Free Republic

TALLAHASSEE — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is on a collision course with the most powerful man in the GOP: Donald Trump. DeSantis is crisscrossing the country to deliver red-meat speeches. Iowa leaders begged him to visit. He just beat Trump in a key straw poll. And now the popular governor is getting close to overshadowing the former president in the 2024 presidential sweepstakes. All of that could be dangerous for DeSantis’ political health, as Trump continues to ponder a new bid for the White House and remains capable of kneecapping any Republican he sees as a threat. “It makes it...

(University of Cambridge) Scientists have revealed a fascinating new design for an incredibly tiny, inflatable spinal cord implant, suited for treating severe chronic back pain that doesn't respond to medication. The inflatable electronic device is part of a spinal cord stimulator (SCS) setup, a type of well-established therapy that delivers mild electric currents to a person's spinal cord via implanted electrodes. That current is sent by a small, implanted pulse generator device, and the whole thing reduces pain because the electrical pulses help to mask pain signals traveling to the brain via the spinal cord. If that all sounds rather...

The City Council of Oakland, California, approved a budget on June 24 that will redirect $17.4 million from its police department to other programs over the course of two years. The Council voted 7–2 to adopt the plan, which will direct the funds to a violence prevention program, according to CBSN Bay Area. The council’s website wasn’t yet updated with the vote tally on June 27. The funding diversion was approved amid a surge in violent crimes in the area, including a mass shooting at Lake Merritt the weekend before the vote.

A well-known neo-Nazi vlogger who loved nothing more than to dress up as comic book villains and call for genocide quietly pleaded guilty to several gun charges Tuesday morning. Paul Miller, a 32-year-old Florida man, is better known by his audience of racists and online trolls as Gypsy Crusader. He had a sizable audience on sites like Bitchute and Telegram—sites well known for their lax rules about hate speech and violent rhetoric—where he would post racist remarks and call for violence. An FBI raid in March netted him three charges for possession of an unregistered firearm and ammunition and possession...

The only foreign scientist who worked at China’s notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology has admitted she can’t rule out that COVID-19 leaked from the lab. “I’m not naive enough to say I absolutely write this off,” Australian virologist Danielle Anderson told Bloomberg of the theory behind the pandemic that has so far killed nearly 4 million people worldwide. Anderson, 42, was last at the institute in central China in November 2019, when the virus is believed to have already started spreading in Wuhan. SARS, an earlier coronavirus that emerged in Asia in 2002 and killed more than 700 people, made...

Advocates for incarcerated women are calling on California political and correctional leaders to halt and reverse the transfer of male-to-female transgender and nonbinary prisoners into the state's women's prisons.SB 132, which took effect Jan. 1, lets prisoners choose their gender identity for purposes of placement — and even bodily searches — regardless of sex reassignment surgery or hormone therapy.Though transfers were a trickle in the first few months, they have "sped up dramatically in recent weeks, and the safety of these women has become more and more compromised," a spokesperson for the Women's Liberation Front (WoLF) told Just the News."Under...

Digital Darkness: The Third Apocalypse — Humanity is only ever one blackout away from the caves. The more advanced and complicated a civilisation, the easier it is to destroy. Far from heeding this long-acknowledged fact, modern nations have decided to hinge their essential services on the deceptively fragile digital world. - Kill Switch - China to US: ‘Sever all military ties’ with Taiwan or face 'war’ — China has demanded the US to "sever" its military ties with Taiwan or it may lead to "war". - Reaching Critical MassOxford Report: United States ranks dead last in media trust among 49...

A South Texas woman was arrested by the Texas Attorney General’s Office Wednesday on 26 counts of violating state election laws. Monica Rene Mendez, 36, of Port Lavaca, was charged with three counts of illegal voting, seven counts of unlawful voter assistance, eight counts of returning marked ballots without consent and eight counts of election fraud, according to jail records. Further details, including the jurisdiction, timing or specific nature of the alleged violations, as well as the number of ballots potentially affected, remained unclear Thursday. As of Thursday morning, Mendez remained in custody at the Victoria County jail, where she...

A killer who gunned down two people after crashing a stolen box truck in a Boston suburb was a white supremacist who targeted his victims because they were black, according to officials. Nathan Allen, 28, shot and killed David Green, a retired Massachusetts State Police trooper, and Romana Cooper, an Air Force veteran, after emerging from a stolen truck that he crashed into a building in Winthrop on Saturday afternoon. After the crash, he interacted “with multiple individuals … choosing only to shoot and kill the two black people he encountered,” Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins said of the...

"Our efforts to expose the bigoted view and dangerous conspiracy theories spread by right-wing activists has now resulted in @YouTube banning our channel and removing thousands of our videos. We attempted to appeal this decision, and YouTube rejected it." Right Wing Watch Twitter

Bashing America is popular on the radical left, but it betrays just how much they really don’t know about the rest of the world. For leftists concerned about the environment, incessantly focusing on the United States is an especially big mental failure. While American stewardship of our land, water, and air have gradually improved over the last 50 years, real degradation of the natural environment has been increasing overseas.Politicians on the left preach piously about the need to protect the Earth while decrying any sort of restriction on trade with the world’s greatest polluter, China. Anyone who cares about good...

A boat was found drifting about a mile off Grand Turk island with 20 dead people on board, including two children, authorities in the Turks and Caicos Islands said Sunday. Officials said investigators had ruled out foul play but were still trying to determine what happened. The identities and origin of the dead were also under investigation. Fishermen spotted the small boat Thursday morning and alerted the marine branch of the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force, who towed the vessel ashore.

The Supreme Court rejected hearing the case cited below. Justice Thomas dissented in that denial of cert. The case concerned a business that operated a medical-marijuana dispensary in Colorado. Since marijuana is still illegal accordig to federal law, there are legal and tax implications to that. This is something that really needs to be dealt with by the court. It is exactly this sort of thing that the court exists for. For governments and courts at all levels to continue to just wink at this stuff and not actually resolve what is, and is not actually legal is really nothing...

California is moving ahead with a dramatic reopening of the economy this week as COVID-19 numbers remain low and more people get vaccinated. In this week's "In Focus SoCal," host Tanya McRae sits down with Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Krekorian, chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, to talk about the economic recovery in Southern California and what we can expect in the next year. "Tourism was devastated during COVID," he said. "At one point, our hotels were at lower than 20% occupancy, and we expect that they'll be back over 70% by this summer. And that's a huge...

"It's been a hell of a year, stress, anxiety, fear, the loneliness many people have felt over the course [of] last year," Newsom said. "So look, we're at this point. But it wasn't without a lot of pain, a lot of suffering. And so I'm mindful of that." "The best days of California are ahead of us."

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made another attempt to convince Americans that rising crime in New York City and elsewhere in the country is a non-issue over the weekend while alleging those pointing to the violence in America's streets are engaging in "hysteria.""We are seeing these headlines about percentage increases" in crime, Ocasio-Cortez admitted before saying "any amount of harm is unacceptable and too much. But I also want to make sure that this hysteria — you know that this doesn't drive a hysteria — and that we look at these numbers in context so that we can make responsible decisions...

In 2020, if you wanted to get a Democrat outraged, you’d have someone in President Donald Trump’s administration speak ill of the media. In 2021, if you want to get a Democrat outraged, have a member of the media speak ill of someone in President Joe Biden’s administration. In this regard, Fox News host Tucker Carlson seems to be a prominent target, particularly when he criticizes how the military has gone woke. On his program Thursday, he criticized Joint Chiefs of Staff head Gen. Mark Milley for his remarks defending critical race theory training and saying he wanted to understand...

A woman goes to a spa and sees a naked man in the womans' locker room. Apparently this woman hasn't been following current events for the last 5 years and doesn't understand some men are actually women and they have the right to be in the womans' locker room. 3 min video. Woman Goes Off After Seeing A Transgender Man Exposing Himself In Front Of Little Girls At A Spa (3 min video)

alifornia will extend its ban on evictions while covering back rent and utility payments for people who fell behind during the pandemic. The state will pay for this under a $7.2 billion plan that Governor Gavin Newsom called the "largest and most comprehensive renter protection deal in the United States." California placed a moratorium on evictions after Newsom imposed the nation's first statewide shut down in March 2020 and ordered most businesses to shut down because of the pandemic. Officials haven't said how many people will qualify under this new plan but there's enough money to provide more than $10,000...