Free Republic

The crazed plane passenger who was duct-taped and zip-tied on a flight to New Jersey first flipped over a discussion about religion with his seatmate, a controversial Messianic rabbi who’s a best-selling author dubbed a “Doomsday prophet.” Author Jonathan Cahn said that now-fired Arizona realtor Arthur Layne Lundeen, 67, allegedly started hurling racist and homophobic slurs after first screaming at him that “Jesus is bulls–t.” “I was the unidentified passenger and I was actually attacked, 30,000 feet in the sky. I was attacked on that plane,” Cahn revealed in a YouTube video Monday. “I have never seen someone change in...

Whitman College, located in Walla Walla, Washington, promises every student on its campus "freedom of expression and association." Unless, it seems, they are Republican. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), when members of the Whitman Republican Club applied to become a college-affiliated student organization, "they had every reason to expect approval through the same review process as any other group." After all, ideological groups such as Climate Justice Coalition and Planned Parenthood Generation Action have a formal affiliation. The student senate, however, unanimously rejected their application. 25-0. Per FIRE: Was it something they had done? Was...

President Trump on Monday said oil prices “will drop precipitously” after the Iran war is won, as Iran seeks to maintain its control of the Strait of Hormuz with a “restricted zone.”“Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon.”The announcement came as Labor Day saw record-high gas prices at an average of $4.15 per gallon in the U.S., with the...

Explanation: Why are Saturn’s poles geometric? Saturn’s North Pole has been known to be surrounded by a hexagonal (6 sides) cloud since discovery in 1987 in data taken by NASA’s Voyager spacecrafts, which quickly flew past the ringed world in the early 1980s. Now, recent observations of Saturn by the Hubble Space Telescope reveal a slightly different geometric cloud pattern around the South Pole: a decagon (10 sides). The geometric boundaries are possibly caused by waves when the fast-moving gas away from the poles interacts with slower-moving gas closer to the poles. In the featured image composite by the Hubble...

New system used 357,000 tokens on 2026 test, beating rivals with design that reuses earlier reasoningAn analysis showed OpenAI's new artificial intelligence (AI) model earned a perfect score on the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) for the first time. While top-tier AI models have previously posted near-perfect scores, this result is drawing attention because it used fewer tokens than existing models. According to results posted on GitHub on Sunday, OpenAI's new GPT-6 Astra was the only evaluated model to score a perfect 450 in the 2026 CSAT LLM Solution Log. The evaluation tested models on questions from the 2026 CSAT...

(Reclaim The Net)—Britain’s police arrested at least 62,199 people over five years under laws governing what people say online or over the phone.That’s a busy period for the written word. And the number of those charged over the same period is 18,510, while 12,292 people were convicted.The Big Brother Watch report, Britain’s Free Speech Problem: How Growing Restrictions Are Stifling Speech Online and Offline, covers the period between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2025.The laws are Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, and Section 179 of the Online Safety Act...

Republican Bruce Blakeman could pull off a stunning upset in New York’s closely watched governor’s race — with the conservative challenger just four points behind Democratic incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul in a new poll. Hochul only leads the underdog and current Nassau County executive 49.6% to 45.7% among likely voters, according to the survey conducted by McLaughlin & Associates for the Blakeman campaign. The remaining 4.7% of likely voters are undecided, the poll, based on interviews with 800 likely voters from Aug. 27-31, shows. The nail-bitingly close results reflect growing dissatisfaction with Hochul’s ability to lead the Empire State. More...

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., said he is willing to consider raising the SSI payroll tax rate and increase the amount of income subject to the tax. The tax applies to the first $184,500 of a worker's earnings. Trust funds are projected to be able to pay full scheduled benefits until the third quarter of 2034, when continuing income would cover 83% of scheduled benefits.

A short video of the problem. The hood on larger Mercedes EQ models (like the EQE and EQS) is not designed to be opened by owners and is restricted to certified technicians.

The home of Australian pastor Andrew Sedra was reportedly attacked by multiple LGBT activists, who issued threats against the family members, including their newborn son. The pastor's X account posted security footage of the attackers, saying they cut off power to the home and tried to gain entry. "On Thursday night, 4 left-wing activists including 2 hooded individuals came to our home after our address was leaked publicly online," the post said. "They threatened to kill us and destroy us, they cut out the electricity from our home and attempted to break in. They knew our whole family by name,...

Amanda Hirsch, host of “Not Skinny But Not Fat,” posted the ad for Polymarket — an online platform that lets users bet on real-life events — the same day the case ended in a mistrial following a hung jury. “On Polymarket it was predicted the verdict would be Not Guilty. Are you surprised? #Polymarketpartner,” Hirsch wrote. The post has since been deleted. Ahead of the mistrial, more than $161,000 was wagered on the outcome of Clancy’s trial on Polymarket. The trade wasn’t available to U.S.-based users, only those located outside the country. While it isn’t legal to bet on the...

Planes are grounded across the UK. The United Kingdom is experiencing major airport disruptions as flights are grounded nationwide following a technical failure in air traffic control. Huge disruption at multiple UK airports including Heathrow and Gatwick as flights blocked from taking off due to air traffic control error https://t.co/EaeMmO52Dd — LBC (@LBC) September 8, 2026 The Telegraph reported: “All flights into London Heathrow and Gatwick have been halted until at least 7pm, with airports including London City, Manchester, Stansted, East Midlands, Birmingham, Belfast City, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Southampton also experiencing disruption. The Telegraph understands that equipment at the headquarters...

Ford joined GM this year in seeking U.S. military contracts after the Trump administration approached U.S. companies about assisting the military with their expertise in mass manufacturing. The automakers’ efforts so far are largely focused on military vehicles, but could grow with time. Simultaneously, both companies are entering the energy storage system, or ESS, market amid an expected growing need related to rising consumer energy costs and data centers. Energy storage systems use a lot of the same underlying technology as electric vehicle batteries to store power for homes, businesses and even utilities. Both markets are viewed by Wall Street...

Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and co-chief executive of techbio company Insilico, is among the scientists who have devoted countless hours to studying aging. He has a reality-check for anyone who thinks that artificial intelligence means that the ability to double lifespans is tantalizingly close. “Absolute nonsense,” said Zhavoronkov, whose company uses AI to discover and develop drugs.In 150 years of discovery, no drug has been clinically proven to extend life, he said in an interview. “Regardless of how rich you are…you cannot buy one year of life with a drug.” What could be within reach in the next decade or so—in...

Sanity returned to the University of Florida Saturday when the Gators took on the Florida Atlantic Owls at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, Florida. During the neo-Marxist cultural revolution that was the summer of 2020, everything deemed "racist" had to be purged, regardless of context or logic dictating otherwise. ESPN reported that this included the popular "gator bait" chant, in which fans would extend their arms in front of them and clap their hands together like an alligator seizing its prey. What exactly does that have to do with race? The university's president that year, Kent Fuchs, announced racial...

Key TakeawaysThe Porsche 718 Cayman has the lowest five-year depreciation in the ranking at 9.6%, while the Nissan LEAF loses 63.1% of its value.Six EVs rank among the 15 fastest-depreciating vehicles.Toyota places seven models among the 15 vehicles with the lowest five-year depreciation.Five-year depreciation varies dramatically by model, with a spread of more than 50 percentage points between the best and worst performers in this ranking.This graphic ranks cars with the highest and lowest five-year depreciation in 2026, based on data from iSeeCars. The automotive research firm analyzed more than 950,000 five-year-old used vehicles sold between March 2025 and February...

Question for the defense. Doesn't the request for a pardon imply guilt? It's generally a bad practice to execute lawyers along with their clients, no matter how sleazy those lawyers might be, but in this case, one must wonder if we should make an exception. Last week, Reddington was criticized for informing the media that there was a lone jury holdout, indicating that the holdout was male, and trying to remove the holdout from the case. Many people interpreted this as jury intimidation so Clancy could get a "not guilty" verdict for methodically and systematically choking the life out of...

If my ministers lack the courage or ability to deliver in the first 100 days, I will sack them. It is almost 50 days since Andy Burnham fulfilled his long-held dream of becoming the leader of the Labour Party and prime minister. Let’s put to one side the fact that after years of trying he only managed to make it to Downing Street via what was in effect a Labour Party coup; that the Labour MP who stood aside for him I was promised a highly paid job in Number 10; and that Burnham has no legitimate mandate of the...

Sun Tzu made an observation, some 2,500 years ago, that modern coalition politics seems to have taken to heart, though no one credits him for it. Paraphrased loosely: an army does not need every soldier to want the same outcome. It needs them moving in the same direction until the battle is won. The Red and the Green appear to have absorbed the lesson without ever reading the book. Almost nobody asks what happens once the battle ends and there's no shared enemy left to hold the army together. The Red is the socialist left. The Green is political Islam....

The auto industry has a new solution to Americans’ fear that electric vehicles will run out of juice: a gasoline engine.