Free Republic

The Russians have developed the most sophisticated nuclear missile in the history of the world by a very wide margin, and it is specifically designed to be used in a future nuclear war with the United States. The RS-28 Sarmat is an intercontinental ballistic missile that has a maximum speed of approximately 15,500 miles per hour. It is 116 feet tall, and that makes it roughly as tall as a ten story building. It can carry up to 10 metric tons of thermonuclear warheads, and those warheads can destroy an area the size of the state of Texas. We have...

Robert Fooks swung a pickaxe into his kitchen floor to steal a few more inches of ceiling height. Instead, he cracked open a glazed pottery bowl that had been sitting in the earth beneath his 400-year-old Dorset cottage since the English Civil War. Inside sat roughly 1,000 gold and silver coins, untouched since someone buried them in the mid-1640s.The story surfaced after the coins sold at auction in 2024. The hoard lay hidden beneath the kitchen floor at South Poorton Farm until Robert and Betty Fooks decided to lower the ground level during a renovation...The couple bought the property in...

In 1995, a human skull emerged from the Atlantic Ocean and landed on a beach in Longport, New Jersey. More bones followed over the next 18 years, surfacing across three different Jersey Shore towns. For three decades, investigators called the unidentified remains "Scattered Man John Doe." Now, genetic genealogy researchers have given him back his name: Captain Henry Goodsell, a 29-year-old schooner commander who died in a winter storm 181 years ago.The identification, confirmed in April 2025 and announced by the Ramapo College of New Jersey's Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center in May, marks one of the oldest cold cases ever...

A viral X post claims Anthropic’s Claude AI helped recover 5 Bitcoin worth nearly $400,000 after more than a decade of failed attempts. A pile of cryptocurrencies. Unsplash An X user says an AI chatbot helped recover nearly $400,000 worth of forgotten Bitcoin from an old college-era wallet, turning a decade-long crypto nightmare into one of the internet’s strangest comeback stories this week. The user, who goes by “Cprkrn” on X, claimed they regained access to 5 Bitcoin that had been locked away for more than 11 years. The coins were reportedly bought when Bitcoin traded near $250. Today, that...

The 6th Circuit upheld that 158-year-old law, while the 5th Circuit concluded it could not be justified as a revenue measure. If you search for "home still" on Amazon, you will see a wide variety of contraptions designed to separate and concentrate a liquid mixture's most volatile components. Many of them are explicitly advertised as appliances designed to produce alcoholic beverages such as whiskey, brandy, gin, and vodka. But if you bought one of those products with the intent to use it for that purpose, you would be committing a federal felony. The federal ban on home production of distilled...

Whiny New York University students are in an uproar after renowned social psychologist and bestselling author Jonathan Haidt — who has argued that Gen-Zers are coddled and anxious — will deliver their commencement speech. Haidt, a psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business, was chosen by the school to deliver the 2026 graduation address at Yankee Stadium on Thursday — with administrators hailing him as one of the “most consequential scholars of the 21st century.” But an ultra-woke group of student government leaders quickly tried to derail his address, arguing in a lengthy and nonsensical statement that NYU’s selection proves...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has technically been banned from visiting China by its communist government, but he accompanied President Donald Trump on his trip to Beijing on Tuesday using a bureaucratic loophole created by the Chinese to let him in. Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles to Florida who was elected to the Senate in 2011, was one of several congressional representatives banned from traveling to China in July 2020 because they spoke out against China’s brutal oppression of the Uyghur Muslims of occupied East Turkistan. The U.S. had previously sanctioned four Chinese officials for herding the Uyghurs into...

DNA testing has finally revealed that two mysterious individuals -- a young boy and a teenage girl entombed together in a rare Anglo-Saxon double burial -- were brother and sister, according to a report by The Independent. The pair initially drew attention two years ago when they were discovered in Cherington, Gloucestershire, because of the unusual way they were laid to rest. Both children had been placed gently on their sides. The young girl faced her brother and had been propped up in a way, perhaps on pillows, that made it look like she was watching over her younger sibling...

According to a statement released by the University of York, researchers have identified rare traces of dyed purple textiles in two Roman infant burials. Known as Tyrian purple, the extremely costly colorant was manufactured by crushing thousands of murex marine sea snails and was typically reserved for use by emperors, royalty, and members of the aristocracy. However, experts were able to detect its presence on garments wrapped around two small children who died and were buried around 1,700 years ago. Their remains are held in the collections of the York Museums Trust. The dye was identifiable through chemical analysis because...

According to a statement released by the University of Southampton, a crannog in shallow waters in Loch Bhorgastail on Scotland's Isle of Lewis has been evaluated by researchers from the University of Southampton and the University of Reading with a technique called stereophotogrammetry, which involves stitching together photographs taken at different angles to create a high-resolution 3D model. The study determined that the structure began as a circular wooden platform, measuring about 75 feet in diameter, that was topped with brushwood. Neolithic pottery was also discovered in the area surrounding the crannog, enabling archaeologists to date this first construction of...

According to a Herald Scotland report, National Trust for Scotland archaeologists, assisted by volunteers, recovered a piece of copper alloy from a stone structure in Highland Scotland's Ben Lawers National Nature Reserve that may have been used to distill whisky in secret to avoid paying taxes that had been levied beginning in the 1780s. The researchers suggest that the copper part is a piece known in Gaelic as An Gearradan, or the collar connecting a still to its lyne arm, which controlled how much vapor returned to the pot and therefore controlled the flavor of the finished product. The team...

Archaeologists from the University of Haifa have unearthed a 1,600-year-old mosaic with a Greek inscription reading, "Peace on the elders," that may be the earliest evidence of a dedicated institution for the elderly.The discovery was made at the Sussita (Hippos) National Park near the Sea of Galilee, the primary Christian city in the region during the Byzantine period. The mosaic, dating to the late fourth or early fifth century CE, was discovered at the entrance to a public building.According to Dr. Michael Eisenberg, co-director of the excavation project, the finding provides "living proof that care and concern for the elderly......

You get ten questions of current events. I got 8/10 right. See if you really are a 'News Junky'!.............

The ex-hooker who allegedly hired a hitman to kill his Chelsea art-dealer hubby coolly sat in Manhattan federal court Tuesday as prosecutors showed jurors grisly photos of the victim’s bloodied corpse. Daniel Carrera Sikkema, wearing a gray blazer over a white shirt, showed no emotion during opening statements at the kick-off of his trial — even as prosecutors displayed images of the body of his much older estranged husband, Brent Sikkema, who was riddled with stab wounds from the January 2024 killing inside his home in Rio de Janeiro. Federal prosecutors alleged that Sikkema, in his mid-50s, hired Cuban national...

Eric Clapton cut short a concert in Madrid last week after someone in the audience threw an object that struck him in the chest, several news outlets report. Mr. Clapton had just finished performing “Cocaine” at the Movistar Arena last Thursday when someone hurled what appeared to be a vinyl record sleeve. The Clapton fan club Where’s Eric! said the incident occurred during the famed guitarist/songwriter’s first appearance in Madrid in 25 years. Mr. Clapton, 81, was not seriously injured and went on to perform in Barcelona on Sunday.

“Golden Dome” could cost taxpayers $1.2 trillion over 20 years, according to a government report issued on Tuesday. ...Even if the system is built, the report concluded, an adversary like Russia or China that has a large arsenal of nuclear weapons could overwhelm it and some missiles would hit their targets. The budget office report found that the “space-based interceptors” the president envisions — satellites armed with missiles orbiting the planet — would consume about 60 percent of the cost.

WASHINGTON — Former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas lamented the delay in immigration enforcement actions until the final year of President Biden’s term — despite having testified to Congress several times while in office that the US border was “secure.” In an appearance Tuesday at Politico’s Security Summit, Mayorkas discussed aspects of the “broken” immigration system in America, acknowledging that a “low bar” for those expressing “credible fear of persecution” allowed too many migrants into the country during the Biden administration. More than 8 million entered by the start of the 46th president’s final year in office — before Biden...

It’s hard to even imagine now, but immediately after it launched in 2004, there was nothing on the internet cooler than Facebook. It was initially available only to Harvard students, then gradually expanded to students at other elite colleges, giving it an aura of exclusivity that founder Mark Zuckerberg clearly coveted. By the time it opened up to public accounts in 2006, the hype was palpable, paving the way to an explosive initial public offering in 2012. Since those salad days, its trajectory has never been quite the same. Sure, it’s maintained market share with a series of cynical acquisitions...

The XA103 is being built under the U.S. Air Force’s Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion program to improve fuel efficiency, thermal management, and power output. Pratt & Whitney clears major XA103 milestone. Pratt & Whitney Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of RTX, has completed a fully digital assembly-readiness review for its XA103 adaptive engine. This breakthrough is a key step in the U.S. Air Force’s Next Generation Adaptive Propulsion program. With this milestone, the company can now begin ordering hardware and prepare to assemble the first physical test engine later this decade. This review signifies the end of an important design...

Two convicted Chinese spies helped Arcadia’s former mayor become a successful SoCal politician — who secretly took orders from Beijing. Yaoning “Mike” Sun and John Chen helped Eileen Wang win office and secretly reported back to their masters in the People’s Republic of China, according to court documents. Sun took orders from Chen as he served as the campaign manager and business partner of Wang in her successful 2022 run for Arcadia City Council. When Wang won her seat, Chen told Sun to send a report to their PRC masters calling Wang a “new political star.” Wang would “go against...