Free Republic

A 21-year-old college hockey captain who dreamed of becoming a police officer was killed in a wrong-way crash involving a Mexican national who repeatedly entered the United States illegally after previously being removed, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed to Fox News Digital. Ryan O'Shea, a senior at the University of New Haven, was driving south on Interstate 91 in North Haven late Oct. 16 when a Chevrolet Silverado traveling the wrong way slammed head-on into his Honda Accord, Connecticut State Police said. According to the State Police accident summary, 31-year-old Guillermo Carmona-Lopez of Bridgeport was driving the Silverado. The...

A liberal-majority appeals court in California handed the Trump administration a victory by blocking a lower court's ruling that ordered the State Department to open its application pool for the 2027 Diversity Visa lottery, which admits roughly 55,000 immigrants from low-immigration countries each year. In a 2-1 ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta requiring the lottery pool to be opened after Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a notice in November delaying the program's acceptance of new applications in order to "implement certain changes," but the application period...

The Senate’s No. 2 Republican believes that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had a hand in the alleged scheme unfolding in the Alaska Senate race. Operatives for Rep. Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign, along with top aides in Senate Democrats’ campaign apparatus, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), are alleged to have been involved in creating one of the stranger races this election cycle: finding and recruiting another candidate named Dan Sullivan to run against the incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, R-Alaska, according to reporting from The New York Times. National Democrats have maintained they had no hand in the...

Coup d'état underway in Poland after EU-aligned Prime Minister Donald Tusk sent police forces to the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw right after President Nawrocki left for Senegal for a diplomatic visit. Nawrocki is currently headed back to Poland. The President of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw, Bogdan Swieczkowski, was suspended and possibly arrested. He is a known support of President Nawrocki. Several right-wing Polish MPs and their supports are reportedly on their way to the Constitutional Tribunal to defend the institution from being taken over by Donald Tusk. Warsaw's police forces are preventing the President of the Constitutional Tribunal...

Got a few million dollars? You could own Gov. Mikie Sherrill longtime home in Montclair now that she’s living in New Jersey’s official governor’s mansion. Sherrill and her husband, First Gentleman Jason Hedberg, are selling the house they’ve lived in for the last 16 years. They recently placed the six-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath Victorian — built in 1865 — on the market. Sherrill and Hedberg bought it for about $1.7 million in 2010, according to state property records. This comes about two months after Sherrill and her family moved full time to Drumthwacket, the Garden State governor’s mansion in Princeton, in...

Explanation: Spooky shapes seem to haunt this dusty expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood, they lurk above the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. Over 2 light-years across and brighter than most of the other ghostly apparitions, vdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula. It lies at lower right in the starry field of view. Inside the Ghost Nebula are reddish...

Eight people have been indicted for conspiring to steal more than $7 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (“SNAP”) between April 2023 and September 2025. The alleged fraud impacted thousands of victims, many of whom never received reimbursement for the stolen benefits. Belal Hauter, 34, allegedly led the conspiracy by opening or directing coconspirators to open numerous merchant processing accounts in the names of various delis, bodegas, or grocery stores, including a deli where multiple defendants worked. The co-conspirators also opened numerous bank accounts to connect to those processing accounts, so EBT transactions went directly to accounts under their...

Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin will apparently talk to anyone about the Democrats’ lawfare plans if they capture the majority in the House or Senate next week; all you have to do is ask. Slotkin, while campaigning Thursday for congressional candidate Sean McCann, dished on what she has up her sleeve, according to an undercover video obtained exclusively by Townhall. “I’m worried that we’re going to be too nice,” the person said to Slotkin in the video, triggering a smirk from the senator. “What are we going to do to hold the Trump regime and its collaborators responsible? I’m talking prosecutions,”...

An email address that James Talarico’s attorneys confirmed belonged to and was at one time used by the Texas Democratic U.S. Senate candidate appears in a database search result associated with the adult dating website Fling.com’s 2011 data breach. A Fling.com account was created with Talarico’s email address just before Talarico began teaching sixth graders.The result lists the username “mohawk787” and an account creation timestamp of December 26, 2010, at 20:56:49. The profile’s interests field lists “FETISH,” “GROUPSEX,” “SEXUAL RELATIONS,” “ONLINE FLIRTING,” and “OTHER.”Townhall shared the information described in this article with the Talarico campaign and requested comment Friday morning,...

“Ukraine struck the Novokuybyshevsk Oil Refinery in Russia’s Samara region on Friday, ending a two-week pause in attacks on Russian oil-processing facilities. The Ukrainian drone attack triggered a major fire at the refinery. Thick columns of dark grey smoke were seen rising high into the sky. A 16-second dashcam video, recorded from a moving vehicle on a nearby road, captured the smoke and fire. According to The Wall Street Journal report, the pause in Ukrainian strikes reportedly followed pressure from the Trump administration. This came after Washington was concerned about rising global fuel prices ahead of the US midterm elections...

Democrats promise to lower costs, but journalists rarely ask them to explain their policies—or account for the soaring prices under Biden. Two things are missing from almost every media report attacking President Trump over affordability: acknowledgment that Democrats supported Biden’s policies during the inflation surge, which left Americans paying substantially higher prices, and any serious examination of which Democrat policies would actually make life more affordable. If Democrats regain power, their policies could make things worse. According to a recent article, House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries promises to lower grocery, gasoline, housing, and health care costs. “We are explicitly promising...

The Post is publishing results of its Kansas Senate poll in the interest of transparency and to highlight the challenges the poll faced. The Washington Post and George Mason University began contacting voters last week in one of the country’s most competitive but least-polled Senate contests: the race in Kansas between Republican Sen. Roger Marshall and megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton, who is trying to become the first Democratic senator from the state since the Great Depression.

A woman driven by a compulsion to harm children admitted in a Pittsburgh court that she murdered her best friend’s infant son in a plea agreement that is likely to keep her in prison for life. Nicole Virzi, 32, had been charged with capital murder with the possibility of the death penalty before she opted to plead guilty Wednesday to third-degree murder and other charges. She was sentenced to 35 to 80 years behind bars. “Although this office was committed to pursuing this case to trial and its ultimate conclusion, after continued and on-going consultation with the family and considering...

An escape artist pulled off a thrilling stunt high above Hollywood’s famed Magic Castle to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Harry Houdini’s death on Halloween. Performer Houdini II successfully escaped a straitjacket while suspended upside-down from a crane about 80 feet high next to the castle. The escape artist took just under 2 minutes free himself, saying the straitjacket was an “exact replica” of the one actor Tony Curtis wore in the 1953 film “Houdini.” He completed the escape without an airbag or protective landing system beneath him. Houdini has performed stunts like jumping from Miami’s MacArthur Bridge into Biscayne...

Judge Ada Brown of the Northern District of Texas has been suspended pending psychiatric testing and the resolution of a bar complaint after a bizarre hearing in April 2026. In the hearing, Brown, a Trump appointee, went on a racial diatribe against a lawyer, Ezra Young, over his race. Young was accused of being White. When Young informed her that he is Hispanic, Judge Brown went on to say that he is “white-presenting” in continuing her racial browbeating. Judge Brown was also accused of abandoning her work, but the hearing has caused the most chatter among lawyers. Young filed a...

The endless cries of creeping fascism from the Left have become exhausting, particularly when progressives keep reminding us that their problem isn't authoritarianism itself, but who gets to wield the authority. The most recent example? Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor under Bill Clinton - a man who routinely warns about fascism - advocating for the government to seize control of private companies. Reich wants a Democrat-controlled government to cut off Elon Musk's government contracts and prepare to nationalize SpaceX and Starlink if they regain power. In the spirit of Marx himself, Reich wants the state to take ownership...

FORT BRAGG, N.C. (WBTV) - A former North Carolina military contractor was arrested this week for leaking classified defense secrets and stealing Army night vision goggles, federal prosecutors said. FBI agents arrested 37-year-old James Ashbacher, a former U.S. government contractor, on Tuesday, Oct. 27, in North Carolina. Ashbacher, who held a top-security clearance, was accused of leaking national defense information on a “popular social media site,” unlawfully keeping national defense information at his home and stealing night vision goggles from the U.S. Army. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Ashbacher began working around 2021 for an unidentified private company...

A prominent Minnesota Democrat who served in the state's House of Representatives revealed on Thursday he believes the federal probe into Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., has legitimacy. It's the latest signal that the political dam may be breaking as scandals and investigations into the congresswoman continue to pile up. "Democrats should understand that the allegation is almost certainly true—whatever conclusion they draw from that point could vary—and her denials calling it a right-wing, Islamophobic or racist conspiracy are almost certainly not," Joe Radinovich posted on X in reference to the claims that Omar married her brother as part of an...

POLK COUNTY, Fla. (CBS12) — A weeklong undercover operation called “Polk Around & Find Out II” led to 281 arrests in Polk County, including 17 people who worked at theme parks, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier’s office said Friday. The operation targeted child predators and human trafficking and resulted in 488 new charges, including 198 felonies. The Polk County Sheriff’s Office ran two stings at the same time: one targeting adults seeking sex with children and another focused on human trafficking. Sheriff Grady Judd called it the largest undercover operation his office has conducted. At the news conference, Judd said...

There is something in the watercooler at The Washington Post. Well, more specifically, in whatever water WaPo's editorial board is drinking. For the most part, the Post remains a hotbed of Trump Derangement Syndrome-induced hysteria. Typically, the wildfire of irresponsible propaganda "journalism" is lit by editorial directives. For example, The New York Times editorial board is comprised of pathological liars, and that creates the standards-free environment that permeates the organization. WaPo's editorial board has been getting some things right lately, which is one of the most interesting things I've seen in 20+ years of writing about media bias. The way...