Free Republic

The European auto industry is a case study on how short-sighted trade policy goals, results in consequences. Previously, German auto companies like Volkswagen entered into trade agreements with China and began manufacturing their vehicles with immediate financial success in the market. However, it did not take long for Chinese auto companies to reverse the engineering and begin to deliver the same quality vehicles at much lower prices. The Chinese then stop purchasing the Volkswagen vehicles and purchase the cheaper version, while simultaneously begin exporting those same vehicles into the home market from where the technology originated. Today, with a double-digit...

Martha Ann Lillard, the last U.S. polio patient who used an iron lung to survive, has died at age 78. The Shawnee, Okla., resident first experienced symptoms of the disease on her fifth birthday in 1953, she told KFOR 8 days before her death. “I woke up and it was sunny outside, and I started to sit up, and my neck was killing me,” she said. “I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow.” “After four days, I went unconscious. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move my arms or legs,” she explains. Lillard had contracted polio — just two years...

Maine Democrat Graham Platner on Friday formally withdrew from his US Senate bid in a letter to state elections officials that signed off with an F-bomb. Platner posted on X a picture of the letter, which did not share any immediate details about who he hoped would succeed him to face Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November. The missive touted the 156,084 votes he had received in Maine’s Senate Democratic primary last month, suggesting that his more than 70-percentage-point win showed: “People are desperate for change.” “Mainers voted for a new kind of politics,” the letter read. “One that...

A convoy of police cars, lights flashing, tail the large yellow truck up to the back gates of London’s British Museum. It’s just before 3 a.m. on July 10, a date that has been kept under wraps for months. After the truck pulls into the museum’s loading bay, four men open its back doors to reveal a cage-like rectangular crate. Inside it is another crate, inside that crate is a metal shell, and inside that shell, folded back and forth on itself 28 times, is a precious and fragile artifact, nearly a thousand years old. The journey this truck has...

1:07 VIDEO AT LINK............ SpacEx has competition!...............

A former Long Island nurse who raked in $1.5 million selling fake vaccine cards during the COVID-19 pandemic was slapped with a record-breaking $544,000 fine from the state. Ex-Amityville practitioner Julie DeVuono, 53, who pleaded guilty to forgery and money laundering back in 2023 was hit with the massive penalty for a “large-scale” scheme where she hawked the phony cards to parents of 162 school-aged kids between November 2019 and January 2022, the state Department of Health announced Thursday. “This is the largest civil penalty imposed for vaccination fraud in the Department of Health’s 125-year history,” state Health Commissioner Dr....

An illegal immigrant who has been deported three times has been charged in a July 3 crash that killed a 6-year-old girl in North Carolina. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lodged a detainer asking North Carolina officials not to let Jaime Santiago Corona out of jail without notifying them, according to a Department of Homeland Security news release. Calli Toler, 6, was killed in the crash. Corona, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, faces multiple charges. DHS noted that Corona’s “criminal history includes convictions for driving under the influence of liquor and obstructing police.” According to arrest warrants, Jaime...

While disagreeing on most else, teacher unions and conservative education policy reformers share views on cellphone bans, AI guardrails in K-12 public schools. ================================================================== Teachers unions and education reformers are historically longtime rivals – frequently bumping heads over policies surrounding school choice, parents' rights, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practices in K-12 schools. There's one issue, however, upon which these groups agree – that technology, creeping first via phones and now Artificial Intelligence, is interfering with student learning. "Social media and student personal device use have become a constant presence in our schools,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National...

Dramatic new bodycam footage captured the moment heroic NYPD cops plucked a distraught woman off steel cables high above the Brooklyn Bridge, saving her from sure death. “I just wanna talk,” one cop is heard telling the woman after she climbed high atop the East River span shortly before 7:40 p.m. on Wednesday. “What’s happening today? “I wanna help you, that’s why I’m up here right now,” the officer said. “I genuinely care, I do. It’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem, it really is. I don’t know what you’re going through but I want to understand. We have...

Studying old paintings can give us a surprising glimpse of historic natural history. In 1611, the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder finished his epic allegorical painting Air. In it, he depicted the Muse of Astronomy, Urania, reclining on a cloud as a menagerie of feathered birds surrounds her. But while studying the animals in the picture, one researcher spotted something far more intriguing: in the top right corner, there appeared to be a bat carrying a bird in its mouth. For most people, this might not mean much. But for the ecologist Pedro Romero-Vidal it set his mind racing,...

A seasonal railway conductor for Tennessee's Incline Railway at Lookout Mountain has been fired after making now-viral comments, wishing riders a happy Independence Day, which triggered some passengers. The conductor, identified as Jack Peterson, is clearly fed up with mass migration policies that are ruining our country. He hilariously told passengers on the Fourth of July, "To the very, very few Americans in here, happy Independence Day." He continued, "To the rest of you, welcome to the greatest country on the face of the planet, and if you disagree, you can leave." It is unclear how many foreigners were on...

A stone disk recovered from a 5,000-year-old tomb has puzzled archaeologists for generations. Its shape looks surprisingly modern, and the debate over what it was actually made for is far from over. © Credit: Alain Guilleux ==================================================================== Found in an ancient Egyptian tomb almost a century ago, the Sabu Disk remains one of archaeology’s most unusual discoveries. Its distinctive shape has sparked countless theories over the years, even though researchers still favor a much simpler explanation. The stone object was discovered in 1936 in the tomb of Sabu, an official buried at the Saqqara necropolis during Egypt’s First Dynasty. Dating...

The near-Earth Object 2009 FD, as seen by the ESO's Very Large Telescope (Image Credit: ESO) Every year, more than 5,000 tons of material with cosmic origins lands on Earth’s surface, with as much as 15,000 tons of this “space dust” making its way into the atmosphere but vaporizing during reentry. The resulting rain of micrometeorites that reaches our planet consists mostly of tiny objects anywhere from 30 to 200 micrometers in size, based on past studies. But what are the origins of these large volumes of material that accumulate over time as they shower the Earth throughout the year?...

[Translated from Dutch] We fell off our seats when we received the following video. It turns out to be a video of Kunstencentrum KAAP from Bruges and Ostend. That arts center ‘deserves’ 68% of its turnover by simply reaching out its hand to the Flemish Government, which then invests 2 million euros every year. With that 2 million euros, KAAP organizes, really, you hold on, “decolonizing” dance projects. You will see an example of such a ‘decolonizing’ dance in annex. Have we become collectively mad or what? No, but really, seriously, the Flemish Government is losing! There is money short,...

The Case for America takes on one of the most contested legal battles in modern American history - the true story of January 6th. Host Treniss Evans is joined by attorney Roger Roots and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Raiklin to dismantle what they call a five-year government narrative built on the word "insurrection." Roots argues the DOJ systematically overcharged and over-sentenced J6 defendants with felony charges unprecedented in American history, while filing a sweeping 90-plus-page civil complaint on behalf of hundreds of Jers. Raiklin says the statute of limitations on that testimony expires in just three weeks, and he's...

Premiums Could Jump More Than One-Third Over Two Years—Middle-Income Enrollees Face the Full Costs Without Enhanced Credits, Even as Existing Federal Subsidies Shield Most from Further Increases =================================================================== ACA Marketplace insurers are proposing a median premium increase of 14% for 2027— indicating a likely second consecutive year of double-digit increases, according to a new analysis of preliminary rate filings in 16 states and DC. If these increases hold, typical premiums for insurers participating in the ACA Marketplaces would jump by more than one-third between 2025 and 2027. Across the 77 ACA Marketplace insurers in the 16 states and DC that...

A sprawling global web of gangsters targeted in a massive federal takedown used California as its cash register to rake in millions of dollars through extortion schemes, contract killings, and drug and gun trafficking, authorities revealed. Local and federal officials on Tuesday arrested 11 accused members of transnational, India-based gangs and their affiliates in the Golden State as part of a case dubbed “Operation Hard Ball.” Los Angeles’ top federal prosecutor, Bill Essayli, described the gangs as the most powerful you’ve never heard of, allegedly reaping millions of dollars in illegal profits from drug deals, extortion, weapons sales and theft....

If they were visible to the naked eye, these structures would be huge in the sky. Image Credit: UCLan/Stellarium ========================================================================= The cosmological principle states that, on the largest scales, the universe is uniform and isotropic. In other words, it should look broadly the same no matter where you are or which direction you look. You would not expect to find a single enormous structure in one particular region of the sky. Finding two in relatively close proximity is even more surprising. Five years ago, researchers discovered the Giant Arc, a vast crescent of galaxies stretching 3.3 billion light years across...

The Chinese Tianwen-2 mission has captured the first imagery of a space object that some astronomers are calling Earth’s “quasi-moon.” The object was captured in images released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), after its Tianwen-2 spacecraft reached the tiny asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa. Initially discovered in 2016, the asteroid became the target of a sample return mission launched by China on 28 May 2025. Officially the CNSA’s second mission under its Planetary Exploration of China Program, Tianwen-2 aims to return close to 100 grams of samples from the surface of the small object. Earth’s Mysterious Quasi-Moons Quasi-moons are the...

Now they turn on Nazi-tattooed alleged rapist Graham Platner? After all these months of defending him and making excuses — knowing full well what a repugnant dirtbag he is? Let’s be honest: At this late date, the accusation that Platner raped an ex-girlfriend should shock absolutely no one. And that it took so long for Dems to cut him off speaks volumes. Indeed, the only reason they’re deserting him now is not that they’ve finally grown a moral spine; it’s that they fear his grotesque character won’t fly with normal voters. Not only would a continued Platner campaign for Maine’s...