Free Republic

- A federal appeals court on Thursday vacated a ruling that ​blocked Mississippi's ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public schools, reassigning the case away from a district court judge who had acknowledged that a key ‌ruling contained AI-generated errors. The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals threw out, opens new tab the preliminary injunction against the state law and reassigned the civil rights lawsuit to a different district judge for further review.

A Louisiana doctor is accused of wasting five crucial minutes while a young child in her care was drowning right in front of her. Sukanthini Subbiah, 48, was arrested by the Orlando Police Department on Wednesday and charged with first-degree aggravated manslaughter of a child for allegedly allowing seven-year-old Khushil Bandi to drown. At the time of the drowning on April 10, Subbiah was visiting her mother in Orlando, Florida, with her son, who is also seven years old and was identified as DJ by police, according to an affidavit reviewed by the Daily Mail. While Subbiah was in town,...

(The Center Square) - Arizonans will have a chance to put a stop to their taxpayer money being spent on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. On Nov. 3, Arizona residents will vote on Proposition 142, which would stop state money from funding DEI-related offices and programs. The proposition would prevent taxpayers from being forced to support race-based policies as a condition for college admission or graduation, hiring or contracting.

Pennsylvania State University is recommending the closure of 47 undergraduate programs across its various campuses, including 11 programs at its flagship campus in University Park. ... The affected programs represent 11.5 percent of the 403 undergraduate programs that are offered across all Penn State campuses, affecting 784 students, equal to about 1.1% of Penn State's overall undergraduate population. The 11 programs flagged for closure at the University Park campus are professional photography (BDES), geobiology (BS), geosciences (BA), elementary and kindergarten education (BS), middle level education (BS), world languages education (BS), information sciences and technology (BS), security and risk analysis (BS),...

Under President Donald Trump, Elon Musk's DOGE effort and the White House have accomplished what conservatives long dreamed to do but never achieved: substantially dismantling America's foreign aid agency. The shrunken U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), while it hasn't been officially wiped out by Congress, will be difficult to revive under future administrations and will be "less attractive" for future bureaucrats, former USAID special government employee, Mike Benz told Just the News. "Even if you turn the apparatus back on, there will be a slower ramp-up simply because I think the precarious nature of it, knowing it might be...

Family members of those killed in a January 2025 crash in which an Army Black Hawk helicopter hit a civilian airliner are irked over a new report that lets leaders off the hook. Sixty-seven people died in the incident in which the helicopter and an American Airlines jet collided, with pieces of the wreckage falling into the frigid Potomac River. An Army report listed multiple long-standing issues that contributed to the disaster, but did not say whether anyone was punished, according to The Washington Post. When families of those killed on American Airlines Flight 5342 were able to preview the...

The holiday brings, out many of the worst excesses of identity politics.Bless my Italian-American mother's memory—her maiden name was Guida, and her parents were immigrants from southern Italy who never learned to speak English. But I won't be observing Columbus Day this Monday. Indeed, I stopped caring about it years ago. Traditionally a celebration of Italian-American pride and the Genoese explorer who "discovered" the New World, for decades the day has come to embody many of the worst excesses of identity politics, both among its champions and its detractors. Whatever political and cultural purposes it might have once served,...

The issue came from a cockpit software update, The Wall Street Journal reported. Boeing has been under intense regulatory and safety scrutiny in recent years. Boeing has identified a previously undisclosed 737 MAX software glitch that could cause an automated navigation feature to fail during landing, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing company documents. The issue emerged from a cockpit software update and can occur when flight crews alter their planned flight path after a missed approach, the report said. When reached for comment, Boeing said it informed all 737 operators last month about the software issue under...

Racism plagues American health care — reverse racism. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division just brought another case against a top medical school for blatant discrimination against white and Asian applicants: Blacks applying to the University of California at San Francisco’s med school get admitted at almost 13 times the rate of similarly qualified white applicants. Black and Hispanic students the school admitted from 2023 to ’25 averaged lower test scores and undergraduate grades than the average white and Asian applicant the school rejected. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon’s letter blasting UCSF follows similar ones to UCLA, UCSD and Yale;...

Trafalgar Square isn’t some random patch of concrete where London needed something colorful to fill an empty corner. This is one of the most famous historic spaces in Britain. Nelson’s Column towers over the square. Statues of King George IV, Sir Henry Havelock, and Sir Charles James Napier have stood there for generations. Whatever anybody thinks of those men today, they represent actual pieces of British history. And now, into the middle of all that comes Lady in Blue… She’s an overweight black woman in a bright, skin-tight blue dress, striding forward on the Fourth Plinth. The idea is that...

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. (WEAU) - Police departments across the country are celebrating national police women’s day. Some Chippewa Valley women in law enforcement say they usually don’t have issues regarding their gender from within their departments. “When it comes to law enforcement, and being female, there’s certainly differences that you experience and I feel like it’s more related to the public and perception of female officers,” said Olivia Erl, the Patrol Lieutenant of the Eau Claire Police Department. “But the bottom line is I come here to do my job and serve the community like everybody else does,” said Chief...

We have uncovered new information and accusations about the cargo airline operating the Amazon Prime Air plane that crashed in Miami on Sunday, killing five people in a van inside the airport perimeter and in a Toyota Corolla outside the perimeter. This cargo airline, called 21 Air, has a documented history of hiring foreigners who can’t follow instructions from air traffic controllers, as well as a reputation for hiring incompetent pilots who can’t pass basic training at other airlines, according to industry professionals who say they have first-hand knowledge of the company’s operations. We’re going to go through the evidence...

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III on Tuesday announced that he would retire at the end of the year, the Washington Post reported. His retirement comes amid pressure from the Trump administration, which has worked to revamp many of the Institute's museums and displays. Last year, the administration notified the Smithsonian that it would review museum exhibits ahead of the 250th anniversary of the United States.

In one of his Truth Social bombs, President Donald Trump insisted we should rename Lake Ontario to Lake America after Canada refused to accept his trade negotiation terms. It obviously echoes his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. It's easy to find these whole geographic kerfuffles unnecessary. But the media hated the first one so much that the Associated Press found itself restricted from the White House press pool for refusing to accept the new Gulf terminology. What they hate is anything Trump does to add a patriotic pro-America tinge to something that they associate...

CareerSource Polk President and CEO Stacy Campbell-Domineck has been temporarily removed from her position as executive director without compensation while an independent review examines the organization’s management and governance. The Polk County Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday, Sept. 1, to approve two resolutions involving CareerSource Polk, the local workforce development organization responsible for connecting job seekers with employment and training opportunities. The first resolution immediately removed Campbell-Domineck from the executive director position until the governance review is completed. The second allows the county to bypass its normal consultant-selection procedures so the review can be conducted on an expedited...

Off target. A popular chain store released it’s modern version of what some shoppers describe as the modern Jim Crow Halloween outfit. Target has spent the last several years learning an uncomfortable lesson about corporate activism: once a company decides to enter the culture war, there may not be an easy way out. The retail giant is once again facing controversy after pulling a Halloween costume that critics reportedly complained was offensive to black Americans, making only the latest political headache for a company that has repeatedly found itself caught between progressive activists demanding that it embrace ‘social justice’ and...

If poor Jason Arday killed himself, it will be necessary to work out why. To do so, it will help to know why he resigned his professorship. It seems highly unlikely he resigned if Cambridge University did not want him to. It had defended him in public throughout, after all. Yet if he had been confident of Cambridge’s continuing support, why did he sacrifice the benefit of its protection? If Cambridge suggested to him that its protection would, for whatever reason, shortly cease, what caused its change of mind? What a terrible shock for him if the institution which had...

A routine knee replacement meant to restore 72-year-old Glenda Dorton's mobility has instead left her facing an uncertain future after her family says the wrong medication was injected before surgery. The Centerville, Tennessee woman arrived at Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital Midtown in Nashville on August 14 expecting a procedure that millions of Americans undergo each year. Her family says the operation itself went well, but what happened before it began changed everything. According to her daughter-in-law, Kristina Dorton, the medication placed into Glenda's spine for a pre-surgical epidural was not the intended anesthetic. She says it was potassium, a drug...

Nathan Cofnas, the U.S. academic who raised plagiarism concerns over the late Cambridge professor Jason Arday, said on Thursday he had been suspended by Belgium’s Ghent University and was under investigation for discrimination. Arday, once hailed as Cambridge’s youngest Black professor, was found dead, aged 41, in London last Friday, days after resigning from his post. Arday had denied the allegation of plagiarism but acknowledged making mistakes. “I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me,” Cofnas wrote on his X account. In a post a few hours earlier he said he was “under investigation by...

A former New York City Police Department sergeant from Orange County pleaded guilty to driving in the wrong direction on the Taconic State Parkway while intoxicated and striking another vehicle, causing a driver's death, state Attorney General Letitia James said Wednesday. Tiffany Howell, of Warwick, who was off-duty at the time, pleaded guilty to aggravated vehicular homicide and second-degree manslaughter before Judge Anne Bianchi in Westchester County Court, James said. Howell, 48, crashed head-on into a car driven north by Manuel Boitel at 11:37 p.m. on Jan. 22 while she was driving south at more than 50 mph with a...