Free Republic

A once-in-a-century crater formed on the moon right under our noses. A routine search of images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera found a fresh crater as wide as two American football fields, planetary scientist Mark Robinson reported March 17 at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Meeting in The Woodlands, Texas. The crater is 225 meters wide and formed in April or May 2024, Robinson said. According to predictions based on other lunar landmarks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years. The discovery can help highlight the risks impacts pose to future astronauts. One of the...

Deadbeat drivers left nearly $350 million in tolls unpaid in 2025 — more than double the annual total from three years earlier, a new MTA analysis estimated. The staggering figure comes after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority adopted a “cashless” system — with officials now looking turning for the state to pass legislation that would take extreme measures in some cases, like allow the agency to put liens on the property or bank accounts of scofflaws. “Preliminary data for 2025 indicate that upward trend has continued, and interventions adopted in 2024 have not gone far enough to mitigate impacts of persistent...

WASHINGTON — Security lines at the world’s busiest airport stretched for five hours on Sunday as the TSA crisis escalated over the weekend. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy predicted that massive waits at airports across the country are about to “get much worse” due to the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. Lines stretched around the building at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Monday. And TSA agents told travelers that the wait for some areas at the airport — which handled 106 million travelers last year — was five hours, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Nearly 400 TSA workers...

Alleged Iranian spies with ties to regime bigwigs have been charged with infiltrating Silicon Valley. Last month, a federal grand jury indicted three Iranian software engineers for allegedly stealing trade secrets from tech companies, including Google. Two of the suspects are sisters, Samaneh Ghandali, 41, and Sorvoor Ghandali, 32. They were charged alongside Mohammadjavad Khosravi,40, who is Samaneh’s husband, with allegedly using their employment at unidentified technology companies to “obtain access to confidential and sensitive information,” according to the Department of Justice. The tech workers then allegedly “exfiltrated confidential and sensitive documents, including trade secrets related to processor security and...

A statue of Christopher Columbus was installed on the grounds of the White House early Sunday morning, as part of President Trump’s effort to position the explorer as a hero after monuments to him were removed across the country.The statue is a replica of one that protesters in Baltimore tore down and dumped into the city’s Inner Harbor in the summer of 2020. The statue’s marble pieces were retrieved from the harbor, and a Maryland artist used them to guide the creation of the replica.The new statue was erected sometime overnight on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office...

“And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.” (Mt 17:1-2) When Jesus took Peter, James, and John to a high mountain to show them this amazing moment where he was transfigured and glowed with such brilliance that he outshined the sun, Peter’s reaction was very earthly. Peter wanted to build tabernacles in places where people could come and worship where this event took place. It’s almost...

Cuba’s communist dictatorship may be living on borrowed time as the island’s power grid crumbles — but the Democratic Socialists of America is making “solidarity” with the regime its issue of the moment. On Friday, the DSA sent 20 of its members there as part of the lefty “Nuestra América Convoy,” aiming to “show the world that Cuba is under siege, but they are not alone.” They relaxed in luxury Havana hotels and rode in air-conditioned buses to meetings with Communist Party officials. A wrecked economy and a grim 67-year history of repression that’s made more than a million Cubans...

A new statue of Christopher Columbus went up on the White House grounds Sunday that was built using pieces from a monument to the Italian explorer that protesters destroyed six years ago. The 13-foot, one-ton replica of a Columbus statue toppled in Baltimore in 2020 – then dumped into the city’s inner harbor – was commissioned by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations and is part of the White House’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. The statue has been placed outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Artists retrieved shards of marble belonging to the wrecked statue from...

(Mar. 20, 2026) — Author’s Note: If parents have existing foreign citizenship, the 14th Amendment ‘born in the United States’ citizenship at birth clause DOES NOT APPLY to their children. WHY? Because the child already has the citizenship of their parents. The 14th Amendment was drafted from the 1866 Civil Rights Act to ‘cure’ stateless children whose parents had no nationality to confer, NOT to create ‘dual’ or ‘hybrid’ citizens which is a Conflict of Law. Modern nationality law began in the 1700’s, changing with the age of exploration, colonization, and the decline of feudal monarchies. The jus feudalis ‘feudal’...

A California sheriff and top Republican candidate for governor seized over 650,000 votes from the state’s November elections this weekend. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco launched an investigation into the state’s November 2025 special election on Proposition 50 after a third-party organization, the Riverside Election Integrity Team, claimed it found roughly 45,000 excess votes. California elections officials have dismissed the team’s findings, but Bianco says his office will conduct another count. “This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded,” Bianco told reporters at a Friday press conference. Proposition 50 was a...

Lindsey Graham on Kharg Island: "We did Iwo Jima. We can do this."

https://larrys.substack.com/p/a-short-musical-bio Sometime in the late 1970s I abruptly became a history professor. Prior to that, I was a rocker who was "almost famous." Here is a little of my drumming bio, experiences, and influences.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just dropped some new merchandise referencing a line from a hearing related to the Epstein files. Upon learning that Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert leaked a photo of her there, she stormed out, expressing that she didn’t care if the panel held her in contempt. “You can hold me in contempt from now until the cows come home,” she said. While this played well with her fans, some find the related merch distasteful. Hillary Clinton’s Epstein hearing merch Footage from the late February hearing started spreading on social media last week. As Clinton answered questions...

Ecclesiastes says there is nothing new under the sun, and while the transgender movement may feel new and modern, it echoes a cult from ancient Rome—during a “culture war” not dissimilar from our own, according to the detransitioner Forrest Smith. The cult of Cybele or the Magna Mater, an ancient Roman “mystery religion,” highlighted effeminate men and even included the story of a man getting castrated in a religious ritual. “I learned about this because it was a piece of rhetoric within my former community that trans people have always existed,” Smith—a man who identified as a woman and went...

Former Clinton aide and Democratic strategist Paul Begala said the Democratic Party has drifted toward becoming a "faculty lounge," criticizing what he described as growing elitism within its ranks. During an appearance on "Real Time with Bill Maher" Friday, Begala discussed how Democrats’ election strategy has evolved, and Maher referenced California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent comment that the party needs to be more "culturally normal" to win. In a February interview with CNN, Newsom said Democrats should be "less prone to spending disproportionate amount of time on pronouns, identity politics." "We used to be the party of the factory floor,...

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing furious backlash after breaking his Ramadan fast with Muslim jailbirds on notorious Rikers Island – and describing it one of his “most meaningful evenings” since taking office. “It was a night that will stay with me for quite some time,” the city’s first Muslim mayor gushed Friday on X about his under the radar and historic visit on Monday, which by Saturday sparked a firestorm of outrage. Earlier in the week, the soft-on-crime socialist told NPR of his Rikers powwow: “This is one of the most meaningful evenings that I’ve had as the mayor...

Gov. Hochul was fittingly ridiculed last week for urging wealthy New Yorkers who fled the state for Florida to return and bring their rich friends with them. “We need your money” was the gist of her plea. She has zero chance of success. The rich didn’t get rich by being so easily duped, but Hochul had to know that. So why did she decide to make a fool of herself? It’s not because she’s dumb, but because she thinks voters are — and that they have short memories. After all, this is the same Hochul who, during her 2022 campaign,...

Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra docuseries has caused an immense storm of controversy surrounding its depiction of Cleopatra VII Philopator as a black woman, and whilst Cleopatra herself was not black, there were indeed black pharaohs who ruled over Egypt at one point in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. The 25th Dynasty, also known as the Nubian Dynasty, or Black Pharaohs, ruled Egypt between 744 BC and 656 BC as part of the wider Kushite Empire. The 25th Dynasty originated from the city-state of Napata in Nubia, in what is today Sudan. The Nubian Kushite civilization, from whom the 25th Dynasty...

A newly revealed surveillance video from the night of Jeffrey Epstein’s death shows the prison guards casually milling about only a few feet from the cell where he killed himself. Correctional officers Tova Noel and Michael Thomas are seen lounging in front of the officer station in the Special Housing Unit of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center at around 3:15 a.m., both writing on a piece of paper, walking back and forth and talking on the phone — instead of conducting the mandatory 3 a.m. rounds, according to video unearthed in the trove of DOJ documents recently released. Epstein was just...

Two more nations signed on to a letter Saturday strongly condemning Iran’s partial blockade of the Strait of Hormuz – isolating the Islamic Republic diplomatically as it seeks to apply maximum economic pressure by bottling up oil shipments. The two latest to join are Australia and the United Arab Emirates – one of Iran’s Gulf neighbors who has been bombarded with missile attacks from Tehran – bringing the total to 22 countries. Earlier signatories were the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan, whose Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told reporters Thursday that she informed President Trump what her country...