Free Republic

Restore Britain running in the Makerfield by-election is "good news" for Andy Burnham, Britain's top pollster has said. Professor Sir John Curtice said Rupert Lowe's right-wing party was making life "much more difficult" for Nigel Farage's Reform UK. It comes as a new poll by Survation put Labour in the lead for the crunch ballot with 43% and Reform just behind on 40%, but Restore Britain was third with 7%. Sir John said the by-election, which the Greater Manchester Mayor is using in a bid to return to Westminster to challenge the PM, is "on an absolute knife-edge". He told...

VATICAN CITY—Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision” and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors must be countered. The pontiff’s encyclical letter—a text that is poised to define Leo’s papacy—reads like a sharp warning to Silicon Valley executives and humanity more broadly about the future of civilization as new technologies rapidly advance. The risk, he said, is that humans will be reduced “to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.” Leo used two biblical images to describe the choice humanity faces....

“Today, we remember George Floyd, who was murdered by a former Minneapolis police officer six years ago,” Frey said on X. “That moment changed our city forever. It forced Minneapolis to confront painful truths about race, policing, inequity, and trust — and demanded hard conversations and accountability. Since Floyd’s murder, our city has been challenged not just to say we’ve changed, but to prove it.“ This isn’t Frey’s first foray into pandering for support by propping up Floyd. Astute observers will remember that Frey performatively kneeled before Floyd’s golden casket while weeping back in 2020.

Reform UK’s Nigel Farage has criticised Elon Musk over his support for Restore Britain, warning the tech billionaire will “split the right” in the Makerfield by-election. The Tesla boss posted a series of messages backing Restore Britain on his social media platform X. Labour’s Andy Burnham hopes to use the Makerfield contest to return to Westminster and potentially launch a bid to replace Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister. Reform’s Robert Kenyon came second in the seat in 2024 and an opinion poll suggested Mr Burnham has a lead of just three percentage points over him. But with Restore Britain’s...

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Sunday criticized Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), whom President Trump endorsed over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) in the Senate GOP runoff in the Lone Star State. “He is a failure. He doesn’t deserve to be in the U.S. Senate,” Tillis told host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Trump on Tuesday endorsed Paxton, a firebrand conservative who filed litigation in support of the president’s push to overturn the 2020 election. In endorsing the Texas attorney general over a four-term senator, Trump said Paxton “is a true MAGA warrior” and Cornyn, while...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is pushing back on fellow Republicans who have criticized an emerging deal being negotiated by the Trump administration to end the war with Iran. Paul, who has criticized the war while joining with Democrats to support War Powers Resolution votes to curb President Trump’s actions, said those criticizing Trump should give him room to operate. “War virtually always ends with negotiations,” Paul wrote in a post on X. “Critics of President Trump’s peace negotiations should give President Trump the space to find an American First solution.” Trump on Saturday said the U.S. was getting close to...

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....

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...