Free Republic

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth -- in a dramatic and rare move -- on Tuesday fired one of the service's top generals following an Army inspector general investigation that concluded he improperly intervened in the process for selecting senior commanders. Gen. Charles Hamilton, who had been the head of Army Materiel Command, was removed after what officials described as a flagrant abuse of authority aimed at securing a leadership role for a subordinate officer who was found unfit for command and had an inappropriate relationship with the general, according to the IG report. The move marks the first time in nearly...

Syrian rebels who overthrew the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad on Sunday are reportedly executing their opponents, imposing Islamic sharia law, and threatening non-Muslim minorities, including the Kurdish population in the north. Videos are circulating on social media showing Syrian rebels killing people associated with the regime — some of whom may have been part of the state security services, and others who appear to have been ordinary employees. The New York Times reported Tuesday: Islamic State forces on Tuesday killed 54 people in the Homs region in central Syria who had been part of the Syrian government’s military and fled...

When all our lives are online, there is an abundance of content available for malicious actors to exploit with AI-powered tools, says RSIS’ Dymples Leong.News emerged in late November that over 100 Singaporean public servants, including five ministers, received extortionary emails with deepfake images. The messages demanded US$50,000 of cryptocurrency in return for not publishing “compromising” videos. The emails contained purported screenshots of those videos showing the victim’s faces, which seemed to be taken from public sources such as LinkedIn. This is not the first extortion plot against public servants in Singapore. Earlier this year, several members of parliament received...

Thousands of Spanish fisherman gathered in protest of an EU proposal which would cut the number of days trawlers can be at sea from the current 130 to 27 or 28 days. Fisherman in Spain continued their strike on Tuesday protesting proposed European cuts that would largely restrict the number of days they can fish in the Mediterranean. The European Union wants to decrease the number of fishing days for Mediterranean trawlers by 79% in an effort to improve fish stocks and protect biodiversity. Protesters argue that these cuts would badly harm Spain's economy and damage the fishing industry. They...

Few people have demonstrated an ability to use leverage to make deals more than President-elect Donald Trump. He built his business career around the concept, and he’s demonstrated that those skills can be ported to the political world just as easily. And while the feverish speculation about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as a potential Secretary of Defense nominee has become more muted this week, it’s still worth examining the idea from the perspective of political leverage as opposed to political necessity.Let’s start with the fact that floating DeSantis’s name is not the same as offering him the job. The former...

Kamala Harris’s defeat was damaging to the left. But her loss overshadows the true scope of the damage wrought on the Democratic Party: the permanent loss of the Senate. Democrats have lost the Senate before, but this loss is different from 2014. This time, it may well be for good. For the first time in a century, there is not one Democratic senator from a reliably red state. We have entered an era of one-party rule — at least where the Senate is concerned. Today, the Senate map mirrors the national electoral divide. Democratic senators in blue states, Republican senators...

The brother of Ted Kaczynski, the domestic terrorist known as the "Unabomber," said Tuesday that he hopes the man accused in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson didn't view his brother as a "key model" and is distressed that his brother's actions decades ago may motivate violence today. For two decades, Ted Kaczynski waged a deadly bombing spree that killed three people and injured 23 others until his capture in the Montana wilderness in 1996. Kaczynski had taunted officials with a rambling manifesto and was apprehended following one of the longest FBI manhunts in history. The suspect in Thompson's...

A U.S. District Judge in Oregon has blocked a $25 billion-bid by supermarket giant Kroger to take over rival Albertsons after ruling that the Federal Trade Commission's concerns about the merger's impact on market consolidation were valid. Judge Adrienne Nelson said Tuesday afternoon that a merger between the two companies would end up harming consumers. The two companies "engage in substantial head-to-head competition and the proposed merger would remove that competition," Ferguson wrote. As a result, the proposed merger would likely to lead to outcomes that "unilaterally" harm consumers, and is thus "presumptively unlawful. " Judge Ferguson also ruled the...

Owners of a solar farm torn to pieces were among those counting the cost of killer Storm Darragh - as recovery work was ongoing on Monday. Hundreds of panels at the giant 190-acre Porth Wen solar farm in Anglesey, North Wales - only built two years ago - were blown off their mountings, some ripped to shreds. The site at Llanbadrig, in the north of the island which is owned by French power firm EDF Energy and powers up to 9,500 households, now needs significant repairs. Elsewhere on the island of Anglesey, blades were sheared off a wind turbine which...

Christians in Syria confront an uncertain and perilous future under the control of Islamist-led rebel forces, a human rights group has warned. The city’s minority Christian population, significantly diminished by years of civil war, now grapples with fears of escalating threats and restrictions. Islamist rebel forces, led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and U.K., captured Aleppo about a week ago, followed by Homs and Damascus late Saturday night in a sweeping offensive that toppled Syrian government forces. Bashar al-Assad resigned and left the country on a flight to Russia on Saturday...

Texas has spent years tweaking its electric grid, but it’s still not fixed. How do we know this? ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, projects an 80% likelihood of rolling blackouts if a storm the magnitude of Winter Storm Uri hits the state this winter. Prior to Uri in February 2021, the probability of rolling blackouts was only 5%. A weaker storm—equivalent to 2022’s Winter Storm Elliott—has a 50% probability of triggering rolling blackouts. And there is no assurance that rolling blackouts can be executed, risking a widescale grid failure. So, by ERCOT’s own projections, the grid is more...

PALM BEACH, FL — Inside sources said President-elect Donald Trump drew a hard line in the sand during a dinner meeting last week with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as witnesses reported overhearing Trump telling Trudeau that the U.S. would refrain from annexing Canada if they would admit that their "bacon" is just weird, gross ham. The offer came during a tense trade tariff discussion while Trudeau visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort home last week, with Trump offering a compromise in which the U.S. would avoid adding Canada as its 51st state if Trudeau would issue a public statement...

In the second shooting, lawmakers noted that there were "critical vulnerabilities" in the security of the golf course, but said federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) did not provide further information it needed on the preparation and response to the shooting. In its final report, the House task force investigating the assassination attempts against President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday accused multiple government agencies, including the U.S. Secret Service (USSS), of failing to produce documents it requested for its probe. Trump survived two assassination attempts earlier this year,...

Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana clashed with retired Army Maj. Gen. Randy Manner over the general’s criticism of President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters during a Tuesday hearing, with Kennedy asking the former officer if he considered himself “more virtuous” than Trump’s supporters. Manner appeared on CNN’s “Laura Coates Live” in October, during which he claimed Trump’s supporters were “fascists themselves” while being interviewed. Kennedy brought up Manner’s comments during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled, “How Mass Deportations Will Separate American Families, Harm our Armed Forces, and Devastate Our Economy.” “On October 14th of this year, you went...

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis finds herself at the center of a growing legal storm after a Georgia judge ruled in favor of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, in a lawsuit over access to her office’s communications with Special Counsel Jack Smith and the House January 6 Committee.The decision, issued by Judge Robert McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court, comes after Willis’s office failed to respond in a timely manner to Judicial Watch’s open records request. The court granted a default judgment against Willis, ordering her to comply with state open records laws and produce the requested...

Explanation: It was a night of 100,000 meteors. The Great Meteor Storm of 1833 was perhaps the most impressive meteor event in recent history. Best visible over eastern North America during the pre-dawn hours of November 13, many people -- including a young Abraham Lincoln -- were woken up to see the sky erupt in streaks and flashes. Hundreds of thousands of meteors blazed across the sky, seemingly pouring out of the constellation of the Lion (Leo). The featured image is a digitization of a wood engraving which itself was based on a painting from a first-person account. We know...

@realDonaldTrump Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!

One day after Democrats fumed about his absence on the world stage and from his own administration, retiring President Biden has announced he will roll out even “more student debt cancellation,” work to “achieve a ceasefire in Gaza with the hostages released” and send further military assistance to Ukraine, according to an internal White House memo. The memo from Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients, which was addressed to all White House staff, outlined the 46th president’s foreign and domestic priorities for his remaining 42-day “sprint” before President-elect Donald Trump assumes office, a copy of the memo obtained by The...

It looks like the Federal Communications Commission under Brendan Carr won’t be the only agency looking to tear down the government-backed dystopian activities of website traffic cop NewsGuard. Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson issued a statement Dec. 2 joining his colleague Commissioner Melissa Holyoak in urging the agency “to investigate online platforms for unfair acts or practices relating to their opaque, unpredictable processes for banning users and censoring content.” Ferguson stipulated that “we must vigorously enforce the antitrust laws against any platforms found to be unlawfully limiting Americans’ ability to exchange ideas freely and openly.” Part of Ferguson’s antitrust push...

A Conservative former minister has called for first-cousin marriage to be banned in the UK. Introducing the proposals in Parliament, Richard Holden said the children of first cousins were at greater risk of birth defects and the practice should be prohibited to protect public health. However, independent MP Iqbal Mohamed argued a ban would be ineffective and said these issues would be better addressed through education programmes to raise awareness of the risks. Downing Street said the expert advice on the risks of first-cousin marriage was clear but indicated that the government had no plans to change the law. SNIP