Free Republic

If Reform UK wins the next general election, people who earn less than £75,000 ($100,000) and work overtime above a 40-hour week will pay no income tax on the extra hours. The £5bn a year tax cut announcement, made during the crucial Makerfield by-election campaign, will be seen as a direct challenge to Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester. Mr Burnham hopes to oust Sir Keir Starmer if he wins the seat. It appears to be inspired by Donald Trump’s move to scrap tax on tips and is an attempt to make it harder for Labour to define itself...

Public anger has mounted in the United Kingdom over the death of an 18-year-old British student who lay dying in a Southampton street, southern England, after being stabbed four times, only for police officers to handcuff him instead of immediately treating his wounds after his alleged attacker claimed he had been racially abused. Henry Nowak, a first-year accountancy and finance student at the University of Southampton from Chafford Hundred in Essex, was walking home from a night out with football teammates in the Portswood area in the early hours of December 3, 2025 when he encountered 23-year-old Vickrum Singh Digwa....

The internet is forever, people warn. But leading newspaper companies could change that in a burgeoning war against artificial intelligence chatbots. More than 340 national and local news publishers, from The New York Times to The Idaho Statesman, have blocked the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories due to concerns their proprietary content could get gobbled up by Big Tech companies to train AI tools like ChatGPT. That’s according to a new analysis by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, which first reported that leading publishers across the U.S. have cut off access to the digital tool designed to...

Former British health secretary Wes Streeting has labelled the UK's decision to leave the European Union a "catastrophic mistake" as he launches his bid to become the country's next prime minister. Streeting, who quit his Cabinet position earlier this month, has openly called for Keir Starmer to resign as leader, and told reporters on Saturday that he would stand in any leadership race. Speaking at the Labour Party's Progress conference, Streeting also took aim at Brexit. "At the core are three big important choices we have to make as a country that can help us regain our sense of progress,"...

“Progress! Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one?” asked an enraptured Woodrow Wilson in 1913. “No words come more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself, and yet men through many thousand years never talked or thought of progress.” Instead, Wilson claims, they thought only of the past as a golden era, a time in which morality and technology were superior. “Now all that has altered,” Wilson believes. “We think of the future, not the past, as the more...

A fire at a Staten Island dockyard sparked a massive explosion that left 16 people — including 13 firefighters and two emergency medics — hospitalized on Friday, according to the FDNY. The blaze ignited in the basement of a metal building at the rear of the coastal facility in Mariners Harbor around 3:30 p.m., fire officials said. Just over 50 minutes later — well after the inferno at the Richmond Terrace dockyard near Andros Ave. had risen to a two-alarm fire — the building was suddenly rocked by an explosion that fire officials described as “major.” One civilian and two...

The anti-incumbent, anti-Israel fever is set to take out Democrat Rep. Dan Goldman (NY-10). Trust me, no one on the left or the right will be sad to see him go. Goldman was the lead counsel for House Democrats in the first impeachment of President Donald Trump. Goldman infamously decided to pick a fight with Angel Mom Josephine Dunn, who lost her child to fentanyl, and testified before Congress at the impeachment hearing for former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Goldman was as hateful and condescending as usual, but ended up with his tail between his legs.

Police are investigating Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor over potential sex crimes, it is understood. Detectives are keen to speak to a woman who claims she was taken to the former prince's home in Windsor "for sexual purposes". And they are appealing for other potential Epstein survivors to come forward in a complex and potentially expanding inquiry that's expected to last for many months. Andrew remains under investigation and strongly denies any wrongdoing. Police have already spoken to a range of witnesses since the suspect was arrested, on his 66th birthday, in a pre-dawn raid on his new Norfolk home three months ago....

FR CANTEEN MISSION STATEMENT Showing support and boosting the morale of our military and our allied military and the family members of the above.Honoring those who have served before. FReeper Canteen Just Hangin' Cafe Come on in, we're open Need a place just to hang out? This is it. We serve coffee, tea, conversation and music. I'm thinking something cold and tangy. Our AWESOME military, our AWESOME allies, and their families are welcomed and honored here. Remember those who gave all this weekend.No worries in the FReeper Canteen Just Hangin' Cafe. Grab a cup and start a conversation. You...

Starbucks SBUX.O terminated a worker-facing AI program for automating inventory counts this week, nine months after deploying it across its North American stores, according to an internal newsletter reviewed by Reuters and two people with direct knowledge of the situation. The tool was part of CEO Brian Niccol’s efforts to fix the coffee chain’s persistent product shortages that he has blamed for hurting sales. “Starting today, Automated Counting will be retired,” read an internal company newsletter from Monday that Reuters reviewed and verified with two employees. “Beverage components and milk will now be counted the same way you count other...

A team from Vienna and Frankfurt has found a formula describing a strange phenomenon: space and time can form a kind of “crystal” that may turn into a black hole.Alongside the famous gigantic black holes, physics also allows for microscopic versions. They emerge from so-called critical states, when spacetime organizes itself into a regular, crystal-like structure during a process known as critical collapse. A team from Goethe University Frankfurt and TU Wien has now succeeded, for the first time, in describing this phenomenon with an exact mathematical formula using an unusual mathematical trick. Black holes usually form in spectacular events,...

Andy Burnham could lead Labour to victory against Reform in a general election, polling reveals. The survey, carried out by More in Common, found that Labour would get an eight-point boost with Mr Burnham at its helm if he succeeded in his attempt to become the next party leader. The “Burnham bounce” would secure Labour 30 per cent of votes, three points ahead of Nigel Farage’s party which has consistently led the opinion polls since the autumn of 2025. This week, Mr Burnham was selected as Labour’s candidate to fight the Makerfield by-election, where he is tipped to beat Robert...

From the Dayton, Ohio, suburbs to boardrooms in Dallas, the employees fueling AT&T’s next wave of growth aren’t fresh-faced college graduates with expensive four-year degrees. They’re skilled, blue-collar workers ready to get their hands dirty — and AT&T can’t find enough of them. “We need people who know how to actually work with electricity. We need people who understand photonics. We need people who can go into folks’ homes and connect this infrastructure to make it work right,” AT&T CEO John Stankey told CNBC during a recent interview from the company’s Dallas headquarters. “We find that we’ve got to go...

Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican congressman locked in a heated primary battle with a Trump-backed challenger, is fundraising from anti-war, Muslim-American activists, and leftist-aligned PACs. President Trump has called Massie, long a thorn in his side, the “worst Republican Congressman in history”, throwing the weight of his MAGA political machine behind his opponent to oust him.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (AP) — A former assistant principal at an elementary school in Virginia is due in court for trial, accused of ignoring warnings that a 6-year-old student brought a loaded gun to school that was later used to shoot his first-grade teacher. Ebony Parker’s criminal trial is set to start Monday in Newport News, Virginia. Parker is charged with eight counts of felony child neglect, one for each of the eight bullets in the gun that was brought into the classroom of Richneck Elementary schoolteacher Abby Zwerner in January 2023, prosecutors have said. Each count carries a maximum...

BOISE, Idaho — All four crew members ejected safely after two Navy jets collided and crashed on Sunday during an air show at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in western Idaho, officials said. The collision involved two U.S. Navy EA18-G Growlers from the Electronic Attack Squadron 129 in Whidbey Island, Washington, said Cmdr. Amelia Umayam, spokesperson for Naval Air Forces, U.S. Pacific Fleet. The aircraft were performing an aerial demonstration when the crash happened, Umayam said in a statement. The four crew members from both jets safely ejected and the crash was under investigation, she said. The crew members...

MONTGOMERY, Ala. —President Trump in his first term proved a windfall for the Southern Poverty Law Center, the antiracism nonprofit famed for its courtroom wins against the Ku Klux Klan decades ago. In 2017, the same year Trump took office and a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., turned violent, annual contributions and grants to SPLC surged from $50 million to more than $130 million and have remained above $100 million nearly every year since.

"Aria" was 13 years old when she was sexually assaulted by an imam, who told her he was "healing" her. A respected faith leader at a mosque in East London, Abdul Halim Khan would tell young girls and their parents they needed "curing" from "bad spirits". After attacking them, he warned the girls that if they told anyone about the abuse, the so-called cure would be undone, they would be cursed, or that harm would come to them and their families from black magic. "I genuinely believed he had supernatural powers," says Aria, which is not her real name. She...

FBI Director Kash Patel took part in a VIP snorkel outing near the USS Arizona Memorial on his return from official visits to Australia and New Zealand last summer. As you can imagine, Washington's outrage factory fired up like somebody found a second Watergate in a dive bag.

Summary Health Secretary Wes Streeting resigns from Keir Starmer's government, saying he has "lost confidence" in his leadership In a letter to the prime minister, which Streeting published online, he says "where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift". Read the letter in full here Streeting has not yet triggered a leadership challenge - but he tells Starmer "it is now clear that you will not lead the Labour Party into the next general election" He says what comes next should be "a battle of ideas... It needs to be broad, and it...