Free Republic

A borough councilperson was fatally shot in New Jersey this week, authorities have confirmed, marking the state's second attack in seven days where an act of gun violence resulted in the death of a local elected official. Russell Heller, 51, was a council member in the township of Milford, near the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He was shot around 7 a.m. on Wednesday morning in the parking lot of the PSE&G Central Division headquarters building in Somerset, where Heller had worked as a supervisor for 11 years. Officers were dispatched to the facility on a 911 call, the...

There was an air of magical realism in the daylong visit to Kiev last Friday by the EU’s policy commissioners comprising the executive branch of the group — the so-called College — led by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. At the end of the day in Kiev on Friday, during a joint press conference in Kiev with President Volodymyr Zelensky, all that the EU’s super bureaucrats would promise was that “Ukraine’s future is in the EU.” However, as the BBC reported, “Typically, it takes years for countries to join — and the EU has declined to set...

How a decade of quiet planning and Western fear of spies is turning China into a scientific powerhouseChinese-American physicist Xiaoxing Xi is still haunted by the memory of an early morning in 2015, when a group of FBI officers surrounded his home in Pennsylvania. The agents pointed guns at his wife and two daughters and then handcuffed him. The former chair of Temple University's physics department was charged with leaking sensitive technology to the Chinese government. Prosecutors accused Professor Xi of secretly sharing the design of a pocket heater for a supercomputer with scientists in China. Overnight, Professor Xi's face...

The security guard wounded in a shooting — that also injured two teens — outside a Brooklyn high school was trying to break up a fight when he was grazed by a bullet in the neck, police sources said Thursday. The 37-year-old private security guard — who is employed by Williamsburg Charter High School — told investigators that he was making his rounds during Wednesday afternoon dismissal when he spotted a large fight at the corner of Varet and White streets, the sources said. He stepped in — and even held back someone involved in the melee — when he...

The propellers of both engines of the Yeti Airlines aircraft that crashed in Nepal last month and killed 71 people, including five Indians, did not have power during its descent, a PTI report quoted government-appointed panel probing the aviation disaster as saying. During the analysis and investigation, the propellers of both engines were found to have gone “feathering in the base leg in the course of landing,” My Republica newspaper reported, quoting the panel. Yeti Airlines flight 691, after taking off from Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport on January 15, crashed on the bank of the Seti River between the old...

The Biden administration on Thursday announced that it would issue a $2 billion loan to a battery manufacturing facility as it looks to bolster the country’s supply chain for electric vehicles. “The Department of Energy is proud to announce a conditional commitment for a $2 billion loan to Redwood Materials,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on Thursday during a press conference. “If finalized, this $2 billion loan is going to help Redwood to complete this project to produce critical components for EV batteries.” She did not elaborate on what the conditions of the commitment are. The Hill has reached out...

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) torched Republicans and Democrats alike on Wednesday night during a rousing speech at the Washington Press Club's Congressional Dinner. Journalists and lawmakers packed into the glamorous Waldorf Astoria hotel in Washington, DC, for the 77th annual event. Mace, already known for her blunt and outspoken ways, brought down the house with roasts of her controversial colleagues as the featured Republican speaker - and sprinkled her speech with some light-hearted jabs as well. She made several jokes about Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) related to a federal probe into whether he had committed sex acts with a minor,...

Takeaways * We will be ending the suspension of Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks. * We’ve put new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses. * The public should be able to hear what politicians are saying so they can make informed choices.Social media is rooted in the belief that open debate and the free flow of ideas are important values, especially at a time when they are under threat in many places around the world. As a general rule, we don’t want to get in the way of open, public and democratic debate on...

President Donald Trump is up double digits in the latest 2024 Republican primary poll, released by Premise Data. The survey asked, “Who do you think the Republican Party should nominate as the party’s candidate for president in 2024?” A majority of Republican respondents, 57 percent, chose Trump, leaving Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) 29 points behind with 26 percent support. No other candidate came close, as Vice President Mike Pence came in third with five percent support. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) came in fourth place with three percent support, followed by former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley (two...

An estimated 27.3 million people watched President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday — a 29% drop from the audience for last year’s speech and the fewest to view the event in at least 30 years, according to Nielsen Media Research. ​ The total number of viewers ​who tuned in Tuesday was off from the 38.2 million who watched the president’s speech in 2022 and substantially lower than the 46.7 million who viewed former President Donald Trump’s second State of the Union in 2019, the Nielsen data show.​ The only smaller audience since 1993 came in 2021, when...

The Florida High School Athletic Association's board of directors has voted 14-2 to remove questions about high school athletes' menstrual history from a required health form for participation in high school athletics. Thursday's emergency meeting focused on the debate around menstrual cycle information. But in a less-discussed change to the requirements for Florida athletes, the newly adopted form asks students to list their "sex assigned at birth." The previous version asked only for "sex." The vote comes after weeks of controversy surrounding questions on the medical form, which is typically filled out by a physician and submitted to schools. The...

Dr Jordan B Peterson examines the current energy crisis, the globalist ideology that simultaneously fuels it while calling for the sacrificial demise of the poor, and what this truly means for Europe's future, if not the entire world.

WHAT THE ACTUAL HECK IS HAPPENING IN NEW JERSEY? This happened a week ago: New Jersey GOP councilwoman gunned down outside her home in targeted attack And then this news broke today, one week later: New Jersey GOP councilwoman gunned down outside her home in targeted attack 51-year-old Milford Councilman Russell Heller was found dead on Wednesday just after 7 am in the Somerset parking lot of the local energy company PSE&G where Heller worked, according to the New York Post. Police identified 58-year-old former employee Gary Curtis as the suspect, and discovered him dead in his car from a...

Henry Bicker Gibson was cashier of the Ontario Bank, director of multiple financial ventures, president of a canal company, and president of two railroads, the latter of which was merged with others to form the New York Central.

Former President Donald Trump detailed his plan for “reclaiming American energy dominance” and creating the “power plants, pipelines, grids, ports, refineries, and shipping terminals of tomorrow” in his latest campaign ad video shared exclusively with Breitbart News.Trump, who remains the lone candidate in the 2024 presidential primary field, pledged to “bring back a pro-American energy policy at long last” if he is elected to the Oval Office, unveiling his plan to de-regulate the industry, once again exit the Paris Climate Accords, and “rapidly” approve “worthy” domestic energy infrastructure projects to lower prices and create jobs for Americans:I will deploy a...

Over 50,000 Americans died at Gettysburg, making it the bloodiest battle of the bloodiest war in our nation's history. And if you'd stepped on this sucker, you might have been the last casualty of the Civil War. From The Hill: According to the park, the shell was found within the Little Round Top rehabilitation project area in the southwest corner of Little Round Top, the site of a Union victory over the Confederacy on July 2, 1863, amid the Battle of Gettysburg. Officials with the park say the device dates to 1863. It weighs about 10 pounds, and measures about...

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Thursday defended President Biden’s reaction to the flight of a Chinese surveillance balloon across the United States and said he agreed with the president’s decision to shoot it down off the coast of South Carolina. Romney said he was satisfied with answers he received from senior administration officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, at an all-senators classified briefing on the incident. “My questions were satisfactorily answered and I believe the administration, the president, our military and our intelligence agencies acted skillfully and with care. At the same time, their capabilities are extraordinarily impressive,”...

PORTLAND, Ore. — A new high-income tax by Metro is waiting on collections from thousands of households in Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington counties. Anyone with a late payment could be facing additional fees and interest. The Supporting Housing Services tax collects 1% of personal income for individuals who make more than $125,000 annually or more than $200,000 for joint filers. In the past month, Metro has issued roughly 20,000 notices to taxpayers fitting the income requirements for either failing to pay the 2021 tax by April 2022, or for mistakes in their filing, according to Metro spokesperson Nick Christensen. “We're...

Former Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) let President Joe Biden have it over the ongoing crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying on Wednesday that he had been wrong to dramatically change border policy without having a good plan in place to mitigate the potential fallout of those changes. Cuomo made the comments during the most recent episode of his podcast — “As a Matter of Fact …” — and he even went so far as to say that “the southern states were right” when they warned Biden not to dismantle the policies left in place by former President Donald Trump and...

So many lies were told at the House Oversight’s first committee hearing Wednesday into the corruption scandal involving Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and the subsequent cover up by the FBI with social-media firms to rig the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden. Or, as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tried to rebrand it: “Hunter Biden’s half-fake laptop.” It’s a sign of desperation that more than two years after The Post published the first bombshell story from the laptop, Dems can’t get their stories straight on what the laptop really is. Is it Hunter’s property, his “personal data” that was...