Free Republic

Apparently, convincing your friends to sell chicken can pay off — big. At 24, Arman Oganesyan was making $50 a night as a stand-up comedian with no restaurant or business experience when he pitched the idea of selling Nashville hot chicken to his childhood friends Dave Kopushyan and Tommy Rubenyan. Pooling $900 in savings, they launched Dave’s Hot Chicken in 2017 as a pop-up in a Los Angeles parking lot. On Monday, private equity firm Roark Capital bought a majority stake in Dave’s Hot Chicken, which is now a franchise business with more than 300 locations, in a deal worth...

The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics shifted their rating of the race for incumbent [Democrat] Maine Rep. Jared Golden’s Congressional District from “leans [Democrat]” to “toss-up” on Tuesday.By presidential partisanship, Maine’s 2nd Congressional District is the most Republican district currently held by a Democrat, according to the Center for Politics’ analysis. The congressional race’s move to the “toss-up” column after Golden announced on May 20 that he is seeking reelection in 2026 instead of making a bid for governor or Senate.President Donald Trump won the seat by 9 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election — marking his largest...

KJ Muldoon, a 10-month-old baby who sparked nationwide headlines after receiving a first-of-its kind gene-editing treatment, was released from the hospital this week. KJ has spent the majority of his life at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia after being diagnosed with a one-in-a-million, deadly genetic disease shortly after birth. Working quickly, his doctors were able to use new gene-editing technology called CRISPR, designing a bespoke treatment just for him. The treatment, first infused into his body at seven months old, seems to have worked. KJ’s body, which was fighting a toxic buildup of ammonia, began to thrive and he quickly gained...

Karine Jean-Pierre, who served as White House press secretary under former President Joe Biden, has switched her party affiliation to independent, according to a publishing company’s description of her forthcoming book. Jean-Pierre, who has worked in Democratic politics for decades, is set to release a new book that will discuss Biden’s decision to bow out of the 2024 election and encourage voters to look beyond the two-party political system. The description of her book, titled Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines,” says she “didn’t come to her decision to be an Independent lightly.” The...

Yunqing Jian, 33, first entered the country on a fraudulently obtained F1 student visa, the FBI says One of the two Chinese nationals arrested for allegedly smuggling a toxic crop-killing pathogen, which also has devastating health effects on humans, stuffed the noxious fungus into her boots while entering the United States in 2022, documents show. According to an arrest affidavit for University of Michigan post-doctoral research fellow Yunqing Jian and her boyfriend, Zunyong Liu, Jian first brought Fusarium graminearum, described as a "potential agroterrorism weapon" in scientific literature, in August 2022. A transcribed WeChat conversation between Jian and Liu shows...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Dutch opposition parties called Wednesday for fresh elections as soon as possible, a day after anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders sparked the collapse of the country’s four-party coalition government.Prime Minister Dick Schoof’s 11-month-old administration fell apart when Wilders withdrew his Party for Freedom ministers. Schoof and the ministers of three remaining parties remain in power as a caretaker Cabinet.The government, with limited powers, now has to lead the country for months before new elections and during what could — again — be protracted talks to cobble together a new coalition in the fragmented Dutch political landscape...

[Catholic Caucus] $30 million? The price of Pope Francis’ performative humilityFrancis’ decision to live in the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse instead of the traditional papal apartments added €200,000 per month to the Vatican’s bills amid a spiralling financial crisis. Recent investigations have revealed that one of Pope Francis’ most notable and purportedly “humble” decisions actually cost the Vatican around €200,000 a month.For the past 12 years, secular pundits and close allies of Pope Francis have relentlessly pushed the message that his humility is striking. One of the earliest and most prominent examples cited to support this argument was Francis’ decision...

Community of (actual) Amish pick up and move building in New York. This was from a few years ago (2022), but did a search but didn't see it posted here even back them.

It is at moments like this when I wish General Michael Flynn had not comprehensively compromised his ability to provide advice and counsel to President Donald Trump. This is great advice shared via Twitter:“1. While most of America remains blissfully uninformed by our establishment press, the world’s two greatest superpowers are being manipulated by Dark Forces inside and outside our government, into a major military confrontation that no country wants, and no sane person would ever want.2. I have no role in the Trump Administration, but over a long career in the active uniformed military, specifically military intelligence, I have...

Join with fellow FREEPERS to pray for AMERICA: For those in Authority in Government, Family, Military, Business, Agri-Business; End to Sex Slavery; Healthcare, Education, Churches, and the Media. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. (1 John 5:14)Forum threads labeled [Prayer] are closed to debate of any kind.

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked President Trump from deporting the family of the Egyptian terrorist who firebombed Jews in Boulder, Colorado. US District Judge, Gordon Gallagher, a Biden appointee temporarily blocked the deportation of Mohamed Sabry Soliman’s wife and five children.

Hackers have leaked what they claim is AT&T’s database which was reportedly stolen by the ShinyHunters group in April 2024 after they exploited major security flaws in the Snowflake cloud data platform. But is this really the Snowflake-linked data? We took a closer look. As seen by the Hackread.com research team, the data was first posted on a well-known Russian cybercrime forum on May 15, 2025. It was re-uploaded on the same forum on June 3, 2025, after which it began circulating among other hackers and forums. After analyzing the leaked data, we found it contains a detailed set of...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The United States assesses that Ukraine's drone attack over the weekend hit as many as 20 Russian warplanes, destroying around 10 of them, two U.S. officials told Reuters, a figure that is about half the number estimated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.Still, the U.S. officials described the attack as highly significant, with one of them cautioning that it could drive Moscow to a far more severe negotiating position in the U.S.-brokered talks to end more than three years of war.Russian President Vladimir Putin told U.S. President Donald Trump in a telephone conversation on Wednesday that Moscow would have...

This afternoon, a young woman claiming to be a Field Representative from the US Census Bureau knocked on our door and aske my wife if she could ask a few questions. The first was her birthday. My wife impulsively gave it to her and then thought better of it, and got quite agitated, asking why she thought she could just drop in and start asking questions. After all, we filled out our Census form in 2020, and the next one is in 2030, five years from now. The rep got a bit snippy, saying "once the interview had started it...

Piers Morgan called out a trans-identifying male semi-pro pickleball athlete to his face and said, "You're cheating" when you compete against female athletes in the sport. During Monday's episode of "Piers Morgan Uncensored," the host was speaking with the biological man, who goes by the name of Sara Weiss, who attempted to argue that there was nothing wrong with him competing against women despite the fact that girls have been severely injured by playing against boys. Morgan said it is a fact that the reason we separate the sexes when it comes to sports is because "males have a biological...

President Trump on Wednesday doubled down on calls to scrap the nation’s debt ceiling, pressing for bipartisan action to abolish it and finding common ground with Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.). “I am very pleased to announce that, after all of these years, I agree with Senator Elizabeth Warren on SOMETHING. The Debt Limit should be entirely scrapped to prevent an Economic catastrophe. It is too devastating to be put in the hands of political people that may want to use it despite the horrendous effect it could have on our Country and, indirectly, even the World. As to Senator...

A woman testified on Wednesday in Sean Combs’s federal trial that he had held her over the balcony of a 17th-floor apartment and that she had once seen the music mogul burst into the home of Casandra Ventura, his former girlfriend, and throw a knife at her. The woman, Bryana Bongolan, was a friend of Ms. Ventura — better known as the singer Cassie — and described a series of violent and threatening interactions with him. Though Ms. Bongolan, a designer, had met and befriended Ms. Ventura around 2013 or 2014, when Ms. Ventura became associated with her fashion company,...

I just wondered what you out there do for dinner. I like to cook and it's always a challenge to come up with something new. I do make recipes I've seen on the net. Some are good, some not. Last night I made pork fried rice, which I've made before. It's better than the one you get at the restaurant, no so dried out and very easy to make and really doesn't cost a whole heck of a lot. I put the basic recipe up here but me, I didn't put any broccoli in it, but it could go no...

America’s fertility rate is hovering around historic lows, with approximately 1.6 births per woman over her lifetime. This is below the level needed to sustain the population, which is 2.1 births per woman.

Politico: A federal judge has dismissed a Democratic Party lawsuit claiming an executive order issued by President Donald Trump was intruding on the independence of the Federal Election Commission. In a ruling Tuesday night, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali said the Democratic Party groups’ case was simply too speculative to justify emergency intervention from the court. The FEC had pledged to remain independent, had received no directive from the White House to change its practices and vowed to abide by the law. Without evidence undermining those promises, Ali said he was compelled to dismiss the suit. Page scroll down The...