Free Republic

Massachusetts gas station owner fed up with what he considers attempts by oil companies to fleece customers with outrageously high prices at the pump has stopped selling gas as a protest. Reynold Gladu, who has run Ren’s Mobil Service in downtown Amherst for nearly 50 years, drained his tanks earlier this month and has no current plans to refill them. “I don’t want to be part of it anymore,” Gladu told The Daily Hampshire Gazette for a story published Tuesday. “This is the biggest ripoff that ever has happened to people in my lifetime.” Gasoline in Massachusetts is averaging more...

Under-counts may have cost Florida and Texas another House seat. Well, well. Remember how Democrats accused the Trump Administration of trying to rig the 2020 Census? Now a Census Bureau study reveals that Republican-leaning states may have been hurt by mistaken under-counts. On Thursday the bureau published the results of its post-enumeration analysis, which it does after every Census to identify errors in the count. Its study found that 14 states were over- or under-counted by statistically significant margins. Compare that to 2010 when the bureau’s post-hoc analysis found that all the state population counts were more or less accurate....

The United States confirmed a case of monkeypox infection on Wednesday in a man who recently traveled to Canada. It is not yet clear if the man, who lives in Massachusetts and who traveled to Canada by car, is connected to the growing outbreak of monkeypox cases in Europe. The case was announced in a statement posted to the website of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Confirmatory testing was done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had warned earlier Wednesday that cases in this country were likely to begin to be detected. “Given that we have...

Wow! The Wall Street Journal in 2016: The Clinton Foundation, State and Kremlin Connections. Why did Hillary’s State Department urge U.S. investors to fund Russian research for military uses? A program overseen by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as part of the "reset" with Russia wound up enhancing Russia's military technology and funneling millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. Both the U.S. Army and the FBI found that the program, intended to support Russia's version of Silicon Valley, was exploited to improve Russia's military capability. The FBI warned several American technology companies in 2014 that the city of...

BOSTON (AP) - Prosecutors have asked a judge to halt citizenship proceedings for a businessman who headed an Islamic charity so the FBI can continue investigating whether he lied about his ties to organizations that include one linked to Osama bin Laden. U.S. Attorney Michael J. Sullivan asked to postpone Emadeddin Z. Muntasser's naturalization hearing scheduled for Thursday. The judge did not immediately rule on the request and gave Muntasser until Wednesday to respond. Muntasser, whose citizenship application has been in the pipeline more than two years, is "the subject of a pending federal criminal investigation regarding statements he made...

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) this week announced the state updated its face covering advisory, urging residents to “wear a mask in public indoor spaces” moving forward. “We updated the face covering advisory today to urge all residents to wear a mask in public indoor spaces,” Baker stated during State House briefing.

After police in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, took her car, Malinda Harris did not get a chance to contest the seizure for five and a half years. After the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute threatened to file a lawsuit on her behalf last March, the county agreed within a week to return the car, which she finally got back this summer.The contrast between those two timelines shows how easy it is for the government to seize innocent people's property under civil forfeiture laws, which allow law enforcement agencies to supplement their budgets by confiscating assets they claim are connected to criminal activity. Harris'...

BOSTON — Massachusetts is partnering with as many as 20 other states in an effort to create a shared digital system through which residents can prove their COVID-19 vaccination status. Gov. Charlie Baker spoke about the development effort Monday during a radio interview. He explained the plan centers around a QR code — a digitally encoded pattern designed to be scanned from a device — that residents can display on a smartphone. Those codes could be scanned by businesses, venues or others to verify vaccination status.

WRENTHAM, Mass. (WJAR) — A man donned a blonde wig and dressed as a woman so he could secretly record girls and women in a Massachusetts mall's restroom, police said. Jacob Guerrero, 23, of Woonsocket, was arrested Monday night. WJAR According to a police report, the investigation began Aug. 24 when police received a call from customers at the Wrentham Village Premium Outlets complaining of a person, who appeared to be a man dressed as a woman, acting suspiciously in the women's restroom. Wearing a blonde wig, investigators said Guerrero followed girls as young as 12 into the bathroom. "What...

<p>Hospitals across the region are seeing full intensive care units and staff shortages are starting to affect care. Public officials are pleading with the unvaccinated to get the shots. Health care workers are coping with pent-up demand for other kinds of care that had been delayed by the pandemic....</p>

(CNN)To avoid lockdowns, people in the United States will have to do things that they won't necessarily want to do, such as wearing masks at indoor gatherings even if they're vaccinated and having kids mask up in schools, the director of the National Institutes of Health said Monday. "We want to avoid lockdowns at all costs, but that means we're going to have to do some other things that won't necessarily be welcomed by people," Dr. Francis Collins said on ABC's "Good Morning America" when asked how he saw the fall playing out. Those unwelcome things include vaccinated people wearing...

Former president Barack Obama intends to host quite the shindig at Martha’s Vineyard in honor of his 60th birthday. The birthday bash will reportedly have roughly 700 people present despite fresh concerns over the spread of the COVID-19 Delta variant. Axios reports that the party will be located at the Obamas’ $12-million-dollar home, with 475 confirmed guests (including the likes of Steven Spielberg) in attendance. Another 200-plus people who make up the staff will be on the property. Pearl Jam is also expected to give a performance, bringing one local hairdresser along with them for styling purposes. The Axios article...

Be honest, does the idea of canine attack dogs trained to sniff out COVID-19 fill you with a sense of safety and security, or does it signal just a touch of end times foreboding within you? In my mind, I see the COVID K9 unit as a good thing, right up to the moment they are used to hunt down “the unvaccinated” so they can be removed and detained in a facility to be named later. Think that’s just fearmongering? Maybe you need to read about Bill A416 in New York. It’s really not hard to see the direction that...

Talk about honor among 40 Thieves. "Communists did the right thing. They just called in Jack Ma and say, "You aren't gonna do it, sonny," Berkshire Hathaway's Charles Munger said. The issue seems to be, that some oligarchs are more equal than other oligarchs. If you're one of the rapaciously greedy billionaires in the U.S. or the E.U., you get to rule the roost, deciding which politicians get elected and which wars get fought. But in exchange for the 1st world keeping Russia and China in the second-string of world economies, their dictators get to jerk their own "oligarch" billionaires...

Amid a heavy state police presence, the first “Rise of the Moors” member appearing Tuesday in Malden District Court on several firearms charges after a highway standoff in Wakefield repeatedly objected to a judge’s basic questions, declined to be interviewed by a public defender and insisted he had the “right to bear arms.”

A liberal Massachusetts town has created a fund that will be used to pay reparations to eligible black residents to “repair past harms” it committed against them or their ancestors. The Amherst Town Council voted 12-1 earlier this week in favor of establishing the fund, council clerk Athena O’Keeffe confirmed. No money is in the fund yet, but town finance officials have proposed a plan to put $210,000 in the account later this year, the Daily Hampshire Gazette reported.

A Massachusetts mayor called out pro-abortion Catholic politicians last Thursday at a pro-life rally in Quincy. In his speech at a June 17 “Night 4 Life” rally in Quincy, Massachusetts, the city’s mayor Thomas Koch asked, “Where are the consciences today of our elected politicians – particularly the Catholic and Christian ones?” the New Boston Post reported. The pro-life rally, which took place at Veterans Memorial Stadium in Quincy, was attended by hundreds of participants. In an email following the event, Mayor Koch told CNA that "the Gospel of life is at the heart of Jesus' message and I am...

A CVS in Ipswich, Massachusetts, gave a 'limited number of patients' the wrong dose of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine on Monday Patients were given a 0.3 mililiter (mL) dose, 40% lower than the correct 0.5 mL dose recommended by CDC Doctors and the CDC say that as long a patient's first shot is a half-dose, or 0.25 mL, they will be fully protected once they receive a second dose As of Thursday, 41 million Americans - 12.5% of the population - have received one dose and 16.1 million - 4.9% of the population - are fully immunized

Massachusetts abolished enslavement before the Treaty of Paris brought an end to the American Revolution, in 1783. The state constitution, adopted in 1780 and drafted by John Adams, follows the Declaration of Independence in proclaiming that all “men are born free and equal.” In this statement Adams followed not only the Declaration but also a 1764 pamphlet by the Boston lawyer James Otis, who theorized about and popularized the familiar idea of “no taxation without representation” and also unequivocally asserted human equality. “The Colonists,” he wrote, “are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white...

...The Batavia Police Department in upstate New York on Tuesday joined hundreds of local law enforcement agencies in asking both potential victims and concerned residents to report allegations of unemployment benefit fraud directly to the state's Department of Labor. Police in Avon Lake, Ohio, in Whitman, Massachusetts, and in Evanston, Illinois, say frustrated taxpayers have called or even shown up at the station holding 1099-G tax forms which show someone is fraudulently reporting income in their name. ..