Free Republic

One of the beneficiaries of Virginia’s aggressive attempt to gerrymander the state for Democratic advantage could be a former federal prosecutor whose campaign for Congress hinges on his efforts to use the law to target President Trump and his supporters. When a slim majority of Virginia voters gave the legislature authority last month to create congressional districts that could give Democrats a 10-1 advantage, J.P. Cooney cheered the outcome in a message on social media, boasting that the new district he was running in had been drawn “expressly for the purpose of standing up to Donald Trump’s and MAGA’s corruption.”...

Roughly one week after the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals handed Texas a win on its border security law, SB 4, the law is facing a second legal challenge. The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Texas, and the Texas Civil Rights Project filed a class-action lawsuit on Monday seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to block the law from going into effect. The law, which makes illegal entry into Texas a state crime, is set to go into effect May 15. It gives Texas law enforcement the authority to return illegal foreign nationals to a port...

A New Braunfels, Texas, woman arrested in January for setting fire to a county Republican Party’s headquarters was charged with terrorism, according to local media. Grace Carol Brown was arrested Jan. 22 by the New Braunfels Police Department on suspicion of arson and burglary after employees at the Comal County Republican Party headquarters discovered the building had been broken into and a small fire had been set on Jan. 14, according to a Jan. 23 release. A Comal County grand jury added the terrorism charge on April 15, the San Antonio News-Express reported. “Sadly, this incident is not isolated,” Texas...

Florida detectives are pursuing a group of teenagers whose late-night joyride across a local golf course left the pristine landscape scarred by deep tire tracks and thousands of dollars in property damage. It happened around 7:17 p.m. on Saturday, April 18, at the Weston Hills Golf Course, according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO). Deputies responding to reports of suspicious activity arrived to find evidence of significant damage to the course’s greens. A witness at the scene told deputies that several juveniles had been riding motorized bikes and a golf cart across the course. The scale of the disruption was...

WASHINGTON (KFSN) -- A new report says a former U.S. House of Representatives staffer filed a complaint against Valley Rep. Jim Costa with the House Committee on Ethics back in 2023.The report from News of the United States (NOTUS) says a woman, whose name is not mentioned in the report, came forward and filed the complaint after she had a more secure position in Congress and wasn't concerned about losing her job. The woman claimed Costa repeatedly asked her to dance and made advances toward her during an event in February of 2020, while she worked with a different lawmaker.The...

Not a single Democrat in the Senate is willing to support the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, and a new op-ed from The Washington Post might just explain why. The SAVE America Act would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and voter ID to cast a ballot in federal elections. The current “safeguard” preventing noncitizens from registering to vote and voting is a tiny square box on the federal registration form asking applicants to attest they are telling the truth about their citizenship status. In other...

UK Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has sharply criticized the government’s handling of rising antisemitism, describing the situation as a “national emergency" and calling for immediate action, including a ban on pro-Palestinian marches, as reported in the Daily Mail. Her remarks come as Prime Minister Keir Starmer convenes senior officials, police representatives, and public figures in Downing Street for a “whole of society" discussion on the recent surge in attacks targeting Jewish communities throughout the UK. The meeting follows a stabbing incident in Golders Green last week, which left two Jewish men injured and heightened concerns over public safety. Badenoch warned...

MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. (CBS12) — A United States Secret Service employee has been arrested in Florida for allegedly exposing himself.John Andrew Spillman, 33, was taken into custody Monday morning and booked into the Miami-Dade jail on a charge of indecent exposure.According to WSVN, in a statement, the Chief of the Secret Service emphasized that Spillman's actions are "unacceptable" and go against the professionalism and integrity expected from their personnel.

The latest man charged with trying to assassinate President Donald Trump received an apology from the judge in his court appearance Monday. Attorneys for Cole Allen claimed in filings revealed during the hearing that the suspect had been wrongfully placed on suicide watch and denied access to a Bible. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui gave the government until the next day to update the court on where Allen would be held at the Washington, D.C., jail. "Whatever you've been through, I apologize for the prior week," the judge said to Allen, according to USA Today. "I'm sorry," the judge said...

About a month ago, Senator Jim Justice hosted the owners of the Omni Hotels & Resorts chain for a meeting at The Greenbrier Hotel to explore possibilities for working together. The meeting, by all accounts, had moments of strain, and lawyers for the Omni owners now allege the senator threatened his leverage over West Virginia’s courtrooms. Justice, a two-term Republican governor now serving in the U.S. Senate, and the Texas billionaires who own Omni are in conflict over control of The Greenbrier, its 710 guest rooms, four golf courses and casino. [snip] “At that meeting, the Senator and his counsel...

In the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, archaeologists recently discovered a 1,600-year-old tomb with several mummies inside. Some of them were decorated with gold leaf or geometric patterns—features commonly found in burials of this kind.But one of the mummies was unearthed alongside a particularly unusual artifact: a papyrus fragment from Homer's Iliad, the epic poem set during the Trojan War. The ancient Greek text had been tucked beneath the wrappings on the mummy's abdomen during the embalming process."The fact that in this case the text, in Greek, refers to a literary text is truly novel," say Maite Mascort and Esther...

Three days before a 31-year-old male stormed the White House Correspondents Dinner, hoping to assassinate President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet, the New York Times published a 35-minute video titled: “‘The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’ Why petty theft might be the new political protest.” In it, a Times editor interviewed two other members of the media aristocracy about the moral code shared by a large swathe of young Americans. That code justifies theft—and even violence—when harnessed to a fashionably left-wing cause. None of the participants—podcasting celebrity Hasan Piker, New Yorker writer Jia...

Listen to those like leftist podcaster Hasan Piker and former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who openly support Hamas, and they’ll tell you that while they support the destruction of Israel, they want to assure Jews in the Diaspora that they have nothing to fear from them. Or, at least, not as long as they don’t support Israel. They are adamant in asserting that anti-Zionism—a movement that denies rights to Jews that no one would think to deny to any other group or people—is not the same thing as antisemitism. Indeed, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, they are proud...

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — An affidavits reveals new details in what led to police arresting a man who was seen carrying an AR-15 style gun inside of a restaurant on Chattanooga's Southside Sunday.Officers were dispatched around 4:17 p.m. after the affidavit says a concerned caller reported a suspicious man who may have been concealing a firearm.When police arrived at Bollywood Tacos, they found the man—later identified as 20-year-old Roman McDonald—sitting in a booth inside the restaurant.According to the arrest report, officers attempted to detain McDonald and discovered a Colt SP1 AR-15 rifle hidden in his pants.The weapon was loaded, with a...

Bixonimania, a made-up eye condition created to prove that large language models (LLMs) could be easily deceived, ended up tricking human researchers as well. Bixonimania was created in 2024 by a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. They wanted to see whether large language models like ChatGPT or Gemini could see through what was considered obvious misinformation, or whether they would swallow this medical misinformation and present it as valid information. Within weeks of Thunström’s team uploading two fake studies about bixonimania to a preprint server, the made-up condition was already...

At a closed marine park in the south of France, two orcas swim lonely circles in an aging tank, its walls caked with green algae. Their fate has become a drama in France, where the government must decide soon whether to transfer them to another marine park or release them into a sanctuary in the sea. While the prospect of sending them into nature is appealing, evoking a sense of restitution for captive mammals, critics argue it is both experimental and unrealistic. These orcas — a female, Wikie, 25, and her son Keijo, 13 — were born in Marineland,...

Rick Harrison, the Las Vegas pawn shop owner and star of the hit show Pawn Stars, stood up at the White House Small Business Summit on Monday and said what a lot of Main Street business owners have been thinking. “Literally he’s going to go down as maybe the best president ever,” Harrison said of President Donald Trump. “I love this guy!” The moment drew cheers from a room packed with more than 130 business owners who had traveled from across the country to mark National Small Business Week at the White House. VIDEO AT LINK............. Harrison, who owns the...

Iranians need access to weapons to challenge their rulers, President Donald Trump said on Monday, arguing that protesters would fight effectively if armed but are currently outmatched by government forces. “They have to have guns. And I think they’re getting some guns. As soon as they have guns, they’ll fight like, as good as anybody there is,” Trump said in an interview with The Hugh Hewitt Show. Trump also suggested that US military pressure had already significantly weakened Iran and that further action could be completed within a short timeframe. Trump: The Iranian people have to have guns and I...

The United States said Iranian attacks on shipping and forces in the Persian Gulf have so far remained below the level that would trigger a broader conflict, a senior US military official said. “They’ve attacked US forces more than 10 times, all below the threshold of restarting major combat operations at this point,” said Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said Iran had also fired at commercial vessels nine times and seized two container ships since a ceasefire was announced, adding the actions were part of efforts to disrupt global trade. Caine said around 22,500 mariners...

FRESNO, Calif. (FOX26) — Californians are facing growing uncertainty at the pump after the state’s last major oil shipment from the Strait of Hormuz arrived in Long Beach on Monday, as leaders warn the state has roughly four to six weeks of fuel supply left under normal conditions.The shipment was the last to leave the Strait of Hormuz since Iran closed it in February, forcing state officials and refinery operators to find new sources of crude while also trying to keep up with converting it into gasoline to meet consumer demand.