Free Republic

Two high-profile shootings carried out by transgender individuals in the span of less than a week have sparked fears about a perceived uptick in violence from the community. On February 10th, an 18-year-old transgender shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar, gunned down his mother and stepbrother before killing six others at a school in British Columbia, Canada. Then on Monday, Robert Dorgan, who also identified as Roberta Esposito, opened fire at a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, ice rink where his son was playing hockey, killing two family members and then himself. Before his attack, Dorgan wrote online, “I’m a gun fanatic transwoman; i...

An Austrian climber has been found guilty of gross negligent manslaughter after his girlfriend froze to death on Austria's highest mountain last year. The man, named only as Thomas P in line with Austrian privacy laws, has been given a five-month suspended sentence and fined €9,600 (£8,400). His girlfriend, Kerstin G, died of hypothermia during a climbing trip on the Grossglockner mountain in January 2025. In a statement sent to the BBC, the court said it considered Thomas P's previous clean record and the loss of a person close to him "to be mitigating factors". ... The court also heard...

In stop-start efforts since November, Taliban officials have cracked down on women and girls in the western city of Herat who have been ignoring the hardline group's rules by showing their faces. Enforcement agents are preventing them from entering hospitals and seminaries and pulling them out of public transport. Initially, women and girls were punished for not wearing a burka — the Afghan burka is typically blue, has a netted opening for the eyes and drapes down around the body, largely constraining the woman wearing it. Later, after what residents described as pushback, officials enforcing the rules relented and allowed...

The Supreme Court will be releasing opinions this morning at 10:00 a.m. Scotusblog will be live streaming the opinions and we will be following along.A list of the pending cases can be found at: SCOTUS casesThere are four cases remaining from the October sitting yet to be decided. Of interest is Louisiana v. Callais (Voting Rights Act) Issue: Whether Louisiana’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.We may get that Opinion or maybe the tariffs case today. Or we may get just one or two boring opinions. In total...

There is a familiar rhythm in public debate. First comes the report. Then comes the denial. Finally comes the euphemism. The controversy over Islamic no-go zones in the West follows precisely this pattern. The phrase itself is contested. The underlying phenomenon is not. We should begin with clarity. What is meant by a no-go zone? The core idea is simple. A no-go zone is an area within a city where ordinary civic norms do not fully apply, where state authority is attenuated, and where non-members of the dominant local community are discouraged, intimidated, or effectively excluded. In the specific...

Destructive storms blasting through parts of the Midwest spawned tornadoes that hit Indiana and Illinois, as near-hurricane force winds swept parts of the region. A violent tornado ripped through southeastern Illinois on Thursday, shredding homes, overturning cars and leaving a trail of destruction that stretched at least six miles long. At least a dozen buildings were destroyed. Powerful wind mangled mobile homes and flipped them upside down. One woman was trapped inside until rescue crews could reach her. That same twister then barreled across the Indiana state line. Another powerful tornado ripped through Bloomington, Indiana, on Thursday, as severe thunderstorms...

While studying the reality of people protecting themselves from increasing populations of bears, it is impossible to ignore the emotional arguments of those who oppose the human killing of bears. It is as if the opponents of human management believe bears to be immortal, never to die except at the hands of human hunters. This is a false, emotional, irrational belief structure. All predators die. Death by human hunter is overwhelmingly less painful than death without human intervention.Without human intervention, most bears die in one of three ways:The most common is being killed and eaten by another bear. Mature males...

Enjoy hunting, fishing, and eating meat while you can. None of these things is to be permitted as progressives progress toward utopia. Moonbattery-addled Oregon shows the way. KPTV reports: Animal rights advocates are close to having enough signatures to qualify a ballot measure in Oregon that would dramatically change how animals are treated under state law, including banning most hunting, fishing, livestock farming and animal research. The proposed measure Initiative Petition 28, would remove many long-standing exemptions in Oregon’s animal cruelty laws. Under the initiative, most activities that hurt or kill animals would become criminal offenses. No doubt many who...

Trump Tariffs Achieve What Economists Said Was ImpossibleThe Wall Street Journal’s headline on Thursday’s trade data declared that “America Imported a Record Amount Last Year Despite Seismic Trade Policy Changes,” emphasizing that the annual deficit “was little changed” and concluding that the tariffs “did little to dissuade Americans from importing.” Bloomberg declared: “US Notches One of Its Biggest Annual Trade Gaps Since 1960.”Sounds scary enough to make some doubt that President Trump’s tariffs were having any effect at all. Maybe all those anti-tariff pundits were right and tariffs could not rebalance trade. That, of course, is precisely the reaction the...

The U.S. trade deficit has fallen by nearly half since President Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcements in March, with the December gap coming in 48 percent smaller than the March peak.The combined goods and services deficit dropped to $70.3 billion in December from $136.0 billion in March, a decline of $65.7 billion, according to Commerce Department data released Thursday. The goods deficit alone fell 39 percent, from $162.1 billion to $99.3 billion.The dramatic nine-month improvement suggests Trump’s tariff strategy is achieving its core objective of reducing America’s trade imbalance. March represented the peak of the deficit as importers rushed to...

‘It is tragic that Oregon’s current Democratic lawmakers are so committed to their party’s radical abortion agenda that they will not, at the very minimum, take action to ensure that babies who survive abortion attempts are treated with the same standard of care as any other newborn.’ Oregon Right to Life Pro-abortion Oregon lawmakers voted against bringing a bill to the House floor Monday that would ensure that babies born alive during failed abortions are treated with the same standards of care as newborns delivered under usual circumstances. Representative Court Boice made a motion during a February 16th House floor...

ZDNET's key takeaways Agentic AI technology is marked by a lack of disclosure about risks. Some systems are worse than others. AI developers need to step up and take responsibility. Agentic technology is moving fully into the mainstream of artificial intelligence with the announcement this week that OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberg, the creator of the open-source software framework OpenClaw. The OpenClaw software attracted heavy attention last month not only for its enabling of wild capabilities -- agents that can, for example, send and receive email on your behalf -- but also for its dramatic security flaws, including the ability...

Kansas Republicans voted to override Democrat Gov. Laura Kelly's veto of a bill that requires transgender people to use restrooms and changing facilities based on biological sex rather than gender identity. The Kansas Senate voted to override the veto Tuesday, 31-9, and the Kansas House followed Wednesday with an 87-37 vote, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported. The override means Senate Bill 244 is the second new law of the 2026 legislative session and the first to take effect, according to the report. Senate President Ty Masterson, a Republican, praised the outcome, saying the override "restored sanity." He said Kelly's veto "would...

Violet Zulu sits in a two-room home in Lusaka with no running water, trying to rebuild her life at twenty-six. She earns about forty dollars a month cleaning houses. She begs for food at times so her two little boys can eat. Her partner abandoned her when she became pregnant a third time. She told reporters, “I never wanted to abort my pregnancy, but it is the circumstances at home that forced me to do it.” That sentence breaks the heart. She did not crave abortion. She feared hunger. She loved her sons and believed that another child would starve...

Poland will use antipersonnel as well as anti-tank land mines to defend its eastern border against the growing threat from Russia, Poland’s deputy defense minister told The Associated Press on Friday as the country officially left an international convention banning the use of the controversial weapons. The 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty, also known as the Ottawa Convention, prohibits signatories from keeping or using antipersonnel mines, which can last for years and are known for having caused large-scale suffering among civilians in former conflict zones in countries including Cambodia, Angola and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Poland, which ratified the document in...

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to be in disbelief on Wednesday when CBS News White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe asked for examples of when President Donald Trump had been wrongly accused of racism. O’Keefe cited Trump’s response to the death of civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, in which Trump said he had been “falsely and consistently called a racist.” Leavitt said that her office was prepared to provide a “plethora of examples” of Democrats and the left-wing media accusing Trump of racism. “Yesterday, in his statement about Jesse Jackson, the president said, ‘despite the fact that I’m falsely...

Democrats will stop at nothing to defile this great nation. Via PJ Media: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is introducing legislation to make the LGBTQ pride flag a congressionally authorized symbol, giving it the same federal protections as the U.S. flag, military flags, and POW/MIA flags. The “pride” flag literally represents sexual perversion. That’s how sick the Democratic Party has become. Schumer wants the pride flag to have the same status as Old Glory and the flags honoring those who served and sacrificed for this country. This brownish-green loogy hawked up and spat on Old Glory and the vets who...

At a remote and barren Sahara desert site in Niger, scientists have unearthed fossils of a new species of Spinosaurus, among the biggest of the meat-eating dinosaurs, notable for its large blade-shaped head crest and jaws bearing interlocking teeth for snaring slippery fish. It prowled a forested inland environment and strode into rivers to catch sizable fish like a modern-day wading bird — a “hell heron,” as one of the researchers put it, considering it was about 40 feet long and weighed 5-7 tons. The dinosaur presented a striking profile on the Cretaceous Period landscape of Africa some 95 million...

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin has never been one to show good judgement. When he’s not getting caught conducting “personal business” on a staff Zoom call, he’s accidentally admitting that there’s an ongoing leftist-led judicial coup designed to stymie President Trump’s agenda. The serial self-pleasurer let the proverbial cat out of the bag in his Monday opinion column for The New York Times. Titled, “The Plan for a Radically Different Supreme Court Is Here,” the article purports to roll out a blueprint for countering conservative appointments of originalist judges to the bench but inadvertently discloses the existence of leftists’ efforts...

BREAKING: Transgender Minnesota State Rep. Leigh Finke (D) says that queer kids need access to porn websites for “educational” purposes. He is arguing that Age verification is oppression because some kids need porn content for "education."