Free Republic

Italy's Giorgia Meloni has again hit back at US President Donald Trump on social media after he questioned her political popularity and repeated his claim that she asked "over and over" for a photo together. Trump said on Saturday that the prime minister was "doing poorly in Italy with her level of popularity". He also accused her of not supporting US efforts to prevent Iran "from obtaining or developing a nuclear weapon". In a statement on Instagram, Meloni said Trump's "constant, unprovoked attacks" were "senseless". "As for my popularity, being your friend has certainly not helped it, nor does it...

SpaceX may have just dropped its biggest hint yet about what comes after Starship Flight 13. Indeed, FINALLY! Starship's Next Giant Leap may be here as the new filings point toward an Orbital Return Demo that could mark the next major milestone on the road to full reusability. With that work continues at Starbase on Pads 1 and 2, the Gigabay, and future launch infrastructure. Elsewhere this week, we cover Falcon 9 launches carrying BlueBird satellites, Starlink, and another classified NRO mission, Cargo Dragon’s return from the International Space Station, Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander preparing for launch, Ariane 6’s impressive...

Tony Seruga @TonySeruga 1/6 The Pulte-Gabbard Offensive: A Structural BreakdownI've identified the precise fulcrum point here, and it's worth unpacking why this combination of players and information creates genuine leverage.Tony Seruga@TonySeruga·22h2/6🎯 Why Pulte Scares the MachineBill Pulte isn't just another wealthy Trump ally. He's the grandson of the guy who literally built the modern American home — and he's taken a very different path with his capital.- Philanthropy as intelligence gathering: Pulte's Twitter philanthropy operation (dubbed "Pulte Philanthropy") put him in direct contact with tens of thousands of ordinary Americans. That's not charity — that's a distributed intelligence network. He...

20 June 2026 Saturday of week 11 in Ordinary Time Church of the Irish Martyrs, Ballycane, Ireland Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: Green. Year: A(II).First reading2 Chronicles 24:17-25'You have deserted the Lord: now he deserts you'After the death of Jehoiada, the officials of Judah came to pay court to the king, and the king now turned to them for advice. The Judaeans abandoned the Temple of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, for the worship of sacred poles and idols. Because of their guilt, God’s anger fell on Judah and Jerusalem. He sent them prophets to bring them back to...

Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters said in a statement posted Saturday on Telegram that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed to vessel traffic, accusing the United States of violating the recently negotiated memorandum of understanding intended to end the U.S.-Iran war and restore maritime access through the strategic waterway. The statement, which was also circulated by Iran's Tasnim News Agency Telegram channel, said the move was a response to what it described as America's "bad faith and blatant breach" of the agreement as well as continued Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon."From this moment," the statement said, "the Strait...

Lander, who is running as a progressive with support of Mayor Mamdani, is running away with the contest with just over a month to go before the June 23 primary. If Lander wins by anything close to the more than 2-1 margin in the survey it would represent a huge political victory for Mamdani. Goldman refused to back Mamdani even after he won the Democratic primary.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations and its Texas chapter have filed a federal lawsuit against Fort Worth ISD on behalf of Shayma Alzubi, the former incoming principal at Western Hills High School, who was reassigned after scrutiny of past social media posts. The complaint, filed June 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division, brings claims under the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. It seeks to return Alzubi to the Western Hills principal role for the 2026-2027 school year, along with damages, attorneys’ fees, and litigation...

Senior research scientist John Jumper said on Friday he would leave Google DeepMind to join AI startup Anthropic, the latest ‌high-profile departure at the Big Tech giant's AI research and development division. Jumper, ‌who won a Nobel prize alongside Google's Demis Hassabis in 2024, is best known as the co-creator ​of AlphaFold, a breakthrough AI that has predicted over 200 million protein structures, cutting years off biological and medical research. How intense is the AI talent war among tech giants? "After nearly nine years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic," Jumper said in a post on...

At least 13 people were injured late Friday night when two gunmen opened fired from a vehicle into a crowd in the city's Princeton Park neighborhood, Chicago police said. Police said at around 11 p.m., officers were called about a person who had been shot along West 95th Street near South Wentworth Avenue. A preliminary investigation determined a red SUV pulled alongside a large crowd, and two suspects inside the vehicle began firing gunshots before fleeing the scene. When officers arrived on the scene, they found two people who had sustained gunshot injuries. A 32-year-old woman was shot twice in...

The Trump administration is working with Qatar on a mechanism that would let Iran tap roughly $6 billion in frozen oil revenue to buy food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods, an early financial sweetener under the 14-point memorandum of understanding signed Wednesday with Tehran, people familiar with the talks said. The plan, which is still unfinished and requires Iranian sign-off, would route purchases through Iran's central bank and could serve as a template for unlocking a slice of the roughly $100 billion in Iranian assets around the world.The arrangement, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, would draw down a...

Iran's top joint military command, ​Khatam al-Anbiya Central ‌Headquarters, said on Saturday that the Strait ​of Hormuz would ​be closed to vessel ⁠traffic, citing ​alleged violations of a ​ceasefire agreement by the U.S. and Israel, Iran's ​Mehr state ​news agency reported. It said that ‌the ⁠closure was the "first step" in response to what it ​described ​as ⁠breaches of commitments and warned ​that further measures ​would ⁠be taken if "aggression" continued.

Throughout the early Cold War, conservatives in Congress—including Republicans—opposed American entanglements in the Middle East, drawing on an earlier noninterventionist consensus that valued restraint overseas and fiscal prudence at home. Conservative Republicans presented a vocal bloc of opposition to the Eisenhower Doctrine, which expanded American influence in the Middle East, ostensibly to counter Soviet influence and fill the vacuum left by the departure of the European colonial powers. One such dissenter was Iowan Representative H.R. Gross, one of the most fiscally conservative congressional members in history. Dissenting Republicans voiced similar critiques during the American response to the 1973 Yom Kippur...

Oklahoma Republican lieutenant governor nominee T.W. Shannon criticized the opening of the Obama Center in Chicago, arguing that the project highlights concerns about voter identification, and reports of unpaid contractors.

The Trump White House is lashing out at some of its most reliable allies as a bitter civil war erupts on the right over the administration’s controversial Iran agreement. Conservative commentator Batya Ungar-Sargon became the latest target Friday after she blasted the deal as an “utter humiliation” for the US and accused Vice President JD Vance of unfairly attacking Israel while defending Tehran. Within hours the official White House rapid-response account on X unloaded on the conservative pundit in a pair of scathing posts. “The only humiliation here is Batya desperately begging for an additional brain cell because her failing...

Trump may have given Iran everything it wanted on paper—but the real question is whether Tehran fell for a deal that gives America the leverage to walk away. To evaluate the Iran Memorandum of Understanding on its merits, beyond the hype, let’s start by separating what we know from what we don’t. Iran’s military has been destroyed. It has no air force, no navy, and no air defenses. We have obliterated Iran’s uranium enrichment plants, its uranium mills, and its uranium hexafluoride conversion facility, as well as the secret bomb-making workshops in Parchin that Iran would never allow the IAEA...

Yes, Elon Musk is richer than Mansa Musa by modern measurable standards. Current Wealth Figures Elon Musk (as of mid-2026): His net worth is estimated at around $1.2 trillion (Bloomberg, Forbes), driven largely by stakes in Tesla and SpaceX (which went public via IPO, pushing him past the trillion-dollar mark). This makes him the first confirmed trillionaire in modern records. Mansa Musa (r. ~1312–1337): Popular estimates put his wealth at roughly $400 billion (sometimes $300–500 billion) in today's dollars, based on his empire's control of gold and salt trade, and accounts of his lavish 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca that caused...

Republicans are largely skeptical that President Trump’s deal with Iran will deliver a geopolitical win, but they are bullish about its impact on the midterms, with gas prices already dropping.One national Republican operative described feeling “relief” after the agreement, pointing to positive reactions from markets. Oil prices have fallen to their lowest point since the war began at the end of February following the announcement of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran this week. Brent Crude, the international oil benchmark, sat at $79.53 per barrel on Thursday, while West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, was at $76.55.

Hezbollah launched over 50 projectiles at IDF soldiers in southern Lebanon overnight between Friday and Saturday, the military announced. The IDF responded to the attacks with strikes on several Hezbollah terrorists and terror infrastructure sites in southern Lebanon, the military added, including rocket launch positions, weapons storage facilities, and command centers. The military noted that it remains committed to the ceasefire, emphasizing that it will act to "remove any threat posed to the State of Israel and IDF soldiers." Israel's Arabic-language military spokesperson Col. Ella Waweya said calm could be achieved if Hezbollah halted all hostile activity and violations of...

Washington — President Trump's investment accounts traded between $212 million and $695 million in stocks and other securities over the first three months of the year — an unprecedented sum for a sitting president. CBS News is presenting the data from the president's most recent financial disclosure in a new interactive dashboard here. It shows that the president's investment accounts made 2,346 purchases and 1,296 sales between Jan. 6 and March 30, 2026. The figures for individual transactions were presented in a range, which is reflected in the wide disparity between the minimum and maximum values of the trades overall....

The premise that Jeff Bezos said human water consumption will limit AI growth stems from a controversial viral headline that actually reported the exact opposite sentiment. A quote attributed to Bezos circulated heavily online: "If we starve our data infrastructure of cooling resources just to sustain baseline human comfort, we are actively delaying the birth of a super-intelligence... Sometimes you have to prioritise the intelligence that will save us over the biology that slows us down." While that viral quote caused widespread outrage on platforms like Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), tech analysts and public records confirm that the quote...