Free Republic

- A federal appeals court on Thursday vacated a ruling that ​blocked Mississippi's ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public schools, reassigning the case away from a district court judge who had acknowledged that a key ‌ruling contained AI-generated errors. The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals threw out, opens new tab the preliminary injunction against the state law and reassigned the civil rights lawsuit to a different district judge for further review.

A Florida attorney was arrested after she threatened to shoot ICE agents in the head while trying to buy a gun, federal authorities said. Lisa White, who lives in Mississippi, was arrested in Long Beach after allegedly threatening to "kill federal agents" while attempting to purchase a firearm and pepper spray, according to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement release. Homeland Security Investigations identified White as a Florida attorney in a post announcing her arrest on X. Authorities said White asked whether specific firearms could penetrate ballistic vests, then allegedly said she would target agents heads if she could not...

Senate Democrats’ top super PAC announced Tuesday it is launching a new ad campaign in the Mississippi Senate race, as Democrats seek inroads in Republican-leaning states to try to flip the Senate majority. Senate Majority PAC announced a $1.2 million ad campaign in the state through Election Day, beginning with a 30-second spot that boosts prosecutor Scott Colom as a Democrat who will “fight corruption in both parties” and casts GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith as a “do-nothing” incumbent. “Senate Majority PAC has been watching this race closely, and it is clear Colom is running a competitive race that has put...

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Multiple packs of synthetic Kratom were found at Smoke Plus in Newbern, Tennessee, by the West Tennessee Drug Task Force on Tuesday. Agents say that during an undercover investigation, lab-created Kratom was sold to one of the undercover agents out of the back room. Synthetic kratom, $1 million in cash seized from Memphis wholesaler That is when a search warrant was issued for the smoke shop on 603 West Main Street. The task force seized multiple packs of the drug after the warrant was executed. The drugs were then sent to a lab for testing. The Newbern...

I keep hearing that there's a white supremacy problem in America and that white people are lynching black people in droves. It's so bad, apparently, that the media (and children's YouTuber Ms. Rachel) has spent weeks arguing that black people are getting hanged across the nation for the color of their skin. Anyway ... Why did NBC News leave the mugshots out of their post?? .... If these men are guilty of hanging Tasia Fortune, 29, at an abandoned house in Jackson, the just thing to do would be to execute them by the same manner. Unless the libs would...

The Associated Press should be ashamed. Just two days ago, they were the recipients of a Community Note after their X post conveniently omitted some important facts about the murder of Tasia Fortune.Fortune, of Jackson, Mississippi, was found hanging in a tree. Democrats and the media pretended Fortune's murder was a race-based lynching. It wasn't. On September 14, the AP itself reported that Jarques Ratliff, who was associated with Fortune, was arrested on September 11. Yet on September 21, the AP wrote on X that Fortune's death "stirred distressing memories of the grim history of lynchings across the U.S. South."Now...

Mississippi authorities have arrested a 51-year-old man on a murder charge after an official homicide ruling in the death of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old Black mother of four found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned home last month. The arrest follows weeks of intense media attention and widespread online discussion regarding the circumstances surrounding Fortune’s death in a state with a historic legacy of racialized violence. But law enforcement officials confirmed that the suspect taken into custody is Jarques Ratliff, a Black Jackson resident who had a prior personal connection with Fortune.

The U.S. constitution offers the right to bodily integrity, but that does not include access to clean drinking water, a federal court just ruled in a divisive Mississippi case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a decision to dismiss a lawsuit brought forward by Jackson, Mississippi, residents alleging that city officials knowingly allowed people to drink lead-poisoned water.

Coroner identifies woman found hanging from a tree behind a vacant Jackson home The Hinds County coroner has identified Tasia Fortune as the woman found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in Jackson earlier this week. Jackson police declined to release details that might explain how Fortune, a 29-year-old Black woman, ended up in the manner she was discovered Monday that evoked memories of the South’s history of lynching. The coroner’s office said her family has been notified. Her body was sent to the Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy. LaToni Fortune told Mississippi Today on...

The challenge the entire industry faces is that in every single location, I don't care whether it's Michigan, West Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, if you announce you're doing a data center, all of a sudden you get a plethora of misinformation, like it's three times the size of Manhattan, it's so hot it's gonna melt a hole in the ground, the amount of water it's going to use, it's gonna suck the ocean dry. All of this stuff is just not true. I think as we get the real facts out, we'll turn this around. There seems to be an...

A teenager in Mississippi knew the elderly couple he's accused of killing before sparking a standoff with law enforcement, according to new testimony in court. Cordarius Hobbs, 17, is charged with killing 74-year-old Billy Blair and his 71-year-old wife Virginia Carol Blair during a home break-in on June 3 in Mendenhall, Mississippi. Family members of Hobbs testified during the Thursday preliminary hearing that he knew the couple.

A teen murder suspect was found stomped to death in a Mississippi jail — with a harrowing video capturing him limp and bloodied on the floor. Mielun Butler, 18, was booked in the Hinds County Detention Center on July 1 on a murder charge for the fatal shooting of Melvin Edwards, 32, at the notoriously dangerous Pine Ridge Garden Apartments in Jackson last month. * * * he sheriff said he believed the teenager’s killing could be gang-related. “I think it’s no secret that some of the violence that we have been witnessing in our community has eventually spilled over...

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states can continue counting mail-in ballots sent by, and received within, five days of Election Day - delivering a staggering blow to President Donald Trump on one of his biggest fixations. The high court ruled 5-4 to allow state voting laws that permit the counting of the mail-in ballots to remain in place. Republicans argued it conflicted with federal legislation. 'The federal election-day statutes do not prevent Mississippi from counting absentee ballots postmarked by election day but received up to five days thereafter; nothing in the federal election-day statutes requires ballots to be...

The Communist Party USA has condemned the recent police shooting that killed 1-year-old Kohen Kartier Wiley in Mississippi, saying it stands with those demanding answers and justice for his family. In a statement dated June 23, the party said that “under no circumstances” should theft result in someone being killed. The statement came in response to the death of Kohen, who was killed on June 14 during an officer-involved shooting outside the Walmart on U.S. Highway 51 in Senatobia. A statement from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation that was carried by local media said officers with the Senatobia Police Department...

A 1-year-old boy was fatally shot by a Mississippi cop who fired at a car the tot’s mother and aunt were fleeing in through a Walmart parking lot after allegedly stealing diapers. Kohen Wiley, 1, was killed and another woman in their car was critically injured when a cop opened fire at their vehicle in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, Mississippi. Kohen’s family told WREG that his mother was holding him in the front passenger seat while his aunt drove. It’s not clear if Kohen’s mother or aunt was the woman critically injured. Officers from the Senatobia Police Department...

Who broke Britain? Someone—or something—must have. The past 18 years, enough time for a whole lost generation to be born and brought up, have yielded nothing but stagnation and mass disillusionment. In 2007, before the global financial crisis, Britain was at its postimperial zenith. Median household income had just surpassed that of Germany. A pound was worth more than $2, and London was arguably displacing New York as the center of international banking. But since then, Britain has been left behind. The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead...

On Monday, the Supreme Court issued two brief procedural orders involving Voting Rights Act (VRA) cases — one out of Mississippi, the other out of North Dakota. Neither case was decided on the merits. Instead, the Court "GVR'd" the cases, meaning it granted review of them, vacated lower court rulings, and remanded the cases to the lower courts for further consideration in light of the Court's recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. Despite their brevity, the orders may still have major implications for future VRA lawsuits. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented as to both orders, seemingly out of concern that...

Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves called off a planned special session to redraw the state’s Supreme Court districts, even as he said Mississippi could still revisit its congressional map amid a broader GOP redistricting push in the South. Reeves announced Wednesday that he would cancel the special session scheduled to begin next week, which had been called to address Mississippi Supreme Court districts. Several Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump had pushed Reeves to add congressional redistricting to the agenda as part of a broader effort to create safer Republican seats amid a nationwide redistricting battle. Reeves said the cancellation...

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated the liability order in Mississippi’s state Supreme Court judicial redistricting case. The move comes after the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais where the nation’s highest court struck down Louisiana’s congressional redistricting that added a new majority-minority district, saying that lawmakers relied too heavily on race. The high court’s 6-3 ruling deemed racial gerrymandering unconstitutional as it had been practiced under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2 was being used as the justification for U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock’s order that mandated the redrawing of Mississippi’s...

https://x.com/nicksortor/status/2054018749842293099?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2054018749842293099%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=