Free Republic

The Biden administration's plan to relocate grizzly bear populations to rural parts of Washington State will have a devastating impact on agriculture and livestock in the region while posing a significant danger to local communities, a fifth generation cattle producer warned. Residents of Washington State are doubling down on their concerns surrounding the federal government's plan to translocate grizzly bears, an apex predator, to the federally-managed North Cascades National Park, after the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the strategy their preferred plan for grizzly bear management in the region. The North Cascades National Park borders...

A second firm hired by the Trump campaign to investigate fraud in the 2020 election said all of Trump’s fraud claims were false, the firm’s founder told The Washington Post The Trump campaign hired Simpatico Software Systems and its founder Ken Block to investigate fraud claims all over the country after the 2020 election. “No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at,” he told the Post. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was...

Former president Trump’s campaign quietly commissioned a second firm to study election fraud claims in the weeks after the 2020 election, and the founder of the firm was recently questioned by the Justice Department about his work disproving the claims.Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside...

The San Francisco district attorney’s office on Tuesday dropped the charges against a homeless man who allegedly attacked former San Francisco fire commissioner Don Carmignani earlier this month with a crowbar, sending him to the hospital for emergency surgery to treat a hole in the back of his skull. The case was dropped after prosecutors concluded the attacker, Garrett Doty, was acting in self-defense when he beat Carmignani so badly that he broke the former fire commissioner’s jaw and left him in need of 50 stitches The incident began when Carmignani confronted Doty and two other vagrants who were allegedly...

WARNING: PICTURES ARE GRAPHIC. Wolves have killed another cow in Jackson County. Here’s Travis Duncan with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. ... Steamboat Radio was told of the most recent wolf depredation incident today by Adam VanValkenburg, President of the North Park Stockgrowers Association. He said the wolf kill happened sometime Monday night, as confirmed by CPW. He says another suspected kill from the pack was of six elk on another neighboring property in Jackson County. Here’s his opinion on the recent incident in Jackson County. ... “In my opinion and in consulting with other experts, they are teaching their pups...

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said on Thursday the Navy will investigate SEAL Eddie Gallagher over his admission in a recent interview that he did intend to kill an ISIS detainee despite being acquitted of the man's murder in 2019. (emphasis mine) Gallagher made the bombshell admission in an interview on Apple's 'The Line' podcast on Tuesday regarding the 2017 death of a 17-year-old militant captive in Iraq. ... 'I didn't stab him. I didn't stab that dude,' Gallagher said. 'That dude died from all the medical treatments that were done – and there was plenty of medical treatments...

BAILEY, Colo.- The search for a mountain lion continues after it attacked an 8-year-old boy in Bailey Wednesday night. Colorado Parks and Wildlife says the child was playing on a trampoline in his yard when he heard a friend calling from down the street. As he ran towards his friend's home, the mountain lion pounced, grabbing the boy by the head. The boy's brother was also outside and heard a commotion. He ran to his father and told him something didn't sound right. His father rushed down the street and found the mountain lion on top of his son. The...

Mr. Pérez and other farmers say an outbreak of crime in the countryside is driving down food production and exacerbating Venezuela's chronic food shortages. They describe roving gangs stealing tractors, combines, trucks, laser-guided land levelers and agrochemicals. The thieves often resell these expensive, hard-to-find supplies to other farmers on the black market, or for a ransom to their original owners. The rural crime spree, which farmers say has accelerated since it began about two years ago, has forced some growers to cut back. SNIP Even Mr. Pérez, who produces tons of rice annually, feels the pinch. He said the lines...

BOULDER JUNCTION - People often feel like their pets are members of their family. Teri Winter and Jimmy Dean Van Rossum felt that way about their dog Bella. Earlier this week, Bella was killed by wolves. The only thing they found of Bella was blood and fur. "They didn't even leave a bone, we can't find her collar," says Winter. On Monday night, Van Rossum let Bella out to go to the bathroom at his home in Boulder Junction. She never came back. "She was in her woods, her yard, going to the bathroom," Winter says. That's when wolves got...

Barbara Paschke, 85, died as the result of injuries she suffered during a black bear attack inside her home ... from injuries she suffered during a black bear attack inside her Ashley Lake home last Sunday afternoon. The woman, Barbara Paschke, died at 10:30 a.m. while she was hospitalized at Kalispell Regional Medical Center. She died due to injuries from the attack ... The attack occurred inside Paschke’s home between Batavia Lane and Ashley Lake Road; although it’s not clear how the bear got inside Paschke’s home, it exited through a window, investigators said. The attack was severe, officials said,...

(RNS) Paul Ryan has been taking a lot of heat over the factual accuracy of claims he made in his prime time address at the Republican convention last week, but Wednesday night at the Democratic confab the GOP vice-presidential candidate – and practicing Catholic – was schooled by a popular nun on the moral shortcomings of his budget proposals. “Paul Ryan claims this budget reflects the principles of our shared faith,” Sister Simone Campbell, who became a celebrity of sorts this summer when she led the national “Nuns on the Bus” tour for social justice, told cheering Democratic delegates...

Kaktovik residents and visiting biologists worked together to free a large polar bear that became entangled in a fishing net near a Beaufort Sea barrier island Saturday night. The “large male” polar bear got stuck in a net near the North Slope village of about 300 people Saturday evening, the U.S. Geological

TORONTO, April 24, 2015 -- A lesbian teacher ‘married’ to another woman revealed at a pro-gay teachers’ conference earlier this month how she teaches grade 4-5 students to accept homosexuality through what she called “social justice” math. Alicia Gunn, an elementary public school teacher in Mississauga, Ontario, told attendees at the April 10 conference in Toronto’s City Hall that injecting LGBTQ issues into the classroom, especially in math, helps students as young as nine “disrupt the single story that many of our kids have about LGBTQ families.” When asked by one of the workshop attendees if she first asks parents’...

Gov. Jan Brewer will not give ranchers and their employees permission to kill endangered Mexican gray wolves on federal lands. The measure vetoed Tuesday was crafted by Sen. Gail Griffin, R-Hereford. She has been a vocal foe of the program by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reintroduce the wolves into sections of Arizona and New Mexico, saying they are endangering not only cattle but also pets and children. SB1211 would have spelled out that ranchers could “take” a wolf — legalese for killing — that was killing, wounding or biting livestock. It also would have legalized a guard...

Wyoming has spent $7.9 million on sage grouse conservation since 2005. That was the finding of a new report by the Western Governors Association, which inventoried the efforts of 11 western states to protect the bird and its habitat. The report comes in advance of an expected 2015 ruling by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over whether to add the species to the endangered species list. The sage grouse's listing could curtail energy development throughout the West. ... Utah, by comparison, spent $8.8 million on improvements to sage grouse habitat in 2013 alone.

Federal designation of the Greater Sage-grouse as threatened or endangered could result in the withdrawal of over 17 million acres from mining ... Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service of making an unprecedented attempted to limit multiple use on public lands through use of “the Spotted Owl on Steroids”—the Greater Sage-Grouse. ... BLM and Forest Service’s real purpose “is NOT sage-grouse conservation.” “Rather, the so-called conservation measures are designed to: Find another way to implement the draconian land use restrictions in the aborted Wild Lands Policy and Secretarial Order 3310; Dramatically reduce and even prevent mining, energy...

The sage grouse's potential addition to the endangered species list is a problem of epic economic consequences to states in the West, with Herbert explaining that the impact in lost economic development in Utah tops $41 billion for the oil and gas industry alone. "The negative impacts are not acceptable to me and should not be acceptable to anyone here," Herbert told the crowd. The event at the Utah Department of Natural Resources' auditorium is actually a precursor to a national summit that will be held in Salt Lake City this fall. ... a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decision...

Federal wildlife officials are setting aside nearly 1,200 square miles in the American Southwest as critical habitat for the jaguar... Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties in Arizona and Hidalgo County in New Mexico ... The critical designation means anyone developing federal land in the area needs to consult the service to ensure it will not hurt the jaguar’s habitat

The Northern Californian couple who found $10 million worth of gold coins on their land could have broken California Law for failing to report their stunning discovery to police, it emerged today. ..... But, according to Californian Law, the couple should have declared their findings to the police within a ‘reasonable time’ of finding it. The Californian Civil Code, sub-section 2080, also states that a notice must go in the local paper if the haul is worth more than $250. Usually, breaking the Civil Code isn’t an arrestable offense but punished with a fine. ..... But, according to one Gold...

Slate.com has become a journalistic ghetto, an “Amateur Online Webzine Specializing in Hit-Trolling and Outrage-Fishing,” as Ace calls it, and their “business and economics correspondent” (?) Matt Yglesias gets in the spirit with a 415-word item under this headline: Why Taxing the Rich Is Great Yglesias quotes one sentence from a New York Times article: Matt Hlavin, an entrepreneur in Cleveland who owns seven businesses, mostly in manufacturing, bought three Mercedes last year: a $237,000 SLS AMG and a $165,000 S63 AMG for himself, and a $97,000 GL550 sport utility vehicle for his wife. Yglesias then proceeds to argue...