Free Republic

A&E performance fell to the lowest level on record in March as the NHS continues to face unprecedented pressure. Just 84.6% of accident and emergency patients in England were seen within four hours last month, dropping from 85% in February and compared to 90% in March 2017. And the number of people suffering waits of more than 12 hours more than tripled, compared to the same month the year before. Medics said the backlog created by the situation would leave some hospitals struggling to catch up. President of the Society for Acute Medicine Nick Scriven called the figures the "clearest...

Four years ago, it almost looked as if chemical attacks on Syrian civilians would stop. “We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out,” declared then-Secretary of State John Kerry on Meet the Press in 2014. Kerry was referring to Bashar al-Assad’s declared stockpiles of chemical weapons which, under a 2013 deal struck by the Obama administration following a sarin nerve gas attack that brought the U.S. to the brink of striking Syrian government forces, were dismantled and shipped out of the country. But there were two important and deadly loopholes. The first was that...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) hasn’t lost his ability to make Democrats mad, and once again, he has triggered an intraparty kerfuffle on social media. As we head towards the next presidential cycle, many people — on the right, the left and in the media — will be saying Democrats are in the throes of an identity crisis, a struggle for their party’s soul that will tear them apart. But they aren’t, and they won’t be. The Democratic Party screws up plenty and contains its share of idiots, but when it comes to its identity, it’s doing just fine. On Wednesday,...

Many Americans miss having President Barack Obama in the White House, but he doesn’t seem to be one of them. It “is obvious to most people who are watching that he is relieved to no longer be bearing the burden of the presidency,” Josh Earnest, who worked with Obama since his 2008 presidential campaign and served as his press secretary, told The Hill in a report published Monday. “I think there's no doubt that he is more relaxed and more at ease and more unburdened than he's been in a decade, and it shows,” Earnest said. The 44th president has...

Scientists say a patch of ancient seagrass in the Mediterranean is up to 200,000 years and could be the oldest known living thing on Earth. Australian researchers, who genetically sampled the seagrass covering 40 sites from Spain to Cyprus, say it is one of the world's most resilient organisms - but it has now begun to decline due to global warming. The analysis, published in the journal PLos ONE, found the seagrass was between 12,000 and 200,000 years old and was most likely to be at least 100,000 years old. This is far older than the current known oldest species,...

It sure does appear that Russia’s Roscosmos is competing with NASA to see which government agency can delay its missions the longest. In fact, for fun, let’s put together the standings!

"We know what works,” then-President Barack Obama said at the Global Center for Health Innovation in 2015. “We know what we have to do. We’ve just got to put aside the stale and outmoded debates. Reject failed policies. Embrace the policies that we know work. Embrace the promise of the future.” What Obama claimed with such overweening confidence was that a few technical changes might fix most of the problems with healthcare delivery. But he and his allies pushing Obamacare were just plain wrong. His technocratic arguments that the 2010 law could bend the cost curve downward have been refuted...

It becomes clearer every day that Barack Obama, a historic president, presided over a somewhat less than historic presidency. With only one major legislative achievement (Obamacare)—and a fragile one at that—the legacy of Obama’s presidency mainly rests on its tremendous symbolic importance and the fate of a patchwork of executive actions. How much of that was due to fate and how much was due to Obama’s own shortcomings as a politician is up for debate and is a question that emerges from Princeton historian Julian Zelizer’s new edited volume, The Presidency of Barack Obama. With contributions from seventeen historians, the...

Well, that is damned inconvenient. A state-of-the-art pedestrian bridge hailed as the inevitably wondrous result of diversity in engineering has collapsed within days of being paraded before the media. Did I say inconvenient? I should have said symbolic. “Diversity Bridge” (that’s not the structure’s official name, but I think it fits) was designed to connect Florida International University to the city of Sweetwater, where many FIU students and staff reside. The bridge, installed (though not yet opened to the public) a mere four days before its failure, spanned a busy Miami highway, and the collapse crushed cars and people underneath....

With a teacher’s encouragement, seventh-graders in a social-studies class at JHS 80 used their city-issued laptops last week to e-mail letters to The Post to protest a report about their school that cited discipline problems, hazardous conditions, and administrators who try to cover up violent incidents. Sadly, the students did not display the writing skills they should be learning. The missives were rife with grammar, spelling and punctuation errors — and some curse words. OK SO YOU CAN SIT DOWN AND LISTEN TO WHAT IM GONNA TELL YOU TRANCE GENDER!!!!!!YOU SHOULD SHUT THE F–K UP!!!YOU JUST MAD YOU DONT HAVE...

The Independent Institute in cooperation with Canada’s Fraser Institute has issued a new 2017 Economic Freedom of North America report and California’s ranking shows what happens when politicians who have never held a real job or created real jobs in the private sector decide they can regulate an economy into success. California ranks 49th out of all 50 states, finishing just ahead of that slave to Big Government, New York. For some reason the wizards in Sacramento think driving out businesses and replacing them with illegal aliens attracted by “sanctuary policies” is going to pay off big the for state....

BOMBSHELL! Newly Released Emails Reveal Obama Admin’s Reaction to Benghazi April 29, 2014 By Greg Campbell Emails obtained by Judicial Watch have revealed that the top priority after the Benghazi terrorist attack was not national security nor was it ensuring a proper investigation into who orchestrated an attack on our consulate that left four Americans dead. No, the priority of top advisors in the earliest days after the Benghazi attack was ensuring that President Obama “looked good” prior the 2012 election. As part of a Freedom of Information Lawsuit, the Obama Administration released nearly 100 pages of documents to Judicial...

“I’m stunned that they couldn’t even get him on using the weapon,” Brad Steinle. Brad Steinle told the Chronicle that he can’t believe the “culmination of errors” that led to Kate’s death, including a lack of understanding about weapons, given the defense team’s argument to the jury that the gun went off accidentally. “I own a handgun,” Brad Steinle said. “I know that guns don’t just go off. But you have a jury full of people, the vast majority of which probably haven’t shot a gun before and don’t know the intricacies of how a gun works.”

Four years after Gov. Jerry Brown launched his signature program to boost California jobs by awarding tax credits to the businesses that create them, businesses have left two-thirds of those available credits unclaimed — a sign that most expected jobs have yet to materialize. Nor can the state say for sure how many of the administration’s 83,414 projected jobs over five years have actually been created. State offices responsible for awarding and monitoring the California Competes tax credits say they aren’t keeping count. So far, the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) has awarded $622.8 million to 865...

This is a total vanity. I recently gave a TEDx Talk to college students. I had a great time, and I truly hope they listened.

VIENNA -- A new review by the United Nations agency monitoring Iran's compliance with a treaty that restricts its nuclear activities has not identified any violations by Tehran. The quarterly report issued on Monday by the International Atomic Energy Agency is significant considering President Donald Trump's criticism of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. "Iran is now subject to the world's most robust nuclear verification regime, and the IAEA has so far had access to all the locations it needed to visit in the country," Amano said, pushing back on the criticism from Mr. Trump and Republican lawmakers. On Friday, Amano...

Guest essay by Eric Worrall Bill Nye seems to think he has failed to reach people with his demand for urgent action on climate change, but he blames others for creating the conditions which led to his failure. Bill Nye on his climate change education efforts: “I am a failure” “The Science Guy” looks back on his 1990s TV show, and why climate change education has not reflected policy change Between hosting “Bill Nye the Science Guy” and serving as CEO of The Planetary Society, Bill Nye’s career as a science educator means he is also, inherently, an activist when...

President Barack Obama's national security adviser said Friday that her full-throated praise of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was appropriate given the former Taliban prisoner's willingness to go to war for his country -- despite questions about whether or not he deserted his Army colleagues. Susan Rice, who on Sunday said Bergdahl served the United States with "honor and distinction," told CNN in an interview that she was speaking about the fact the Idaho native enlisted and went to Afghanistan in the service of his country. "I realize there has been lots of discussion and controversy around this," Rice said. "But...

Former Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday blasted President Trump's decision not to re-certify Iran's compliance with the Iran nuclear deal, accusing Mr. Trump of jumpstarting an "international crisis." "President Trump's decision today is dangerous," Kerry said in a lengthy statement he posted to Twitter. "He's creating an international crisis. It endangers America's national security interests and those of our closest allies. "The president has polluted the negotiating waters and made it easier for legitimate concerns to be distinguished from back-door efforts to kill the deal," Kerry added. "What we've seen today lacks common sense and strategic thinking to...

WASHINGTON – The Obama Foundation announced on Friday a search for a “diversity consultant” to enforce minority contracting goals for the future Obama Presidential Center and to police pledges that jobs will flow to South and West Side residents. In a statement the foundation said the “diversity consultant” should “demonstrate a verifiable record of implementing transparent and significant diversity and inclusion programs” working with companies owned by minorities, women, veterans, the disabled and “individuals who identify as LGBTQ.” The “diversity consultant” should have “a history of working with unions and engaging with underemployed populations including ex-offenders and youth to increase...