Free Republic

Nearly 2,000 years after it was first built, we're discovering just how ingenious Roman central heating really was. For eight days, a team of volunteers heated our reconstructed Roman hypocaust continuously. This was an experiment to find out what temperatures can be achieved, how long does the system take to get up to temperature and how long does the system retain the temperature once the fire has been extinguished. Our hypocaust is based on archaeological evidence from the remarkable Sparsholt Roman Villa, located around 6 km NW of Winchester, England. The excavation was one of the earliest Roman villas in...

A teenager has pleaded guilty in a school shooting that killed two students and two teachers in the US state of Georgia. Colt Gray, 16, was charged as an adult with malice murder, weapons violations and cruelty to children for the September 2024 shooting at Apalachee High School. Gray, who was 14 at the time of the shooting, entered a non-negotiated plea agreement meaning there will be no trial. His father was convicted of murder in March for giving his son the gun used in the shooting as a Christmas present. Gray told Judge Nicholas Primm that he understood the...

The man who tried to put Benjamin Netanyahu in handcuffs for defending his people just lost his own job over allegations of non-consensual sex with a junior staffer. Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, was removed Friday by a vote of the court’s member states. Eighty-two of 125 nations decided he had to go. It is the first time in the ICC’s history that a sitting chief prosecutor has been tossed out.

The globalist head of The Economist thinks that it's "far right" to want secure borders and legal immigration. If that's true, then this 2009 Chuck Schumer speech on immigration is one of the most far right speeches ever made. Schumer Video summary: "It argues that if those positions are far-right, then a 2009 speech by then-Senator Chuck Schumer on immigration ranks among the most far-right speeches ever given. The post includes a roughly 5-minute video clip of Schumer speaking at Georgetown Law in 2009, in which he discusses immigration enforcement, the need to control illegal immigration, and related policy points."

No Hollywood scriptwriter would have dared pen such an outrageously unlikely plot. A boy of immigrant parents raised on a south London council estate, who couldn't speak, read or write for most of his childhood, overcomes such astonishing odds to become, at 37, the youngest black professor at the University of Cambridge. Ever since, life's glittering prizes in the shape of honorary degrees and academic accolades have cascaded down on Jason Arday along with lavish and high-minded praise. Yet this week, a fellow don has pulled the rug from under those achievements in an excoriating assassination of Arday's work and...

A former NFL player from Kenya with a criminal record has been removed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Chicago, ICE exclusively told Fox News Digital. Daniel Ogama Adongo, 37, was a linebacker for the Indianapolis Colts until 2015 and has been arrested multiple times over the last decade, including a conviction for criminal mischief with damage in 2020. He was sentenced to a year in jail. ICE said Adongo overstayed his visa in 2016 and under the Laken Riley act, signed by President Donald Trump last year, those in the country illegally are required to be detained...

“The left’s goal is always to break human reason. . . .” —Elizabeth Nickson. Iran. . . message received. You ask: Why did Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three times?Answer: He was just that pissed. So it goes with President DJ Trump and the intransigent jihadi maniacs running Iran down a rat hole. Mr. T is just that pissed, too. “War is Hell,” the savvy Union general WT Sherman observed after he torched Atlanta, setting a precedent for moral clarity in the service of tactical fortitude. And thus, a century-and-a-half later, this is Iran’s hard time. Iran...

Qualified women should certainly take their place at the top if they are the best candidates for the job...but that’s not what’s happening. In 2023, the New York Times ran an article entitled, “Increasingly, Women Are Running the World’s Great Museums.” Some of the museums mentioned were the Louvre, the Vatican Museum, and the National Gallery of Art. But it’s not only museums where women dominate. Other arts and cultural institutions seem to be on a permanent trajectory to hire women as CEOs. On the surface, this shouldn’t be a problem. Qualified women should certainly take their place at the...

Some of the X accounts pledging to oppose Vice President JD Vance and back Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the 2028 Republican primary appear to be run from outside the United States by people who are not American voters, according to a report published Friday.The finding appeared in a Washington Post report on a wave of online attacks against Vance that his allies describe as a coordinated “op.” Detractors have adopted a “Never Vance” slogan and flooded social media over the past week, the outlet said, with much of the traffic tied to accounts of murky origin. (snip) The...

Yuri Bezmenov decided he wanted out of the KGB and the Soviet system some 56 years ago while serving in New Delhi, India. Disguising himself as an American hippie, he defected to the U.S. Embassy and debriefed with the CIA. It was decided that Bezmenov should settle in Canada under a new name for a while. Bezmenov came back to the U.S. in 1980 with a mission to educate people about Soviet "ideological subversion," which is the basic systematic methodology communists use to take down countries and establish Marxist-Leninist socialist-type states. More recently, a Chinese defector immigrant, Xi Van Fleet,...

Her DNA search results went helter-skelter. Filmmaker Sophia Maddox broke down in tears when she and her father, Daniel Arguelles, learned from an online ancestry search that his dad was one of America’s most notorious criminals — Charles Manson. “I was obviously very devastated,” Maddox, 26, exclusively told The Post. She recalled feeling “dumbstruck” and “sobbing.” “My dad was just rubbing my back and holding me, and telling me we were nothing like him. But it was a little traumatic,” she added. Co-directed by Maddox and Alexandra Orton, the Hulu documentary, “My Grandfather Charles Manson,” follows Maddox as she looks...

In my own professional life, I was not a scientist, and therefore I never much paid attention to the kinds of rewards and honors that practicing scientists pass out to each other. But at some point I became aware that there was something called the National Academy of Sciences, and that among scientists it was considered a big deal to get selected to become a member. This membership is one of those things that you cannot apply for; rather, one day you get “tapped” by some committee of super-elite gurus who invite you to come learn the secret handshake. Here’s...

The Saudi Prince who died in a luxurious London hotel had ingested a huge cocktail of drugs and alcohol, causing him to suffer cardiac arrest, an inquest ruled Thursday. Abdullah bin Fahad bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz bin Jalawi al Saud, 29, was almost three times the drink-drive limit and had traces of the party drug gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB) and Xanax in his system, an inquest at a London coroner’s court heard, according to The Telegraph. His blood alcohol concentration (BAC) was 0.222%. The legal limit in the UK is 0.08%. The prince was found in his bathroom by a maid at...

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President Donald Trump attacked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at Friday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner — claiming she “never smiles” and comparing her to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Roughly 10 minutes into a wild, rambling address, the president mockingly saluted Collins — who was presented an award from the White House Correspondents’ Association. “I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award,” Trump said. “It was all about me. It was a fake, she shouldn’t get the award, it was a fake. But I didn’t mind. I said, ‘Kaitlan, congratulations.’ But it was fake, there’s no question about it....

If you've been to one of those sports bars with 25 screens, you've seen what happens when a fight breaks out in the middle of a hockey game. People pause a second to watch it play out, the way they do when strolling past somebody on a slot machine in Vegas who's hit an unexpected bonus. There's no guarantee that a fight will break out in a hockey game, of course, but it always feels a little lucky when one does. This is what the Bare Knuckle Ice Wars, which officially debuted in 2022, built its premise on. To do...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Economic Development Corporation admitted this week that his city-owned grocery stores “might not have all the items” you’d find in a typical supermarket. The five stores — which are expected to cost taxpayers upwards of $70 million — will likely not include hot food counters or butchers, EDC officials revealed during a board meeting Thursday. “It may not have all the items, but it’s going to be like a typical grocery store,” insisted Jeanny Pak, interim CEO of the EDC, the powerful city-run nonprofit tasked with boosting economic growth and development. Pak also echoed Mamdani’s assertion that...

SpaceX launched its massive Starship rocket Friday evening from its company town and launch facility in Starbase, Texas, in a 13th test flight and the first since the company’s record IPO last month. The rocket’s Super Heavy booster detached from the Starship spacecraft about two minutes into the flight, and made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf. The upper stage of the rocket made a “soft splashdown” in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX employees called the test flight “lucky number 13,” in a livestream of the event. Elon Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor designed Starship, the largest rocket ever built or...

President Donald Trump delivers remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at Waldorf Astoria at 8:55 p.m. ET on July 24.

It's times like this that make me wish I were Elon Musk. Would love to have the money to build a home such as these showcased in this video. I will not tell you more about them, because you really have to see them to ap[preciate them. Let's just say they take Frank Lloyd Wright homes to the next level. 😁🤙 Really is creative & quality work done on these homes. If interested, I am posting the link to an abndoned manssion, where I have no clue. The mansion was in complete shambles, inside & out. The epxoy floors are...