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A regional effort to build out a hydrogen hub in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kentucky will receive up to $925 million as part of the Biden Administration’s effort to decarbonize the U.S. economy. The Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub (Arch2), a West Virginia-led effort that combines the production of hydrogen from natural gas with carbon capture and storage, is one of seven regional hubs that will be funded over the coming years. The administration projects the Arch2 effort will create 18,000 construction jobs and 3,000 permanent jobs. Another winner is the Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub (Mach2), which envisions development...

A 300-pound Villager who stands 6 feet 4 inches tall has been sentenced after stalking a resident’s grandson he met through an online dating application. Russell Edward Thompson, 54, of the Village of Springdale, has been placed on probation for three years after pleading no contest last month in Sumter County Court to charges of burglary and theft. A charge of stalking, a charge of criminal mischief and two additional counts of theft were dismissed as part of the plea deal. A man who was living with his 73-year-old grandmother in Village of Santo Domingo met Thompson through an online...

BALTIMORE — Once a beacon for activity in downtown Baltimore, the Harborplace pavilions will now be torn down by the new owners who are on a mission to revive the area. It's a place that was once booming with tourists. Now, when you take a walk through the Harborplace pavilions, doors are locked and many stores sit vacant. As the entire harbor is getting redeveloped, one project will be tearing down the two pavilions by the new owners, MCB Real Estate. Marketing Managing Director Jarnell Swecker said this is a result of what the community repeatedly shared. "They need something...

I'm looking for a new hosting service for the images that I sometimes put on Free Republic. A few months ago, somebody's browser freaked out at one of the images I put up, thinking there was malware involved. Since then, I stopped posting the images, but I want to migrate my site to a new hosting service with a decent SSL, because the host and SSL I have are obviously not that good, and the price is almost constantly increasing. What say you, fellow FReepers? What is a good one to check out? I am looking on my own, but...

This week, Republicans and Democrats got together to avert a government shutdown. Too bad. There’s so much that ought to be shut down. Useless Cabinet departments, for example, like Housing and Urban Development, Labor, and Agriculture. Agriculture employs almost 100,000 people. Why? Independent farmers grow our food. They don’t need a giant department. Let’s get rid of the Department of Education, too. Why does it even exist? Education is a local responsibility and none of the federal government’s business. Yet its spending is up 300% over the past 10 years. The department didn’t even exist before 1979. Has education improved...

A massive alligator was caught Friday carrying the lifeless body of a Floridian down a canal. A witness first spotted the 14-foot reptile with its victim clenched between its jaws on a residential street in Largo, a small community just four miles south of Clearwater. “I could tell there was a body in his mouth, so I started recording,” witness JaMarcus Bullard told Spectrum Bay News 9. Bullard, who was on his way to a job interview, alerted the Largo Fire Department, which was stationed just steps away from the gory scene. Emergency personnel quickly pulled the gator from the...

U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement told a German Christian family that was persecuted for homeschooling their children that they needed to prepare to be deported after living in the U.S. for 15 years, says Kevin Boden, an attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association, who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike fled with their family from Germany in 2008 after getting thousands of dollars in fines for refusing to stop homeschooling, which was outlawed in 1918, and sought asylum in the U.S. before being granted “indefinite deferred action status” in 2014, allowing them to...

A recent study conducted at the University of Arkansas finds that men with heightened physical strength are perceived as more conservative by others. The study found that men who seem fit and healthy and have some bulk are considered right-wing, while thin or svelte and weak-looking men were not assumed to lean right. The results came from a series of four experiments that sought to establish a link between political orientation and a fit physique, according to the Daily Mail. Viewers were presented with photos of male bodies with faces covered and asked to rank which ideology they thought the...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - A man in Florida is accused of stealing a large construction excavator and taking it for a drive, knocking down power poles before plowing through the front of a Walmart store in Gainesville, police said. Police said 47-year-old Jesse Charles Smith hot wired the excavator and stole it from a nearby storage area. He damaged other storage units, a Starbucks, and the Walmart on SW 42nd Street during the joyride, police said. Police estimated the total damage to Walmart near $2 million. Police said Smith was also armed with a machete. It's not known why Smith stole...

President Joe Biden’s proposed energy efficiency standards for water heaters, released July 21 by the Energy Department, not only would raise the cost of water heaters for consumers but take certain products off the market. One popular tankless natural gas water heater, made by Rinnai in Griffin, Georgia, would have to be discontinued. The public has until Sept. 26 to file comments. Beginning in 2029, the Energy Department’s proposed regulation would set government standards for all types of water heaters, including gas-fired, oil-fired, electric, and instantaneous tankless water heaters. The proposed rule would raise standards disproportionately for tankless, gas-fired water...

Just because the government raises taxes, doesn’t necessarily mean it will raise more revenues. The Biden administration is discovering that the hard way. In August 2022, President Joe Biden signed the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act into law, which included a new tax on companies’ financial statement income, new IRS funding to increase audits, an excise tax on stock buybacks, and more taxes on natural gas, oil, and coal. To top it off, certain Trump administration business tax cuts simultaneously have been phasing out. On paper, that adds up to more than $60 billion in tax hikes in 2023. Yet, as...

An elderly Florida man was arrested by the FBI after he attempted to rob a Miami-area bank for $650 because he was “in desperate need for rent money” and faced becoming homeless. On Aug. 24, Michael Terry Noojin, 67, jumped in line at a Bank of America in Hollywood, Florida, just after 2:40 p.m. and waited while the three tellers working were helping two other customers. Noojin then walked up to the waiting teller and slid a brown plastic shopping bag under the protective glass divider, telling her, “I have a gun, put all the money in the bag,” according...

A nonpartisan organization that trains election workers from across the country is now being run by two liberal voting activists—one who previously worked for the nonprofit that distributed hundreds of millions of dollars of Mark Zuckerberg’s election grants during the 2020 elections. The grants were supposedly to “help” local governments run elections, but most of the money went to election offices in Democrat-run localities. Meanwhile, most board members of the National Association of Election Officials, commonly known as The Election Center, are current or former elections officials from heavily blue counties. “Left-wing activists want to insert ‘progressive’ groups into our...

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — A man was arrested for trafficking a lethal amount of fentanyl in a cookie jar after deputies stopped him during a traffic stop around 10:15 p.m. on Thursday, according to the Collier County Sheriff’s Office. Larry Chapman, 23, had 9.8 grams of fentanyl hidden in a container labeled “Cookies.” Authorities discovered the container tucked in the driver’s seat back pocket. In addition to the fentanyl, deputies found around 10 grams of cocaine in Chapman’s car. “The DEA says 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be deadly; our deputies recovered nearly 10 grams of this lethal drug during...

A Florida man who allegedly sneaked into a woman’s backyard and watched her through a bathroom window while he was naked from the waist down was arrested this week for voyeurism and burglary. After his arrest Thursday, 71-year-old David Henning allegedly admitted to detectives that he regularly watched his neighbor through the window because he was "curious and sexually motivated to see her naked," according to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. "Can I please get dressed?" Henning could be heard telling deputies during his arrest, according to body camera footage obtained by FOX 13. Henning was arrested a day after...

BAY COUNTY, Fla. – Two Florida women are facing battery charges after a fight escalates and one of them bites the ear off of the other, according to deputies. Bay County Sheriff’s deputies said were called to a house party thrown by unsupervised minors on July 4 after midnight. According to an arrest affidavit, Macy Regan, 23, and Dixie Stiles, 18, got into an altercation when Stiles accused Regan of stealing alcohol and vape pens. Deputies said Regan attempted to leave the house when Stiles confronted her, and Regan pulled out a gun. Deputies said Stiles pushed the gun away...

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo harshly criticized COVID-19 mask mandates and lockdowns, and urged people to consider "refusing to participate." "What do you call re-imposing mask policies that have been proven ineffective or restarting lockdowns that are known to cause harm? You don't call it sanity," Dr. Ladapo posted last week on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. "These terrible policies only work with your cooperation. How about refusing to participate…" Some schools and companies are implementing mask mandates amid a rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations, even though some peer-reviewed research has suggested that face coverings may cause...

MARION COUNTY, FL — A man wearing a shirt that read, “I’m The Reason The Beer’s Always Gone” was arrested Aug. 16 and charged with driving under the influence, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a Facebook post. He was nearly three times over the legal blood alcohol content limit at the time of his arrest, the agency said. James Rix Jr. was clocked going 89 mph in a 45 mph during radar patrol near Marion Oaks Boulevard and Marion Oaks Manor. He initially led deputies on a chase, trying to elude them, but he was eventually pulled over...

POINCIANA, Fla. — Going for a stroll through the neighborhood is one thing. Doing so naked, and disrupting neighbors, is another. The Osceola County Sheriff's Office says 23-year-old Giovanni Alcaraz rang multiple doorbells and tried to break into homes in a Poinciana neighborhood Monday night, leaving explicit surprises on some of the doorbell cams. "He's waving his fanny at the door," Osceola County Sheriff Marco Lopez said. Lopez says at least two homeowners called the police. "Somebody happens to look at their ring door camera and says, 'there's somebody naked in front of my house,'" Lopez said. Lopez says after...

Maybe he just loves that chicken from Popeyes? A loose monkey has been spotted in Central Florida, with the elusive simian recently seen scaring a woman working at a Popeyes drive-thru window. “I look over and I’m like, ‘Is this real? This cannot be possible,’” employee Kimberly Bialobos told FOX 35 after seeing the monkey on Wednesday morning. “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.” Bialobos said the monkey appeared near the restaurant on Enterprise Road, in Orange City, at around 9:30 a.m. She noted that the monkey appeared to know how to navigate the streets, avoiding a busy...