Free Republic

The governments of Japan and the United States agreed in 2012 to move more than 9,000 of the nearly 19,000 Marines stationed in Okinawa more than 2,200 miles east to Guam, a U.S. territory.2 This process—finally begun in 2024—amounts to a withdrawal of forces from territory the United States has pledged to defend, and a de facto retreat from the most pernicious threat: the People’s Republic of China.National defense strategies from multiple administrations and both major U.S. political parties agree: China is the greatest threat to the United States and its interests.3 Few issues generate as much robust bipartisan support...

Trump’s campaign of repression echoes the red scare. But now the government has bigger ambitions and more powerful tools There are many parallels between the first McCarthy era, roughly 1946 to 1956, and Trump’s campaign of political repression, his own updated McCarthyism. Both regimes crafted a monster of quasi-facts and innuendo and fed it with fear: an enemy within, well-organized and financed, secretive and violent, allied with evil foreigners and bent on overthrowing capitalism, democracy and Christian morality. Both used flagrantly unconstitutional means to cleanse the nation of the spectral menace. Each time, federal employees were targeted first. President Harry...

President Donald Trump appears to have a strategy: threaten irreparable damage to Iran's civilian infrastructure then hit pause and hope the other side decides to come to the table and revive negotiations. By ABC News' count, he's tried it no less than seven times. So far it hasn't worked. In what's becoming a familiar pattern, Trump wrote on his social media platform late Saturday night that at the request of Iran and other Middle Eastern countries he'd decided not to carry out his what White House officials said would be a devastating strike targeting Iran's energy infrastructure. But, he warned,...

McRae spoke to ‘Variety’ about her political beliefs after her collaboration with Morgan Wallen and rumored romance with Jack Hughes fueled speculationJack Irvin has worked at PEOPLE since 2022. He covers and edits daily music news, and he's interviewed both up-and-coming and established artists including Dolly Parton, Michelle Branch, Ashanti, Cyndi Lauper, Normani, Carly Rae Jepsen and Coco Jones. Tate McRae is addressing questions about her political beliefs. In a new Variety cover story interview, the Canadian pop star, 23, responded to claims she’s a MAGA supporter after her “What I Want” collaboration with Morgan Wallen and rumored romance with...

Federal and state officials are racing to address an assault on the nation’s water supply that they believe is the work of Iranian hackers.In 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration proposed creating stronger cybersecurity guidelines to better safeguard the nation’s water supply from hackers.The steps were modest, but necessary, officials said at the time: Many municipalities lacked even basic protections, and the computers that monitor and adjust water quality, including chemical-treatment levels, were easy-to-find targets for a would-be intruder.The E.P.A. rescinded the order, however, after Republican-led states and industry groups sued to block its enforcement. They argued...

Flock cameras are in thousands of communities across the country and often hide in plain sight. A Flock camera is an automated license plate reader, or ALPR, made by the public-safety technology company Flock Safety. The cameras are commonly installed along roads, at intersections, near neighborhood entrances, and around businesses or other private properties.

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told President Trump that his interior secretary, Doug Burgum, had misled him with a self-serving cover story for his own mistakes. ================================================================= Jeanine Pirro had had it up to here with Doug Burgum. The famously voluble U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia strode into the Oval Office late Monday with her future on the line and the interior secretary, whom she privately called an incompetent liar, in her cross hairs. A few hours earlier — in front of the cameras, from the Resolute Desk — President Trump had accused...

The White House on Wednesday released declassified information saying the FBI opened an investigation into whether President Trump was acting as an asset for Russia when he fired FBI Director James Comey, a theory an administration official said was not backed up by evidence. The official said the investigation, known as Oxferd Comma, was a subcomponent of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI probe into potential collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government — an investigation that has long drawn Mr. Trump's ire. The predicate of Oxferd Comma was the newly elected president's decision to fire Comey in 2017....

The endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, likely assisted far-left Democratic candidate William Lawrence in his Tuesday night primary win in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. The progressive will now face Republican incumbent Tom Barrett, R-Charlotte, in November’s general election. The activist community organizer from Lansing’s leftist credentials were burnished by campaign appearances last month with fellow progressives Abdul El-Sayed, who was in a tight race for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat against Rep. Haley Stevens, and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Lawrence, a member of the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated Democratic opponents Matt Maasdam, a...

Explanation: Don’t get spooked by Saturn’s ghostly spokes! Today we feature a nearly two-hour timelapse of Saturn and its rings looping forwards and backwards. A day on Saturn is only 10 hours long, so two hours of observation covers quite a bit of its rotation. If you look closely, a ghoulish shadow appears and disappears as Saturn’s B ring rotates. Decades of observation with Voyager 2, Cassini, and Hubble show the appearance of Saturn’s spokes varies with the planet’s seasons. Like Earth, Saturn’s spin axis is tilted compared to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. During Saturn’s equinox,...

MIKE ROGERS FOR U.S. SENATE ROGERS ON MICHIGAN DEMOCRAT NOMINEE FOR U.S. SENATE "The choice this November is simple: common sense or complete insanity. For more than 25 years, one party has controlled Michigan's two Senate seats — and they've run our state into the ground. They've driven 200,000 manufacturing jobs out of Michigan. They've dropped our schools to 45th in the nation. They've saddled families with the highest utility rates in the Midwest. Working people are paying more, earning less, and getting left behind. And now the same failed politicians are asking us to send Abdul El-Sayed to Washington....

"The conservatives on here denying the affordability crisis are engaged in what I can only describe as an act of political suicide. They're also lying, which is the worst part. Grocery prices are up. Housing. Energy. Insurance. Health care. Basic living expenses. It's real. It's happening. Denying it just makes you look out of touch, deceitful, and untrustworthy. It's also a completely unnecessary and unforced error. No credible person is claiming that Trump caused these price surges. You don't have to disgrace yourself by denying the reality in front of your face just to prove your loyalty to Trump. The...

A Florida man was arrested after authorities say he stalked a woman he met on a dating app and stole a teddy bear containing the woman’s son’s ashes. According to the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, deputies were dispatched on Aug. 1 to help Flagler Beach Police Department officers with an investigation into a suspect, identified as Justin Fountain, after a woman went to Flagler Beach police and said Fountain had “become increasingly controlling and aggressive.” “According to the victim, Fountain tracked her location, following her around Flagler County, and stole her child’s ashes from her despite her asking to stop...

Alyza Lewin, president of U.S. affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement, stated that El-Sayed’s victory “should raise alarm bells for Jewish Americans across the country and everyone who believes in civil rights for all.” Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, stated on Wednesday that Democrats had nominated El-Sayed. “Abdul El-Sayed is a direct threat to Michigan’s Jewish community,” Brooks said. “El-Sayed has called the government of the Jewish state as ‘evil’ as Hamas, ‘struggled’ to say that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state and empathized with a terrorist who tried to murder Jewish schoolchildren...

Photons traveling through a cloud of atoms can emerge so early that they appear to have spent a negative amount of time inside. Researchers tested whether this was merely a misleading feature of the light pulse by making extremely weak measurements of the atoms. Surprisingly, the atoms confirmed the same negative dwell time. The finding does not break standard physics, but it reveals that one of quantum mechanics’ strangest effects is physically measurable. ... Our experiment used photons – quantum particles of light – and the against-the-odds journey they must undertake to pass straight through a cloud of rubidium atoms....

A federal judge on Wednesday officially allowed the Trump administration to end temporary deportation protection for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, marking the final step, for now, in a months-long case that made its way to the Supreme Court. The announcement from US District Judge Ana Reyes comes more than a month after the high court reversed a ruling she made earlier this year that halted the government’s plans to end a program, known as Temporary Protected Status, for Haitians who fled the country in recent years amid political unrest and on the heels of natural disasters. “The court’s order,...

With America's support "double that of during the Kennedy era" for returning to the Moon, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said this week that we'll have a permanent lunar base within 20 years, and American astronauts living there full-time. But that might not be today's biggest news from the entrepreneur-turned-astronaut-turned-NASA-head. “If we do want to have that extraordinary future that many of us imagine, you have to have some sort of a space economy to fund it,” he said, adding that "We’re supposed to be doing what no other government agency, no company is capable of doing, no other nation around...

Churchill Downs Incorporated and The New York Racing Association Introduce a Six-Race Championship Series, Running Across Three Iconic Racing Venues and Crowning One Champion CDI and NYRA Leaders to be Available for Joint News Conference Monday at 4 p.m. ET LOUISVILLE, Ky. (August 3, 2026) – Churchill Downs Incorporated (“CDI”) (Nasdaq: CHDN) and The New York Racing Association, Inc. (“NYRA”) announced today the creation of the “Thoroughbred Championship Series.” The new six-race competition will begin in 2027 and establish an annual season-long championship for America’s leading three-year-old Thoroughbreds. The country’s most iconic racing venues – Churchill Downs Racetrack, Belmont Park...

LOS ANGELES – A Downey man arrested over the weekend at Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles while possessing ammunition on his person and a loaded firearm in his pickup truck was charged today in a federal criminal complaint with a firearm offense. Jeanine John Taele, 38, is charged with possession of an unregistered short-barreled rifle, a felony that carries a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison. Taele, who also faces criminal charges in Los Angeles Superior Court stemming from the same incident, is expected to make his initial appearance tomorrow in United States District Court in...

A US military GPS-jamming exercise has been linked to a medevac plane crash that killed four people in the mountains of New Mexico. The twin-engine Beechcraft King Air was flying from Roswell to Ruidoso in early May to collect a patient when its pilots suddenly lost access to their modern navigation systems. It was a clear, nearly moonless night, leaving the crew with few visual references as they flew over the dark and sparsely populated landscape. But about 100 miles away, military personnel were testing technology designed to disrupt GPS signals during an electronic warfare event at White Sands Missile...