Free Republic

President George Washington took the very first oath of office as the nation’s Commander-in-Chief on April 27, 1789, and since then, America’s inaugural ceremonies have grown, evolved, and rolled with the punches. On Friday, President Donald Trump announced that his inaugural ceremony on January 20, 2025, would be moved indoors to the Capitol Rotunda, due to harsh Arctic weather and parallel concerns about the safety of all attending the celebration. He wrote, “The various Dignitaries and Guests will be brought into the Capitol. This will be a very beautiful experience for all, and especially for the large TV audience!” While...

The dwarf planet Ceres – long believed to be a barren space rock – is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface. Now a team of scientists from the United States and Europe have analysed images relayed from the orbiter, captured about 35km (22 miles) from the asteroid. They focused on the 20-million-year-old Occator crater and...

JERUSALEM — Muslim militants, evoking a jihadist pretext and backed by rogue states, are attacking vital Western interests. The president of the United States fails to convince Europe to join a coalition to confront the aggressors. No, this is not President Bush versus Saddam Hussein, but Thomas Jefferson versus the Barbary pirates of North Africa, who were plundering Western ships and enslaving their crews. When Jefferson proposed creating a multilateral force to stop the pirates, Europe went on bribing them. "This is money thrown away," Jefferson concluded, before ordering the Navy into action. On Aug. 1, 1801, the first American...