Free Republic

A crew of Uzbek wannabe mobsters was busted Wednesday for swiping $4.5 million of cigarettes, high-end cheese and other goodies from warehouses across the Northeast — in a scheme straight out of “Goodfellas,” The Post has learned. Crew leader Murad Khasanov and his cronies allegedly used a modern twist on an old-school mob heist — hacking into computer networks and creating forged invoices to convince warehouse workers to simply hand them the haul without ever needing to point a gun, law enforcement sources said. When they weren’t hitting the road in trucks full of cigarettes, seafood, pricey cheese, meat and...

Federal agents, in a daring predawn raid Wednesday, pounced on the opulent, $35 million Newport Beach mansion of an Iranian tech boss charged with supplying US computer hardware to Iran’s military and nuclear programs. The California Post was there as the FBI arrested Jamshid Ghomi, 63, of Newport Coast, who was charged with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and is expected to appear Wednesday afternoon in Santa Ana federal court. The businessman, who is a dual citizen of Iran and the US, is accused of selling computer hardware to the Iranian government for use in its...

Mom’s not the word. New York state Democrats passed a bill to erase words like “mother” and “father” from Family Court Law — in the latest gender-neutral rewriting in the state’s official records. “Mother” would be replaced with “gestating parent” while “father” becomes “non-gestating parent” and “paternity” proceedings would become “parentage” proceedings under the woke bill that was rammed through both houses of the state legislature this week. A “putative father” in paternity proceedings would now be defined as “an alleged parent” under the bill, which was sponsored by liberals Sen. Luis Sepulveda (D-Bronx) and Assemblywoman Amy Paulin (D-Westchester) and...

ROSELAND, N.J., June 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Private sector employment increased by 122,000 jobs in May and pay was up 4.4 percent year-over-year according to the May ADP National Employment Report® produced by ADP Research in collaboration with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab ("Stanford Lab"). The ADP National Employment Report is an independent measure of the labor market based on the anonymized weekly payroll data of more than 26 million private-sector employees in the United States. ADP's Pay Insights captures over 15 million individual pay change observations each month. Together, the jobs report and pay insights use ADP's fine-grained data...

New Game Show "The Answer Is Right!".............. https://x.com/i/status/2061821123009126809

The Justice Department said Tuesday it obtained a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center that contained new allegations about how its donations were purportedly used to pay informants inside hate groups. The superseding indictment, which the DOJ said was returned by a grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama, alleges that $4.1 million worth of tax-exempt funds were used to pay informants inside extremist organizations, who then allegedly engaged in activities including recruiting new members and purchasing materials for cross burnings and Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods. The charges do not stem from the general practice...

[Catholic Caucus] Homosexual German priest says Bible should be read through ‘queer’ lens'Reading the Bible from a queer perspective essentially means approaching the texts as a source of liberation for all ways of life,' wrote Father Burkhard Hose.An openly homosexual German priest, who enjoys the support of his local bishop, has said that the Bible should be read through a “queer” lens.Father Burkhard Hose, a well-known pro-LGBT activist within the Catholic Church in Germany, wrote an essay in which he laid out what it means to read Holy Scripture through a “queer” lens.“Reading the Bible from a queer perspective essentially...

TEMPE, Ariz., June 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Economic activity in the services sector continued to expand in May, say the nation's purchasing and supply executives in the latest ISM® Services PMI® Report. The Services PMI® registered 54.5 percent, the 23rd consecutive month in expansion territory. The report was issued today by Steve Miller, CPSM, CSCP, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Services Business Survey Committee: "In May, the Services PMI® registered 54.5 percent, an increase of 0.9 percentage point compared to April's figure of 53.6 percent. The Business Activity Index remained in expansion territory in May, increasing 1.8...

An Ohio-based smoke bomb designer and two other companies have agreed to pay more than $4 million to the United States to settle a lawsuit over a gender reveal that literally went up in smoke back in 2020, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. A pyrotechnic device at a couple’s gender reveal party in Yucapia’s El Dorado Ranch Park on Sept. 5, 2020 sparked the El Dorado Fire, which burned nearly 23,000 acres and caused a firefighter’s death. Hubbard, Ohio-based Wholesale Fireworks Corp. and its Hudson, Ohio-based subsidiary, American Fireworks Wholesale Inc., agreed to pay the $4 million to settle...

What if no king is truly above the law? In this deep dive into Lex Rex (1644), Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford makes a bold biblical argument: the law is king—not the king himself. Written during a time of political upheaval, this classic work challenges absolute monarchy and lays a foundation for constitutional government rooted in Scripture. In this video, we break down: The 10 key principles of Lex Rex What the Bible teaches about government authority (Romans 13, Deuteronomy 17, 2 Samuel 5) Why rulers must be accountable to God and the people The biblical case for resisting tyranny How...

We updated this list as part of the the Best of the Best Books Reading Challenge! Join the challenge now! Very short novels have a special magic—not least because, not to be morbid, you can simply read more of them before the inevitable heat death of the planet (or similar). I previously wrote about great contemporary novels under 200 pages, but now it is time to turn my attention to my favorite short classics—which represent the quickest and cheapest way, I can tell you in my salesman voice, to become “well-read.” A few notes: Because the “contemporary” list surveyed novels...

AAmong the greatest early accomplishments of the second Trump Administration was the shuttering of USAID. It’s great in part because it’s saving billions previously supposedly spent on trans camel surgeries in the third-world, but also because it has shut down innumerable Democrat NGOs and non-profits, including the Democrat National Committee, which, within a month, went broke and had to borrow millions just to keep the lights on. It seems USAID’s money—taxpayer money—wasn’t just spent on bizarre, leftist boondoggles overseas. It largely funded the Democrat Party and their cronies in America. Smart, that Trump guy. A recent, tear-drenched New York Times...

Something Suspicious Is Happening The accumulating evidence has led me to believe Gold is going to get revalued… and sooner than most think. Bond yields are blowing out now. Central banks are buying gold at record levels. President Trump recently announced he wants to audit Fort Knox. States across America are reintroducing gold and silver into the monetary system. And every single day, I watch one expiration: December 2026. Deep out-of-the-money COMEX gold calls. $10,000/oz — 1.1M oz in open contracts $15,000/oz — 2.4M oz in open contracts $20,000/oz — 2.65M oz in open contracts Thousands upon thousands of contracts....

It was once common to suggest people who lose their blue-collar jobs should “learn to code.” This is no longer very good advice, if it ever was, since coding is now something you should definitely not learn if you want to keep up with progress. (AI tells me that the number of jobs for programmers has declined by 27.5 percent since AI came along.) But “learn to code” remains a pretty good metaphor for what we faculty will have to do if we want to keep doing our jobs. Higher ed is a broken thing, and if we’re going to...

Vickrum Digwa who stabbed 18-year-old university student Henry Nowak to death with a ceremonial Sikh knife has been found guilty of murder. As the case sparks outrage across Britain, Samara Gill examines the questions surrounding the use of kirpans, claims of racial motivation, and whether police and the justice system got it badly wrong from the very beginning with Harman Singh.

June 3 (UPI) -- Kuwait closed its main airport in Kuwait City on Wednesday after Iranian missile and drone strikes injured several people and caused "significant damage" to its main terminal building as renewed hostilities between the Iran and the United States escalated.The airport activated its emergency plan, suspending all flights indefinitely after its Terminal 1 building was the target of "Iranian aggression, resulting in significant damage to several airport facilities, in addition to recording human injuries," the Directorate General of Civil Aviation said in an update on X.DGCA spokesman Abdullah Al-Rajhi said it has been decided to suspend air...

There is something seriously wrong with a government, and its people, when they cannot count votes in what one would expect to be a reasonable time frame. What's a reasonable time frame? France, as an example, can say who won a presidential election by early morning of the next day, at the latest. In CA, as of right now, only about 58% of some estimated 8 million plus votes have been counted. And the LA primary for mayor? Still counting. I'll assume that this counting is not even by hand (as in France, I believe) but by "sophisticated" machines, and...

Rosie O'Donnell is opening up about her facelift journey and shared a before-and-after photo of her transformation.(snip) In an essay titled "decisions," which is formatted like a song or poem, the 64-year-old talked about why she decided to get a facelift and the internal conflict she faced afterwards over whether to publicly disclose why she went through with the procedure. "I used to feel very strongly about facelifts," she began. "Not casually -- morally. I had assigned myself as head of all women who would never -- ever." She went on, "I thought it was a betrayal. Of feminism. Of...

The incident took place Sunday night on Frontier Airlines Flight 3345, which had departed from San Juan, Puerto Rico, bound for Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. About 45 minutes into the flight, 51-year-old Juan Gabriel Reyes of Pahokee, Florida, began acting erratically, according to an arrest affidavit from the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office and a federal criminal complaint, the New York Post reports. Flight attendants and passengers spotted Reyes trying to open one of the aircraft’s emergency exit doors mid-flight. When crew members ordered him to sit down and stop, he ignored them completely, rushed toward the front of the plane, and...

It appears James Talarico's church practices what it preaches, which isn't a good thing. His woke church, which believes God is non-binary and that Jesus would have been a-okay with abortion, is spending some of its money on woke initiatives, including a trans summer camp and funding travel for out-of-state abortions. At the Texas church where the Democrat senate hopeful preaches sermons on the need for abortion in the “trans community,” church funds are sent not only to abortion giant Planned Parenthood, but also to radical organizations that pay to help facilitate out-of-state travel for women to kill their unborn...