Free Republic

Russia marks Cheburashka's 60th birthday on August 20 amid indications officials in the country may be set to disown the beloved character over claims he represents a dark force corrupting Russia's children, along with debate over the creature's "ethnicity." Amid the record-breaking success of an eponymous 2023 film about Cheburashka and its 2026 sequel, Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent pro-Kremlin political theorist, has repeatedly railed against the character, whom he has variously described as a "lunar demon" and "rootless cosmopolitan" (a pejorative Stalin-era term for a Jewish person) responsible in part for the collapse of the Soviet Union. In December a...

A former University of Kentucky student-athlete pleaded guilty Friday to first-degree manslaughter in the death of her infant son, whose body was found inside a trash bag in a closet. Laken Snelling had initially pleaded not guilty after a grand jury indicted her on several charges, including first-degree manslaughter, abuse of a corpse, tampering with physical evidence and concealing the birth of an infant. Snelling, 22, changed her plea to guilty on Friday, NBC affiliate in Lexington, Kentucky, WLEX reported. Appearing before Fayette County Circuit Court Judge Diane Minnifield, Snelling began crying as she entered her guilty plea. “I was...

A notice promoting an HIV/AIDS medicine product from Nigeria traditional healer Sarkin Lakanin Jihar Kano. When US funding cuts disrupted access to free antiretroviral therapy, some Nigerians turned to traditional healers marketing herbal ‘cures’ framed as Islamic medicine. Copyright: Photo Courtesy of Sarkin Lakanin Jihar Kano Speed read[KANO, SciDev.Net] Aisha* once relied on free antiretroviral therapy (ART) from a clinic in Maiduguri, northeastern Nigeria, funded through the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) programme. The treatment kept her HIV suppressed. That changed when US President Donald Trump ordered a halt to PEPFAR funding in January 2025. “When I...

Explanation: What does it feel like to zoom around a spinning supermassive black hole? The featured video is an animation showing a time-lapse of 4 years of observations of the star S301 orbiting Sagittarius A*, the 4-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of our Galaxy. S301 was discovered in 2023 with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory, located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Astronomers recently found that S301 takes approximately 8.7 years to go around the black hole and reaches speeds of 25,000 km/s. It comes closer to the black hole than any other stars...

We should be concerned about young men's physical and mental healthA new documentary, "Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere," hit number one on Netflix this spring, spotlighting the influencers who exploit young men and monetize their insecurity. One way they do this is through looksmaxxing apps. Imagine a 15-year-old taking a selfie. Seconds later, an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm returns its verdict: 6.3 out of 10. Underneath, a list of repairs: improve your canthal tilt, sharpen your jawline, raise your facial harmony, increase your masculinity. He has just been told, by something that sounds like science, how far his face sits...

Navigating a world with peanut allergies can be… well, nuts. Even if you’re not the one who’s allergic. More than six million Americans have a food allergy, and peanuts are the third-most common allergen. And it doesn’t just impact those who can’t eat it: Because reactions can be deadly, peanut-free policies and other restrictions are common in places like schools and restaurants. But a Minnesota-based startup is developing a new “hypoallergenic” peanut that could bring the salty snack back to hospitals, planes, cafeterias and restaurants without causing allergic reactions. Nurtured Nuts CEO Bryant Williams sought to remove three of the...

Whilst several reports of a confirmed Geely Hypercar programme for the 2027 FIA World Endurance Championship have somewhat jumped the gun, it is entirely correct to say that every day that passes sees the prospect of the Chinese OEM joining top class WEC action next year move closer. Geely have been in negotiations for some time to acquire the assets of the current Alpine Endurance Team with a firm view to contesting the WEC from the start of the 2027 season. This after Alpine announced in February that their A424 programme would cease after the end of the current season....

Alyssa Milano is revisiting her 'debilitating' postpartum anxiety attacks, which led to a psychiatric ward stay amid the high-profile Lindsay Clancy trial. Clancy is accused of murdering her three children Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan at her home in Massachusetts in 2023.

Microsoft employees donated over $2 Million to Democrats so far in 2026, 80% of all political donations. This from the company which studies "Pronouns in Software".

Energy Secretary Chris Wright met with executives from refining companies on Monday to explore ways the Trump administration could help them boost throughput volumes to help keep America’s gasoline and diesel market fully supplied. The meeting took place in Midland, Texas during an industry conference Wright was attending. Wright and the White House believe an increase in refined volumes could hold the key to lowering prices for gas and diesel at the pump. The administration’s concerns are not surprising given the fact that gasoline prices have stubbornly remained above $4.00/ gallon nationwide amid the ongoing Iran Conflict, a dollar...

Prince Harry and six other high-profile figures will have to make an initial payment of £9.5 million ($13 million) toward the legal costs of a British tabloid publisher after losing a high-stakes case against them last month, a UK High Court judge ruled Friday. CNN's Max Foster reports.

L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies shot a pit bull that was reportedly attacking them while they were attempting to apprehend a suspect Thursday in Sunland, authorities confirmed to KTLA. The incident occurred around 4 p.m. at the Sunland Recreation Center near Sherman Grove Avenue and Foothill Boulevard. Authorities did not disclose what the suspect was wanted for, but said the person was taken into custody and that the dog belonged to him. During the attack, officials said less-lethal force was used multiple times on the animal, including the use of a Taser, though weapons had little effect on the dog, prompting...

Colorado state officials on Thursday morning released the results of spring 2023 K-12 achievement tests and the results are mixed -- suggesting that where students were developmentally when their learning was disrupted by the COVID pandemic may play a role in how well they're succeeding academically today. In the English Language Arts portion of the Colorado Measures of Academic Success for example, higher percentages of students in grades 5, 6 and 7 met or exceeded expectations than in 2022, but grades 3 and 4 saw drops or nominal gains. The CMAS tests students in grades 3-8, finding that across the...

A Whitby father who got a two-year house arrest and three years of probation for firing at armed home intruders who shot his son won’t face a longer sentence after it was upheld. Last week, the Court of Appeal for Ontario dismissed the Crown’s appeal of the length of the man’s sentence, which they argued as “demonstrably unfit.” A panel of three Ontario Court of Appeal judges, however, stated they saw “no error” in the sentence. “Nor do we find that the sentence was manifestly unfit,” the appeal judges added. The appeal decision, published online earlier this week, detailed the...

An 11-year-old schoolboy from Cambridge, Illinois, has made history by becoming the world’s youngest male to curate a museum. Anderson Taylor earned the Guinness World Records title after opening the Cambridge Natural History Museum when he was just nine years and 340 days old on August 10, 2024. Anderson is the museum’s sole owner and curator and has built a collection featuring fossils, minerals, gems and taxidermy animals. Anderson’s journey began in 2022 after a family trip to Scotland. A visit to the Staffin Dinosaur Museum inspired his fascination with creating a museum of his own. “When I went to...

Vice President Vance said Thursday night that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has a “very discreet plan” to shrink the nation’s debt. “He [Bessent] has had a very discreet plan, of course, supported by the president of the United States, to get the United States to a point where our economy is growing faster than our debt,” Vance said on Newsmax’s “Carl Higbie Frontline.” “And if you look, we are on track. So, even though the debt is too high, even though we inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration, we actually do have a plan to get the economy...

Nathan Cofnas, the U.S. academic who raised plagiarism concerns over the late Cambridge professor Jason Arday, said on Thursday he had been suspended by Belgium’s Ghent University and was under investigation for discrimination. Arday, once hailed as Cambridge’s youngest Black professor, was found dead, aged 41, in London last Friday, days after resigning from his post. Arday had denied the allegation of plagiarism but acknowledged making mistakes. “I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me,” Cofnas wrote on his X account. In a post a few hours earlier he said he was “under investigation by...

Credit: HHS.gov The far-left hacks at CNN are so terrified of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement that they have completely abandoned basic math just to attack Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blasted CNN host Erin Burnett after her program aired a ridiculous “investigation” attempting to discredit the affordable meals featured on Kennedy’s new cooking series, The Real Food Show. Kennedy’s program, inspired by President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, features chefs preparing nutritious, whole-food meals for approximately $5 or less per serving. But CNN decided to “fact-check” Kennedy...

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) ... identified a phenomenon they call attribution decay, where the more data a generative model is trained on, the less any individual training example matters to any particular output. It feels counterintuitive, but at sufficiently large scales, they find, you can often remove any single image from the training data, or every image by a given artist, or every photograph of a given person, and the generated sample doesn't change. And if removing something changes nothing, the researchers argue, it can't be said to be responsible for anything. ... Their workaround is...

President Donald Trump on Friday morning said the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported over the next three months without being subject to out-of-quota tariffs. Trump also said, “We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.” The president’s Truth Social post announcing the move did not say which companies had made those commitments, which he said came “as we work to rebuild this herd and help our ranchers.” Trump did not say who he had reached a deal with on...