Free Republic

The US military sank another suspected drug vessel in the Pacific Ocean Thursday, marking the 22nd strike under the Trump administration’s Operation Southern Spear and the first since War Secretary Pete Hegseth was accused of ordering survivors of a boat bombing be killed. The latest lethal strike killed “four male narco-terrorists” traveling on a vessel operated by a “Designated Terrorist Organization” in international waters, according to US Southern Command. “Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific,” US Southern Command said. The strike is the first in more...

Beijing’s epic military parade in early September triggered Western anxiety over China’s mounting hard-power potential. Indeed, the weapons trotted out were fearsome... But there’s a danger in fixating on China’s military upgrades. In fact, the country is fast eclipsing liberal democracies in more pragmatic ways — or already has. Grand set pieces of military theatre highlight combat threats to be taken seriously. Yet the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is positioning the nation as a twenty-first-century leader for different reasons. Among these are China’s near monopoly on critical mineral processing and refinement, its application-centric approach to artificial intelligence (AI), and...

An Arizona man looking for a huge payday for his ‘Lambo.com’ domain wound up left with nothing but legal fees and a loss of his initial investment, after a United States district court ruled in favor of Lamborghini and awarded the carmaker the domain name without having to pay a dime. It all started in February 2018, according to court documents, when Richard Blair purchased the "Lambo.com" domain for $10,000. In April 2022, Lamborghini filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center seeking a transfer of domain name under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute...

You can be pro-abortion, as the Washington Post is through and through, and still come to conclusions that advance the cause of life. Examples? I don’t know if I can find more than one instance from the WaPo’s editorial page, but yesterday it did reach a sound conclusion on the same topic for a second time. To wit, the editorial clobbered Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, for blocking, for a second time,” a “legitimate, politically accountable decision” on “flimsy legal grounds”. What are they talking about? Presidents too often try to advance their agendas unilaterally. Yet when it comes...

My latest song. Play it loud.

Around 8,000 years ago, a vast stretch of land connected Britain to mainland Europe. This lost world, known as Doggerland, was a thriving Mesolithic landscape teeming with mammoth, deer, and human communities. But everything changed with a catastrophic event that submerged this Stone Age Eden beneath the rising waters of the North Sea. In 1931, fishermen accidentally pulled prehistoric bones and tools from the seafloor, marking the first modern discovery of Doggerland. Since then, especially from the 1990s through 2019, archaeologists and scientists have used sonar scans, seabed sampling, and digital reconstructions to piece together what life was like in...

The CNN anchor made the embarrassing gaffe during the opening segment on The Lead Thursday evening, as a surveillance photo of suspect Brian Cole Jr. flashed behind him. Moments later, CNN became the first outlet to publish a second photo of the alleged suspect, taken from his mother's Instagram account. It clearly shows that the 30-year-old is a black man.

Key takeawaysNearly 2 in 5 (37%) Americans say they couldn’t afford an emergency expense over $400The median emergency savings for Americans is $60021% of people have no emergency savings at allMore than 3 in 5 (62%) Americans say that having dedicated emergency savings is a priority for them; yet 57% say high inflation and price increases have held them back from contributing this year1 in 4 (25%) people dipped into emergency savings to cover basic living expenses in the past yearPaying down debt is a higher priority than saving for an emergency for 57% of Americans34% believe they could handle...

Austrian businessman Bernd Bergmair, former majority owner of Pornhub, has approached the U.S. Treasury about buying assets of Russian oil major Lukoil after the Trump administration sanctioned the company. "Obviously Lukoil International GmbH would be a great investment and anybody would be fortunate to have the privilege of owning those assets,” Bergmair told Reuters. "I don’t comment on potential investments as a matter of course," he added.Last month, U.S. Treasury issued the greenlight for companies to begin talks with Lukoil for its foreign assets, with U.S. oil and gas giants Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) and Chevron (NYSE:CVX) have already expressed interest....

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird hardly needs an introduction, as I expect everyone in the world has read it, or has seen the film starring Gregory Peck. (If you haven’t read it, perhaps you should.) Lee, incidentally, went to visit the film set, and had this to say about Peck: “an inspired performance. In some mysterious way, Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch transcended illusion.” If that seems a tad clichéd and not especially insightful, then I’m afraid to say that this is the general tenor of the nonfiction pieces in The Land of Sweet Forever , alongside eight previously unseen...

Minnesota Democratic lawmakers, including the Attorney General, were handed over $53,000 in campaign contributions by fraudsters who ripped off taxpayer cash meant to feed children. AG Keith Ellison, his councilman son, mayor Jacob Frey, Representative Ilhan Omar and others received cash from the scammers who siphoned off some $250 million, largely through nonprofit Feeding Our Future. Many did so after meeting the crooks, raising questions about how much they knew. “I’m not here because I think it’s going to help my re-election,” Ellison said during an encounter with Somali business leaders, two of whom later became criminal defendants linked to...

Gov. Tim Walz is promoting a new government assistance program open to illegal immigrants in Minnesota, as he faces scrutiny for allegedly allowing statewide welfare fraud, reportedly committed primarily by Somali immigrants. The Minnesota Paid Family and Medical Leave Program (PMFL), which Walz signed into law and is publicly praising ahead of its start date on Jan. 1, will cover “undocumented workers,” according to the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Employers are required to display a PFML poster at their respective workplaces to notify employees about the paid leave program. The poster must be displayed in any foreign language that is...

Boeing came under increasing scrutiny in the popular press in the wake of a series of reported incidents and accidents involving aircraft it manufactured… Perhaps the most glaring production deficiency occurred in October 2022, when Boeing provided a MAX plane for Alaska Airlines. Workers at Boeing had apparently forgotten to reinstall four bolts that keep a piece known as a door plug in place on the 737 MAX. It was removed to allow three contractors from a temporary staffing company hired by Spirit AeroSystems, the company’s production partner and supplier, to rework defective rivets… The problems at Boeing were due...

Donald Trump has replaced the chief architect in charge of designing his grandiose $300 million White House ballroom. The president replaced James McCrery II and his architecture firm back in late October, according to the Washington Post. Behind the scenes, Trump and McCrery battled over the commander-in-chief’s desire to keep increasing the size of the new building. One source said Trump decided to replace the esteemed designer after McCrery’s firm repeatedly missed deadlines and its small workforce made progress difficult. Trump's ballroom, paid for by big tech donors including Amazon and Google, is described as 90,000 square feet in official...

While giant tech companies like Google and Amazon tout the billions they’re pouring into AI infrastructure, IBM’s CEO doubts their bets will pay off like they think. Arvind Krishna, who has been at the helm of the legacy tech company since 2020, said even a simple calculation reveals there is “no way” tech companies’ massive data center investments make sense. This is in part because data centers require huge amounts of energy and investment, Krishna said on the Decoder podcast.Goldman Sachs estimated earlier this year that the total power usage by the global data center market stood at around 55...

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang presented Joe Rogan’s audience with a vision of AI so dominant it could rewrite reality itself.Huang layed out a future where human knowledge completely takes a backseat to silicon brains in the very near future.“In the future… maybe two or three years, 90% of the world’s knowledge will likely be generated by AI,” Huang told Rogan, his tone matter-of-fact as if charting tomorrow’s weather.NVIDIA CEO blows Joe Rogan away with a staggering prediction about AI. HUANG: “In the future… maybe two or three years, 90% of the world’s knowledge will likely be generated by AI.” ROGAN:...

For years now, manufacturers have been beholden to "CAFE" fuel standards that force them to increase the average fuel efficiency of their fleets. This has forced automakers to make engines needlessly complex (ie, expensive to fix). Ironically, to avoid regulations imposed on smaller vehicles, it has also led automakers to make their trucks larger and larger, and/or abandoning entire production lines, like Ford did with its sedans.

Steve Cropper, the guitarist and songwriter who helped anchor the celebrated Memphis backing band Booker T. and the MG's at Stax Records and co-wrote the classics Green Onions, (Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay and In the Midnight Hour, has died. He was 84. Pat Mitchell Worley, president and CEO of the Soulsville Foundation, said Cropper´s family told her that Cropper died on Wednesday in Nashville. The foundation operates the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, located at the site of the former Stax Records, where Cropper worked for years. A cause of death was not immediately...

It's funny how much of the Democrat modus operandi resembles that of scam artists. Holiday scams are rising as many rush for deals yet discount due diligence. The left employs its own kind of political phishing, creative, yet driven by emotions such as vanity, guilt, and vengeance. Regardless of how it is done, liberalism often disguises its true political aims. Comparing even those political tactics to more nefarious holiday hustles could be useful. A growing fraud is the non-delivery scam. According to the FBI, this is “where you pay for goods or services … but you never receive the items.”...

(1918-1985) Working name of US author born Edward Hamilton Waldo in New York City.