other cigars, or cigarettes?These are just a few of the questions that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine tried to tackle in its report on "Health Effects and Patterns of Use of Premium Cigars." However, the 14-member committee that issued the report ran into some difficulties, one of which was determining what a "premium" cigar was."One of the challenges that we faced was that there was no single consistent definition of...

A legal challenge by a Northern Ireland gay rights activist who claimed he was discriminated against when a bakery refused to make a cake with a slogan supporting same-sex marriage has been dismissed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The court declared the action inadmissible and said the applicant, Gareth Lee, had “failed to exhaust domestic remedies” available through the UK courts. In the ruling, published yesterday, a majority of seven judges said Mr Lee had not invoked his rights under the ECHR “expressly at any point in the domestic proceedings”.By relying solely on domestic law, they said,...

No one is safe. That’s the disturbing lesson of 2021, a year when every corner of the US was pounded by deadly weather disasters.

We know how this ends: Coronavirus becomes endemic, and we live with it forever. But what we don’t know—and what the U.S. seems to have no coherent plan for—is how we are supposed to get there. We’ve avoided the hard questions whose answers will determine what life looks like in the next weeks, months, and years: When are restrictions lifted? And what long-term measures do we keep, if any, when we reach endemicity?SnipHere are some answers I got from scientific experts: hospitalizations and deaths, but stratified by age and vaccination status; a combination of vaccination rate and local transmission; a...

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) Tuesday held a roundtable discussion on federal COVID vaccine mandates with a panel of people injured by COVID vaccines and scientists from some of the most prestigious research organizations in the world, including The BMJ and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Peter Doshi, a senior editor at The BMJ and associate professor of pharmaceutical health services research at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, and Retsef Levi, a health system and analytics professor at MIT, expressed doubts about COVID vaccine efficacy and the failures of the scientific community. “I’m saddened we’re super-saturated as a...

SnipIt’s something of a miracle that life on our planet has been left to evolve without fatal interruption for billions of years. Such a long unbroken chain of survival, however unlikely, is necessary for bags of mud and water like ourselves to eventually sit up, and just recently, to wonder how we got here. And like the bullet-riddled—but safe—planes, our planet has survived countless near-fatal blows. There have been volcanic apocalypses, body blows from supersonic space rocks the size of Mount Everest, and ice ages that might have frozen the planet almost to the tropics. Had any of these catastrophes...

The Declaration of the People of the States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their...

“In this outbreak, the distances between infector and infected persons were … farther than the generally accepted 2 meter 1/8 6.6 foot] droplet transmission range,” the study’s authors wrote. “The guidelines on quarantine and epidemiological investigation must be updated to reflect these factors for control and prevention of COVID-19.”snip “There’s a real misconception about this in the public.” said Seung, who was not involved in the South Korea study. “They’re thinking, if I’m not a close contact, I will magically be protected.” snip Linsey Marr, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies the transmission of viruses...

A Cleveland-based technology company partnered with Purdue University to develop a rapid diagnostic test to detect numerous pathogens, including the molecule that causes COVID-19. The technology from the Purdue and IdentifySensors Biologics collaboration can also be modified to detect influenza, Zika, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, chickenpox, and more. “This test can be done fast, it’s accurate and can be done at home,” IdentifySensors CEO Gregory Hummer, MD, said. According to Purdue University, the real-time technology identified pathogens “by their induced distinctive resistance chance to electronic materials” and automatically transmits results to the individual’s cellphone and appropriate health departments. “We intend to...