Free Republic

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Friday he would not walk away, vowing ​to fight any challenge from his leading party rival Andy Burnham and potentially ushering in a new bout of political instability. Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, won ‌a decisive victory for Labour to claim a parliamentary seat in northwest England, and has signalled that he will use it to enter any contest to replace Starmer. The scale of his victory in Makerfield in northwest England prompted more Labour lawmakers to say Starmer, unpopular and under pressure from the populist Reform UK in surveys, should consider stepping...

The Chicago man accused of burning a cross in Grant Park last week made his first court appearance on Thursday, as a judge denied prosecutors' request to keep him locked up until trial. Merlin Lu, 21, is charged with two felony counts of hate crime, one felony count of property damage, one felony count of arson, and additional misdemeanor charges including disorderly conduct and burning a cross to intimidate. At his first court appearance on Thursday, Cook County prosecutors sought to have him detained while he awaits trial, but the judge said the state failed to show what he did...

Three jailed men who murdered a fellow inmate by stabbing him 25 times in his cell will never be released from prison. Mark Fellows, 45, David Taylor, 64, and Lee Newell, 57, were found guilty of killing Kyle Bevan at HMP Wakefield on 4 November, using makeshift weapons including one made from a metal part from the back of a television. Fellows and Newell were already serving whole life orders for previous convictions, with judge Mrs Justice McGowan imposing "new and separate" life terms for them at Leeds Crown Court. Taylor was given a whole life order for Bevan's death,...

A man who created more than 100 fake social media profiles to blackmail and sexually assault other young Muslim men has been jailed for 16 years. Waleed Saeed, a British-born Muslim of Somali descent, was sentenced in what one Metropolitan Police officer described as the biggest "sexploitation" case he has dealt with. Snaresbrook Crown Court, London, heard how the 31-year-old used a network of fake Snapchat, Instagram and Grindr profiles to solicit intimate images of Muslim men and teenagers as young as 15, many of whom privately identified as gay or bisexual. He would then threaten to "out" them to...

WASHINGTON — Iran re-closed the Strait of Hormuz Friday instead of heading to Switzerland for nuclear negotiations, citing Israel’s refusal to pull forces out of southern Lebanon and US forces’ ongoing presence in the region. In a statement read over maritime radio channels, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said the US was in violation of the memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran, which President Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed Wednesday.

OCSO Intelligence agents have arrested a woman who used her access to a sensitive court database to warn members of a drug trafficking organization that investigators were closing in and had secured arrest warrants. Crystal Lawson, 32, was granted access to the Comprehensive Case Information System (CCIS) database as part of her job as a Juvenile Probation Officer for the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice when she was hired in February 2022. Later that year, she was terminated from that job after she was arrested for battery. But her access to those databases was not cut off. Between January and...

A wave of investigators descended on comedian Carlos Mencia’s Encino mansion Thursday as officers moved methodically through the property, hauling out boxes, sealed cases, and bags of materials tied to a sweeping tax fraud investigation. Photos from the scene show a heavy presence from the California Franchise Tax Board enforcement team, with officers posted across the driveway and front entrance as they carried evidence containers from inside the home to waiting vehicles. Multiple images capture officers actively removing stacked banker-style boxes and hard cases from the residence, staging them outside the property in organized piles. Black duffel bags and additional...

President Donald Trump’s pick for acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, showed up at his new job a day early on Thursday after asking for a list of every employee in the office so he could assess whether to fire them, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. The sources said Pulte is eyeing to cut hundreds of jobs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Pulte’s appearance at ODNI on Thursday caught staff off-guard, including the outgoing director, Tulsi Gabbard, who was given a brief heads up on the visit. Trump himself has said...

Cellphone video taken Wednesday evening at a Target store in Simi Valley shows a man randomly attacking a woman while she was shopping, and then the good Samaritans who jumped in to help her and stop the man. Police ultimately arrived at the store, arresting the suspect, Rejean Tabor, who they say had been released from custody two days before after being arrested in March for indecent exposure and assaulting an officer. Tabor entered the store around 6 p.m., and cellphone video shows a woman rushing to help the woman being attacked – but she was quickly thrown off by...

House Democratic leadership's preferred candidate in Maine's 2nd district, state Sen. Joe Baldacci, lost his primary to progressive rival Matt Dunlap, state election officials announced early Friday morning. Why it matters: This is the second time this month that a candidate backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has fallen short in their primary.

I nearly failed out of grad school, defending Chomsky's theory of syntax. Half a decade later, I'm done pretending it was worth it. Chomskyan generative grammar -- X-bar theory, Government and Binding, the Minimalist Program -- was taught to me at the University of Pennsylvania as the only legitimate science of language. It was the gatekeeper, the screener, the thing students were washed out of linguistics PhD programs over. As I've come to discover, decades of work in dependency grammar and construction grammar -- frameworks I was told didn't exist, didn't matter, or had been "subsumed" -- were doing better...

High-Level Overview: The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure is hitting severe physical, economic, and social constraints. Tech giants have committed trillions of dollars to construct massive hyperscale data centers, but nearly half of the projects scheduled to open in the United States this year have already been delayed or canceled. The briefing investigates how the friction between digital ambition and physical realities—ranging from severe power grid bottlenecks to intense local community pushback—is halting the global AI buildout. The Creator's Main Argument: The primary thesis of the video is that the explosive, unconstrained AI data center boom is hitting a...

Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire in Lebanon on Friday, a US official said, after an escalation in fighting there jeopardized the chances of an interim agreement on ending the war in Iran turning into a lasting Middle East peace deal. US-Iran talks in Switzerland planned for Friday were canceled as fighting flared in Lebanon, creating new uncertainty about the timing of negotiations vital to ensure the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to global shipping. The senior US official said shortly before 4 p.m. Lebanon time (1300 GMT) that a cease-fire would go into effect then. “We understand...

Good ol' Barack Obama. We can always count on him to take any and every opportunity he can to crap on America and blame us for all the wrongs in the world. Nobody was surprised to hear Barry whine about our founders (he openly admitted their evil document, aka the Constitution, was a barrier to what he wanted to do, thank God), and of course, no speech would have been complete without his whining because we're not paying NGO's beaucoup bucks to spread America-hate around the world. That's what he's doing here, in case you don't speak fake, sanctimonious a-hole...

Juneteenth is a powerful reminder that the Democrats lost their war for slavery. Yes, the glorious news of Republican President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation finally made its two-year trek to the great state of Texas. On June 19, 1865, U.S. Major General Gordon Granger delivered General Order No. 3 and proclaimed, in part: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” WHO IS JUNETEENTH FOR? This freedom was made possible by whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics who fought for the Union. (Of course, all these...

Maine Primary Results Finally Certified After Shambolic Ranked-Choice Process Maine Wire Staff June 19, 2026 Maine election officials on Friday released final results from several key primary contests more than a week after voters went to the polls, bringing an end to a prolonged counting process that drew increasing criticism of the state’s ranked-choice voting system and the administration of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. Among the most significant results, former federal prosecutor Bobby Charles secured the Republican nomination for governor, while Hannah Pingree, a former speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, won the Democratic gubernatorial primary. In Maine’s...

Giorgia Meloni has said she was left 'stunned' after Donald Trump mocked her over a photo taken at the G7, claiming the Italian PM had been desperate to pose with him. Italy's foreign minister Antonio Tajani scrapped a June 21 trip to Washington in protest, writing on X that the 'grave and offensive words of President Trump ... offend the whole of Italy.' Trump told Italian TV channel La7 that Meloni 'wanted a picture with me so badly' at this week's summit in France and that he agreed only because he 'felt sorry for her.' He went further in the...

WASHINGTON — Iran re-closed the Strait of Hormuz Friday instead of heading to Switzerland for nuclear negotiations, citing Israel’s refusal to pull forces out of southern Lebanon and US forces’ ongoing presence in the region. In a statement read over maritime radio channels, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said the US was in violation of the memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran, which President Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed Wednesday. “Since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, the complete lifting of the naval blockade, and the withdrawal of American terrorist forces from the Persian Gulf and the region...

Three or four cells, each comprising about 10 elite Iraqi Shi'ite Muslim fighters, launched at least seven drone attacks from desert locations near the southern cities of Basra and Samawa. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has set up secretive new cells in Iraq to carry out attacks on Gulf countries that host American forces, bypassing established militia networks to avoid detection, eight Iraqi sources told Reuters.

New Evidence Fauci Manipulated Intelligence and Lied to CongressWASHINGTON D.C. — Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Anthony Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—work which is now widely viewed as the source of the unintentional lab leak that sparked the pandemic. Today, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Fauci worked with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community (IC) to suppress the truth about his actions,...