Free Republic

My youngest daughter, Katie, who was only 20 years old, was killed on Jan. 19. Her only “crime” was being a passenger in a car in Urbana, Illinois. The man who took her life, Julio Cucul-Bol, was an illegal immigrant who was driving drunk when he slammed into the Honda Civic she was riding in at nearly 80 miles an hour. He fled immediately and was then aided by associates in Urbana and Chicago as he tried to escape justice.

A political science professor at the University of Arkansas stands accused of praising Iran’s Supreme Leader using the school’s letterhead and attacking Israel, The Post has learned. Shirin Saeidi, head of the school’s Middle East Studies program, also allegedly supported a convicted Iranian regime war criminal, evidence shows. Now, lawmakers and a group of Iranian dissidents are demanding administrators at the university further discipline Saeidi, who was removed from her position Friday, according to a spokesman. Saeidi used the school’s letterhead to appeal for the release of Hamid Nouri, who was convicted by a Swedish court in 2022 of ordering...

A senior U.S. official confirmed to Fox News there have been multiple injuries after American service members were ambushed in Syria on Saturday. The official added that some of the injuries were serious. Two local Syrian officials earlier told Reuters that a convoy of U.S. and Syrian forces fighting the Islamic State terrorist group was targeted while on patrol in the central town of Palmyra.

Congress appears poised to pour more gasoline on the fire that caused the nation’s affordability crisis by extending COVID-era subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka “Obamacare.” This is not to say that the beneficiaries of the ACA aren’t suffering from soaring healthcare costs. They are. But the problem, once again, is that the government’s “solution” is just more of what caused the problem in the first place. The growing deficit, the epidemic of dependence on government welfare programs, and soaring prices are all part of the same crisis. We’re not just having an affordability crisis. We’re having a...

December 6 Puccini: LA BOHÈME December 13 Giordano: ANDREA CHÉNIER December 20 at 12:00 p.m. Mozart: THE MAGIC FLUTE – Abridged, English December 27 HANDEL AT THE MET January 10 Bellini: I PURITANI January 17 Bizet: CARMEN March 14 Puccini: MADAMA BUTTERFLY March 28 Verdi: LA TRAVIATA April 11 Mozart: DON GIOVANNI May 2 Tchaikovsky: EUGENE ONEGIN May 9 Donizetti: LA FILLE DU RÉGIMENT May 23 Puccini: TURANDOT

A Republican activist from Idaho has received a barrage of death threats and abuse after he won free beer for reporting an illegal migrant to ICE. Ryan Spoon, vice chairman of the Ada County Republican party was announced as the first winner of the Old State Saloon bar's giveaway in Eagle, Idaho. Bar owner Mark Fitzpatrick won praise from Homeland Security after announcing on social media last month that if individuals provide evidence such as photos, videos, or alternative documentation to help ICE locate migrants without legal status, they qualify for a month of free beer. The bar additionally boasted...

ERUSALEM, Dec 12 (Reuters) - Israel's cabinet has decided to give legal status to 19 settlements in the occupied West Bank, including two that were vacated 20 years ago under a pullout aimed at boosting the country's security and the economy, Israeli media reported. The Palestinian Authority on Friday condemned the move, announced late on Thursday. Some of the settlements are newly established, while others are older, Israeli media said. The move to legalise the settlements in the West Bank -- territory Palestinians seek for a future state -- was proposed by far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Israeli Defense...

A grieving uncle reportedly took the law into his own hands after growing furious over the handling of a case involving the accused killer of his nephew. CBS News Colorado obtained police documents on Wednesday, which showed that a 36-year-old Aurora man named Daniel Alexander Ashby attended a court hearing inside the Arapahoe County Courthouse in Littleton, Colorado, earlier this week for 19-year-old Christopher Ramirez-Rodriguez. The teen is accused of running a red light and killing Ashby’s 12-year-old nephew in July. Police say the Ashby’s nephew was crossing the road on his electric scooter at the time of the incident....

Elon Musk recently asked a question that millions of Americans have been asking for years: “Who sends them their instructions!? Real question.” He was reacting to a familiar spectacle, within minutes or hours of an event, leading Democrats, left leaning pundits, and drive-by media outlets suddenly begin using the same phrase, the same framing, sometimes almost the same sentence, on TV, on 𝕏, and across the web. The pattern is so obvious that it has become a kind of dark joke on the right. We all see the copies, the question is whether there is in fact a script....

The Who's Roger Daltrey has been knighted for his services to charity and to music. The 81-year-old singer received his honour from the Prince of Wales at Windsor Castle yesterday (December 10) and told the Press Association that he considered the award to be "an incredible honour". "I was born in the Second World War and grew up in the streets in London," he said, "for a kid like me, achieving this, it's a dream.” Daltrey was responsible for launching and curating the Teenage Cancer Trust's annual week of charity benefit shows at London's Royal Albert Hall: the initiative has...

A woman is recovering from life-altering injuries after police say she was the victim of a chemical attack near Forsyth Park on Wednesday night. The assault happened near West Waldburg and Whitaker streets, just steps from one of the city’s most visited landmarks.

Close encounters of the delusional kind. A Florida whacko accused of stealing a BMW told cops he was “teleported” into the luxury car on orders from the “X-Men” — and later thanked the officers for saving him from “aliens” he claimed were after him, according to nutty police bodycam footage. Calvin Johnson, 36, was arrested Monday afternoon after swiping the unlocked flashy car from Bicentennial Park in Ormond Beach and wrecking it minutes later while barreling down a nearby highway at 130 mph, according to the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office. The car’s owner told police he was walking his dog...

CHICAGO, Dec 13 (Reuters) - The windowless newsroom of The Phoenix, the Loyola University Chicago newspaper, hums like an old refrigerator. A coffee pot burbles in the corner as juniors Julia Pentasuglio and Ella Daugherty lean over a glowing laptop, updating a Google map. Each red pin marks a sighting of federal immigration agents near campus and the surrounding neighborhoods. Nearby, editor-in-chief Lilli Malone scrolls through reports from Rogers Park, a neighborhood along Chicago's lakefront where 80 languages mix. There were new pins from seven sightings that day alone - reports of vans barreling down side streets, masked immigration officers...

CHRISTMAS BIBLE-ART EPISODE #1 of 33 JESUS' VERY INTERESTING GENEALOGY MATTHEW 1 & LUKE 3 Derived from LUKE, Chapter 3: Adam by MICHELANGELO "The Creation of Adam" Seth "Patriarch Seth" Enosh by ROBERT BARRETT "Enosh Praying" Methuselah "Methuselah" Noah by JAMES EDWIN MCCONNELL "Noah's Ark" Shem by JAMES TISSOT "Shem, Ham and Japheth" Quoted from MATTHEW, Chapter 1: A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham: Abraham was the father of Isaac, by WEYLON SMITH "Abraham and Stars" Isaac the father of Jacob, "Abraham & Isaac" Jacob the father of Judah...

The government has identified 18,000 known or suspected terrorists who reached the U.S. during the Biden administration, senior officials told Congress on Thursday. Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said they represent a “persistent” threat inside the country. “The No. 1 threat that we have right now in my view is the fact that we don’t know who came into our country in the last four years of Biden’s open borders,” Mr. Kent told the House Homeland Security Committee as part of a hearing on worldwide threats. He said the 18,000 are just the ones his agency has...

If you’ve been dreaming of a white Christmas, be warned that it might not become a reality. Many people have memories of watching the snow fall on Christmas Day—but data shows that, across the country, a white Christmas occurs less frequently than you might think. In general, if an area has widespread snow and persistently colder patterns leading up to Christmas, it could be a predictor of snow on Christmas. But while many people across the country might lament the white Christmases of their youth, the truth is that many places typically don’t see snow in late December—people just think...

A man was sentenced to life in prison for stabbing a 67-year-old grandmother to death on a Metro train in Los Angeles.

“I’m not going [up] to a Christian to tell him ‘I hate you’… but that does not deny the fact I do.” Should foreign nationals who hate America be allowed to come here and be allowed to stay here? Should they be able to set up institutions to preach their hatred for Americans? The North Miami Islamic Center, aka ‘Masjid As Sunnah An Nabawiyyah Miami’, which claims to be “one of the largest Islamic Centers in the state of Florida” made headlines before when Imam Fadi Yousef Kablawi called for the destruction of the Jews. Among his supplications at the...

Military analyst Denys Popovych said on Radio NV that Russian troops are currently encircled near Kupyansk and explained how Ukrainian forces carried out a successful operation there on Dec. 13. There are now encircled Russian army units in the city that are clearly in the final stage of their presence there. Cleanup operations are ongoing, and it is impossible to predict when they will end. Why do the Russians make such statements about capturing Kupyansk? They are taking territory on credit. They need it to demonstrate that they are advancing and achieving success. They lost Kupyansk during our Kharkiv counteroffensive,...

Join with fellow FREEPERS across the world to pray for AMERICA: For those in Authority in Government, Family, Military, Business, Agri-Business, Healthcare, Education, Churches, Technology, and the Media. I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone: for kings and all those in authority that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. (1 Timothy 2:1-2) BUT THOSE WHO HOPE IN THE LORD WILL RENEW THEIR STRENGTH. THEY WILL SOAR ON WINGS LIKE EAGLES; THEY WILL RUN AND NOT GROW WEARY, THEY WILL WALK AND NOT BE FAINT. (ISAIAH...