Free Republic

The problem: Thugs were murdering cabbies in New York City. The solution: Get cops to drive cabs and catch the thugs...and I was the cop. It was around the early 1970s, and New York City was experiencing a wave of robbery-homicides of taxi drivers. A team of three black males was killing cab drivers after forcing them to drive to Harlem neighborhoods and taking their cash. Since I was a member of a plainclothes undercover unit, I was assigned to drive a cab during the evening hours in Manhattan. Anyone who has driven in that hustling, bustling borough knows that...

The European Parliament has approved an urgent procedure to fast-track legislation that would revive the EU's expired “Chat Control 1.0” rules. This development sets up a decisive vote on July 9 over whether online platforms may once again be allowed to voluntarily scan private user communications for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). MEPs voted 331 in favor and 304 against using the urgency procedure, allowing Parliament to bypass the usual committee stage. The procedural vote does not itself reinstate the law but accelerates consideration of a proposal that would effectively restore the temporary legal framework that expired in April.

Jasmine Crockett, the race-hustling Congresswoman who lost her Texas Senate bid to Democrat James Talarico, revealed the real reason she lost the race during a black culture festival over the weekend. At a panel discussion during the Essence Festival in New Orleans on the Fourth of July, Crockett appeared alongside Rep. LaMonica McIver (NJ-10) and Louisiana State Senator Royce Duplessis. At one point, Crockett went off on her own party and "racist" Republicans for ignoring black people, saying, "I believe that we need to make demands." "It is not enough just to be that you're not the racist Republican but...

Two American allies, Germany and Japan, already have permission to build the American interceptors, a license that President Trump says he will also grant to Kyiv. In 2022, as fears mounted over Europe’s missile defense capabilities against Russian strikes, the Biden administration granted permission for Germany to build a factory to manufacture state-of-the-art Patriot air defense interceptors. That factory has yet to produce a single Patriot — a sign of the time it can take and how difficult it can be to ramp up production of American weapons abroad, even after winning approval from the United States government to do...

Emily Jashinsky is joined by Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming book, “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement,” to discuss the controversy surrounding Christopher Nolan's upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, focusing on comments by Lupita Nyong'o about telling the story from a female perspective and broader debates over casting and representation.

A completely avoidable tragedy has struck in Ireland as a result of its open-borders immigration policies, as a liberal American citizen living in the nation has been brutally murdered. As The Irish Times reported, 43-year-old Jamey Carney was found deceased in her rented home in Killarney on Tuesday at around 1:20 pm local time by a family member. Carney lived at the residence with her 13-year-old daughter. The murder was absolutely horrible. The Irish Mirror reported that Carney not only suffered serious head injuries in a brutal attack but had been hidden by a duvet being placed over her. Carney...

Advocates of generating electricity mostly with intermittent wind and sun, when challenged on how they would deal with a calm night, are always ready with the obvious answer: energy storage. Just get some batteries, store up excess power from the windy mid-days, discharge as needed, and everything will work out. Unfortunately, the advocates never acknowledge that the problem of making an electrical grid work 24/7/365 with mostly wind and solar generation is much more difficult than just storing power from the day to discharge that night. Both wind and sun are subject to regular “droughts,” just like rain. There can...

🇺🇸Pray For The Peace of Jerusalem🇮🇱 (7/9/26)[Prayer]Personalities1 Samuel 8: 8 And it came to pass, when Samuel was old, that he made his sons judges over Israel. 2 Now the name of his firstborn was Joel; and the name of his second, Abiah: they were judges in Beersheba. 3 And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment. 4 Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, 5 And said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy...

Prosecutor General's Office hasn't established Ukraine's involvement in the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, prosecutors said on July 9, adding that the investigation and evidence collection are still underway. The statement comes a week after Germany's federal prosecutor filed charges against a Ukrainian national suspected of sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022. The suspect is Serhii Kuznietsov, Ukrainian veteran who was extradited to Germany in November 2025. Ukrainian law enforcement is investigating the case as part of criminal proceedings into Russia's war against Ukraine and other alleged offenses. Investigators are reviewing information...

An appeals court on Tuesday ruled that part of Florida’s law restricting how race and gender are taught in classrooms, specifically provisions restricting how those topics are taught in colleges, violates free speech rights. In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit determined part of the Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act, or Stop WOKE Act, signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in 2022 is unlawful. The law was designed to restrict public universities, K-12 schools and private workplaces from promoting certain concepts related to racism, gender and systemic privilege. This week’s...

The many donors out there to the Graham Platner Senate campaign who might be upset about the incredibly poor vetting that was performed on their candidate might be interested to know about evidence of malfeasance and corruption by one of the primary vetters that has just been revealed by an interesting source.And that source is someone familiar to longtime readers of NewsBusters. None other than Mike Elk (pictured) who earned the reputation as perhaps the most lethargic labor reporter in the world but definitely at Politico where he briefly worked about ten years ago.However, despite his reputation for lethargy, on...

Author Stephen King deleted a post on social media defending Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner (D), who is facing widespread backlash after his former girlfriend accused him of rape. King, a Maine resident, weighed in on a report from Politico published Monday that revealed the accusation from Jenny Racicot, Platner’s former girlfriend, who alleged Platner sexually assaulted her five years ago. King wrote in a post on the social media platform X, which was later deleted: “Graham Platner may drop out. (I hope he doesn’t, but.) Meanwhile, the Abuser in Chief just keeps on keepin’ on,” appearing to compare the...

A New York mother, who moved to Ireland with her teen daughter, was beaten to death inside her home as police launched a search for a “person of significant interest” whom she knew. Jamey Carney, a 43-year-old Westchester County native, was found covered under her bedsheets, suffering from multiple head wounds inside her rented home in the Irish town of Killarney on Tuesday... Blood stains were splattered around Carney’s room and the killer allegedly used a duvet to cover Carney’s wounded torso and face before fleeing... Results of the postmortem examination were not publicly released, but officials upgraded the case...

Mark Zuckerberg might think those Kylie Jenner-branded Meta smart glasses are cool, but you know what is really cool? Not having to pay California and three other states virtually the entire valuation of your company. The Social Network script paraphrasing aside, that’s the position Meta’s multi-firm attorneys are taking in the multi-plaintiff suit over litigation the Instagram parent company and other social media platforms are facing in federal court. “A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement,” Meta’s defense team(s) proclaimed in a deep-dive filing this week. Taking a massive bite outta Meta’s...

9 July 2026 Thursday of week 14 in Ordinary Time Church of St. Nicholas, BrusselsReadings at MassLiturgical Colour: Green. Year: A(II).First readingHosea 11:1-4,8-9I am the Holy One in your midst and have no wish to destroyThus says the Lord:When Israel was a child I loved him,and I called my son out of Egypt.But the more I called to them, the further they went from me;they have offered sacrifice to the Baalsand set their offerings smoking before the idols.I myself taught Ephraim to walk,I took them in my arms;yet they have not understood that I was the one looking after...

There is an eighty-five minute documentary that you should watch. It is called The Thread of Liberty: Keeping Our Republic. It comes from Ned Ryun, the author and American Majority CEO who wrote a very good book called American Leviathan two years ago, a work that was subsequently turned into an excellent documentary about our country’s oppressive administrative state. Ryun directed and produced this new film to celebrate America’s two-hundred-fiftieth birthday. While working on the project, he served on President Trump’s 1776 Commission. I really appreciate what Ryun accomplishes with his books and documentaries. In effect, he reminds Americans of...

Apart from eliminating some burdensome federal regulations previously enacted by these morons (repealing almost anything passed by any Congress ever, for any reason, is a good idea) the main outcome of the law will be to destroy neighborhoods, while unjustly enriching well-heeled landlords of decrepit apartment buildings. Specifically, the act expands Section 8 housing, a government program to move violent, gun-happy, drug-dealing welfare recipients from inner-city public housing units into previously safe neighborhoods. The theory is that if only criminals lived in nice middle-class areas, they’d get jobs and become productive members of society! Prevented by their own ideology from...

Fuhgeddaboudit! Mayor Zohran Mamdani caught some Italian heat Wednesday after releasing a map of the Big Apple’s ethnic enclaves that includes places like Little Palestine — but ignores historic Little Italy and other notable Irish and Jewish immigrant nabes. The map, titled “New York City Immigrant Enclaves,” highlights 30 areas across the five boroughs, ranging from Koreatown in Manhattan to Little Pakistan in Brooklyn and Little Yemen in The Bronx. But critics were quick to roast the socialist mayor for overlooking the city’s very own “original Little” — a nationally recognized historic district that brought you everything from meatballs to...

A seasonal railway conductor for Tennessee's Incline Railway at Lookout Mountain has been fired after making now-viral comments, wishing riders a happy Independence Day, which triggered some passengers. The conductor, identified as Jack Peterson, is clearly fed up with mass migration policies that are ruining our country. He hilariously told passengers on the Fourth of July, "To the very, very few Americans in here, happy Independence Day." He continued, "To the rest of you, welcome to the greatest country on the face of the planet, and if you disagree, you can leave." It is unclear how many foreigners were on...

How ludicrous is that? Firearms have been around for a thousand years in one form or another. There are over a billion of them in circulation around the world, around 85% of them in civilian hands, largely thanks to the U.S. (private American citizens own over half of all guns, at 533 million in 2025). The UK pretends that this technology doesn't exist and makes it illegal to own them, even if the blaster is a GIFT from another world leader to the PRIME MINISTER. Starmer, who apparently doesn't have an ounce of testosterone in his body, was reportedly baffled...