Free Republic

Buyers, beware. The San Francisco real estate scene, one that’s historically presented an uphill battle for buyers, has tilted toward all-out war. The catalyst is the artificial intelligence boom, a phenomenon generating new jobs, new wealth and unprecedented demand for housing in the Bay Area. Rents are up, homes are selling faster, prices are rising, and overbids (and we mean way over) have gone bananas. Only the wealthiest, most intrepid, most determined buyers will succeed in such a market. According to a June 2026 report released by Compass Real Estate, the AI boom has affected virtually every aspect of the...

New supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei still absent from public view as his three brothers stand beside father’s coffin Beside the coffin of the assassinated former Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei at a packed prayer hall in Tehran on Sunday there were calls for the killing of Donald Trump. Iran is staging a week of mass funeral processions ⁠for Khamenei, who was killed along with other members of his family on the first day of the US and Israeli war on 28 February. The funeral was delayed because of the war. The funeral prayers for the former supreme leader and four...

Tesla cars are constantly capturing video data from all their cars that is sent back to their servers. No doubt, this data could be used to track criminals or anyone else by a query to the database. I have not seen this discussed anywhere, but seems like LE or those with ill intent could see this as a treasure. I saw this post: This little blue dot on your phone is a revolutionary invention https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4386790/posts and it made me remember this question. Tesla uses the data to improve their self driving algorithms so billions of videos are uploaded from cars...

As millions of patriotic Americans celebrated the 250th Anniversary of American Independence on July 4th, a disturbing scene unfolded in a North Charleston, South Carolina neighborhood. Video circulating on social media shows a white female North Charleston police officer attempting to make an arrest before being thrown to the ground by a black male, then surrounded by multiple black women who repeatedly assault her.

Memphis police say National Guard troops fired their weapons in the early morning hours Sunday, killing a man who was armed with a handgun. Police say officers were responding to calls of shots fired in downtown Memphis just before 4 am local time when they saw "an armed male carrying a handgun." The man — identified by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation as 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson — fled on foot, pursued by Memphis police officers along with Tennessee National Guard soldiers who are assigned to the area. What happened next was not immediately clear. "For reasons under investigation, the situation...

An underground church pastor has been released from prison in China and has arrived in the United States, less than two months after President Donald Trump publicly raised his case with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Ezra Jin Mingri, who founded Beijing’s fast-growing Zion Church, was detained in October last year along with 17 other church leaders in what was one of China’s largest crackdowns on a single religious congregation in decades. The U.S.-based advocacy group ChinaAid, which monitors religious persecution in China, said Saturday that Jin had arrived in Los Angeles following his release. Jin’s detention drew international attention in...

They wore ball gowns and bedazzled baseball hats. They wore suits and ripped jeans. They wore American flag shirts, American flag ties, American flag dresses, American flag purses, American flag handkerchiefs, American flag cowboy hats. Nobody looked like they were dressed for the same event, but here they all were, on the roof of the Watergate Hotel in Washington to celebrate the Fourth of July. About one mile away, after baking in the blistering heat, people were temporarily evacuated Saturday evening from the National Mall due to inclement weather. Some sheltered in Metro stations, others in government buildings. On the...

A progressive protest group has been flying an 8647 flag on federal land near the National Mall, aimed squarely at the President of the United States. The National Park Service called it a true threat and moved to shut it down. An Obama-appointed federal judge just told the government to leave it alone. On June 29, 2026, U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss, appointed by Barack Obama, granted summary judgment to Accountability NOW USA and entered a permanent injunction against the Park Service and Interior officials. The order blocks the government from revoking the group’s demonstration permit or seizing and...

In a divided America, JD Vance sees Christianity as a unifying force. His new memoir, “Communion,” blames secularism for social strife and proposes faith as the solution. The book is not just a conversion narrative; it is an argument that a more Christian America would also be a more peaceful and tolerant one. “I do think in a very foundational sense the country is a Christian nation,” Vance tells me in an interview. Religious decline hasn’t removed social divisions, he says, but instead has deepened them: “I see antisemitism spreading ... You’re seeing an elevation of anti-Christian bias. You’re seeing...

A Delta Air Lines plane carrying 52 passengers and six crew members was hit by fireworks as it prepared to land at a Chicago airport on Saturday night. The flight from Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Airport to Midway International Airport "reportedly made contact with a firework while on descent," a spokesperson for the airline told the BBC. "The flight safely landed and taxied to the gate," they added. There were no injuries and the incident was reported to aviation authorities. The aircraft was struck as millions across the United States celebrated the nation's 250th anniversary with fireworks - part of the annual...

UFC President Dana White could not overlook the break in the weather that allowed UFC Freedom 250 at the White House to proceed as planned. That Sunday, June 14, was uncertain as forecasts did not look promising. This was an outdoor event where fighters could step onto a canvas that, if wet from rain, may have proven hazardous. Moreover, if lightning struck near the event, it could have caused a 30-minute delay, with every subsequent strike furthering the time before resuming the action. This would have been a disaster not only for White, but for President Donald Trump, much to...

Explanation: What has happened to Saturn's moon Iapetus? Vast sections of this strange world are dark as coal, while others are as bright as snow. To help better understand this unusually tinted moon, in 2007 NASA directed the robotic Cassini spacecraft then orbiting Saturn to swoop within 2,000 kilometers. Pictured here, from about 75,000 kilometers out, is the hemisphere of Iapetus that is always trailing. A large impact crater seen in the south spans 500 kilometers and appears superposed on an older crater of similar size. The dark material is seen increasingly coating the easternmost part of Iapetus, darkening craters...

A 21-year-old socialist and unpaid former NYC Council intern who claimed she was axed after demanding she and her peers get paid $32 an hour with full health benefits — and plans to sue the Council — was born into wealth. Mina Farahmand — who willingly interned for free last year to help get fellow silver-spoon socialist Zohran Mamdani elected mayor – is the daughter of a prominent surgeon and grew up in a palatial six-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bathroom home on 30 acres in Colville, Wash. Her father, Mehrdad Farahmand, is a general-surgery specialist at Providence, the largest health care provider in...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 10,000 people over a five-day period at the end of June, marking a major push by the agency tasked with carrying out the Trump administration's mass deportations agenda. The arrest numbers, obtained from a person familiar with the information who spoke anonymously to discuss data that has not been publicly released, come after the agency shifted its approach from high-profile arrest sweeps in major American cities to quieter ways to reach President Donald Trump's deportation goals. The figures indicate that while the administration is no longer cracking down on individual cities, the arrests continue...

U.S. policy used to jam up GPS. Now, those signals beam into your pocket.Shortly after the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000, a new type of Silicon Valley start-up began to crop up: companies specializing in GPS chips. At the time, GPS — the Global Positioning System, a constellation of satellites that provide location and time to receivers on Earth, courtesy of the American taxpayer — was still relatively niche for everyday people. This small handful of companies was founded on the basis of two gambles. One was that, like any other chip, GPS chips — at the time,...

A scathing report released on the Fourth of July says the National Museum of American History downplays the role of the founders while emphasizing social justice.In a broadside posted to its website just as Fourth of July fireworks were lighting up skies around the country on Saturday, the White House faulted the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for what it said was a failure to properly celebrate the nation’s heritage, arguing that it had become a tool of political activism intent on denigrating the American story.The 162-page report, by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, represents a sweeping attack...

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s slain supreme leader, had seemed immovable for decades, a man whose authority had become so deeply woven into Iran’s political and religious life that imagining the country without him felt almost impossible. Now Tehran — the capital from which he ruled, where he was killed and which had shaped his life — is the center of his final journey, filled with mourners for funeral ceremonies taking place across several days, which are part farewell, part spectacle and part turning point. In the days leading up to the first public mourning, the city changed. First gradually, and...

U.S. — The Transportation Security Administration announced on Thursday that it had officially placed the entire Democratic Party on the No Fly List. After several Democratic Party members declared that America deserved the 9/11 attacks and Western civilization should be eradicated, TSA leaders stated that they were left with no choice but to add the entire party to the list. "These people are clearly too violent and unstable to be allowed on commercial jetliners," said TSA official Matthew Kingsley. "At the TSA, we believe that crashing planes into skyscrapers to murder thousands of innocent people is bad. While Democrats' supporters...

Former Dem political darling Calla Walsh attended attended the funeral for slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday, declaring that he was the “greatest anti-imperialist leader” in a propaganda video while covering up in a hijab and traditional garb. Walsh, 22, who has been previously arrested for antisemitic vandalism in the US, spoke with Iran’s PressTV to talk about her attendance at Khamenei’s funeral over the weekend, where she hailed him as a heroic figure standing up to America and Israel. “He was a leader to all people of the world who struggle against imperialism, arrogance, against Zionism, against genocide,”...

President Trump has tried to scale back anti-discrimination regulations that date back decades. Federal agencies have heeded his call.When Kenni Miller started as a shift manager in his local Sheetz convenience store in Altoona, Pa., he felt something that he rarely had as a Black man in the workplace.He felt trusted. He felt appreciated. When he was fired a few weeks later, in the summer of 2020 after a background check, Mr. Miller, then 27, was devastated. A nonviolent, felony drug conviction from his teenage years had never caused him to be denied a job before. And he already proved...