Free Republic

Depending on your passport, it’s been a tough spring for Canada versus the United States. Back in February at the Winter Olympics, the Canadian women’s hockey team lost the gold medal game to the United States, 2-1 in overtime. The men’s team lost their gold medal game… to the United States… 2-1 in overtime. George Springer might still be celebrating that one. It’s time for Round 3. For the first time in the national program’s history, Team Canada has advanced out of pool play at the World Baseball Classic. Its reward for winning Pool A? A date with the United...

In a desperate bid to stop Tinseltown from trekking to cheaper pastures, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is taking a chainsaw to the red tape and high costs of filming at some of the city’s most famous landmarks. Bass announced last week that the city will slash filming fees at the iconic Griffith Observatory by 70% — dropping the daily price tag from $100,000 to a more manageable $30,000. The move effectively rolls back costs to 2008 levels, signaling a massive retreat from the 2022 fee hikes that may have helped drive production out of state.

After complaining for years that Gen Z grads are difficult to work with, bosses are no longer all talk, no action: Now they’re rapidly firing young workers who aren’t up to scratch just months after hiring them. The numbers are stark. According to a survey, six in 10 employers admitted they had already sacked the Gen Z workers they had hired fresh out of college. Intelligent.com, a platform dedicated to helping young professionals navigate the future of work, surveyed nearly 1,000 U.S. business leaders. It found that the class of 2024’s shortcomings are shaping how bosses hire next—and it’s not...

Many people want to be done with Covid lockdowns as a topic. The trouble is that Covid lockdowns are not done with us. Nothing like this had ever been tried in real life, a forced stoppage of most human activity as it affects the material and social world. The impact would be far reaching, long lasting, and devastation – one of the more significant calamities of modern times. Prevailing economic weakness and resulting stagnation for living standards is only one result. It’s nowhere near over. The Friday, March 6, 2026, jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was far...

SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. (WFTV) — Two high school girls in central Florida are charged with attempted murder of another student. Video from the back seat of a police cruiser caught them laughing about their plan. Isabelle Valdez, 15, and Lois Lippert, 14, were seen laughing and smiling as if they were heading to a party. In reality, they were on their way to jail. “This is such a bonding experience. I love this,” Lippert laughed. “I was going to do my makeup this morning for the mug shot, but I couldn’t find anything,” Valdez said. Prosecutors played the video...

A Corpus Christi woman who sued a local Marine pilot, claiming he spiked her hot chocolate with abortion pills and killed their unborn child, is now facing a $1.1 billion counter suit. The original lawsuit was filed Aug. 11, 2025, at the federal courthouse in downtown Corpus Christi and made national headlines. It named NAS-Corpus Christi Marine pilot Christopher Cooprider, accusing him of secretly dissolving abortion pills into his pregnant neighbor's hot cocoa, ending the life of their unborn child. Cooprider is being represented by high-profile attorney Mikal Watts, who is taking on the case for free and seeking over...

NASA is targeting a launch of Artemis II as early as April 1 to send four astronauts on a 10-day mission around the moon and back. The decision Thursday came after an in-depth flight readiness review, where managers met to discuss the mission. "All the teams polled 'go' to launch and fly Artemis II around the moon," said Lori Glaze, of NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. The crew — NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — were at the flight readiness review. NASA had planned to launch the...

Jill Biden is giving her perspective from a since-demolished part of the White House, with the former first lady penning a memoir called “View From the East Wing.” In the book, announced Wednesday, Biden will share “her White House experiences for the first time, in her own words,” publisher Gallery Books said. “She reflects on the Biden presidency and its impact on her family. She brings you behind the scenes, from Camp David to Air Force One, from grading papers in the Rose Garden to witnessing the abrupt end of her husband’s bid for reelection,” the publisher said in promotional...

The non-profit White Coat Waste (WCW) has uncovered disturbing evidence of animal abuse at the University of Missouri-Columbia (UMC), where taxpayer dollars are funding barbaric procedures on cats, including former pets sourced from local shelters. According to records obtained by WCW, UMC maintained a colony of homeless cats acquired from Jefferson City, Missouri’s public animal shelter, using them as blood donors in ways that risked anemia and dangerously low blood levels. These cats, many likely lost or abandoned pets because they had microchips, could be confined for up to two years before potentially being euthanized if deemed “medically necessary” rather...

Months after the last of the United States' 1-cent coins were pressed, some states are beginning to offer their own 2 cents on the penny problem by setting rounding guidance for cash purchases. President Donald Trump announced early last year an end to penny production, saying it was wasteful. It cost 3.7 cents to make each 1-cent coin in 2024, according to the U.S. Mint. The move led to a shortage of pennies in cash registers last summer, forcing consumers and businesses to confront a penniless future in which making exact change would be difficult. The Treasury Department has said...

A Chinese national has been arrested in Kenya's main airport accused of attempting to smuggle more than 2,000 queen garden ants out of the country. Zhang Kequn was intercepted during a security check at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in the capital Nairobi after authorities discovered a large consignment of live ants in his luggage bound for China. He has yet to respond to the accusation but investigators said in court that he was linked to an ant-trafficking network that was broken up in Kenya last year. The ants are protected by international bio-diversity treaties and their trade is highly...

Circuit: Shanghai International, First Grand Prix: 2004, Number of Laps: 56, Circuit Length: 5.451 km, Race Distance: 305.066 km, Lap Record: 1:32.238, Michael Schumacher (2004) Track.

The Trump administration is suing California over a de facto fuel economy rule that it believes the state is using to an enact a pseudo electric vehicle mandate, the California Post has learned. The Department of Justice filed the lawsuit Thursday on behalf of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), arguing that the Golden State is violating federal law by forcing state-specific mileage requirements on car manufacturers through the state’s Advanced Clean Cars proposal. “California is using unlawful policies from the last administration to create exorbitant costs for their citizens — this Department of Justice is proud to stand...

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has revived a controversial benefit program once lauded as a step toward “reparations” for black San Franciscans. Known as the Dream Keeper Initiative, the relaunched program will grant $36 million to “community-serving organizations,” including some that have offered “Afri-centric” mental-health services, African ancestry DNA testing, and free doulas for “African American birthing people.” The Dream Keeper Initiative was founded by former San Francisco Mayor London Breed in 2021, fulfilling her promise to redirect police funding to “the African American community” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 death in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In February 2021, Breed...

Explanation: For the first time we are witnessing outer planet Uranus take center stage and pirouette. Uranus is one of the Solar System’s strangest planets, lying on its side and spinning like a rotisserie chicken. The featured video is composed of over 1000 spectra taken over 15 hours of continuous viewing by JWST's NIRSpec instrument while Uranus rotates. The data captures the behavior of Uranus’s ionosphere: the ionized layer of a planet’s atmosphere that strongly interacts with the planet's magnetic field. The aurora’s rosy glow traces the complex interplay between Uranus's misaligned rotation and magnetic axes. Clouds can be seen...

A California mother charged with murdering her newborn child last month has been accused of killing another baby she delivered 11 years ago. Marisol Flores, 30, was arrested on February 8 after she allegedly killed her one-day-old child at a homeless encampment, according to police. The Ventura County District Attorney filed an amended complaint on Tuesday accusing Flores of murdering her 25-day-old baby, whose gender was not specified, in 2015. 'During the investigation into the 2026 case, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office reopened a previous probe into the November 2015 death of Flores’ 25-day-old baby,' the district attorney's office wrote...

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Although Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are the best-known Beat Generation writers who were exhilarated by jazz, plenty of others were creatively fired by the music.“I’m the bop writer!” boasts a character in The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac’s 1958 semi-autobiographical novella set in the jazz districts of New York. The book, along with On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958), captured what the writer called “the new bop generation way of speaking,” and all three owed much of their inspiration to the author’s love of the improvisational jazz pioneers of that era. On the Road was a genuine...

Live Nation employees described ticket buyers as "so stupid" and joked about "robbing them blind" in private messages from the company's internal Slack account. The exchanges were collected as part of a 2024 antitrust lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which was tentatively settled earlier this week. Live Nation would be ordered to open ticketing deals to other vendors and to pay up to $280 million in damages. The federal government had been joined by attorneys general from 39 states and the District of Columbia who said Live Nation and Ticketmaster had maintained...

A man allegedly drove his car into a family on an evening walk, then opened fire, killing a 3-year-old child in the process. On Feb. 17, Alexander Lamar Banks, 21, was arraigned on one count of first-degree premeditated murder, three counts of assault with intent to murder, four counts of felony firearm, one count of possession of a dangerous weapon w/unlawful intent and one charge of possession of loaded firearm in vehicle, according to a press release from the Eaton County authorities in Michigan. A couple and their 3-year-old daughter, whom they pulled along in a pink wagon, were walking...