Free Republic

From the AI apocalypse to a full-blown nuclear war, it seems that there is an almost endless list of things that might cause the end of the world. But, if those terrifying fates gest us, there is one doomsday event that Earth can't avoid. A terrifying graphic reveals how the Sun will grow into a vast 'red giant' star, becoming so large that it will be the end of the solar system as we know it. Although this might seem utterly petrifying, you don't need to start worrying just yet. Dr Edward Bloomer, senior astronomer at Royal Observatory Greenwich, said:...

An aspiring rapper is being celebrated as a hero after he saved the lives of four people by alerting them to the flames engulfing their home as they slept in Iowa on October 23. According to KCRA, Brendon Birt, who goes by the moniker Blase 96 in his music career, took a wrong turn in the town of Red Oak when he came upon the home. He told the station: 'I just felt like somebody was in there because it was so late at night.' The owner of the house, Tender Lehman, was in Montana due to a family emergency...

FATE, TX—Local libertarian man Gabriel Parton read yet another headline today about how the 2020 election was illegitimate. While Republicans nodded solemnly at the headline and Democrats screamed in rage, Parton reacted the way he does to everything: he just smiled smugly. "Actually," he said as a friend told him that the 2020 election was illegitimate, "all elections are illegitimate. Every election is simply the majority imposing their will on the minority through the threat of force, and as such is a violation of the non-aggression principle. I never consented to this election, and I am now being detained under...

Marine Le Pen’s Front Nationale has been gaining momentum in the upcoming elections. Whilst many polls have put her in the lead for the first round, she has consistently been touted to lose the second. But now she has begun talking about complete withdrawal from the European Union (EU), she may find a lot more support in the second round of voting. Euroscepticism is rife on the continent, and if France leaves, the whole EU edifice will soon crumble. The most recent polls have Le Pen at 18% (which is high when you consider there are at least 7 candidates...

After a building crane fell into Mecca's Grand Mosque on Sep. 11, 2015, killing 114 and injuring 394, the mosque's Imam Abdul Rahman Al Sudais visited the injured and, as he met each one, told them, "This is God's will."[2] Likewise, in February 2004, after a stampede killed at least 244 hajjis (pilgrims) in Mina, a town near Mecca, Saudi hajj minister Iyad Madani oxymoronically responded: "All precautions were taken to prevent such an incident, but this is God's will."[3]

In the brutal closing scene of the 2007 film “There Will Be Blood,” a bowling alley beating, set in motion by years of tension and personal torment, concludes with the final biting words, “I’m finished.” Sifting through the wreckage on the Senate floor last week, the same words could have come from Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu. Forty-one of her Democrat colleagues ruthlessly beat down her proposal to approve the Keystone pipeline, effectively sealing her fate in the December runoff election to keep her seat. Keeping a brave face, Landrieu insisted she held no one to blame and only felt “joy in...

Fresh figures on the US jobs market come out Friday, with a lot more than usual riding on them: new stimulus from Federal Reserve, and the poll numbers for President Barack Obama as he fights to keep his job. With the employment situation stagnant this year -- the jobless rate is stuck at a high 8.3 percent -- the new data for August could say a lot about the strength of the economy, as it weathers a global downturn and a domestic stalemate on economic policy. Chances are, economists say, the numbers will fall in the tepid range of July....

The other day I was talking to Kipp Greggory, our morning talk show host, during whose program this radio blog broadcast airs. We do not see each other very often, but when we do, it’s a fast-paced gab fest! He brought up a point of aggravation to him that amazed me, because it is something that bothers my husband and me, as well, and I have not heard anyone else make the point. It is the profusion of advertising that appeals to the prevalent sense of entitlement that infects many people in our society today. You have heard the ads...

Revealed: The priest who changed the course of history ... by rescuing a drowning four-year-old Hitler from death in an icy river * Future Fuhrer was plucked from certain death by boy who grew up to join the church * German newspaper from 1894 reveals incident It may be the most devastating act of mercy in history. A newspaper report chronicling how a boy of four was saved from drowning has surfaced in a German archive. The child – who historians believe could have been Adolf Hitler – was plucked from the icy waters of the River Inn in Passau,...

The Newt Surge is official. Over the last week, Gingrich’s Intrade odds of winning the nomination rose from 16% to 39%. Romney has faded a little but still leads with 47% odds. No one else is above 5% odds. The polls are even more stunning. Rasmussen shows Gingrich leading 38%-17% in a national poll. Real Clear Politics lists polls with Gingrich leading Romney by 15-30 points in Florida, South Carolina and Iowa, and trailing Romney by only 10 points in New Hampshire. In the general election match-up, Rasmussen has Gingrich leading Obama by 2% and Romney trailing Obama by 6%....

After a tense night of vote-counting yielded no clear result, Australia was heading for a hung parliament with independents Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Bob Katter, who hail from regional areas, becoming the unlikely kingmakers. Independents (L-R) Bob Katter, Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor While they all have links to the National Party, the minor party in Tony Abbott’s conservative coalition, the independents have said that past allegiances will not influence their negotiations. The most unpredictable member of the trio is Mr Katter, the MP for the vast seat of Kennedy in northern Queensland which covers more than 340,000sq miles. A...

A "galactic lens" has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever. Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos. Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe. Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding. It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say. The study, conducted by an international team led by Professor Eric Jullo of Nasa's...

A radical reformulation of quantum mechanics suggests that the universe has a set destiny and its pre-existing fate reaches back in time to influence the past. It could explain the origin of life, dark energy and solve other cosmic conundrums.The universe has a destiny—and this set fate could be reaching backwards in time and combining with influences from the past to shape the present. It’s a mind-bending claim, but some cosmologists now believe that a radical reformulation of quantum mechanics in which the future can affect the past could solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including how life arose....

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang. Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter...

A former Cottonwood man who served 10 years on Texas death row until his murder conviction was overturned last year by an appellate court was killed Saturday in a solo truck crash in eastern Texas. Michael Toney, a 43-year-old Redding native, was killed when his pickup, which had oversized tires, rolled while going around a curve on Farm Road 347 in the rain Saturday morning, a spokeswoman with the Texas Department of Public Safety in Jacksonville said Monday. He was thrown from the pickup and died at the scene, she said. Toney, who had long maintained his innocence, was released...

The Art Archive/Biblioteca Braidense Milan/Gianni Dagli Orti “Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider not what is wont to happen, but what can happen.” It’s been clear for a while, at least since the collapse of Lehman Brothers last fall, that what we have to fear above all is hope itself. Attempts to trust that the worst is over and to stop frightening ourselves seem doomed to propel us into yet worse disappointment. We are not only unhappy, but—believing calm and happiness to be the norm—unhappy that we’re unhappy....

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Billionaire investor George Soros said on Monday that the length and depth of the U.S. recession will depend on who is the next U.S. president and the policies he puts in place to react to any slowdown. A series of grim economic reports in recent weeks have made clear that even if unprecedented government measures to stabilize banks succeed in restoring lending, the economy has been seriously damaged. Many analysts agree that the United State is in recession. "The range of possibilities is very wide," Soros said of how long a recession will last. He was...

ARLINGTON, Va., Sept. 11, 2008 – Seven years ago today, Army Col. William Stoppel dropped his 9-month-old son, Will, at day care and went to work. “It was my son’s first day at Pentagon day care,” Stoppel said. “I came in early, got him situated and went in to the office.” The day happened to be Sept. 11, 2001. Stoppel was assigned to the Army’s personnel office, where he processed promotion packets. When Stoppel got to his office, he borrowed some socks from Chief Warrant Officer William Ruth of the Maryland National Guard, talked to newly engaged Medical Service Corps...

John Piper pastors Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, whose main campus is about 1 mile from the I35 bridge over the Mississippi River that collapsed August 1. His reflections on that tragedy has been distributed far and wide and helped provide a biblical perspective on such events. Piper also responded forcefully and helpfully to the awful, God-dishonoring, soul-destroying and comfort-robbing words of Rabbi Harold Kushner on that tragedy. Both articles are worth reading and passing along to anyone and everyone who wonders "why bad things happen to good people." They are models in pastoral theology and ministry. Roger Olsen used...

Contact: Erik Trinkaus trinkaus@wustl.edu 314-935-5207 Washington University in St. Louis The emerging fate of the Neandertals For nearly a century, anthropologists have been debating the relationship of Neandertals to modern humans. Central to the debate is whether Neandertals contributed directly or indirectly to the ancestry of the early modern humans that succeeded them. As this discussion has intensified in the past decades, it has become the central research focus of Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Trinkaus has examined the earliest modern humans in Europe, including specimens in Romania, Czech Republic and France. Those...