Free Republic

shooting a couple’s 3-year-old girl. 21-year-old Alexander Lamar Banks Jr. ran down 3 adults and a child as they were walking on a sidewalk last Friday and then got out of his car and began shooting at them. Banks fatally shot the couple’s 3-year-old girl, Harlow. A Good Samaritan who tried to intervene was also seriously injured.

Authorities in Greece have announced a major operation to identify and shut down all illegal mosques in the Municipality of Athens, alongside deporting the foreign nationals operating them. The initiative was confirmed by Greece’s Minister of Immigration and Asylum, Thanos Plevris, during a parliamentary committee meeting discussing a legal immigration bill. The crackdown follows a recent case in Agios Nikolaos, where a Bangladeshi national had his legal residence permit revoked for running an unlicensed place of worship. The site was sealed by police, and the individual was sentenced to prison for operating the mosque without authorization. Plevris stated that what...

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is looking to get the Big Apple on a tighter budget, and seems to see cuts to the New York Police Department (NYPD) as a way of getting the city back on track. Mamdani's predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, proposed at the end of his term that the city hire 5,000 more NYPD officers. However, upon entering office, Mamdani moved to cancel all orders signed by Adams following his Sept. 26, 2024, indictment. This included the proposed NYPD personnel increase. Under Adams' plan, the NYPD was set to add 300 officers in July 2026, growing...

Donald Trump has flip-flopped over whether Sir Keir Starmer should ‘give in to wokeism’ and hand the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius, a day after approving the deal. His defiant message comes as dozens of planes head towards the Middle East with tensions between Iran and the US reaching a breaking point after nuclear talks. In a post on his Truth Social platform, the US president said Sir Keir would be making ‘a big mistake’ if he proceeded with plans to hand over the islands – which are home to a joint US-UK military base. The plans would see the...

The Seahawks, if you haven’t heard, won Super Bowl LX. One of the questions to be resolved in the coming weeks is whether they’ll make the annual visit to the White House to commemorate the achievement. There’s speculation they won’t. Per the team, nothing has been offered or decided yet. In situations like this, anything other than “yes” can fairly be interpreted as “maybe not.” It used to be a no-brainer for the Super Bowl champion to make the trip. In recent years, that has changed. (At a time when Americans disagree on many things, that’s an undeniable fact.) Last...

The band also included a pro-Palestinian song in the group of six new songs, titled “The Tears of Things,” ripping Israel for putting violent Hamas terrorists “into a cage” and hinting that the band thinks Palestinian “rage” is justified. “If you put a man into a cage and rattle it long enough,” Bono sings, “A man becomes the kind of rage that cannot be locked up.” Irish rockers U2 have released a short album on Ash Wednesday titled Days of Ash, with a track celebrating radical anti-ICE activist Renee Good and ripping Trump supporters as “the people of the lie.”...

VIDEOThe Florida Freeze this winter almost completely wiped out the iguanas in South Florida. The first week of the Big Freeze the nighttime temperatures fell below 40 degrees on most nights and dropped below freezing on at least a couple of nights. After that first week, temperatures rose again only to drop for a few more days killing many/most of the hardy iguanas that barely survived the first week. Although the temperature has risen into the 80s for over a week, I still have seen NO iguanas until today probably due to the fact that Lake PJ is well stocked...

Wall Street Apes@WallStreetApes7h WOW 🚨 California is tracking down former residents and making sure they actually left to try and collect taxesCalifornia is demanding full details on their move down to the vehicle used and moving invoices“How you know the state of California is hurting. This is the letter they just sent me — Please provide a brief narrative of events and circumstances surrounding you becoming a non-resident of California with your response. Provide the specific move out dates as it was not reported.7 years ago, California 540 non-resident return for each shipment of households, personal vehicle, Etc. Items from...

Canadian Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said he does not agree with an elected member of his party who claimed that Canada was harming its relationship with the US by throwing an "anti-American hissy fit". Jamil Jivani, a Conservative MP from Ontario, made the remark in an interview with right-wing American news outlet Breitbart over the weekend. On Tuesday, Poilievre distanced himself from Jivani's comment, telling reporters that the MP does not speak for his party. Jivani spoke to Breitbart after he travelled to Washington earlier this month on a trip that was not sanctioned by the Canadian government, and where...

WASHINGTON — Veterans and their advocates slammed a new rule by the Department of Veterans Affairs for determining disability compensation, predicting it will lower their payments for service-related illnesses and injuries. The rule, effective immediately, states that a disability level must be based on how well a veteran functions while on medication and not on the underlying impairment itself. Titled “Evaluative Rating: Impact of Medication,” the interim final rule was published in the Federal Register and affects how the VA rates a veteran’s disability for new claims and when reevaluating disabilities through clinical

U2 releases Renee Good tribute song 'American Obituary' "These songs were impatient to be out in the world," singer Bono said of the band's surprise new EP, "Days of Ash." Irish rockers U2 became the latest high-powered musical act to condemn the federal immigration raids with the surprise release Wednesday of a six-track EP that kicks off with a song for slain Minneapolis protester Renée Good. Following in the footsteps of Bruce Springsteen, Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish and other artists, U2 recorded “American Obituary,” a four-minute plus musical condemnation of the crackdown that left the mother of three dead on...

On Wednesday’s CNN This Morning, host Audie Cornish and her panel managed to recast enforcement of federal civil rights law under Donald Trump as “enforcing ideology,” while a Democratic consultant insisted that DEI “was never a problem” until Trump took office. [snip] Host Audie Cornish framed the issue this way: “What it means is the actual government now is involved in enforcing a different ideology, so to speak.” No. It means the federal government is enforcing the law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race. Get the rest of the story and view the...

https://x.com/wcdispatch/status/2023987491007521081 Walter Curt@wcdispatchAlright!! Finally everything is working!Right now, the live Medicaid intelligence map covers all 50 states and includes 208 discovered billing codes, with 11 high-priority codes currently enabled for focused monitoring.The national map view currently includes 4,167 unique provider lead points and 350 hotspot tracts, with deeper investigative views tracking 3,530 high-risk entities, 1,797 T1019-focused leads, and 2,874 critical address clusters.Each lead is ranked with a confidence score and priority tier so teams can triage faster and focus on the highest-impact signals first.The scoring is based on a multi-signal model that looks at payment scale, utilization intensity, concentration patterns,...

“Not only are Jews unsafe in her care, but it calls into question the judgment of those who employ her" says Physicans Against Antisemitsm (PAA).A California-based registered nurse has come under fire from the nation’s largest organization combatting antisemitism in healthcare after she posted dozens of tirades against Judaism and Jews, saying they pray to the “Synagogue of Satan” and that Judaism is “built on lies.” The nurse — RN Gina Borggrebe — works at Michael Lin Advanced Dermatology and for Paul Dougherty MD, according to her LinkedIn. The nurse is based in California and works throughout the LA county...

The heroic bystander, Michael Black, who risked his own life to try to subdue the transgender gunman in Rhode Island on Monday, recounted the harrowing incident on Tuesday. He described how, after he tackled the shooter, his hand became caught in the gunman's slide, stopping him from causing further harm, and how he witnessed the shooter pull out a second gun and take his own life. "As I was watching the game, I heard a pop, pop. And I thought they were balloons, I thought they were big balloons. And the noise was right in front of me. I looked,...

A committed Christian who followed a call to Baptist ministry, Gary’s life took a dramatic and unexpected turn when he was invited to help develop a network of Cowboy Churches in Texas. He flourished in this role, and it grew rapidly. However, the chaos of COVID, combined with partisan political infighting in his congregations, led him to seek an anchor in a theological tradition that could transcend the spirit of the age. This led him to discover the history and authority of the Catholic Church, and he knew that he had to come home.

A federal judge has declared a mistrial in the high‑profile case accusing nine North Texans of attacking the Prairieland ICE Detention Center on the Fourth of July, after determining that a defense attorney’s shirt could improperly influence potential jurors. The mistrial was issued Tuesday during jury selection, after Judge Mark Pittman noticed that defendant Maricela Rueda's defense attorney, MarQuetta Clayton, was wearing a T‑shirt under her jacket with images tied to the civil rights era beneath her jacket. Clayton later exited the courthouse with the shirt turned inside out, which had depicted images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Shirley...

Explanation: Cradled in red-glowing hydrogen gas, stars are being born in Orion. These stellar nurseries lie at the edge of the giant Orion molecular cloud complex, some 1,500 light-years away. This detailed view spans about 12 degrees across the center of the well-known constellation, with the Great Orion Nebula, the closest large star-forming region, visible toward the lower right. The deep mosaic also includes, near the top center, the Flame Nebula and the Horsehead Nebula. Image data acquired with a hydrogen-alpha filter adds other remarkable features to this wide-angle cosmic vista: pervasive tendrils of energized atomic hydrogen gas and portions...

Rebekah had Judaism in her background, but was raised in a fundamentalist form of Pentecostalism that she rebelled against strongly, going deep into a world of regrettable life decisions. Through God’s providence and some key relationships, she began to come back to faith, and was surprised to find, after her initial Christian conversion, that her true spiritual home was in the Catholic Church. She now works helping women in crisis pregnancies in Steubenville, OH.

Do any of our FReeper Coast Guard veterans want to list their service on our military table of honor? If so, please provide the details. Regardless, thank you for your service. Here's a blank template with placeholder text until I receive actual dates and details.FReeper veteranCoast Guard19XX - 19XX, details placed hereFReeper veteranCoast Guard19XX - 19XX, details placed hereFReeper veteranCoast Guard19XX - 19XX, details placed hereI have already built the tables for the Air Force, Marines, NAVY and National Guard tables of honor. After I build tables for each branch, I will create a master table of all military willing...