Free Republic

Democratic strategist James Carville and Democratic National Committee vice chair David Hogg sparred over the best strategy to help the party win elections in a heated debate on Wednesday.Tensions between the two began weeks earlier when Hogg announced plans to spend $20 million through his political organization Leaders We Deserve to primary-challenge older Democrats in blue districts. Democrats were split on this strategy, with some anonymous committee members calling out Hogg for spending money on Democratic primaries over beating Republicans. Carville attacked Hogg's plan as the "most insane thing" he'd ever heard and questioned whether he was breaching his "fiduciary...

Is Planet Nine real? A new study may have just found the strongest clue yet. By analyzing decades-old infrared data from IRAS and AKARI satellites, scientists have spotted a slow-moving object in the outer Solar System—exactly where Planet Nine is predicted to be. If confirmed, it would be the first new planet discovered in over 170 years. Dive into the science, the discovery, and what it means for our cosmic future in this exciting episode. Planet Nine: First Real Clue After Decades of Searching | 9:37 NASASpaceNews | 511K subscribers | 3,717 views | May 2, 2025 Chapters: 00:00 Introduction...

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel announced the arrest of two alleged leaders of a violent child exploitation network connected to a Satanic, neo-Nazi group. Authorities arrested Leanoidis Varagiannis, or War, 21, and Prasan Nepal, or Trippy, 20, in April, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) press release. Varagiannis, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in Greece on Monday. Nepal was arrested in North Carolina on April 22. Patel announced the arrest of Varagiannis and Nepal online on Wednesday. “Working with [the DOJ] and [Attorney General Pam Bondi], I can now report the FBI and our partners have...

Over the weekend, Menashe Hidra’s body was found inside his fifth-floor Valley Village apartment after an assailant broke into a neighboring unit, jumped from the balcony to his and attacked. The assailant appeared to leave bloody handprints on an outside wall during their escape. That same day, Aleksandre Modebadze was found beaten to death inside his Woodland Hills home after a woman called 911 to report an attack. According to law enforcement sources not authorized to speak about the ongoing investigations, both slayings in the San Fernando Valley have a troubling similarity: Los Angeles police officers responded to the scenes...

Aimee Hall, who starred alongside Medas on the popular MTV reality show, announced the tragic news on Facebook on Friday, May 2. “We lost our brother, our best friend, our heart — Kirk,” Hall, 32, wrote. “I was at the beach when I felt it. Before the call even came, a dolphin kept coming up to me, as if to say goodbye.” According to Medas, he only ended up on “Floribama Shore” because he tagged along with a “nervous” friend who tried landing a spot on the show. “My buddy called me and was like, ‘I’m getting interviewed for this...

The stock market rallied Friday after a stronger-than-expected jobs report eased concerns that President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs could tank the U.S. economy, with the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average extending their winning streaks to nine days.The S&P 500 closed at 5,686.67 — up about 1.5 percent for the day — and has now recovered all the ground it had lost since April 2, when Trump announced plans for sweeping tariffs. The Dow jumped more than 500 points to close 1.4 percent higher. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index gained 1.5 percent.Friday’s strong jobs report boosted Wall Street’s confidence...

Archaeologists excavating the site of a future golf course were surprised to find evidence of a prehistoric village — including a rare chariot wheel dating back millennia. The excavation took place near Inverness, Scotland, at the site of the future Old Petty Championship Golf Course at Cabot Highlands. Experts working for Avon Archaeology Highland also found a Bronze Age cremation urn estimated to be 3,500 years old, along with flint tools and quern stones, which were used to grind grains. Remnants of at least 25 Neolithic-era wooden buildings were also uncovered at the site, according to the BBC. Archaeologists told...

Current and former staffers to Democratic Senator Jon Fetterman's raised concerns about his health in an article published by New York Magazine's Intelligencer on Friday, with his former chief-of-staff Adam Jentleson telling a Walter Reed medical director in 2024 that he worried the senator "is on a bad trajectory." In the article, Fetterman called the various concerns and allegations raised by staffers "past and present" as "disgruntled employees saying things that are either untrue or, so, that's kind of the business that we are in." Newsweek reached out to Fetterman and Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's office by email...

Minnesota beaches may never be the same, following a unanimous state Supreme Court ruling this week overturning a woman’s indecent exposure misdemeanor conviction on the grounds that men, transgender individuals and breast cancer survivors are not held to the same standard. “Criminalizing the exposure of female — but not male — breasts does not provide Minnesotans with adequate notice as to the conduct the indecent exposure statute prohibits,” Associate Justice Sarah Hennesy wrote of the court’s decision. “Because a binary approach to breasts fails to recognize the more nuanced physical realities of human bodies, whether they are intersex, transgender, nonbinary,...

Art imitates life ... maybe.There’s something intriguing, even frightening, about the image of an ancient horned serpent roaming across the land. Thanks to some suggestive fossils and legends of old, talk of such a creature isn’t a new concept. But the recent discovery of 200-year-old rock paintings found in South Africa now has scientists hypothesizing that this ancient creature may have been far more than just a legend. The first formal scientific descriptions of this horned serpent—a supposed member of the dicynodont group—appeared in 1845. Considering the abundance of dicynodont fossils found in the Karoo Basin in South Africa, some...

President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end federal funding for NPR and PBS — because of news coverage he called “biased and partisan” — triggered a fierce backlash from public broadcasters that appears poised to expand the White House’s larger legal battleground with the media industry. Issued Thursday night, the order instructs the congressionally chartered Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cut off direct funding to the venerable public media giants — producers of long-running news shows such as “All Things Considered” and “PBS NewsHour” — as well as any grants to local stations that might underwrite the national broadcasters’...

A Kentucky man won the Powerball lottery in his home state and then went to Florida to celebrate, which allegedly got a bit out of hand. James Farthing, 50, won the Kentucky Powerball on April 26 after playing a $2 ticket along with his mother, Linda Grizzle. But just days later, on Monday, Farthing and his girlfriend, 42-year-old Jacqueline Fightmaster, were at a TradeWinds Resort in St. Pete Beach, Florida, and allegedly got into a physical altercation with another guest at the bar. According to an arrest affidavit reviewed by Law&Crime, Pinellas County Sheriff’s deputies attempted to break up the...

President Trump is considering an executive order to examine payments made to college athletes and whether they have created an unfair system, two people briefed on the matter said Friday.Mr. Trump’s focus on the issue — which he’s talked about in the past, one of the people briefed on the matter noted — was renewed after he spoke with Nick Saban, the famed former University of Alabama football coach, backstage at an event Thursday night in Tuscaloosa, where Mr. Trump delivered an address to graduates.The Wall Street Journal first reported on Mr. Trump’s consideration. The two people who were briefed...

A tough first semester at Princeton taught Michelle Obama a career lesson that she's passing down to young professionals.(snip) As an affirmative action student from Chicago, Obama said, she felt "a little intimidated" by Princeton's Ivy status when she arrived on campus in 1981 despite knowing she'd be underestimated. After receiving all A's her first semester, she realized her self-doubt was by design. It was based on notions produced by a "world grounded in racism." "I was like, 'I get this now. You're just trying to get into my head. You're scared of me,'" Obama said. While there were plenty...

Immediately prior to a Papal Conclave seems like the absolute best time to break out the Liber Pontificalis – that fascinating, frustrating, and enigmatic work of Late Antiquity that purports to provide a brief biographical sketch of each of the first 65 Popes of Rome. This is perhaps the fourth or fifth time I have read the Liber cover to cover, not including the dozens of times I’ve referenced individual accounts for research purposes, posts, comments, etc. Admittedly, the text is littered with errors: some obvious, others requiring a PhD in Patristics to spot. Thankfully, the version I most commonly...

House Republicans are planning to include several of President Trump’s campaign promises in the first draft of the bill, which they hope to release soon.It was easy to miss, but last weekend President Trump floated a fundamental rewrite of the American tax code. In a social media post, and again in remarks to reporters, Mr. Trump suggested the United States could stop taxing income under $200,000 and instead rely on revenue from his extensive tariffs. “It’ll take a little while before we do that, but we’re going to be cutting taxes, and it’s possible we’ll do a complete tax cut,”...

NEW YORK (AP) — Tim Friede has been bitten by snakes hundreds of times — often on purpose. Now scientists are studying his blood in hopes of creating a better treatment for snake bites. Friede has long had a fascination with reptiles and other venomous creatures. He used to milk scorpions’ and spiders’ venom as a hobby and kept dozens of snakes at his Wisconsin home.Hoping to protect himself from snake bites — and out of what he calls “simple curiosity” — he began injecting himself with small doses of snake venom and then slowly increased the amount to try...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump, the real estate developer turned commander in chief, is laying bare his style of diplomacy in the early weeks of his new term: It’s a whole lot like a high-stakes business deal, and his No. 1 goal is to come out of the transaction on top.The tactics are clear in his brewing trade war with Canada and Mexico, in his approach to Russia’s war on Ukraine and in his selection of the first country he will visit in his second term.“President Trump approaches diplomacy and engages in a very transactional manner, with economics as the...

President Trump did a grunting impression of a female weightlifter as he criticized the participation of transgender women in sports. The President spoke on Thursday night at the University of Alabama.

The Freeper Canteen Presents....~It’s The 151st Kentucky Derby TimeMay 3, 2025~ Barbershop Quartet ~ Star Spangled BannerCall To The Post KENTUCKY DERBY TROPHY Since the 50th running of the Kentucky Derby in 1924, Churchill Downs has annually presented a gold trophy to the winning owner of the famed "Run for the Roses." History is unclear if a trophy was presented in 1875 to the winner of the first Kentucky Derby, and trophy presentations were sporadically made in following years. Finally, in 1924, legendary Churchill Downs President Matt Winn commissioned that a standard design be developed for the "Golden Anniversary"...