Free Republic

Thousands of people wanting to send a message that racism is unwelcome in the United States gathered in a park outside the White House to protest a white nationalist rally on the anniversary of the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

A large Spanish-language radio station in Mexico will soon begin broadcasting in Chinese in a deal critics say will bring Beijing propaganda to Chinese Americans throughout Southern California. A Federal Communications Commission filing on the sale of radio station XEWW AM 690 radio near Tijuana reveals the buyer has ties to Phoenix Satellite Television US, a subsidiary of Hong Kong's pro-Beijing Phoenix TV. According to government sources, signs that Phoenix is involved in the purchase of the radio station prompted the Trump administration last week to begin an investigation into the national security implications of the sale. Phoenix TV has...

The number of Russians residing and working in the Czech Republic has been steadily growing in recent years. Today Russians are the fourth strongest foreign minority in the country, after Vietnamese, Slovak and Ukrainian nationals. In the last decade their number rose from 23,000 to 37,000. For young Russians, Prague is an attractive city free of the constraints of the Putin regime, and a good place for business and entertainment. The language barrier is easily surmountable due to both nations speaking a Slavic language. However there is one barrier that is harder to cross and that is the stigma of...

CALGARY - The United Conservative Party is under fire after a Calgary nomination candidate cast doubt on the legitimacy of climate change in several social media posts. Randy Kerr, who is vying for the UCP nomination to run in the provincial riding of Calgary-Beddington, is a former campaign manager for party leader Jason Kenney. Some of his posts linked to a website with connections to Breitbart News, the far-right U.S. media outlet, which is associated with the so-called alt-right and has been accused of being sympathetic to white nationalism. “My first reaction to that is, so what,” said Kerr, when...

The New York Times has devoted an entire edition of its magazine, some 30,000 words, to a terrifying piece about climate change. With 2C warming – an unlikely best-case scenario at this point, scientists were quoted as saying – the planet faces “long-term disaster”. I was having lunch with friends in Brooklyn on Sunday, in a low-lying area that will be under water when all of this comes to pass and, political analysis aside, all we could focus on was: what on earth are we going to do? More specifically, how to ensure the survival of our children, and should...

To curb the effects of climate change, the Paris Agreement calls for limiting the rising temperature only 2 degrees Celsius, but a new study recommends even less. Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences studied how the weather may change if humans are able to limit climate change. The study found that by changing the goal from 2 degrees to 1.5 degrees Celsius could prevent extreme precipitation events, such as abnormally high rain or snow that can lead to severe flooding, landslides and debris flows. "As the climate warms, both the mean state and the variability of extreme precipitation are...

This summer of fire and swelter looks a lot like the future that scientists have been warning about in the era of climate change, and it’s revealing in real time how unprepared much of the world remains for life on a hotter planet. The disruptions to everyday life have been far-reaching and devastating. In California, firefighters are racing to control what has become the largest fire in state history. Harvests of staple grains like wheat and corn are expected to dip this year, in some cases sharply, in countries as different as Sweden and El Salvador. In Europe, nuclear power...

CALIFORNIA, THE nation’s most populous state and the world’s fifth-largest economy, is on fire. In a state already known for monster conflagrations, the past month has been unusually destructive. The Mendocino Complex fire north of San Francisco is now officially the largest in California’s history, having burned an area about the size of Los Angeles, and it is just one of the major blazes the state has had to face since last October. As much as the president might prefer to point fingers elsewhere, it is impossible to talk about California’s blazes without considering the role of climate change. Four...

A tornado, albeit a weak one, touched down in New York City last Thursday, in the College Point neighborhood of Queens. A few days earlier, a stronger tornado was spotted near the town of Douglas, in central Massachusetts. The storms were far from the region in the middle of the country known as Tornado Alley, where the bulk of the nation’s tornadoes occur. In a summer already marked by simmering heat that researchers have linked to global warming, is climate change also making tornadoes more common in places where they once were infrequent? Though individual weather events are distinct from...

Though few realize it, the contents of your refrigerator can have a greater impact on climate change than the car in your garage or the fuel that heats and powers your home. That’s why Nordic nations like mine have set out to prove that the simple act of eating may be our best tool in the fight against climate change, as well as other great global crises like public health and inequality. Globally, food systems account for some 20-30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. So let’s turn our attention to the dinner table, to the school cafeteria, and to the...

Injecting particles into the atmosphere to cool the planet and counter the warming effects of climate change would do nothing to offset the crop damage from rising global temperatures, according to a new analysis by University of California, Berkeley, researchers. By analyzing the past effects of Earth-cooling volcanic eruptions, and the response of crops to changes in sunlight, the team concluded that any improvements in yield from cooler temperatures would be negated by lower productivity due to reduced sunlight. The findings have important implications for our understanding of solar geoengineering, one proposed method for helping humanity manage the impacts of...

Even a man who thought that women want to have sex with their fathers, and that women spend much of their lives distraught over their lack of a penis, is right sometimes. This person, the legend that is Sigmund Freud, theorized that people often have the most hateful and negative attitudes towards things they secretly crave, but feel that they shouldn't have. If Freud is right, then perhaps men who are the most opposed to male homosexuality have particularly strong homosexual urges for other men. One study asked heterosexal men how comfortable and anxious they are around gay men. Based...

Deadly fires have scorched swaths of the Northern Hemisphere this summer, from California to Arctic Sweden and down to Greece on the sunny Mediterranean. Drought in Europe has turned verdant land barren, while people in Japan and Korea are dying from record-breaking heat. Climate change is here and is affecting the entire globe -- not just the polar bears or tiny islands vulnerable to rising sea levels -- scientists say. It is on the doorsteps of everyday Americans, Europeans and Asians, and the best evidence shows it will get much worse. Remarkably, scientists can now work out in just a...

Leaders from Caribbean islands are urging President Donald Trump to take climate change seriously before they disappear due to extreme weather conditions, according to reports. Hurricane season poses an existential threat to the islands as increased rainfall caused by climate change makes hurricanes stronger, experts say. Recently, leaders from the Caribbean began urging Trump to understand the gravity of global warming. “In 2017, we saw some of the most devastating and destructive hurricanes we’ve seen in our history,” Selwin Hart, Barbados’ ambassador to the U.S. told The Guardian. “This needs to be recognized.... This isn’t some scientific debate, it’s a...

... On the right, hatred of Russia also runs deep, and little or no distinction is made in most quarters between things Russian and Soviet. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian patriot and the anti-communist par excellence, told an interviewer in 2006, that is very disappointing, indeed. Why such blindness and rigidity across the political and media class in the Western world, and in the United States in particular?

This is the summer when, for many, climate change got real. The future looks fiery and dangerous. Hot on the heels of Trump, fake news and the parlous state of the Brexit negotiations, despair is in the air. Now a new scientific report makes the case that even fairly modest future carbon dioxide emissions could set off a cascade of catastrophe, with melting permafrost releasing methane to ratchet up global temperatures enough to drive much of the Amazon to die off, and so on in a chain reaction around the world that pushes Earth into a terrifying new hothouse state...

During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon. They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosaurs. But the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. There were perhaps sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal...

Geese have a problem. Some are arriving at their Arctic mating grounds so exhausted they’re not in the mood anymore. Shifting environmental signals are making the birds race northward on their spring migration, flying faster and skipping the stops they normally use to rest and refuel, said a study in the journal Current Biology. The finding gives new insight into the way climate change is altering the calculus of animal migration. “This is the first one I know of where a long distance migrant is increasing its travel speed,” said Matthew Ayres, a biology professor at Dartmouth. Barnacle geese spend...

An unprecedented global heatwave has shattered records in nearly every corner of the planet. Death Valley set a new record. Cities in the Middle East have seen record hot days. There were days in India where it was so hot outside that conditions were nearly unlivable for human beings. Hundreds of people have died from heatstroke worldwide this summer. Heatwaves are now causing more deaths in U.S. cities than all other disasters combined. These sorts of the extreme heatwave events have been predicted for decades by scientists. We've known for some time now that extreme weather events like extraordinarily hot...

Since 2011, a devastating civil war has pitted Syrian, Russian, and Iranian armies against Sunni jihadis. Turkey has often weighed in as well. The Syrian conflict has also turned Christians against Christians. Some of Syria’s Christians persistently defend Bashar Assad as their lifelong protector. Others believe he is not only a ruthless dictator, but a pawn of Iran — the radical Islamist Revolutionary Shiite regime that has no place for Christians in its ideology. Historically, both tyrannical kings and modern dictators have used Christian minorities as useful instruments in their political toolbox. Notably, Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq long included...