Free Republic

CV NEWS FEED // Billionaire businessman Elon Musk emotionally described how he regrets giving his then-teenage son puberty blockers, adding that the boy was metaphorically “kiIIed by the woke mind virus.” Musk recently sat down with psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson for an interview that aired on DailyWire+ on Monday. “It wasn’t explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs,” Musk told Peterson. “And so, I lost my son essentially,” Musk added after a pause. “They call it deadnaming for a reason. The reason it’s called deadnaming is because your son is dead.” The businessman’s son, now legally...

MOSCOW, July 23 (Reuters) - Residents of Moscow who sign up to fight in Ukraine will receive a down payment of 1.9 million roubles ($21,777) from the city, taking their annual pay in their first service year to 5.2 million roubles ($59,600), the mayor's office said on Tuesday. Total pay will include the downpayment, wages from the defence ministry, as well as regional and federal handouts, the office of Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a statement. The new payments will enter into force immediately, it said. The increase means that annual pay for Russian contract soldiers from Moscow will...

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MN) mounted a silent protest during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Wednesday, holding up signs that said “Guilty of Genocide” and “War Criminal” during his address. Netanyahu, who was received with a standing ovation, began his address by acknowledging the Israeli hostages and their families, and by honoring Israeli soldiers in the gallery, — including Ethiopian and Muslim soldiers, and soldiers who, though wounded, returned to the fight. He rebuked anti-Israel protesters, alluding to the thousands who had gathered outside the Capitol, noting that they stood with Hamas and with “evil,” and noting...

Law enforcement officers have uncovered a major embezzlement scheme involving Hr 138 million ($3.3 million) allocated from the state budget for the needs of Ukraine's Armed Forces, the Prosecutor General's Office announced on July 19. The investigation identified 30 suspected officials, including employees of housing and maintenance departments and representatives of commercial structures across Ukraine. According to prosecutors, 15 of these individuals were members of organized criminal groups. The charges include embezzlement and misappropriation of funds related to the procurement of fuel wood, electricity, natural gas, furniture, and construction work on military infrastructure at inflated prices. Some suspects are also...

Hillary Clinton extended support to vice president Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential candidate and said she will have an uphill battle as the first Black and South Asian woman to be at the top of a major party’s ticket. In an opinion piece on New York Times, Hillary Clinton commended President Joe Biden's decision and said Kamala Harris can defeat Donald Trump. "Ms. Harris is chronically underestimated, as are so many women in politics, but she is well prepared for this moment," Hillary Clinton wrote calling Kamala Harris a fresh start in American politics. Talking about the prejudices that...

Archaeologists have uncovered a "monumental" fortification that protected Jerusalem's biblical kings some 3,000 years ago. The "dramatic" archaeological discovery solved a 150-year-old mystery in the City of David. Since 2007, archaeologists have been excavating the area around the Givati Parking Lot, the largest active archaeological excavation in Jerusalem today. The excavation site on the northwestern side of the City of David has unearthed different layers of the city's life from the Middle Ages to ancient times. The most recent archaeological find is the remnants of a moat that split the City of David in half — separating the king's palace...

Explanation: Our Moon doesn't really have craters this big. Earth's Moon, Luna, also doesn't naturally show this spikey texture, and its colors are more subtle. But this digital creation is based on reality. The featured image is a digital composite of a good Moon image and surface height data taken from NASA's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) mission -- and then exaggerated for educational understanding. The digital enhancements, for example, accentuate lunar highlands and show more clearly craters that illustrate the tremendous bombardment our Moon has been through during its 4.6-billion-year history. The dark areas, called maria, have fewer craters...

Almost three-fourths of registered Democrats want someone other than Vice President Kamala Harris to be the party’s nominee, a CNN poll found Wednesday. The finding exposes a lack of enthusiasm for Harris as the party’s de facto nominee, who appears to be hand-selected by top Democrats. By simply choosing Harris for the nomination instead of holding a democratic process, Democrats will nullify about 14 million votes cast during the Democrat primaries for President Joe Biden. The poll asked Democrats/Democrat-leaning independents who are registered to vote and prefer the Democrat Party to nominate a candidate other than Harris in 2024. “Is...

n —Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was defiant in his remarks to a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday afternoon as he sought to shore up support for Israel's 10-month war against Hamas in Gaza, while railing against those who have protested the conflict. "We meet today at a crossroads of history. Our world is in upheaval," Netanyahu said. "In the Middle East, Iran's axis of terror confronts America, Israel and our Arab friends. This is not a clash of civilizations. It's a clash between barbarism and civilization. It's a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify...

TYRONE, Pennsylvania — Shirley Hall has always lived in this charming Blair County borough, located a few miles from the big city of Altoona and once the home of booming coal and paper mill industries. She has also been a Catholic all of her life and for most of it a registered Democrat, two attributes she says are, or at least were, a profound part of her identity. She is still a Catholic, faithfully so, but last week when watching former President Donald Trump walk into the convention hall in Milwaukee just two days after being shot, she changed her...

CV NEWS FEED // Iowa’s Supreme Court has declined to rehear a case challenging a law banning most abortions after six weeks in the state, setting the pro-life law to go into effect on July 29, according to the Iowa-based news publication the Gazette. Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Iowa, and the Emma Goldman Clinic requested the rehearing, which was ultimately denied on July 22, the Gazette reported. The pro-abortion organizations said in a statement that the Supreme Court’s decision to not rehear the case “will push abortion care almost entirely out of...

Former GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley slammed an anti-Trump political group Tuesday over its use of her name to back Dem Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The former South Carolina governor and ex-United Nations ambassador disavowed any connection to the political action committee known as “Haley Voters for Harris,” blasting the group as “deceptive and wrong” for trying to convince her supporters to cast ballots for the veep in November. “Kamala Harris and I are total opposites on every issue,” Haley said in a statement. “Any attempt to use my name to support her or her agenda...

Jerrold Nadler is a despicable liar. Democrat Rep. Nadler (NY) blamed President Trump for the assassination attempt on his life on Wednesday during a hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray. On July 13 President Trump was grazed in the ear after a 20-year-old gunman named Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed on a roof and took several shots at Trump and rallygoers in Butler. The assassination attempt happened just one week after Biden issued veiled threats to Trump. In a phone call with Democrat donors on July 8, Biden said “it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.” Joe Biden also issued...

America’s founders believed direct democracy was a slower, more indirect path to tyranny. To prevent this, they avoided establishing an “elective despotism” and designed a system that filtered democracy through representative legislatures. Popular ballot initiatives didn’t exist until the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. Now, progressives use ballot initiatives to turn red states blue, including a proposal to abolish primaries altogether. What is the Republican Party’s response? As Democrats work toward creating a permanent political majority at the national level, their extremism has intensified popular backlash in nearly half the states, making them even redder. Currently, Republicans hold...

CV NEWS FEED // Authorities recently arrested and charged for possessing child pornography a well-known animator who has worked for both Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. The married man – whose far-left views were public – was later released from custody. Journalist Andy Ngo wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Sunday that children’s cartoonist Kyle Adam Carrozza “is accused of having hundreds of child s—x abuse content.” “According to jail records, he was released without bail on the felony charges,” Ngo added. Ngo further noted that according to archived social media posts made by Carrozza, it is apparent that the animator “is...

I voted for Haley against Trump in the Virginia primary. I am now for Harris. So I am a Haley voter for Harris. Am I not allowed to say that? Do I not have a right to associate with others saying that? It is sad that Trump-supporting Haley has also become anti-free speech Haley.

PARIS -- US Open champion Coco Gauff will be the female flag-bearer for the United States at the Paris Olympics' opening ceremony, joining four-time NBA champion LeBron James, the American team said Wednesday. Gauff, 20, will be the first U.S. tennis player to carry the flag, three years after she was forced to miss the Tokyo Olympics when she tested positive for COVID. "I never thought in a million years I would have the honour of carrying the American flag for Team USA in the opening ceremony," Gauff said in a statement. "I could not be more proud to lead...

In some good news for nearly half the world's men, scientists have found that a naturally occurring sugar in humans and animals could be harnessed as a topical treatment for male pattern baldness. This discovery could deliver a non-invasive, inexpensive and safer alternative to leading treatment minoxidil. An international team of scientists from the University of Sheffield and COMSATS University Pakistan has found that the organic compound 2-deoxy-D-ribose (2dDR) can stimulate new hair growth, following eight years of research into how this deoxy sugar could assist wound healing. The accidental discovery came about when they saw how hair around wound...

Former attorney general Eric Holder, now a senior counsel at the white shoe law firm Covington & Burling, is taking a break from conducting "diversity, equity, and inclusion" audits for major corporations to vet Kamala Harris’s potential running mates. Holder, who charges corporations over $2,000 an hour to assess their racial inclusivity, was enlisted on Monday to vet potential vice presidential nominees including Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, and Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, Reuters reported on Monday. Harris’s selection of Holder to oversee the first major undertaking of her short-lived presidential campaign...

The F/A-XX program is intended to develop a carrier-based sixth-generation fighter that can conduct the same missions as the Super Hornet but that also enjoys supercruise, stealth characteristics and that can operate as the communications hub of a system of manned and unmanned systems. The F/A-XX is a conceptual cousin of the NGAD program, but the projects have been kept at arm’s length, probably because of concerns over a replay of the F-35 program. Although the F-35 program eventually produced variants for the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps, the pursuit of commonality resulted in much confusion and...