Free Republic

... When the House of Lords approves the election bill today then we will be on course for a 12 December winter election. It is set to be one of the most unpredictable and epic elections of modern times. Unpredictable, because Brexit totally overshadows it, but also because Brexit has totally reshaped our politics, too. The main parties can no longer rely on the traditional class party residual loyalty. Instead, we have an emerging sort of identity culture politics which has changed the game entirely. And epic in the sense that the sort of promises the two main parties are...

Book includes how Steele was commissioned to write dossier Robert Reich: Trump is an international mobster The former journalists Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch are to publish a book on Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia, including an account of how they commissioned the British ex-spy Christopher Steele to write his dossier on the future president. Crime in Progress: The Secret History of the Trump-Russia Investigation will be published in December by Penguin Random House in the US and UK. Simpson and Fritsch founded the Washington intelligence firm Fusion GPS. In summer 2015, it began investigating Trump and Moscow. It hired...

Republicans and Democrats clashed during a rare congressional hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as the reauthorization deadline for key surveillance powers looms. The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday focused on a number of powers granted to the Justice Department, the FBI, and the National Security Agency under the USA Freedom Act in 2015 that are set to expire in December, hearing from witnesses from the DOJ, the FBI, and the NSA. Republicans and Democrats generally seemed in agreement about the importance of empowering the agencies to monitor lone wolf terrorists and to conduct roving wiretaps on potential terrorists...

A comet first spotted by a Ukrainian amateur astronomer looks to be just the second known object to visit our cosmic neighborhood from beyond the solar system. What could be an even bigger deal is that this one was discovered as it's still approaching us. The comet was found by Gennady Borisov of Crimea on Aug. 30, and went by the temporary name GB00234 until very recently. After being watched by several other observatories over the past few weeks, it was given the official name of C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) by the Minor Planet Center on Wednesday. It appeared to follow...