Free Republic

From some time in 2019 to the present, the Department of Homeland Security, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations, has been running an Operation Silent Night to intercept items coming from China that can be used to make suppressors/silencers. The operation has seized a lot of material, with relatively few arrests. The items seized are routinely marketed as solvent traps, fuel filters, or pill containers. As most of them do not have holes so that a bullet can travel through them, it is difficult to prosecute people for importing a “silencer” or even “silencer parts” when similar items...

Donald Trump’s Latino Superfan Myriam Witcher Baffles CNN’s Baldwin: He Is ‘My Perfect Man’. In his ongoing quest to prove that Latinos do, in fact, “love” him, Donald Trump brought a Hispanic woman named Myriam Witcher up on stage at his Las Vegas rally Thursday night who could not love him more. “Yes, Mr. Trump! We love you! We love you, all the way to the White House!” she exclaimed, her hands held high in the air. On Friday, CNN’s Brooke Baldwin tried to get to the bottom of how this woman could possibly feel the way she does about...

The sun's temper ebbs and flows on what scientists had thought was a pretty predictable cycle, but lately our closest star has been acting up. Typically, a few stormy years would knock out a satellite or two and maybe trip a power grid on Earth. Then a few years of quiet, and then back to the bad behavior. But an extremely long stretch of low activity in recent years has scientists baffled and scrambling for better forecasting models. An expected minimum of solar activity, between 2008 and 2009, was unusually deep. And while the sun would normally ramp up activity...

The 'grave slab code' baffles expertsApr 12 2007 By Tony Henderson Environment Editor, The Journal What could be a 900-year-old code is baffling archaeologist Peter Ryder. Over the last 30 years Northumberland-based Peter has recorded 700 ancient grave slab covers in the county, plus another 500 each in County Durham and Cumbria. But the carvings found on one 12th-Century slab, which had been recycled and used 300 years later in a church tower, have set Peter a puzzle. Three 12th-Century grave slabs were incorporated into the tower of St Michael and All Angels Church in Newburn, Newcastle. They have been...

Rock ’face’ mystery baffles experts Photograph of the face carving, found near Rothbury, Northumberland Credit Aron Mazel Archaeologists have found a trio of extraordinary stone carvings while charting the phenomenon of prehistoric rock markings in Northumberland, close to the Scottish border in the United Kingdom. Records and examples of over 950 prehistoric rock art panels exist in Northumberland, which are of the traditional ’cup and ring’ variety, with a typical specimen featuring a series of cups and concentric circles pecked into sandstone outcrops and boulders. However, archaeologists at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, who are studying prehistoric rock carvings,...

A globe-trotting inflatable snowman who disappeared from a garden last Christmas has sent postcards to its owner from exotic destinations around the world. The 5ft blow-up snowman, who signs his name Frosty, went missing from Helen Bevan's back garden two weeks before Christmas last year. Since then Mrs Bevan, 42, of Tondu, south Wales, has received postcards from Tenerife, Antigua, Thailand, Mexico, Malaysia and Hong Kong, all signed with the words "all my love, Frosty". Mrs Bevan said she has only seen Frosty once since his disappearance. She said: "I was shocked when I heard a knock at the door...