Free Republic

In the final weeks of President Joe Biden’s administration, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is announcing a jobs giveaway for newly arrived migrants with work permits. On Tuesday, Mayorkas announced a final rule from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that will allow millions of migrants, many of whom have been released into the U.S. interior by the Biden administration, to keep their work permits for up to 540 days when they seek a renewal. Migrants previously could renew their work permits for 180 days. For years, Democratic mayors had lobbied DHS to extend such...

Just days before his fourth birthday, Santiago was diagnosed with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), the most common cancer in children. He began chemotherapy the next day, and the outlook was promising—disease-free survival rates for B-ALL are among the highest for pediatric cancers, at 80 to 85%. However, limited progress has been made over the last 15 years, and relapsed B-ALL remains a leading cause of cancer death among children. Santiago's parents enrolled him in a trial, which included over two hundred sites across four countries, combined standard chemotherapy with two cycles of blinatumomab, an immunotherapy already used for children...

From Wicked and Moana 2 to the record-setting Eras Tour and the pop girlie Grammy sweep, culture for and by women is still fueling the entertainment businessOver the American Thanksgiving weekend, two girl-centric movies about female empowerment – one starring an animated Polynesian teenager and the other a bunch of singing witches – crushed at the box office. Moana 2, from Walt Disney, had the biggest Thanksgiving Day opening in history. Universal Pictures’ Wicked, which debuted the week prior, set a record for a Broadway-to-screen adaptation. Together, they led the holiday stretch to its best numbers ever. And it was...

Researchers have reported results from the first-ever clinical trial demonstrating that a high-fiber, plant-based dietary intervention may delay progression to multiple myeloma, a rare and incurable blood cancer affecting the bone marrow. The study enrolled 20 participants with a precancerous blood disorder and an elevated body mass index (BMI) at risk of developing multiple myeloma. They received 12 weeks of high fiber plant-based meals and 24 weeks of coaching. Two participants with progressing disease prior to the study showed a significant improvement of their disease progression trajectory. Additionally, at one year after enrollment, none of the participants had progressed to...

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...