Free Republic

The Senate voted late into the night on Thursday to approve a House-passed bill to suspend the debt limit with just days to go until Monday’s fast-approaching deadline to prevent a first-ever default. After hours of discussion and debate, lawmakers considered and voted down 11 amendments to the bill — 10 from Republicans and one from a Democrat — before finally passing the bill, sending the measure to President Joe Biden's desk with just days to spare ahead of Monday's default deadline. "No one gets everything they want in a negotiation, but make no mistake: this bipartisan agreement is a...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida may soon fine some financial institutions that identify gun store purchases under a pending proposal ahead of the upcoming legislative session. The proposal — known as the “Florida Arms and Ammo Act” — seeks to thwart the emerging corporate practice of identifying and potentially flagging an individual’s financial data after a purchase at a gun retailer. Proponents, including Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, describe the proposal as a “first in the nation.” The effort comes as some credit card companies track and categorize gun store sales amid growing concerns of violence and mass shootings. “We are all...

Officials say a Pinellas County deputy was killed overnight in a hit-and-run crash at a construction site on Interstate 275 near Roosevelt Boulevard. The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office has announced the suspect in the hit-and-run death of a deputy was taken into custody after an eight-hour search in the Ulmerton Road and I-275 area. According to Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, Deputy Michael Hartwick, 51, was killed when he was struck by a front-end loader being driven by a construction worker just after 10:30 p.m. Thursday night. The suspect was initially believed to be Victor Vasquez-Real by deputies. The individual allegedly...

Web infrastructure company Cloudflare on Wednesday revealed that threat actors are actively attempting to exploit a second bug disclosed in the widely used Log4j logging utility, making it imperative that customers move quickly to install the latest version as a barrage of attacks continues to pummel unpatched systems with a variety of malware. The new vulnerability, assigned the identifier CVE-2021-45046, makes it possible for adversaries to carry out denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and follows disclosure from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) that the original fix for the remote code execution bug — CVE-2021-44228 aka Log4Shell — was "incomplete in certain non-default...

A Michigan township said schools would be closed on Monday after several staff members had a "negative reaction" to the COVID-19 booster shot. Saginaw Township Community Schools posted an announcement on the homepage of its website , noting that, due to being understaffed, schools in its district would be closed on Monday, affecting after-school programs and child care. "A large number of our staff had a negative reaction to the COVID booster shot given at a voluntary clinic over the weekend," the notice said. "There is a substitute teacher/staff shortage throughout the state, further complicating the availability to cover those...

A Florida judge on Tuesday rejected the latest petition asking that a hospital be ordered to administer ivermectin to a woman extremely ill with COVID-19, The Palm Beach Post reported. Palm Beach County Circuit Judge James Nutt, for the second time in three days, rejected the petition and asked that attorneys representing the husband of 47-year-old Tamara Drock and those for Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center try to resolve the dispute, the Post reported. Ryan and Tamara Drock both contracted COVID-19. Although Ryan recovered — he took ivermectin — his wife has been hospitalized and is in the intensive-care unit...

The U.S. Supreme Court declined Tuesday to hear an emergency appeal of a vaccine requirement imposed on Maine health care workers, the latest defeat for opponents of vaccine mandates. It was the first time the Supreme Court weighed in on a statewide vaccine mandate. It previously rejected challenges of vaccine requirements for New York City teachers and Indiana University staff and students. Justice Stephen Breyer rejected the emergency appeal but left the door open to try again as the clock ticks on Maine’s mandate. The state will begin enforcing it Oct. 29. The Maine vaccine requirement that was put in...

The following dataset provides facility-level data for hospital utilization aggregated on a weekly basis (Friday to Thursday). These are derived from reports with facility-level granularity across two main sources: (1) HHS TeleTracking, and (2) reporting provided directly to HHS Protect by state/territorial health departments on behalf of their healthcare facilities. The hospital population includes all hospitals registered with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as of June 1, 2020. It includes non-CMS hospitals that have reported since July 15, 2020. It does not include psychiatric, rehabilitation, Indian Health Service (IHS) facilities, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities, Defense...

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett expressed concerns Sunday that the public may increasingly see the court as a partisan institution. Justices must be “hyper vigilant to make sure they’re not letting personal biases creep into their decisions, since judges are people, too,” Barrett said at a lecture hosted by the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center. Introduced by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who founded the center and played a key role in pushing through her confirmation in the last days of the Trump administration, Barrett spoke at length about her desire for others to see the Supreme Court as...

The Department of Education said it has opened a civil rights investigation into whether Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is violating the rights of disabled students with his executive order banning mask mandates. On Friday, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a letter to state Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran. The document said th DOJ was ''opening a directed investigation'' into whether the statewide ban on mask requirements in schools ''may be preventing school districts in the state from considering or meeting the needs of students with disabilities.'' The letter, from Suzanne Goldberg, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary...

ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida's new "anti-riot" law, championed by Florida lawmakers as a way to prevent violent protests, violates First Amendment rights. That's according to a federal judge, who blocked HB 1 Thursday. Chief Federal District Judge Mark Walker said the groups who brought the lawsuit demonstrated that the law chilled protest activities since it was enacted, because "the challenged law's confusing definition of 'riot' fails to give their members sufficient notice of what is prohibited or when they could be subject to arrest, such that their members do not wish to participate in future protests or have ceased organizing...

Tyson Foods Inc said on Tuesday it was mandating COVID-19 vaccinations for its entire workforce, joining a growing list of major U.S. companies as they face renewed pandemic restrictions due to the fast-spreading Delta variant. Surging COVID-19 cases and new guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that requires fully-vaccinated individuals to wear masks have led many companies to rethink their plans. Many of corporate America's biggest names have taken action following the CDC's guidance, including mask mandates from McDonald's Corp, Apple Inc and vaccination requirements by Walmart and Walt Disney. U.S. officials said on Monday...

Anyone working for Google or Facebook will be mandated to take the COVID vaccine, in a move that will affect tens of thousands of people in more than 40 countries. Google announced the decision along with a delay until October for employees returning to offices. The company said that the policy will initially be put into place at Google’s California headquarters and other U.S. offices, before being imposed on its global locations with the policy being “adjusted” to meet the laws of different countries. “Anyone coming to work on our campuses will need to be vaccinated,” chief executive Sundar Pichai...

The Kremlin said on Tuesday that people who were not vaccinated against COVID-19 or did not have immunity would be unable to work in all workplaces in Russia and that those people could be discriminated against.

President Biden plans to nominate former Florida Sen. Bill Nelson (D) to serve as administrator of NASA, the White House said Friday. If confirmed, Nelson, who served in the Senate for 18 years, will helm NASA as it carries out its Artemis program by working with private companies to establish a presence on the moon with the ambitious goal of reaching Mars in the coming years. Biden’s plans to nominate Nelson were first reported by The Verge and other news outlets on Thursday and confirmed by the White House on Friday. Nelson, who is 78, served three terms representing Florida...

Brave has fixed a privacy issue in its browser that sent queries for .onion domains to public internet DNS resolvers rather than routing them through Tor nodes, thus exposing users' visits to dark web websites. The bug was addressed in a hotfix release (V1.20.108) made available yesterday. Brave ships with a built-in feature called "Private Window with Tor" that integrates the Tor anonymity network into the browser, allowing users to access .onion websites, which are hosted on the darknet, without revealing the IP address information to internet service providers (ISPs), Wi-Fi network providers, and the websites themselves. The feature was...

BRADENTON, Fla. - Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke about COVID vaccinations in Manatee County on Thursday but opened his news conference talking about Wednesday's violent pro-Trump protests in Washington. Protesters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday and forced lawmakers into hiding in an attempt to overturn the results of the election. DeSantis said he "100 percent" supports the right to protest but said "the minute that crosses over, there needs to be penalties." He called the actions of protesters "totally unacceptable." "Those folks need to be held accountable," he said. "It doesn't matter what banner you're flying under, the violence is...

On Wednesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a massive antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, claiming the social media giant has harmed competition by buying up smaller companies like Instagram and WhatsApp to squash the threat they posed to its business. Forty-seven other state and regional attorneys general are joining the suit. The lawsuit centers on Facebook’s acquisitions, particularly its $1 billion purchase of Instagram in 2011. In addition to its acquisition strategy, the attorneys general allege that Facebook used the power and reach of its platform to stifle user growth for competing services. “For nearly a decade, Facebook has...

FLORIDA — Gov. Ron DeSantis announced last week that while vaccines for COVID-19 are coming soon, he won’t require anyone to get vaccinated if they don’t want to. But a GOP state lawmaker said that state law, as currently written, could allow him or any other governor to mandate vaccinations, and he will file legislation in the coming days to repeal that law. “Right now in Florida, under the public health emergency statute chapter 381, they can literally take you, test you, quarantine you, but also force you to take a vaccine. They can restrain you and force you to...

I’m renovating my patio and wanted to take the ceiling fan off of a switched circuit and run a dedicated feed for power since the fan is always on anyway. I found some drops in the wall near my entertainment center that seemed like a sure thing, so I killed the breaker, cut the line and started running everything to splice in the new fan circuit. While I was stripping wires, my arm touched a ground and I got nice jolt. Yes, my arm touched a ground and got jolted. Grounds are supposed to be dead, right? Well, despite a...