Free Republic

The Covid-19 shutdowns have been based on the premise that the disease would kill more than two million Americans absent drastic actions to slow its spread. That model assumed case fatality rates - the share of infected people who die from the disease - of 1% to 3%. The World Health Organization’s estimated case-fatality rate was 3.4%. Some experts - including in these pages - have questioned this assumption. They argue that known cases are likely only a small portion of the true number of infections, and thus high case-fatality rates could be off by orders of magnitude. We don’t...

The big dinosaur extinction of 65 million years ago didn't produce a flurry of new species in the ancestry of modern mammals after all, says a huge study that challenges a long-standing theory. Scientists who constructed a massive evolutionary family tree for mammals found no sign of such a burst of new species at that time among the ancestors of present-day animals. Only mammals with no modern-day descendants showed that effect. "I was flabbergasted," said study co-author Ross MacPhee, curator of vertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. At the time of the dinosaur demise,...

New Data Chart on Judicial Confirmation Crisis     3/10/2003By Thomas JippingUpdated on March 10, 2003 Court Seats Current Vacancies Pending Nominees Confirmed Defeated Before Judiciary Committee Before Full Senate U.S. District Court 665 36 22 86 0 22 3 U.S. Court of Appeals 179 25 19 17 0 14 5 U.S. Supreme Court 9 0 0 0 0 0 0 U.S. Court of Int'l Trade 9 1 1 0 0 1 0 TOTALS 862 62 42 103 0 31 8 FOR MORE INFORMATION: Current Vacancies: the latest vacancy list compiled by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Pending Nominees: the...