Free Republic

“Bee” on alert. Roughly 250 million bees escaped into the wild when a commercial semi-truck rolled over in Washington state, prompting officials to warn locals to stay away from the area. The truck was hauling 70,000 pounds of honey bee hives when it overturned in a rural part of Whatcom County, just north of Seattle near the Canadian border, around 4 a.m. Friday, according to the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office.

The British economy continues to struggle under PM Keir Starmer, the military is depleted and a pension crisis is on the horizon, but there is one area where the UK is exceeding expectations. Starmer’s UK has achieved levels of political prisoners not only resembling but occasionally even outdoing those of Communist dictatorships like Cuba, Venezuela and even China. Freedom House estimated that Cuba has 2,768 political prisoners, Venezuela has 1,953 political prisoners, and thousands more in China. Starmer’s regime and an enthusiastic police force have easily outdone these backward Communist regimes by arresting over 1,000 people a month for social...

Some of the biggest U.S. airlines are quietly charging solo travelers more than passengers who book as a pair.. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines have added new fare rules that in some cases require passengers to book at least two tickets to access the cheapest fares. That means solo travelers could end up paying as much as 70 percent more for the same flight. ... On a short United hop from Chicago O'Hare to Peoria, Illinois, a single ticket cost $269. But the same ticket dropped to $181 per person when booking two travelers. In some cases,...

The United States should stockpile guns, ammunition and drones instead of bitcoin, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Friday at the inaugural Reagan National Economic Forum in California. "We shouldn't be stockpiling bitcoins," Dimon said when asked about how industrial policy is entwined with national security policies during a panel. "We should stockpiling guns, bullets, tanks, planes, drones, you know, rare earths. We know we need to do it. It's not a mystery."

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called on former first lady Jill Biden to “answer for” her role in the massive cover-up of her husband’s declining mental aptitude, accusing her of still “lying to the American people.” Leavitt unleashed her fiery tirade against the wife of former President Joe Biden while speaking to reporters on Thursday: “I think, frankly, the former first lady should certainly speak up about what she saw in regards to her husband… Because I think anybody, looking again at the videos and photo evidence of Joe Biden, with your own eyes and a little bit of...

President George W. Bush famously underestimated Vladimir Putin. Asked about his impressions of the Russian president, the then-US president claimed that he had “looked into Putin’s eyes” and “saw his soul.” His secretary of state, Colin Powell, said that he, too, had looked into Putin’s eyes “and I saw the KGB.” Bush found out what was behind Putin’s eyes a little too late. Toward the end of Bush’s second term, in 2008, Putin’s Russia invaded the neighboring country of Georgia... Ever since Putin repeated his Georgian maneuver on a much grander scale in Ukraine in 2022, there are still people...

A bipartisan group of more than 130 retired judges filed a brief Friday urging a federal court to drop charges against Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan, saying her arrest undermines "centuries of precedent on judicial immunity." Dugan, a Milwaukee County circuit court judge, was arrested April 25 by FBI agents on federal allegations she prevented the arrest of a man by immigration authorities during a federal law enforcement operation at her courthouse. The man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, was arrested and detained at an immigration detention center. In an amicus brief filed Friday, the group of judges argue that Dugan shouldn't be prosecuted...

During the Biden administration, conservative challengers won Supreme Court victories that limited the president’s power to craft policy in matters from student-debt relief to air pollution. Now, those precedents are returning to haunt one of their greatest champions: President Trump. On Wednesday, a specialized federal court in New York invalidated the worldwide tariffs Trump imposed to address a range of issues on his agenda, from international trade imbalances to cross-border trafficking of fentanyl. The unanimous decision by the U.S. Court of International Trade relied in part on the “major questions” doctrine, which the Supreme Court adopted in 2022 to bar...

Despite all the excuses and finger pointing, liberals/socialists don’t think that they lost the last election -- they think that the people just voted wrong. As Lenin said: “People always have been and they always will be stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics.” To influence these people, Lenin said: “We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.” We have seen this tactic repeated in the negative stories about Trump and his supporters over the past decade. This is where totalitarianism starts. It ends...

As Clint Eastwood turns 95, is the America that made him slipping away?

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the Supreme Court is allowing the government "to do what it wants" in a scathing dissent, after justices allowed the Trump administration to strip temporary legal protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Supreme Court justices lifted a lower-court order that kept humanitarian parole protections in place for more than 500,000 migrants from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The court has also allowed the administration to revoke temporary legal status from about 350,000 Venezuelan migrants in another case. Jackson said the decision "allows the government to do what it wants to do...

In the olden days, the world was run on a feudal system. There were a handful of mostly inter-related nobles who lived in palaces, wore fancy clothes, and ate sumptuous food. They were served by a large class of serfs who did the unpleasant things like digging latrines, plowing fields, slaughtering animals, tanning leather, and all of the other work needed for the nobles to live in luxury. In return, the nobles kept the serfs from starving but generally oppressed them and sometimes did so gratuitously for their own amusement. Serfs had no rights and very little money and were...

Just two weeks into his new role as the top elections official in Shasta County, Clint Curtis abruptly fired the county’s most veteran elections official. Curtis, an out-of-town lawyer who will now handle the elections in the northern California county, shocked the community when he was appointed the interim county registrar of voters in early May. He will temporarily serve in the role until the 2026 election. Despite the transitional nature of his job, he’s still making big changes. Barely a month into the job, Curtis handed Joanna Francescut, the former assistant county registrar of voters, a termination letter. Curtis...

A Secret Service whistleblower claims that former President Joe Biden was so out of it at the White House that he would “get lost in his closet,” Sen. Josh Hawley revealed Friday. The stunning level of disorientation is an example of why the Democratic cover-up of Biden’s mental decline is one of the biggest scandals in presidential history, Hawley argued. “This Secret Service whistleblower actually was assigned to Biden,” the Missouri Republican told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “He told me that Biden used to get lost in his closet in the mornings at the White House,” Hawley claimed, noting...

Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump… Truss? Cockburn was surprised to hear from across the Pond that Liz Truss – who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom for just 49 days – had plans to set up a social media site. “What I am doing is establishing a new free speech network, which will be uncensored and uncancellable, to actually talk about the issues people don’t want to talk about,” the former PM said at a conference in England last month.The move would see Truss compete with X, Parler, Gettr, Gab and, yes, Truth Social, Trump’s social media app. How will...

A community in Florida is rallying around a disabled veteran after the homeowners association told him he had to take down an American flag on a flag pole in his yard. What are the people in the homeowners association even thinking? Who tells a disabled veteran to take down the flag that he fought for and became disabled defending? Shame on these people. They even filed a lawsuit over this. .... Disabled veteran fights homeowners association lawsuit over flagpole in Florida yard A disabled veteran in Volusia County, Florida, is at the center of a heated dispute with his homeowners...

Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani surged to within single digits of disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary race, according to newly released polling. According to a PIX 11/Emerson College poll released earlier this week, Mamdani, a 33-year-old Muslim from Queens who is a state assemblyman, trails Cuomo 54.4% to 45.6% after 10 simulated rounds of ranked-choice voting, a notable improvement from late March when Cuomo was ahead 38% to 10%. “Cuomo has led in the polls since early 2025, but Mamdani has surged, gaining 23 points and winning second-choice votes nearly 2-to-1,...

Researchers warn that misclassification could deprive women of the emergent care they need for the serious adverse events linked to abortion.The likelihood that a woman seeking emergency care for a potentially life-threatening complication following an abortion will have her abortion misclassified as a miscarriage has increased significantly over the last decade, a new peer-reviewed study from the Charlotte Lozier Institute found. The study’s nine authors warn that more misclassification, often due to deliberate concealment of a drug-induced abortion, could deprive women of the emergent care they need for the serious adverse events linked to abortions, more specifically those involving mifepristone....

With the Trump administration back in the White House, America has an opportunity to restore commonsense energy and manufacturing policies after years of radical environmental overreach. One of the most glaring examples of this overreach is the electric vehicle (EV) push -- a movement championed by progressive elites that, under the guise of sustainability, threatens to undermine national security, weaken domestic industry, and entangle our economy further with the Chinese Communist Party.The EV revolution is not a grassroots innovation born out of market demand. It is a politically engineered shift, heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars and driven by mandates from...

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republican Sen. Joni Ernst was met with shouts and groans when she said “we all are going to die” as she addressed potential changes to Medicaid eligibility at a town hall in north-central Iowa on Friday.