Free Republic

President Trump agreed with European leaders including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to red lines for the coming talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska and said he hoped to follow up quickly with a trilateral summit with the two warring leaders. -snip- “President Trump was very clear that the American desire was to obtain a cease-fire at this meeting in Alaska,” Macron told reporters after the meeting. -snip- While Trump’s decision last week to meet Putin on American soil worried Europeans, trans-Atlantic relations have since warmed. In a flurry of calls and meetings, senior U.S. officials—including Trump, Vance and...

Her 1963 debut, ‘Portrait of Sheila,’ remains a staple of the genreSheila Jordan, a celebrated jazz vocalist and staple of the Blue Note roster, has died at the age of 96. The news was shared by Sheila’s daughter Tracey on August 11. She wrote on Instagram: “Dear Jazz Family & Friends, My dearest mum Sheila Jordan passed away peacefully this afternoon, Monday, August 11 at 3:50 pm. Her friend Joan Belgrave was playing her a bebop tune called ‘Bill for Bennie,’ by her late husband Marcus Belgrave…my mom fell asleep listening to the music she loved and helped define.”...

Same drink, different year — and, hopefully, different result. That's Mark Thomas Lynn's approach to the relaunch of Afterdream, a cannabis drink, this year. His company — the premium spirits and beverage company AMASS Brands Group — originally released its THC-infused formulation in 2021, but they pulled it off the market after about nine months due to legal hurdles around where and how they could sell the drink. "Even though people were going crazy over the product, we were like, 'Oh my God, this is just too byzantine,'" he says. "The regulations, basically, hadn't caught up." After re-releasing Afterdream in...

A tourist who attempted to snap a photo with an elephant was subsequently severely injured after being trampled and stripped — revealing his bare behind for all manner of beasts to bear witness. Authorities are calling it a reckless and dangerous stunt. The shocking incident, which occurred near a temple in Karnataka, India on Sunday, was captured on video by other visitors at the wildlife reserve. The footage has since gone viral online, sparking outrage and renewed warnings about human-animal interactions. The tourist, identified as R. Basavaraju, had reportedly trespassed into a restricted forest area when he encountered the wild...

A former physician at one of the nation’s most respected pediatric institutions is facing federal charges for allegedly amassing one of the largest known personal collections of child sexual abuse material in recent history. Howard M. Saal, 73, a former geneticist and dysmorphologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, appeared in federal court this week after investigators say they uncovered a horrifying trove of over 153,000 images and 470 videos of child pornography, with some victims reportedly being as young as newborns. According to charging documents, the nightmare began when a Hamilton County Sheriff’s detective assigned to the FBI’s Child Exploitation Task...

... In 2022, after eight years of intermittent fighting in Ukraine’s east, Russia initiated a full-scale invasion, with the aim of reducing a rump Ukraine to a satrapy. Putin has given no indication of renouncing that ambition or of abandoning his broader goal of restoring Moscow’s sway over much of the former Soviet or tsarist empires, including the Baltic states and other nations to Russia’s west. Any “deal” between Trump and Putin (and the U.S. president, who has more recently referred to a “feel-out” meeting, is clearly downgrading expectations) will, given the Kremlin’s longer-term objectives, never be enough. The best...

On Sunday, I outed myself: I am Track Athlete A in a major lawsuit, Gaines v. NCAA, that aims to win justice for women in college sports. For two years, I’ve lived in the shadows, watching my records, my opportunities, my dignity and my voice get stripped away — not by happenstance, but by design, as colleges applied rules allowing male athletes into women’s sports. My university, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and my own coaches applauded as a man competed on our women’s team, erased my records and those of other women, and was ushered into our locker room....

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said in an interview that he dealt with stage 4 melanoma and an experimental trial drug saved his life. In the fifth episode of the Netflix documentary "America's Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys" that debuts next week, Jones, 82, talked about undergoing cancer treatments at MD Anderson in Houston. However, he didn't reveal details of the treatment and what it was for. "I was saved by a fabulous treatment and great doctors and a real miracle [drug] called PD-1 [therapy]," Jones told The Dallas Morning News on Tuesday. "I went into trials for that...

The bigger picture shows D.C. crime is on the rise, former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily, days after President Donald Trump announced he is placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control and activating the National Guard to restore law and order in the nation’s capital. Sund explained that there are several agencies working together to secure D.C. and highlighted that Trump is a “very, very detail-oriented person.” “In case people don’t know that, it is not uncommon for him to be driving in a motorcade and realize, hey, street...

The participants have also spoken in favor of firm security guarantees for UkraineLONDON, August 13. /TASS/. The European ‘Coalition of the Willing’ urged to toughen anti-Russian sanctions if the forthcoming talks between the presidents of Russia and the United States in Alaska fail to produce a ceasefire, according to a statement released by the UK Prime Minister’s Office. The participants of the recent online meeting on Ukraine "were clear that the path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine," reads the joint statement, published on behalf of the meeting’s co-chairs - UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has asked a state court clear the way for law enforcement officials to arrest Democrat Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke for allegedly violating a court order barring him from fundraising for the statehouse Democrats who fled Texas to delay the redistricting process for U.S. congressional seats in the state. Paxton has filed a motion for contempt in court against O’Rourke, alleging that he violated a Tarrant County, Texas, judge’s order and therefore is subject to a fine of up to $500 and jail time of up to six months behind bars. “Beto told me ‘to come...

The sugar daddy of temper-tantrum-throwing Texas Democrats appears to be ramping up for another losing political campaign. Someone my family knows well — let’s just call her an old family friend to protect the subject of this, uh, sensitive story — for years battled a nasty plantar wart on the ball of her foot. Our friend and her doctors tried just about everything shy of amputation. Salicylic acid treatments. Prescription medicines. Cryotherapy. Immunotherapy. Minor surgeries (electrodesiccation and curettage). She couldn’t get rid of it. That freeloading wart just wouldn’t take the hint. The unpleasant growth hung around so long she...

President Donald Trump threatened "very severe consequences" for Russia if President Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to end the war in Ukraine after their meeting in Alaska on Friday. -snip- Trump later appeared to cast doubt on whether he could convince Putin to stop bombing Ukrainian civilians. "I'll tell you what. I've had that conversation with him. I've had a lot of good conversations with him then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home or a rocket hit an apartment building, and people are laying dead in the streets," Trump said. "So, I guess the...

An MS-13 gang member serving time in prison for murder is suing President Donald Trump to be “recognized” as a woman. A report found that Oscar Contreras Aguilar, who was sentenced to serve 21 years in prison for kidnapping and the murder of a 14 year old, filed a lawsuit against Trump and the Bureau of Prisons, saying that his administration has failed to “recognize” his gender identity. […] “Transgender women prisoners in men’s prisons,” the alleged transgender said, adding that they face “harsher, more degrading treatment than their cisgender counterparts.” Contreras Aguilar said that MS-13 gang members had tried...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: * Experts believe a giant mass of hot rock known as the North Atlantic Anomaly (NAA) is heading toward New York City. * A new study suggests that the NAA could be responsible for the split between Canada and Greenland 80 million years ago. * The recent research adds to previous studies, pointing to a new hypothesis in geological history. ========================================================================= The theory of continental drift was proposed by German meteorologist Alfred Wegener more than a century ago in 1912. According to the theory, the continents we know today were once...

Today the leaders from Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Poland, Finland, the E.U. and NATO will be holding a conference call with President Trump and Vice-President Vance to give instructions in advance of the Trump-Putin summit.None of the European leaders were invited to the Alaska summit, yet all of the European leaders want to tell President Trump what to do at the summit with President Vladimir Putin. Because, of course they do…EUROPE – […] The Europeans recognize that they can only do so much to influence a president who often veers off-script and likes nothing more than to declare a deal.But...

The Biden administration quietly eliminated the top testing threshold for the highest-performing applicants seeking to become air traffic controllers, an internal slide seen by The Post confirms. In 2023, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials scrapped the previous “best qualified” tier for candidates who scored 85% or above on the Air Traffic Skills Assessment (ATSA) exam in favor of a “well qualified” threshold for applicants who scored at least 80%. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy revealed the change to The Post’s Miranda Devine on the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” out now. IMAGE An internal slide shows that the Biden administration...

REPORT: Female UK police officers are going undercover by dressing in tight clothes to elicit catcalls from men so they can then arrest them, according to the Telegraph. The Surrey Police Department is proud to announce that multiple men have been arrested for "harassment." The females are reportedly pretending to be joggers to catch men catcalling them. "One of our officers was honked at within 10 minutes, then another vehicle slowed down, beeping and making gestures just 30 seconds later, that’s how f

While some far-left Democrats have admitted that President Trump did the right thing in federalizing Washington, D.C.’s, police and ordering the FBI and National Guard into the city to combat violent crime, the far-left, hate-Trump mainstream media quickly pounced on the crime data he used in announcing the move.Violent crime in the nation’s capital, they say, is down almost 40 percent. But the media’s crime-fighting journalists don’t know — or did know and didn’t report — that the city fiddles with violent-crime data to exclude very violent crimes from their total.Thus, violent crime in the city did not decrease 35...

When those who don’t know history inevitably repeat it, the greatest offense is not their profound ignorance (which is seriously painful), but it’s that their obliviousness has real consequences for those of us who know better.Government by its very nature is, at best, a “necessary evil,” and in its worst state, “an intolerable one.” And, leftist ideologies, like communism, certainly fall under the “worst state” category. Now, after millions and millions of taxpayer dollars and months of issues—like completely bare shelves, a “rancid odor” that filled the store, and rampant crime—one of the nation’s only taxpayer-funded grocery stores has closed...