Free Republic

FBI/Patel's war on big drug dealers continues.

You probably don't want to know. Image Credit: New Africa/Shutterstock.com ====================================================================== Every so often, the Internet rediscovers a food fact you’d think everyone already knew. But hey, we’re all still learning, right? In recent times, it was paprika and allspice. This time, it’s our old friend Parmesan cheese taking its turn in the spotlight. "Today years old when I found out Parmesan cheese is made from baby cow’s stomach & I could go cry," one user wrote on Twitter, prompting others to learn this too. "I’m just gonna have to go full vegan at this point." Parmesan is traditionally made...

Some officers in Orlando worked together to take a scaly suspect off the streets Orlando Police officers responded to a call about a dangerous animal on Lake Debra Drive on Tuesday night. When officers arrived, they discovered a five to six-foot alligator in the hallway of an apartment complex

"The business incentives driving consumer AI development remain fundamentally misaligned with reducing hallucinations." —The Singularity Hub on "X" Which is to say, there is Reality, and then there is every other cockamamie aggregate of simulation pretending to represent Reality, i.e. garbage. How many millions among us already subscribe to the latter? Apparently, lots, and they are not evenly distributed these days. You surely know where to look for the un-Reality. The party of men can get pregnant, and all the rest. . . . Enter A-I to make things worse. Probably a lot worse. We have failed to learn the...

The hoof, preserved in section as a very thin clay layer, caps the end toe bone in the foot of an adult mummy of the duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus annectens. Photograph courtesy of Tyler Keillor/UChicago Fossil Lab ========================================================= For the first time ever, we’ve been able to prove that some dinosaurs had hooves, thanks to two remarkably well-preserved mummified dinosaurs retrieved from Wyoming’s Badlands. The specimens are the duck-billed dinosaurs Edmontosaurus annectens that, thanks to a "fluke preservation event" are near-perfect 66 million years later. Known as “clay templating,” that process essentially encased the dinosaurs shortly after burial with a mask...

Bernie Sanders said: “Billionaires should not exist.”Source:https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1176481898685710337Billionaires should not exist. https://t.co/hgR6CeFvLa— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) September 24, 2019Zohran Mamdani said:“I don’t think that we should have billionaires.”Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VowT8L8Uu6kI have four questions for Sanders, Mamdani, and anyone else who believes that billionaires should not exist.But first, I’d like to present some background information before I ask those four questions.Aluminum used to be so expensive that it was considered a precious metal. When they built the Washington Monument, they put a 20 pound piece of aluminum at the top. At the time, it was the biggest piece of refined aluminum in the world.Since then,...

Electric cars and phones eventually slow to a crawl when the battery loses lithium. A team in Shanghai says a simple add-in can bring that lithium back into play, and one lab cell kept working after nearly 12,000 charge cycles. The idea is to add a lithium rich salt into a tired battery so it can accept and deliver charge again. If it scales beyond the lab, the approach could keep a lot of packs out of scrap heaps. How lithium boosts a battery The work comes from Yue Gao’s group at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. His team trained...

With the federal shutdown entering its fourth week, spurred by a stalemate over the cost of health insurance for 22 million Americans on Affordable Care Act plans, a new report shows that over 154 million people with coverage through an employer also face steep price hikes — and that the situation is likely to get worse. Premiums for job-based health insurance rose 6% in 2025 to an average of $26,993 a year for family coverage, according to an annual survey of employers released Oct. 22 by KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. It’s the first time...

Explanation: A darkened and mysterious north polar region known to some as Mordor Macula caps this premier high-resolution view. The portrait of Charon, Pluto's largest moon, was captured by New Horizons near the spacecraft's closest approach on July 14, 2015. The combined blue, red, and infrared data was processed to enhance colors and follow variations in Charon's surface properties with a resolution of about 2.9 kilometers (1.8 miles). A stunning image of Charon's Pluto-facing hemisphere, it also features a clear view of an apparently moon-girdling belt of fractures and canyons that seems to separate smooth southern plains from varied northern...

🚨 BREAKING: Hakeem Jeffries just got brutally EMBARRASSED on national television - gets CALLED OUT for his hypocrisy "What you're asking Republicans to do when they control the White House, Senate and House is what the DEMOCRATS could NOT do when you controlled all 3 heads of government!" "The 3 year setup for the expiration of [Obamacare] credits was put in when *YOU* controlled the White House, House and Senate." "This is a setup of your OWN creation! NOW you want the Republicans to do something you DIDN'T do when you were in power?" 🔥🔥 Hakeem is flailing. That's brutal.

Astronomers have found signs that the small icy world Chiron, orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, may be forming a new ring system in near-real time. ================================================================ an illustration of Chiron with rings An artist's conception of the small icy world Chiron, which orbits between Saturn and Uranus and may be building its own ring system. (Image credit: Observatório Nacional/MCTI/Chrystian Pereira) In a universe where change usually unfolds over eons, astronomers have gotten a rare front-row seat to watch a small, icy world beyond Saturn build a brand-new set of rings in real time. A team of Brazil-based astronomers found that...

FBI Director Kash Patel called out sports commentator Stephen A. Smith on Thursday after the pundit suggested the arrests in connection with the NBA sports betting scandal were revenge for perceived anti-President Trump activism. Speaking with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Patel called Smith’s claim “the single dumbest thing that I have ever heard out of anyone in modern history, and I lived most of my time in Washington D.C.” “It’s right up there with Adam Schiff,” Patel said, referring to the Democratic senator from California. “We arrest people for crimes.” After the news of the arrests broke, Smith in an...

Is he even real? The internet had many questions after a photo began to circulate.It was, in nearly every way, an ordinary photo distributed by The Associated Press to news media outlets. It showed three policemen leaning against a silver car parked in the courtyard of the Louvre Museum in Paris just hours after the brazen theft of a collection of French crown jewels on Sunday.But then there was the dapper man standing jauntily on the right side of the photo.The officers, the A.P. caption said, were there to block the entrance to the museum. But the man, dressed in...

Press Release of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue and the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, 23.10.2025Press release of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogueand the Commission for Religious Relations with JudaismWalking Together in Hope:60th Anniversary of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra AetateTo celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration Nostra Aetate on the Church’s relations with non-Christian religions, the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue and the Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism are organizing a special event called, Walking Together in Hope, which will take place on 28 October 2025, from 18.30 to 20.00, in the Paul VI...

Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, the self-described "working class Mainer," attended an elite boarding school in Connecticut that costs upwards of $75,000 a year. Its alumni include Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, former CIA director Porter Goss, Clinton family crony Strobe Talbott, MacKenzie Scott Bezos, and the veteran news anchor Chris Wallace. "Graham Platner is enrolled as a first-year student at the Hotchkiss School, located in Lakeville, Conn.," a Maine newspaper, the Ellsworth American, reported in November 1999. "Platner is familiar to many through his role as the Artful Dodger in 'Oliver' and as a 20th Maine Civil War Re-Enactor."...

Mavis Jones, the wife of Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones (D.), donated to a bail fund that frees murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals from jail, and urged her followers to do the same. "I just donated to the Minnesota freedom fund," Mavis Jones posted to X in May 2020, as Black Lives Matter rioters wreaked havoc in Minneapolis in the days following George Floyd’s death, and just months before marrying Jay Jones. She also linked to the group's donation page before adding, "please consider doing the same or donating to any of the *legitimate* organizations supporting protesters." The...

Measurements were taken at 13 different locations in the Arctic Ocean. Credit: Lisa W. von Friesen ====================================================================== As Arctic sea ice melts, new life may emerge from the thaw. Researchers have discovered that bacteria beneath and along the melting ice are converting nitrogen gas into a form that fuels algae. The rapid loss of Arctic sea ice is widely seen as a catastrophe. Yet, in an unexpected twist, the melting ice may actually boost the foundation of Arctic marine ecosystems: algae. Algae serve as the essential food source for most ocean life, but their growth depends on nitrogen, a nutrient...

Leading Senate Republicans want to vote within the next month on a package of bills to pressure Russia to compromise in Ukraine peace talks, but it’s not clear if President Donald Trump will back the legislation. ... “I think Sen. Graham is suggesting a ‘Russia Week,’” Thune told reporters Thursday afternoon. “We’ll take a look at what that might consist of. I’ve been interested for some time in getting the sanctions bill up on the floor. We’re trying to do that in concert and coordination with the White House to make sure that we’re giving them the best possible opportunity...

Life was never the same for New Yorkers after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, with every resident coping with the trauma and devastation of that day. But for Muslim New Yorkers there was an added burden: the suspicion and sometimes physical harm now lurking around every corner. Vigilante violence against Arabs and Muslims exploded across the city and around the country. In what feels very much like a precursor to today’s ruthless ICE raids, mass arrests swept up Muslims on flimsy immigration pretexts, with many of them being held under extremely abusive conditions. The contemporary national security state...

The U.S. military is sending an aircraft carrier to the waters off South America, in the latest escalation and buildup of military forces in the region, the Pentagon announced Friday.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to U.S. Southern Command to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a social media post.Deploying an aircraft carrier is a major escalation of military power in a region that has already seen an...