Free Republic

After being offline for more than a decade, oil is officially flowing again through the Santa Ynez Pipeline System off the coast of Southern California. The network of pipelines, which pass through Santa Barbara County before ending at Pentland Station in Kern County, restarted Monday following an executive order from President Donald Trump on Friday, which has been seized on by Gavin Newsom. “This is an attempt to illegally restart a pipeline whose operators are facing criminal charges and prohibited by multiple court orders from restarting,” Newsom said in a statement when Trump first announced plans for Sable to resume...

Kentucky senator says he wants to represent 'free-market wing' of Republican Party as alternative to Trump-Vance populismLibertarian-minded Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is leaving the door wide open to a possible 2028 White House run. "We’ll decide after 2026," Paul said in an interview that posted this weekend. Paul ran for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, but dropped out after a distant fifth-place finish in Iowa's Republican caucuses. He won re-election later that year in the Senate, and was re-elected again in 2022. The senator, who for years has been a leading voice inside the GOP for fiscal conservatism,...

Steak ‘n Shake has rolled out its new tater tots cooked in beef tallow, expanding the fast-food chain’s push toward traditional frying methods. The announcement drew attention on social media after the Indianapolis-based company highlighted the ingredient Monday morning in an X post, with commenters praising the move, while others debated whether beef tallow is healthier than vegetable oils. Steak ‘n Shake previously made headlines last year when it announced that its fries would be cooked in beef tallow instead of vegetable oil — part of what the company described as a return to the “authentic way” of frying potatoes....

Seventeen alleged drug traffickers are facing charges after authorities say they ran a sprawling methamphetamine pipeline that pumped hundreds of pounds of the drug every month across Northern California. Prosecutors in Placer County announced Thursday that the suspects were charged with crimes including conspiracy and transporting large quantities of methamphetamine for sale after an eight-month undercover probe dubbed “Operation Meltdown.” The investigation began in July 2025 when an undercover detective bought several pounds of meth from a suspected dealer in North Auburn, according to the Placer County Sheriff’s Office. What started as a single case quickly snowballed into what investigators...

Hundreds of TSA officers have quit over the federal budget battle that left them working without pay –fueling hours-long flight delays and Department of Homeland Security videos blaming Dems for the travel nightmare. More than 300 TSA officers have tossed in the towel since the shutdown began Feb. 14, while a slew of other workers have been taking unscheduled absences, CBS News reported, citing internal TSA statistics. Hobby Airport in Houston saw 53% of its TSA officers call out March 8 and 47% the next day, while other airports have seen double-digit call-out averages since the shutdown started. John F....

In late 2022, an ambulance pulled up to a bombed-out apartment building in this village outside Kyiv. Three people emerged. One wore a gray hoodie, another a baseball cap. Both had masks covering their faces. The third was more easily identifiable: He was unmasked, and had one arm and two prosthetic legs, witnesses told Reuters. The masked men carried cardboard stencils from the ambulance and taped them to what had been an interior wall of an apartment before the Russians obliterated the place. Then they pulled out cans of spray paint and got to work. An absurd image appeared in...

The United States have already secured qualification for the FIBA Women’s World Cup 2026 in Berlin, but will close out the tournament against Spain on Tuesday (17 March).

MIAMI -- It’s the country that gave us Miguel Cabrera’s Triple Crown, Luis Aparicio’s game-changing speed, Dave Concepción's Gold Glove defense and Jose Altuve’s October taters.But for all the talent Venezuela has brought to MLB –- more players, in fact, than any foreign nation other than the Dominican Republic –- its importance to the sport had been underrepresented on the World Baseball Classic stage. The South American nation had not only never won the event but had never previously reached the finals.Until now.

President Catherine Connolly has said the story of Saint Patrick symbolises the "resilience and courage" of migrants. Ms Connolly used her first St Patrick's Day message to celebrate migrants and warn against the "normalisation of war" ahead of Taoiseach Micheal Martin's meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday. A week ago she criticised the "deliberate assaults on international law" in the Middle East and said the UN charter "cannot be ignored". While not naming the US or Israel explicitly, this was seen as a rebuke of the Irish government after ministers avoided stating that the bombing campaign...

The findings come from a newly released Marine Corps report that’s over 600 pages long. That report determined that the mishap was the result of a malfunction in the artillery’s fuze, which electronically controls the timing of detonation. “The M767Al fuze is extremely reliable, with only one malfunction in its service history, in 2017, that was ultimately determined to be caused by an external factor,” the report said. “It is manufactured to a tolerance of one defect in a million.” ... The report ruled out wrongdoing by Marines, interference by other unmanned aerial systems and birds. Instead, the report suggested...

The United States saw four terror attacks on its soil in just the two weeks since the Iran war began, yet Democrats voted yet again last week to #Defund Homeland Security. Are they trying to help the terrorists? They also seem to hate TSA workers and flight passengers: Chaos has reigned at airports around the nation, with hours-long security lines; the shutdown has prompted 300 agents to quit and others to take unscheduled leaves rather than work without pay. The defunding’s latest horror: The Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Bombing Prevention just canceled a training class on how to...

Artificial intelligence seeks to emulate the faculties of the human mind through computational systems, a synthetic recreation of our brains’ capabilities to perceive, learn, and reason. Now, a company claims to have taken a totally different tack by simulating the 125,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections of an adult fruit fly’s brain — and then letting it roam inside a Matrix-like virtual environment. In a video shared by Eon Systems cofounder Alex Weissner-Gross, the crudely animated insect can be seen stretching its legs inside a simulated sandbox, rubbing its front feet together and using its labellum to drink from...

No matter how far liberals sink, we can always count on them to explore new depths of pettiness. For instance, leave it to liberals to grouse about a modest and historically appropriate change to a commemorative coin now in circulation. Then, leave it to those same liberals to blame President Donald Trump for the design when, in fact, the change occurred during the final months of former President Joe Biden's administration. […] … (L)iberals have speculated that the removal of the peace-signifying olive branch symbolizes Trump’s bellicosity. […] As usual, however, the liberals got it wrong. In fact, the Citizens...

It's hard to miss how elitist media like the Associated Press thrive on the notion that the Iran war is already a fiasco. On Sunday, the AP author was Will Weissert (best remembered for scribbling a loving paean for Fidel Castro), but it could have been written by any of a number of flacks at the DNC gloating over what they think will help the Democrats in the midterm elections. The result was an opinion piece very poorly disguised as a legitimate story -- "Two weeks into war with Iran, Trump has been knocked back on his political heels."It was...

Explanation: If not perfect, then this spiral galaxy is at least one of the most photogenic. An island universe containing billions of stars and situated about 40 million light-years away toward the constellation of the Dolphinfish (Dorado), NGC 1566 presents a gorgeous face-on view. Classified as a grand design spiral, NGC 1566 shows two prominent and graceful spiral arms that are traced by bright blue star clusters, red emission nebulas, and dark cosmic dust lanes. Numerous Hubble Space Telescope images of NGC 1566 have been taken to study star formation, supernovas, and the spiral's unusually active center. NGC 1566's flaring...

Two former campaign managers for former President Barack Obama warned that the Democratic Party is a mess ahead of the 2028 presidential election, due to not knowing what they stand for. Jim Messina explained to Axios that while Democrats are planning to rely on voters’ frustrations with President Donald Trump and his administration to pick up additional seats in the upcoming midterm elections, that is not enough to win the presidency. Meanwhile, David Plouffe warned that Democrats are not ready to win “in what are now red states in neutral and even challenging environments.” …

Megyn Kelly on Monday questioned President Donald Trump’s coming to the defense of Fox’s Mark Levin amid their ongoing feud, suggesting that Trump may be falling out of touch with his own base. Kelly and Levin have engaged in an intense war of words in recent weeks, with Kelly becoming especially critical of Trump’s war in Iran and Levin’s support of it. In response, Levin has called Kelly “emotionally unhinged” and “petulant.” Then, things took a dramatic turn when Kelly referred to Levin as “Micropenis Mark.” She added that Levin “tweets about me obsessively” and that he “doesn’t like it...

1 min video at link: FOX & Friends@foxandfriends“I know that families have even been detained. I know family members are missing.”An Australian official sounds the alarm for Iranian female soccer stars as more players reportedly pull asylum bids after reportedly facing heavy intimidation.“When you do break a contract as an athlete in Iran you can face the death penalty.”

The Oscars, once Hollywood's premier celebration of cinematic artistry, have increasingly come under fire for prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates over pure merit and storytelling excellence. Titled "Why the Oscars Suck: Diversity, Equity Inclusion Standards Fail Art," this critique highlights how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Representation and Inclusion Standards-introduced in 2020 and fully enforced for Best Picture eligibility since 2024-have transformed the awards into what many view as a politicized checklist rather than a genuine honor for filmmaking achievement.

Jimmy Kimmel didn’t host the Oscars on Sunday — that job went for the second year in a row to the fantastic Conan O’Brien — but in presenting the documentary categories, the “Jimmy Kimmel Live” host still had a few sharp things to say. In coming out to present the documentary short and documentary feature Oscars, Kimmel joked that O’Brien had gone out and accidentally “exposed his face to the sun and was incinerated. So I will be finishing out the rest of the program.” But turning serious, he noted that with documentaries, “We hear a lot about courage at...