Free Republic

An adorable owl was rescued late Thursday evening by the California Highway Patrol after crashing onto a busy Southern California roadway. The injured owl was found on a busy three-lane road in Stevenson Ranch at about 10:14 p.m., officer Luis Quintero from the California Highway Patrol told the California Post. Officers spotted the beige, wide-eyed owl stranded along The Old Road, just north of Stevenson Ranch Parkway in Santa Clarita. Lying helpless in the left lane, the owl struggled on its back, wings fluttering against the pavement.

Taxpayers are yet again helping fund disruptive activism in Los Angeles — this time the radicals planning to chaos across the city and county for Saturday’s “No Kings” protests, which organizers claim will be the biggest yet. One the leading groups participating in the event is the Liberty Hill Foundation, a social justice nonprofit that receives $14 million in Los Angeles city funding for tenant outreach and housing programs. Public filings show the group has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the ACLU of Southern California, raising further questions about taxpayer-supported organizations being used for radical political advocacy. ACLU...

Iran’s probably gay and likely incapacitated new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei hasn’t been seen publicly in a month — but it has nothing to do with poor health, the evil regime has claimed. Khamenei has been lying low for security reasons after his father, former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was wiped out by the US and Israel at the start of their war with Tehran. “The reason for his absence from public view is the observance of security considerations due to the current special circumstances,” said Ali Bahreini, Iran’s representative to the United Nations office in Geneva, CNN reported,...

Three children grew up in the same household, raised by the same parents, exposed to the same environment. Yet their lives unfolded in dramatically different ways—all because of a single gene. The older brother met all of his early developmental milestones and could read at the age of 5. He had an excellent memory for car license plates and could make rapid mental calculations. His social deficits, however, came to light once he started school. He was socially awkward, had few friends, couldn’t understand social cues, and was prone to mood swings. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, which is...

What I remember about it is that it is approximately a Victorian era movie or miniseries. The show aired anywhere from the late 70's to late 80's. In the show, it involves an older sister or single mother and two younger children who are taken in by a compassionate wealthy young gentleman, possibly an aristocrat. He tries to raise the children to be fit for his level of society, but the young man becomes resentful of him and ends up stabbing him in the leg when the young man reveals that he is now broke because of bad investments. I...

I embarked on a vanity project to record some of my chess games against Shredder, my cell phone app. The games are recorded in algebraic notation, but I prefer the traditional English descriptive notation, so I asked ChatGPT to make the conversion. It kept correcting itself through multiple iterations. I finally had to stop it. I turned to Grok to get the conversion done. It seemed to work, so I asked Grok to illustrate the game with board positions at critical points in the game. It turned into a major league fail on steroids. I won't bore you with the...

Apparently, we can finally talk about it in the mainstream media. For years, we were censored, called names, and polls were done asking people whether we belonged in concentration camps. Half of Democrats believed it should be a criminal offense to question the efficacy of the vaccine. Seriously. Almost half of Democrats once believed that if you were a vaccine skeptic, you belonged in a camp and should have your children taken away. One of my own family members believed that. Other findings from the poll:Other punitive measures in the same pollFrom the same survey, with Democrat shares described in...

James Tolkan, the character actor who expressed a disdain for “slackers” in the Back to the Future trilogy and portrayed Tom Cruise’s no-nonsense commanding officer in Top Gun, has died. He was 94. Tolkan died Thursday in Saranac Lake, New York, a family spokesperson announced. Tolkan also played Napoleon and his look-alike in Woody Allen’s Love and Death (1975) and was the crooked accountant known as Numbers who works for Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino) in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990). He appeared in three movies directed by Sidney Lumet: as a cop in the Pacino-starring Serpico (1973), as a...

Below is the transcript of a speech I gave at a Net Zero Watch event in Edinburgh on 9 March 2026: . Good evening, and thank you for inviting me to speak today. Scotland is often described as an electricity superpower. Not only is that not true, the Scottish grid is actually extremely vulnerable, being held together by just two power stations: Peterhead and Torness. So critical is this dependence that the National Energy System Operator, NESO, will not allow both to go on maintenance at the same time. Yet within the next 5-6 years both could close. Today I’m...

Emmy award-winning director Marina Zenovich's Water & Power: A California Heist, a National Geographic documentary film executive produced by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney, unfolds like a real-life version of the 1974 film noir "Chinatown," uncovering the exploits of California's notorious water barons, who profit off the state's resources while citizens endure a debilitating water crisis.

I spent 23 plus years on the military and during that time we had extensive training on many aspects of nuclear material handling, especially before 91. One of the tools made aware to all was the Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST). This isn't necessarily a military unit but the make up of the team is dictated by the situation. I'd bet dollars to donuts that we may have a NEST (or two), accompanied by some type of SF inside Iran trying to secure the gayahtollah's nuke stash. What say you?

Newly-unclassified documents show that in 2022 Ukrainian officials discussed diverting hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars -- earmarked for clean energy -- back to Biden's ill-fated 2024 campaign. There is no evidence the intercepted allegations were investigated during the Biden administration. intelligence intercepted Ukrainian government communications discussing a plot to route hundreds of millions of American tax dollars earmarked for clean energy in the war-torn country and move them to the United States to enrich then-President Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to a declassified intelligence report summarizing the intercepts that was obtained by...

OH CANADA: Canada just met its NATO 2% defense obligation for the first time since the 1980s. Carney celebrated. He did not mention that Canada's GDP shrank in Q4 2025 and that is the only reason they hit the target. Canada did not build up its military. It contracted its economy.

As Gov. Kathy Hochul looks to rework New York's climate goals, Mayor Zohran Mamdani's climate chief says the city's own environmental benchmarks are critical to improving affordability in the five boroughs. Hochul is asking lawmakers to push the timeline set forth in the state’s climate law, which called for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, from 2030 to 2040. The governor has said her actions are motivated by affordability, and that implementing the law under the existing terms would be onerously expensive for New Yorkers. In contrast, New York City is moving ahead without political delays. Chief Climate Officer Louise...

TSA agents will start seeing paychecks drop in their bank accounts on Monday, a much-needed boost for stressed-out airport workers who have been caught up in a bitter political fight for more than 40 days. President Trump signed an order on Friday, using emergency powers to order the workers paid despite the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown. While Congress has failed to fund the rest of the department, TSA workers will get some relief, though other DHS workers are still unpaid. “Today, at the direction of President Trump and the Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, TSA has immediately...

Senate Democrats are fighting tooth and nail against the SAVE Act, arguing that requiring Americans to prove their identity with a photo ID when they go to the polls to vote — even when the ID itself is given away for free — prevents eligible voters from casting ballots. They contend proving citizenship would make voting harder for millions who lack ready access to birth certificates or passports, supposedly disenfranchising black and Hispanic Americans. Yet democracies all over the globe, both in the wealthy West and in the developing world, enforce similar rules. Every country in Africa, for example, requires...

A married mom who vanished last year may be tied to a string of mysterious deaths and disappearances of US scientists and military officials with access to potentially sensitive information, according to a report. Melissa Casias, who worked with her husband as an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory [LANL] — famous for developing nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project — has not been seen since she dropped lunch off for her daughter in New Mexico last summer. She is one of four high-clearance people who have died or gone missing since June 2025 with connections to UFO-linked retired...

Pamela Genini, a 29-year-old model and entrepreneur who also appeared on reality TV in Italy, was stabbed to death on her balcony in Milan in October last year, allegedly by her wealthy, 52-year-old ex-boyfriend, who’d been stalking her and begging her to take him back, according to officials. When her body was being moved to her final resting place on Monday, cemetery workers became alarmed when they realized the coffin would not close properly — and there were loose screws, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. The coffin was opened — and the stunning model’s head was missing. Fresh silicone...

1. Introduction In recent decades, distortions resulting from pervasive non-market policies and practices have left critical minerals supply chains of market-oriented economies vulnerable to a myriad of disruptions, including economic coercion. Correcting these vulnerabilities is imperative, as critical minerals are strategic assets integral to modern and innovative industrial economies, and diverse, resilient, and market-based supply chains are essential for our economic and national security. To this end, the United States and the United Mexican States (“Mexico”) (collectively, “the Participants”) seek to develop a new paradigm for preferential trade in critical minerals supported by price floors and other measures, and have...

We have long heard about the financial plights of solidly blue states. Places like New York and California have the highest taxes and the highest costs of living in the country. But there is a new blue state story where Democrats refuse to back off their ideological insistence that high taxes will get their state to the fiscal promised land. That place is Massachusetts. Massachusetts is on the verge of a financial implosion. The reason: Massachusetts Democrats' grand plan to replace the state's taxpayers with migrants is not the grand plan they expected it would be, and the state is...