Free Republic

Multiple agencies continued to search Sunday for a U.S. Marine who went missing during a training exercise off the coast of southern California, military officials said. Crews began searching for the Marine early Thursday morning, shortly after midnight, according to a Navy news release. The Marine was reported missing from the USS Anchorage during integrated training between the Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group and the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit. ... The Navy transitioned from search-and-rescue efforts to a search-and-recovery operation Friday evening. The Marine’s name was being withheld pending the notification of family. The search has covered about 2,400 square...

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Multiple agencies continued to search Sunday for a U.S. Marine who went missing during a training exercise off the coast of southern California, military officials said.Crews began searching for the Marine early Thursday morning, shortly after midnight, according to a Navy news release. The Marine was reported missing from the USS Anchorage during integrated training between the Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group and the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit.It’s at least the second time in six weeks that the U.S. military has been forced to look for missing members. The remains of the second of two U.S....

Everyday life has become a pressure cooker. The question is when that pressure cooker is going to blow up, and what forms that explosion will take. Two dangerous trends are coalescing in Germany: the deterioration of private life and the tyrannization of politics. The latter comes to light in the persecution of any political opinion marginally different from that of the government. Private life deteriorates under pressure from a stagnant economy with its withering welfare state. Unending tax hikes are coupled with the erosion and increasing unreliability of social benefits. There is another aspect of the regress of private life...

Being the United States president can be pretty overwhelming. Fortunately for the 44th U.S. President Obama, had basketball to turn to relieve himself of some of the stress. ...Obama played and he played without any reservations. "they didn't adopt any "presidential rules," and he paid for it dearly one time as someone caught him on the mouth and gave him a busted lip. "There ain't no presidential rule?" Stak chimed in. "I got the scars to prove it," Obama bragged. The affable U.S. president said hoops was as much a part of his schedule as meeting diplomats from other countries....

WASHINGTON — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decried Apple’s recent $200 price hikes on computers and tablets, which the tech giant blamed on a memory chip crunch — and called for breaking up Big Tech. “We need to break up a lot of these companies that are far, far too big, and we need to be instituting consumer protections for people,” the New York Democrat told Fox News. Most analysts believe the so-called “RAM-ageddon” crisis is a result of the rapid build-out of data centers to power artificial intelligence, which has turbocharged demand for memory chips. Citing memory chip shortages, Apple jacked...

Explanation: Right now, one of the largest sunspot groups in recent history is crossing the Sun. Active Region 4478 is not only big -- it's violent, showing tangled magnetic fields capable of throwing off huge clouds of particles into the Solar System. Some of these CMEs might impact the Earth. At the extreme, these solar storms could cause some Earth-orbiting satellites to malfunction, the Earth's atmosphere to slightly distort, and electrical power grids to surge. When impacting Earth's upper atmosphere, these particles can produce beautiful auroras. Pictured here, AR 4478 and its dark sunspots were captured in visible light a...

One of the defining images of 2020 featured two homeowners, two firearms and a confrontation that ignited a national firestorm. Six years later, the legal, political and cultural fallout from that moment continues to reverberate through debates over self-defense, private property rights, public protest and prosecutorial power. On June 28, 2020, as racial justice protests swept cities across America following the death of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter demonstrators made their way through Portland Place, a private, gated street in St. Louis, toward the home of then-Mayor Lyda Krewson. As the crowd passed through the neighborhood, the McCloskeys emerged from...

Frank Everink hadn’t even heard of Kansas City. But when the Dutch soccer fanatic saw his team would be playing along the border of Missouri and Kansas, he made a detour in his worldwide road trip. Everink got into his camper van and drove south from Toronto, making stops in Detroit, Chicago and Indianapolis. Along the way, he—and other European fans who flocked to Kansas City for the World Cup—beheld the fruits of the American economy from a vantage point few foreign tourists typically see: suburban superstores, hulking plates of food, quiet streets. He marveled at the sprawling houses, a...

@SenRandPaul Anthony Fauci will answer to the American people. 7/29 at 10 AM

Two large Saharan dust clouds are headed west from Africa towards the United States. It’s Saharan dust season in the Atlantic, the time of year when massive clouds of dust from Africa’s Sahara Desert are carried westward by winds, sometimes traveling thousands of miles to the United States. Where is the dust now? Satellite photos from Sunday showed one primary dust plume in the western Caribbean Sea, over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and across the southern Gulf of America. Unhealthy air quality was observed across Belize and across the Yucatan Peninsula, where dust concentrations are highest. When will the dust hit...

Five young Arapaho braves snuck off from Fort Robinson 150 years ago this week and fought the 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn, where General Custer met his demise. They later told their story to actor and adopted member of the Arapaho tribe, Tim McCoy. ============================================================== Left Hand (left) was 22 years old when he snuck away from the agency at Fort Robinson and ended up fighting with the Sioux and Cheyenne in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. (Courtesy) They have been dubbed by historians as the Arapaho Five, warriors who found themselves fighting against the cavalry in the Battle...

CNN head Mark Thompson has no interest in sharing “oversight” of his network and has made his position clear to incoming Paramount bosses ahead of an expected $111 billion merger with CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, according to a new report. With the merger looming and reports indicating Paramount-Skydance CEO David Ellison could hand CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss a major role at CNN, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin reported in The New York Times that Thompson has made his feelings on the future clear. Thompson has reportedly told Paramount executives that he “would not share oversight of...

Consider what it takes to lie to a free people at scale. A private liar can deceive a neighbor. A campaign can deceive a district. But to deceive an entire nation, and to do it durably, you need something rarer. You need an institution the public has been trained to trust, and you need to borrow its authority. The intelligence community is that institution. When career officers say a thing is so, citizens reasonably assume the judgment rests on secret evidence too sensitive to share. That trust is precisely what makes the apparatus so dangerous when it is turned, because...

"People don't use it to make serious trades, they don't use it to buy their dinner and pay at the supermarket...What it does is allows crooks to move money around..."

The Shenlong, or "divine dragon," space plane is a reusable, robotic spacecraft that China has repeatedly launched into low Earth orbit (LEO) on board vertical rockets, before reentering the atmosphere for a horizontal runway landing — similar to the iconic spacecraft from NASA's now-defunct Space Shuttle program. The space plane has never been photographed by outside nations, so we have no clear idea what it looks like or how large it is. Shenlong first launched into space on a two-day mission in September 2020, before completing an eight-month stint in LEO between August 2022 and May 2023, and a nine-month...

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Furious Napa Valley vineyards facing oblivion as crucifying new fees drop: ‘Can see where this ends’ California’s Napa Valley is fermenting into a full-blown revolt as furious vineyard owners warn a new fee could leave them paying tens of thousands of dollars a year — the latest financial punch threatening to crush the struggling wine industry. Farmers across the iconic Northern California enclave say they are staring down financial disaster as the state moves to crucify them for their use of groundwater. Under a new law coming into effect later this summer, wineries will have to pay just under $99...

The collaboration between director Michael Powell and writer/producer Emeric Pressburger began on the eve of World War Two and built up a considerable head of steam making films for and about that war. Some were obvious propaganda (Contraband, 49th Parallel, One of Our Aircraft is Missing) while a couple were far too idiosyncratic to match any workable definition of propaganda (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale). Blimp was so at odds with the British government's idea of what aided the war effort that Churchill himself ordered the military not to assist the filmmakers during its production....

The fight over DEI in the military centers on a fundamental question: is removing ideological programs politicizing the ranks, or depoliticizing them? As I read and hear the usual cavalcade of woke, retired Democrat generals and admirals like McRaven, McCaffrey, Franken, and others falsely claiming that Pete Hegseth is “politicizing” the senior ranks of the U.S. military, inside my head, I am screaming in rage at the impunity with which they spread this pernicious and wholly inaccurate falsehood. Hegseth is doing EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE as he depoliticizes our military’s ranks by eradicating the very most political doctrine to ever infect...

NASA is racing to save an aging telescope from falling back to Earth with a daring rescue mission. The $30 million salvage operation gets underway as soon as this week with the planned launch of a robotic lifesaver. NASA hired startup Katalyst Space Technologies to boost the Swift Observatory to a higher orbit where it can continue hunting for some of the universe’s biggest explosions. A three-armed spacecraft built by Katalyst will chase after Swift once it takes off from an atoll in the Pacific’s Marshall Islands aboard an airplane-launched Pegasus rocket. Liftoff could occur as early as Tuesday. Scanning...