Free Republic

Aug 1 (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury bought yen on Friday to support the battered Japanese currency, the Financial Times reported, marking Washington’s first yen-buying intervention with Tokyo in more than a decade as it languishes near 40-year lows. The Federal Reserve ​Bank of New York sold euros for yen on behalf of the Treasury through Goldman ‌Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the FT said, citing people familiar with the matter. The report did not indicate any amounts of yen purchased.... Earlier on Friday, the Treasury informed a number of banks that it might intervene in the yen market and that...

A day after Google unveiled a new feature that allowed users to create AI-generated satellite images with the click of a button on its Google Earth platform, the company announced it was removing the tool. "We've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes," Google said in a statement on X. "However we've also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails." In its initial announcement of the new feature on Thursday, the company said...

President Trump may have found the cleanest answer yet to the Senate Republicans trying to hold up Todd Blanche. Keep Blanche exactly where he is. Blanche is not some random White House aide temporarily dropped into the top job. He is the Senate-confirmed Deputy Attorney General, and federal law puts him first in line when the Attorney General’s office is vacant. The legal point behind President Trump’s hardball option is laid out in this clip: This is where the obstruction campaign runs into the actual statute. The official U.S. Code says that when the Attorney General’s office is vacant, the...

On Thursday, shocking footage spread online of droves of primarily young male Moroccans storming Ceuta, a small Spanish territory on the North African coast. Thousands of them swam around breakwaters and climbed fences to enter the tiny enclave. An estimated 60,000 people are believed to have arrived in Ceuta—where the permanent population is 84,000—in 24 hours. Eighteen immigrants have died during the crossings. Meanwhile, local bars and shops are closed for fear of looting. The chaos has caused the leader of Ceuta to appeal to Madrid to send in the army. The Spanish government has done so, but it should...

US embassies in Jerusalem and other Middle Eastern capitals call on citizens in the Middle East to avoid travel to the Middle East and be ready to depart due to the “potential for unforeseen escalation” in the conflict with Iran. “Due to heightened tensions in the Middle East, the security environment remains complex with the potential for unforeseen escalation,” embassies from Cairo eastward say in identical messages published on their respective websites. “The Iranian regime is unpredictable, as seen by its recent decisions to attack areas in the region without warning or provocations as well as to expand attacks to...

Amazon said this week that it received hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds from President Trump’s tariffs and pledged to return some of the profits to its customers. This follows a Supreme Court decision earlier this year that many of the Trump administration’s tariffs were illegal, prompting the U.S. government to start a process to refund billions of dollars in import taxes to affected companies. Brian Olsavsky, the chief financial officer of Amazon.com, Inc., said during a Thursday earnings call that the company is “participating in the tariff refund process” and received an amount of $600 million in its...

Key Points * Former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI hedge fund, Situational Awareness, collapsed from $45 billion to around $10 billion in assets on falling semiconductor stocks and mounting margin calls. * Driven by reported leverage of up to 400%, the 20-something manager was forced to sell off all his leveraged public stock bets — including hard-hit names like SK Hynix and CoreWeave — to Ken Griffin’s Citadel at a discount. * The crash marks a dramatic turn for Aschenbrenner, who launched the fund after gaining Silicon Valley fame with his 2024 AI manifesto, drawing scrutiny from critics over his...

A Middlesex County police department used an officer disguised as a shrub to crack down on distracted driving Wednesday, issuing 74 citations. The Dunellen Police Department conducted a distracted driving enforcement operation on the 100 block of North Washington Avenue, an area with heavy vehicle and pedestrian traffic, according to a Facebook post. The goal was to enforce New Jersey’s handheld cellphone law and increase safety in the community. Police issued the 74 citations during a six-hour span. “Our ‘shrub’ was busy,” the department said in the post.

This monster shark’s going totally nuclear on New York’s coastline! A massive, nearly 12-foot man-eater has been wreaking havoc on large marine animals in the waters off Long Island — sparking a hunt for the predator and a wild theory that she mutated from a nuclear waste leak. The giant mako shark — dubbed “Sharkzilla” by experts — reportedly sunk her teeth into a humpback whale near Montauk, leaving it with a 2-foot bite mark.

he times, they are a-changin’. Rapidly. And not in a good way. Two separate — and growing -- psychoses are converging in a perfect highly imperfect storm of authoritarianism to existentially threaten the land of the formerly free and brave. To wit: In 2000, only 28% of Democrats identified as “liberal.” Today, that figure has nearly doubled. The number who claim to be very liberal has also risen dramatically. In fact, a recent survey shows that 1 in 3 Democrats now proudly consider themselves to be Democratic-Socialists. The party has been fundamentally transformed — and quickly. DSA candidates are now...

MADISON, Wis. — The encampment at the site where a Madison police officer shot and killed a man could cost the city “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway told News 3 Now on Friday. The encampment at the intersection of Williamson and Baldwin streets was erected late last week in response to the killing of Corey Ruiz. Police said Ruiz was seen “checking vehicles” before his encounter with police and used a knife to injure one of the officers detaining him before the shooting. The City of Madison has provided some resources to keep the protest area safe,...

A doctor working as a DoorDash driver to support his wife’s medical career was shot in the back of the head after being sent to a Philadelphia address where residents told police they had not ordered food. Md Mahfuzul Haque, 43, was making a delivery in the city’s Kingsessing neighborhood on July 7 when he was killed in what police described as a targeted attack involving three masked suspects. Zakah Johnson, 15, has been charged as an adult with murder, robbery, conspiracy and firearms offenses over Haque’s death.

🇺🇸Pray For The Peace of Jerusalem🇮🇱 (8/1/26)[Prayer]Personalities1 Samuel 26:1-25 David Again Spares Saul’s Life 26 The Ziphites went to Saul at Gibeah and said, “Is not David hiding on the hill of Hakilah, which faces Jeshimon?” 2 So Saul went down to the Desert of Ziph, with his three thousand select Israelite troops, to search there for David. 3 Saul made his camp beside the road on the hill of Hakilah facing Jeshimon, but David stayed in the wilderness. When he saw that Saul had followed him there, 4 he sent out scouts and learned that Saul had definitely arrived....

We must decide, and soon, if a “religion” that preaches slavery and mass slaughter of those who refuse to convert is compatible with American religious liberty. In Terminello v. City of Chicago (1949), Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert Jackson wrote: "The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."It has also been said that some Muslims don’t want to kill infidels....

The MONTHLY Victory Garden Thread is a gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. If you have specific question about a plant/problem you are having, please remember to state the Growing Zone where you are located. This thread is a non-political respite. No matter what, you won’t be flamed, and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack...

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — A News10NBC investigation has uncovered payroll problems at a local tool and die shop, where some workers say they haven’t been paid in four weeks. Accurate Tools, located on Lyell Avenue, makes precision metal parts and components and employs about a dozen people. News10NBC reporter Brett Davidsen spoke with employees and the owner about the ongoing pay issues. “We work everyday, but we don’t get paid,” Bill Riesenberger said. “It started out as a day or two late, and then a week late, now it’s been up to 4 weeks late and there’s no end in sight.”...

Seeing Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral seemed fitting: Z-Man’s money-laundering operation in Kyiv was the proximate cause of Graham’s death. Had the senator not been working so hard to add to the butcher’s bill in Europe, he would still be alive today. Surely there is a lesson here for some people to see. I know there are plenty of pro-Ukraine cheerleaders who just cannot stomach any criticism of an ongoing military conflict that has now lasted longer than WWII. However, I have never seen this as anything other than a civil war that British, European, and...

Trump administration bank regulators moved Friday to close what one nonprofit consulting firm has advertised as the “CRA Goldmine,” curbing the ability of left-wing advocacy groups to use an anti-redlining law to pressure banks for donations. Community organizations can challenge a bank’s record under the Community Reinvestment Act when it seeks approval for a merger, acquisition or new branch. The prospect of a poor CRA grade, which can delay or derail those plans, has given activist groups leverage to press banks for grants and other financial commitments. Bridge Philanthropic Consulting, which advises nonprofit organizations on fundraising, has promoted the system...

A vast network of these large NGOs operates as a de facto branch of the government, deliberately designed to bypass the constitutional limits of a democratic republic.This setup creates a highly effective, insulated loop that shifts power away from voters through several distinct mechanisms: 1. Laundering Taxpayer Cash The financial plumbing of these organizations reveals their true nature. Congress regularly appropriates billions of dollars to federal agencies (like the EPA, USAID, or the Department of Energy). Those agencies do not spend all that money internally; instead, they distribute it via multi-million-dollar "grants" to friendly NGOs.The NGO takes the taxpayer money...

The arrest and detainment of a Johns Hopkins researcher is one of the latest examples of increased immigration enforcement at airports. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Fatima Ameaka at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport this week as she was boarding a plane to Florida. ... For the past two years, Ameaka has been working to improve how communities respond to infectious disease crises, such as measles outbreaks. She's a senior analyst at the Center for Outbreak Response Innovation, which operates out of Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. ... In a statement from the U.S. Department of...