Free Republic

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) recently updated his Congressional colleagues on his health, according to one who said he believed the longtime Kentucky politician will come back to work on Capitol Hill. The confident prediction from Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) comes just days before an Aug. 3 deadline for Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) to call a special election to fill McConnell’s seat. Marshall and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told independent journalist Nicholas Ballasy McConnell had reached out to his colleagues recently, with Ernst pointing to a letter the 84-year-old sent to the Senate physician. While it’s unclear what the letter...

President Donald Trump lashed out at Jeannine Pirro after the U.S. Attorney in Washington D.C. dropped criminal charges against an American Olympian who had been accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Trump blasted Pirro in a Truth Social post Saturday: I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area. There...

CEUTA, Spain (AP) — Spain announced it was installing a 500-meter-long (1,600-foot) containment barrier on the sea border between its North African territory of Ceuta and neighboring Morocco after between 50,000 and 60,000 migrants breached the frontier earlier this week. The death toll has climbed to 67, including some who drowned and others who were killed in a stampede to cross a breakwater barrier, the Spanish government said Saturday. A handful of exhausted migrants who swam to Ceuta’s urban Tarajal beach Saturday morning were met by soldiers who escorted them back across the border. Spain’s interior ministry says the majority...

Iranian hackers are likely behind a widening cyberattack campaign against US water systems that has reached at least seven states, including more than 30 systems in Minnesota alone, and likely extends further, a cybersecurity expert told JNS on Friday. “The working assumption is that it is Iranian threat actors,” Annie Fixler, director of the cyber and technology innovation center at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS. “The kind of behavior matches what we’ve seen out of Iran. The kind of targets and the systems that we’re talking about match.” Fixler cautioned that no actor has publicly claimed responsibility....

Jon De Lorraine @jon_delorraine Translated from French 🔴🇪🇺 IMMIGRATION 22 EU countries have signed the letter led by Italy and Denmark to strengthen external borders and accelerate expulsions. The five states that did not sign: ❌ 🇪🇸 Spain ❌ 🇫🇷 France ❌ 🇮🇪 Ireland ❌ 🇱🇺 Luxembourg ❌ 🇵🇹 Portugal The 22 states that signed: 🟢 🇩🇪 Germany 🟢 🇦🇹 Austria 🟢 🇧🇪 Belgium 🟢 🇩🇰 Denmark 🟢 🇪🇪 Estonia 🟢 🇫🇮 Finland 🟢 🇬🇷 Greece 🟢 🇭🇺 Hungary 🟢 🇮🇹 Italy 🟢 🇱🇻 Latvia 🟢 🇱🇹 Lithuania 🟢 🇲🇹 Malta 🟢 🇳🇱 Netherlands 🟢 🇵🇱 Poland 🟢 🇨🇿 Czech...

Whether Stephanie White likes it or not, she has to deal with the issues that her players have gotten involved in. One such issue is the backlash towards Sophie Cunningham, who commented in an ESPN profile that female athletes should be protected in sports where they “shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” Prior to the Indiana-Portland game on Friday, White was asked about her stance on this matter. The Fever head coach offered a disclaimer for her response. “I don’t know that I would say that I’m educated enough from a scientific standpoint. I don’t ever believe that exclusion...

Announcement: http://ReplacementClock.org is now live! A year ago, I went looking for something like a Great Replacement Tracker — a site that aggregated all the demographic data for the West and could tell me how bad things really were. To my surprise, I couldn't find one. So six months ago, I started building it myself. Today, I'm announcing the first live version of the Great Replacement Clock. It tracks the European-descended share of the world's population and of 45 historically White countries. It consolidates historical figures and modeled projections into a single interactive timeline — sourced, auditable, and methodologically transparent....

The father of a six-year-old Kentucky boy stabbed to death in his own bed is publicly breaking down after the man who did it was released from prison for the second time, this time with no supervision. Dean Tipton took to Facebook on Wednesday and wrote that the killer of his son Logan being released again may be his breaking point. Tipton wrote that the justice system handed his family a life sentence while giving the killer, Ronald Exantus, a slap on the wrist. Exantus broke into the Tipton family’s Versailles home on December 7, 2015, stabbed Logan Tipton to...

Edna Elizabeth Townsley, Mark Jerome Gabour, Marguerite M. Lamport, Thomas Frederick Eckman, Dr. Robert Hamilton Boyer, Karen John Griffith, Thomas Ray Karr, David Hubert Gunby, Thomas Aquinas Ashgton, Paul Bolton Sonntag, Claudia Marilyn Rutt, Harry Walchuk, Officer Billy Paul Speed, Roy Dell Schmidt and the unborn son of Claire Wilson. These are the names of the people who lost their lives when a shooter turned a simple day at the University of Texas into one of the darkest days in Texas history. This Saturday, August 1, marks the 60th anniversary of the UT Tower shooting, a day when 18 people...

A day after Google unveiled a new feature that allowed users to create AI-generated satellite images with the click of a button on its Google Earth platform, the company announced it was removing the tool. "We've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes," Google said in a statement on X. "However we've also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails." In its initial announcement of the new feature on Thursday, the company said...

On Thursday, shocking footage spread online of droves of primarily young male Moroccans storming Ceuta, a small Spanish territory on the North African coast. Thousands of them swam around breakwaters and climbed fences to enter the tiny enclave. An estimated 60,000 people are believed to have arrived in Ceuta—where the permanent population is 84,000—in 24 hours. Eighteen immigrants have died during the crossings. Meanwhile, local bars and shops are closed for fear of looting. The chaos has caused the leader of Ceuta to appeal to Madrid to send in the army. The Spanish government has done so, but it should...

US embassies in Jerusalem and other Middle Eastern capitals call on citizens in the Middle East to avoid travel to the Middle East and be ready to depart due to the “potential for unforeseen escalation” in the conflict with Iran. “Due to heightened tensions in the Middle East, the security environment remains complex with the potential for unforeseen escalation,” embassies from Cairo eastward say in identical messages published on their respective websites. “The Iranian regime is unpredictable, as seen by its recent decisions to attack areas in the region without warning or provocations as well as to expand attacks to...

Amazon said this week that it received hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds from President Trump’s tariffs and pledged to return some of the profits to its customers. This follows a Supreme Court decision earlier this year that many of the Trump administration’s tariffs were illegal, prompting the U.S. government to start a process to refund billions of dollars in import taxes to affected companies. Brian Olsavsky, the chief financial officer of Amazon.com, Inc., said during a Thursday earnings call that the company is “participating in the tariff refund process” and received an amount of $600 million in its...

Key Points * Former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI hedge fund, Situational Awareness, collapsed from $45 billion to around $10 billion in assets on falling semiconductor stocks and mounting margin calls. * Driven by reported leverage of up to 400%, the 20-something manager was forced to sell off all his leveraged public stock bets — including hard-hit names like SK Hynix and CoreWeave — to Ken Griffin’s Citadel at a discount. * The crash marks a dramatic turn for Aschenbrenner, who launched the fund after gaining Silicon Valley fame with his 2024 AI manifesto, drawing scrutiny from critics over his...

A Middlesex County police department used an officer disguised as a shrub to crack down on distracted driving Wednesday, issuing 74 citations. The Dunellen Police Department conducted a distracted driving enforcement operation on the 100 block of North Washington Avenue, an area with heavy vehicle and pedestrian traffic, according to a Facebook post. The goal was to enforce New Jersey’s handheld cellphone law and increase safety in the community. Police issued the 74 citations during a six-hour span. “Our ‘shrub’ was busy,” the department said in the post.

he times, they are a-changin’. Rapidly. And not in a good way. Two separate — and growing -- psychoses are converging in a perfect highly imperfect storm of authoritarianism to existentially threaten the land of the formerly free and brave. To wit: In 2000, only 28% of Democrats identified as “liberal.” Today, that figure has nearly doubled. The number who claim to be very liberal has also risen dramatically. In fact, a recent survey shows that 1 in 3 Democrats now proudly consider themselves to be Democratic-Socialists. The party has been fundamentally transformed — and quickly. DSA candidates are now...

We must decide, and soon, if a “religion” that preaches slavery and mass slaughter of those who refuse to convert is compatible with American religious liberty. In Terminello v. City of Chicago (1949), Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert Jackson wrote: "The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."It has also been said that some Muslims don’t want to kill infidels....

The MONTHLY Victory Garden Thread is a gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. If you have specific question about a plant/problem you are having, please remember to state the Growing Zone where you are located. This thread is a non-political respite. No matter what, you won’t be flamed, and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack...

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — A News10NBC investigation has uncovered payroll problems at a local tool and die shop, where some workers say they haven’t been paid in four weeks. Accurate Tools, located on Lyell Avenue, makes precision metal parts and components and employs about a dozen people. News10NBC reporter Brett Davidsen spoke with employees and the owner about the ongoing pay issues. “We work everyday, but we don’t get paid,” Bill Riesenberger said. “It started out as a day or two late, and then a week late, now it’s been up to 4 weeks late and there’s no end in sight.”...

Seeing Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral seemed fitting: Z-Man’s money-laundering operation in Kyiv was the proximate cause of Graham’s death. Had the senator not been working so hard to add to the butcher’s bill in Europe, he would still be alive today. Surely there is a lesson here for some people to see. I know there are plenty of pro-Ukraine cheerleaders who just cannot stomach any criticism of an ongoing military conflict that has now lasted longer than WWII. However, I have never seen this as anything other than a civil war that British, European, and...