Free Republic

Since 2017, self-driving cars owned by Chinese companies have traversed 1.8 million miles of California alone, according to a Fortune analysis of the state's Department of Motor Vehicles data. As part of their basic functionality, these cars capture video of their surroundings and map the state's roads to within two centimeters of precision. Companies transfer that information from the cars to data centers, where they use it to train their self-driving systems. The cars are part of a state program that allows companies developing self-driving technology -- including Google-spinoff Waymo and Amazon-owned Zoox -- to test autonomous vehicles on public...

KEY POINTS The Bank Secrecy Act has been around since the Nixon administration. The law was designed to stop criminal enterprises, large and small. Unless you're breaking the law, you have nothing to worry about. It's your money, and generally, you have the right to withdraw as much -- or as little -- as you desire from your bank account. However, under a law called the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), banks must report any deposits or withdrawals of $10,000 or more. Here, we'll cover why the BSA exists and if it's anything you need to be concerned about....... During the...

There are pivotal moments that define a person’s transformation, both personally and politically, and Elon Musk is right in the middle of one. Thanks to the Democrats’ radical Marxist agenda and their botched, tyrannical policies, Musk has been pulling off political U-turns left and right. So much so, that jaws were literally dropping after his latest post. This was, by far, Elon’s most savage “red pill” moment to date. It all unfolded when Elon Musk chimed in on a thread about the SAVE Act on his X platform, a proposal aimed at ensuring only American citizens vote in federal elections....

The Singapore Food Agency said ‘these insects and insect products can be used for human consumption or as animal feed for food-producing animals’ A young girl eating a fried grasshopper. Singapore on Monday approved grasshoppers, and 15 other insects as food. Photo: Shutterstock =================================================================== Sixteen species of insects, including crickets, locusts and silkworms, have been approved as food in Singapore, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) said on Monday. “With immediate effect, [the] SFA will allow the import of insects and insect products belonging to species that have been assessed to be of low regulatory concern,” the agency said in a...

The Israel Defense Forces visibly stepped up operations in central Gaza overnight Sunday and continuing into the early hours of Monday morning, as the Israel's military unusually announced that it was "striking Hamas terror targets in the central Gaza Strip." However, the IDF said residents were warned ahead of time, and a route was opened for their safe evacuation. The military and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) also made it clear that they were targeting both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) operatives, who were using United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) headquarters. One particular strike was reported...

Italian pasta, anyone? ================================================================== Some of the more obscure headlines from around the world can be the most informative. Let’s face it—what happens in some other nation may already be happening in our own. So, when the above headline caught my eye, it felt like time to dig a little deeper. Sixteen species of insects, including crickets, locusts and silkworms, have been approved as food in Singapore, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) said on Monday. “With immediate effect, [the] SFA will allow the import of insects and insect products belonging to species that have been assessed to be of low...

"We are the new kids on the block" - Reform UK leader @Nigel_Farage He has been speaking in the House of Commons today.

James Inhofe, the firebrand Republican Senator whose political career covered six decades, has died, the Tulsa World reported Tuesday. Inhofe, 89, served in the Oklahoma Legislature, as mayor of Tulsa, in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the the United States Senate. Funeral services are pending. Inhofe was the definition of a career politician, had served in the U. S. Senate since late 1994. He was is the longest-serving U.S. Senator in Oklahoma history. Before the Senate, he was a member of the U.S. House for eight years. Prior to that he spent four years as mayor of Tulsa...

~My conscience is clear. For the entirety of his alleged presidency, I've been calling Joe Biden "the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet" - not because that's a uniquely penetrating insight but because, as I remarked along the way, it's perfectly obvious to any creature more sentient than a tapeworm. October 2022: March 2022: Mark Steyn: Joe Biden is the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet. Watch GB News: Freeview 236, Sky 515, Virgin 626 Subscribe to our YouTube: https://t.co/Wa58gYGZwF pic.twitter.com/hxG39VTkTc — GB News (@GBNEWS) March 7, 2022 April 2021 - even on Fox News, although unbeknownst to...

Representation of engineered squalene pathways employed for poplar transformations. The enzymes required for biosynthesis of squalene, FDPS and SQS, were re-targeted to plastids (right) or used in combination with lipid droplet co-production or scaffolding through fusions with LDSP (left). These pathways utilize IDP/DMADP building blocks made available in plastids from the MEP pathway or in the cytosol from the MVA pathway. Variations of both strategies were attempted when engineering poplar. Credit: Plant Biotechnology Journal (2024). DOI: 10.1111/pbi.14345 What do poplar trees, sharks and biofuels have in common? While it might sound a bit like a riddle, a team led by...

The Gateway Pundit reported last month that the Arizona Republican Party filed a lawsuit against the corrupt Secretary of State Adrian Fontes after discovering from 500,000 to 1.3 MILLION ILLEGAL VOTERS and illegal aliens on the state’s dirty, inaccurate voter rolls. This is likely one of the reasons why Biden refuses to drop out of the race. He knows he has secured this election by welcoming millions of illegal aliens into this country and that the fix is in. The Democrats understand that if he does step down, it will be slightly easier to sell another rigged election to the...

Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history. The White House has limited Biden’s daily itinerary and shielded him from impromptu exchanges. Advisers have restricted news conferences and media appearances, twice declining Super Bowl halftime interviews—an easy way to reach millions of voters—and sought to make sure meetings with donors stuck to scripted pleasantries. Senior aides dismissed travel suggestions over worries the president didn’t have the stamina for them,...

The New Republic has received massive backlash for using a cover image of Donald Trump as Hitler for a piece that argues America will be plunged into fascism if he wins the election.We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, , he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would...

A teenage suspect was shot by US Marshals on Friday after allegedly attempting to carjack Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's federal bodyguards outside her home

Despite the best efforts of leftist activists, many nonwhite parents are fighting back against the LGBT agenda infecting public schools.Like many left-leaning public school districts across America, the leadership of Fairfax County Public Schools just outside our nation’s capital is majority white, despite the region’s racial diversity. Meanwhile, the district’s white, leftist leaders, who incessantly claim to be inclusive, are ironically ignoring parental objections to teaching radical gender ideology in schools.At the end of June, the school board voted to include gender ideology in its seventh-grade sex-education curriculum. In response to a survey in which 84 percent of respondents opposed...

It looks like Joe Biden is refusing to step down from the Democrat presidential ticket. Putting aside the legal issues and deadlines resulting from late ballot changes and the undesirability of Kamala Harris taking over, there are problems with removing Biden by force. Let’s take a look at them:1. Removing Biden at the convention: The delegates are already pledged to Biden. This would require 300 delegate signatures and would be very messy at best, with Michelle Obama (assuming she is their savior) having to compete with other potential candidates. An alternative plan, still very messy and still subject to the...

A parolee with a lengthy rap sheet has been taken into custody and charged after a Big Apple woman was found shot dead, wrapped in a sleeping bag and dumped outside with the trash, police sources told The Post Tuesday. Chad Irish, 55, was slapped with concealment of a human corpse, criminal possession of a weapon and menacing charges after being brought in for questioning on Monday over the death of 31-year-old Yazmeen Williams, the sources said. He hasn’t been hit with any homicide charges tied to the 31-year-old victim’s gruesome slaying. Irish, who is currently out on parole for...

Protesters carrying signs with anti-tourist slogans and chanting "tourists go home" took to the streets of Barcelona, saying mass tourism is making the city unaffordable to residents. VIDEO AT LINK....................

Who knew that the “despotic inroads on the rights of property” referenced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their grotesque work of political ideology (The Communist Manifesto) against property owners would mean devaluation of said property through government policy?The obvious implication was physical violence, as the authors describe “wresting” away capital and wealth, and taxation, as state-sponsored theft is a given for non-producing and envious failures like Marx, but as we’ve seen time and again, the left’s policies also rob from us by devaluing the properties in which we invest.Here’s the latest example, out of New Hampshire, via a...