Free Republic

The Trump Administration has ordered US embassies to halt all student visa applications as the president cracks down on America's higher education business. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has directed officials to stop scheduling appointments with student visa applicants as they prepare to implement a social media vetting process, according to a cable obtained by Politico. 'Effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued septel, which we anticipate in the coming...

No one is going to make an excuse for gang violence. There's no feasible way to excuse such a thing. It not just results in death and injury, but it also terrorizes ordinary citizens in ways that should never happen.In Australia, they recently had an incident where two gangs battled with machetes in a shopping mall. First, I was surprised to see there were enough people at a mall to have a gang battle, but then there was the nature of the fighting.

Moderna said on Wednesday it had withdrawn an application seeking approval for its flu and Covid combination vaccine candidate after discussions with the US Food and Drug Administration. The company said it would resubmit the application later this year with vaccine efficacy data from a late-stage trial of its experimental seasonal influenza vaccine, which it expects to report this summer. The decision comes a day after the US FDA said it would require new clinical trials for approval of annual Covid-19 boosters for healthy people under 65 years old. Shares of the company have been battered by declining Covid revenue...

It has saddened to me watch Harvard, a university that I love from which I have greatly benefited, self-immolate through gross mismanagement, poor governance, and ideological capture that have occurred over the last 15 or so years, and that have been brought into clear focus beginning on October 8, 2023. When a day after the launch of the Hamas attack on Israel, 33 Harvard student organizations held the victims “solely responsible” for the acts of the terrorists while their extraordinarily barbaric acts were still underway, I realized that something had gone profoundly wrong at my alma mater. Further investigations on...

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency announced Sunday that, well, there were a lot of people over the age of 120 still on the Social Security rolls. A LOT. That's so many geezers. According to Breitbart, DOGE has been providing regular updates on the growing number of seemingly fraudulent Social Security recipients. And in the most recent update, delivered last week, DOGE revealed that a total of 12.3 million individuals listed as 120+ years old were now officially marked as deceased in the system. Back in March, Musk controversially claimed that an alleged 2.1 million illegal immigrants had also enrolled...

COVID is still around, and it is still deadly for a lot of Americans. The CDC says that the virus is killing multitudes in the U.S. each week, even though there are vaccines and treatments available. Experts say that a lack of vaccinations and missed treatment opportunities are two of the main reasons why these deaths keep happening. Are people still dying from COVID? Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that COVID killed an average of 350 people every week, as per a report by GMA. The CDC data indicates that although the number of...

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire! May 27, 2025, 11:44 AM

“They were never, ever effective… and they were never, ever safe.” Those words aren’t coming from some fringe blogger. They’re from Dr. Angus Dalgleish — a veteran oncologist and professor of oncology at a major UK institution. “These were not vaccines,” Dalgleish says. “These were horrible gene therapies that could actually integrate into your genome.”

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa defended the “Kill the Boer” slogan as a “liberation chant” Tuesday, refusing U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand to arrest opposition figure Julius Malema for using it. Last Wednesday, during a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump accused South Africa of “genocide” and showed a video of Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party chanting “Kill the Boer,” “Kill the farmer,” “Shoot to kill,” and other violent slogans at large rallies. Trump said that Malema ought to be arrested for incitement. Malema responded by repeating the slogan, both online and in another rally Sunday. Ramaphosa...

A 1-month-old baby girl was tragically killed when the family’s puppy chewed the infant’s face as her mom and stepdad slept in Queens early Tuesday, cops and sources said. The baby’s mother called 911 just after 6:30 a.m. to report that her newborn was lying between the couple inside the apartment within NYCHA’s Queensbridge Houses when the pair awoke to find the 6-week-old German shepherd, pit bull mix gnawing on the baby’s face, law enforcement sources said. EMS workers responded to the unit on 12th Street near 41st Avenue, but the baby could not be saved, cops said... “She told...

U.S. consumers just delivered a clear message: they’re not as worried as the experts thought. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index jumped by 12.3 points in May, the largest monthly gain in four years, as Americans grew more upbeat about the economy, the job market, and their own financial prospects. The reading came in at 98.0, up sharply from April’s 85.7, and blew past all forecasts by economists. Econoday’s survey had a range of forecasts from 84.0 to 91.3, with the consensus at 87.3. It wasn’t just a bounce—it was a breakout. The Expectations Index, which measures how consumers see...

A former flight attendant caught smuggling over 100 pounds of a deadly new synthetic drug made of human bones faces up to 25 years in a Sri Lankan prison.Charlotte May Lee, 21, from the United Kingdom, was seized at Bandaranaike Airport in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo earlier this month after allegedly carrying suitcases full of "kush," a new[-ish] drug originating in West Africa which kills an estimated dozen people a week in Sierra Leone alone.

Daily Readings from the USCCBJesus said to his disciples: “Now I am going to the one who sent me, and not one of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ But because I told you this, grief has filled your hearts. But I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” John 16:5–7Jesus continues to speak prophetically to His disciples about the necessity for Him to go to the Father so that He...

President Donald Trump has threatened to take away $3 billion in federal grants from Harvard University and redirect the money to trade schools, escalating a months-long battle with the Ivy League institution. "I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land," Trump posted Monday on his social media platform, Truth Social. "What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!"

Under a new mandate, Colorado residents will now be forced to fund lip injections, cheek implants, nose jobs, breast augmentations, and other elective cosmetic procedures—not for burn victims, not for cancer survivors, but for one legally privileged group: men who claim to be women and women who claim to be men.

President Trump’s “Golden Dome” plan has riled the three countries whose weapons technology poses the greatest threat to American territory, with China, Russia and North Korea claiming the missile-defense project is driving a dangerous new arms race. -snip- North Korea slammed the Golden Dome on Tuesday as the “largest arms-buildup plan in history.” China and Russia in a joint statement earlier this month called the project “deeply destabilizing.” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, in a briefing to journalists Tuesday, said the plan “represented a direct disruption to the foundations of strategic stability.” All three countries have also denounced Trump’s...

National Public Radio on Tuesday sued President Donald Trump over his executive order to cease all federal funding for the nonprofit broadcaster. Trump’s May 1 order violates the First Amendment’s protections of speech and the press and steps on Congress’ authority, NPR and three other public radio stations wrote in the lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. The order “also threatens the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information,” according to the legal complaint against Trump and a handful of top officials and federal agencies....

ChatGPT's latest artificial intelligence model has refused to switch itself off, researchers claim. The model, created by the owner of ChatGPT, has reportedly disobeyed human instruction and refused to power down. Experts say they gave the AI system a clear command but the o3 model, developed by OpenAI and described as the 'smartest and most capable to date', tampered with its computer code to avoid an automatic shutdown. According to The Telegraph, AI safety firm Palisade Research said: 'OpenAI's o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off. 'It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow...

Metformin, the common diabetes drug, enhances egg-laying in older hens by triggering liver genes that promote yolk production and reduce fat buildup — offering a major breakthrough for sustainable poultry farming. It turns out chickens and humans share more in common than you might expect, especially when it comes to fertility. And the surprising connection? A widely used diabetes medication called metformin. Researchers at Penn State have discovered that metformin, best known as a treatment for type 2 diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in people, can also help chickens lay more eggs. Specifically, it helps broiler breeder hens, the...

Joe Biden’s stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis raises many questions, not least why a U.S. president with access to the best healthcare in the world didn’t have routine blood screenings that could have caught the disease before it turned deadly. One possible culprit is an excessive deference to so-called experts, many of whom believe older people shouldn’t be screened for cancer because they are likely to die in short order anyway. This is the view of liberals like Ezekiel Emanuel, an Obama and Biden adviser, who want to put government in control of all Americans’ healthcare. A Biden spokesperson last...