Free Republic

The Daniel Carter Beard Bridge and both sides of Interstate 471 over the Ohio River between downtown Cincinnati and Newport remain shut down Friday after a massive fire damaged the bridge. State inspectors are examining the bridge right now and hope to open the northbound side of the bridge as soon as it’s safe, said Matt Bruning, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Transporation. There is no timeline yet when the bridge might fully reopen but the southbound side along I-471 could be closed for “weeks,” he said. Cincinnati Fire Chief Frank McKinley said the cause of the fire and...

Deep state whistleblower Edward Snowden may be getting a new lease on life. The famous fugitive, who has been living in Russia since 2013 after leaking classified National Security Agency documents showing the US was engaged in a massive surveillance program, has been a cause célèbre among left-wing and free speech activists, but has received a chillier reception from Republicans. But Snowden has some powerful allies in President-elect Trump’s cabinet, insiders told The Post. Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, co-sponsored a resolution in September 2020 calling on the United States to drop all charges against...

Aleida Guevara, daughter of communist mass murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara, recently claimed that she would like to go to Lebanon and fight against Israel alongside the Shiite jihadist terrorist group Hezbollah. Guevara, a 64-year-old Cuban physician, made the assertions in remarks given to the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese outlet Al Mayadeen during her attendance at an “anti-fascist” far-left event organized last week by Venezuela’s socialist regime in Caracas.

President Joe Biden pressed Chinese President Xi Jinping during a private meeting Saturday on the People’s Republic of China’s unfair trade policies after President-elect Donald Trump made ceasing the country’s trade practices a key part of his winning platform. The outgoing Biden, 81, emphasized how federal officials will take necessary actions to intercept any use of advanced technology that undermines national security of the United States or its allies, the White House said in a statement. Biden met with Xi at the Chinese leader’s hotel for the third and final time of his presidency toward the end of an Asia-Pacific...

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the radical leftist President of Brazil currently hosting the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, will tell attendees Monday the time has come for a global taxation impost on ultra wealthy individuals. At a July meeting of G20 finance ministers in Rio, the world’s wealthiest nations agreed to start a “dialogue on fair and progressive taxation, including of ultra-high-net-worth individuals,” despite fierce resistance from the United States and Germany. Now Lula says the time has come for action as he hopes to move the wealth tax plan forward as the money raised from billionaires will...

The United States has formally recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez as the country’s president-elect following the disputed July 28 presidential election, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Tuesday on X. “The Venezuelan people spoke resoundingly on July 28 and made Edmundo Gonzalez the president-elect. Democracy demands respect for the will of the voters,” the top US diplomat posted while participating in the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro. The announcement marks a significant change in US policy towards Venezuela: up until now, the US and other countries said Gonzalez had won more votes than incumbent leader Nicolas Maduro in...

There are always four phases to the Left's argument against an issue: 1. That thing isn't happening; it's a Right-wing conspiracy. 2. Okay, that thing is happening, but it's not happening much. 3. Yeah, that thing's happening and it's a good thing. 4. It's happening, it's a good thing, and we're not gonna let you stop us. Bigots. This story is somewhere between Steps 2 and 3. ne of the women accused of stealing and fraudulently casting more than a dozen ballots ahead of last November’s election pleaded guilty Monday. Vicki Stuart, 64, was charged with 34 counts related to...

The security camera in the elevator OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji used to go to his apartment for the last time was unplugged, his family claim. The tech prodigy, 26, was found dead on November 26 only a month after revealing the company’s dubious methods of training ChatGPT. Balaji was found next to his bathroom door with a gunshot wound to the head and blood all over part of his apartment in San Francisco’s Mint Hill neighborhood. His parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, insist he couldn’t have killed himself, and have shared security camera video of the last time he...

A Russian satellite believed to be part of Moscow’s nuclear anti-satellite weapon program appears to be malfunctioning, with erratic movements suggesting it may no longer be operational. The development could be a major blow to Russia’s military space ambitions, US analysts said. Cosmos 2553 was launched just weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Over the past year, it has shown signs of uncontrolled tumbling, according to radar data from LeoLabs and optical tracking shared by Slingshot Aerospace with Reuters. The satellite is believed to serve as both a radar tool for intelligence gathering and a platform for radiation testing....

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized approximately 11,000 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition being smuggled into the United States from Mexico. CBP officers assigned to the El Paso port of entry on November 5 encountered a 2011 Honda Ridgeline arriving from Mexico. The officer directed the driver, a Mexican national, to a secondary inspection station after a “Low Energy Portal Scan” revealed possible anomalies. A K-9 search and a secondary Z-portal x-ray scan confirmed the anomalies. Officers began a physical search of the vehicle and discovered multiple plastic bags packed with loose 7.62 ammunition, according to a statement from CBP...

For Elon Musk, giving sight to the blind isn't just a first century phenomenon. The Tesla and X CEO brain implant venture, Neuralink, filed trademark applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on March 3 for "Telepathy," "Telekinesis," and "Blindsight," hinting at a future where human thought could transcend traditional communication and control. The company, co-founded by Musk in 2016, is developing a brain-computer interface (BCI), a system that decodes neural signals to operate external devices. Musk has touted telepathy as Neuralink’s first product, designed to empower people with paralysis to "control a computer or phone just...

Russia is recruiting hundreds of Yemeni men to fight in its war in Ukraine by luring them to Russia under false pretenses in coordination with the Houthi terrorist network, a report by the Financial Times found. The Yemeni recruits who were transferred to Russia under a "shadowy trafficking operation" were originally told they would receive high-paying jobs and Russian citizenship. However, after arriving with the help of a Houthi-linked company, many have apparently been coerced into the Russian military, forced to sign fighting contracts at gunpoint and sent to the front lines in Ukraine.

Columbia University activists are planning a protest of Veterans Day — which organizers want to “reclaim” from the “Israel-US wr machine” in the name of Palestinians killed in Gaza. The unsanctioned student group Columbia University Apartheid Divest is circulating flyers for the event — set for Monday on the Ivy League school’s main Morningside Heights campus. “Veterans Day is an American holiday to honor the patriotism, love of country, and sacrifice of veterans. We reject this holiday and refuse to celebrate it,” a flyer for the agitator group’s event said.

The most remarkable feature of the UFO swarm that began November 18 over New Jersey and then expanded in short order to infest New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Oregon, Minnesota, California, Texas (and where else?), with an average of 92 sightings per night, and that continues wholly unabated through the present day, is its persistence. The swarm persists unabated, the public demand that the government explain persists unabated, and the government stonewall of the public demand persists unabated. This persistence reveals how ineptly the government reads the public mood.The great lesson of COVID—well known to all the unwashed who lived through...

The foreign-born judge behind a ruling forcing President Donald J. Trump to authorize around $2 billion in payments from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is a Canadian-American jurist. United States District Court Judge Amir Ali, who serves on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, was one of the last appointees named by former President Joe Biden, becoming the first Arab American Muslim on the federal bench. Ali assumed office less than two weeks after Donald J. Trump won the 2024 presidential election and has quickly emerged as one...

A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Thursday to lying about a $10 million bribe that a Ukrainian businessman paid to then-vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter to “protect” his firm from a looming corruption investigation. Alexander Smirnov, 43, entered into a plea agreement with special counsel David Weiss and confessed to having created “a false and fictitious record” as part of a multi-year federal probe into the Bidens. The falsehoods included the bribery allegation, which was memorialized in an FBI FD-1023 form in 2020 and released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) last year, and other aspects of...

The most shocking political events took place on February 26 in Bucharest, where the front-runner in Romania’s presidential elections, Calin Georgescu, was seized by the police on the street in broad daylight and brought in for “questioning”. In true autocratic government style, this happened just before he was going to formally submit his candidacy to enter the electoral contest. A large number of police raids have also been ordered against members of Mr Georgescu’s campaign team and other political associates. Background Ostensibly, all this is related to an inquiry by the Prosecutor General into Mr Georgescu’s first presidential campaign in...

Maryland black gun activists and youtuber Mark “Choppa” Manley was wrongly raided by the ATF. Mark talks about the raid with TCRL in this video.

The former leader of the Ukrainian Armed Forces declared that World War III has already started, as tensions rise amid escalating strikes from both sides of the European conflict. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who served as Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief until being sidelined earlier this year by President Zelensky: “I believe that in 2024 we can absolutely believe that World War III has begun.”

A senior North Korean general was wounded in a recent Ukrainian strike in the Kursk area, a Western official said Thursday. It is the first time that Western officials have confirmed that a high-ranking North Korean military officer has become a casualty in the escalating Russia-Ukraine conflict.