Free Republic

the 79-year old comic channels the satirist Jonathan Swift and offers a dozen “modest proposals” for the manifesto of the socialist organization “In our Socialist America, everyone will be so fulfilled spiritually and financially that the police department will be dramatically reduced to where an officer’s only job will be to adjudicate domestic disputes.” “Toward that end, stands will be set up at local farmers markets, where they will work to resolve marital issues in a folksy, farm-to-table manner,” he writes. He rapidly progresses to more outlandish ideas, including national paid leave for the death of pets, mandating that employers...

Senior defense officials Friday confirmed reports that al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan are distributing leaflets offering rewards of up to $100,000 for Americans captured alive. "I think it confirms what we've been saying and that is that Afghanistan remains a very, very dangerous place," Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S.-led coalition, told Pentagon reporters in a video link-up from U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla. U.S. forces found the leaflets last week in eastern Afghanistan, in a region where much fighting has taken place. The leaflets or pamphlets offer $50,000 for an American delivered dead...

The United States wants a reactor on the moon by 2030. A Russian-Chinese alliance is working on one for 2036. Some leading scientists say the danger is great.In late August, NASA asked contractors to prepare to build a nuclear reactor that could survive a space voyage and run without maintenance near the moon’s south pole. That may sound like science fiction, but the agency wants it ready to be launched by December 2030.There is a reason for the rush. Russia aims to have a lunar reactor running by 2036 as part of a secretive partnership with China. NASA has already...

A New York Times tech executive who was allegedly shot dead by his elderly in-laws in California was in a vicious war with them and his estranged wife for being transgender, according to court documents. Jonathan McKinsey’s wife, Candice Jang, filed for a restraining order against him in 2025, and he replied by filing a restraining order of his own.

A tech executive behind the popular New York Times games was allegedly shot dead by his elderly parents-in-law in a brazen broad daylight attack, police say. Shouyong Zhang and Shili Chen, both 77, allegedly fatally shot their son-in-law Jonathan McKinsey, 40, in the parking lot in California on Saturday. McKinsey, the head of engineering for games player experience at the New York Times since 2023, was raced to hospital with multiple gunshot wounds and died at the scene, police say. Witnesses reported seeing two masked shooters approach McKinsey in the parking lot and took turns unloading a barrage of shots...

On Tuesday, he signed a document that paves the way to expanding the U.S. military presence on the island, opening new bases. But it explicitly stops short of conveying any territory to the United States. And no one — especially Denmark, which governs the vast but mostly empty space — wanted to emphasize that point, for fear that Mr. Trump might renounce the agreement he had just hailed as “tremendous for Europe and for the US.” Mikkel Olesen, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, described the final document, which was released Tuesday, as only a moderate improvement...

The New York Times came under fire Wednesday over a baffling passage that appeared in an article about an Israeli documentary — which said the Jewish state “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.” The Sept. 14 article, penned by Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner, covers the controversy over the documentary film “NAZA,” which chronicles the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and just won the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The article details the criticism about the 80-minute film lodged by some Israeli officials — who called it “based on blood libels” and...

Robin Morgan, a prolific feminist writer and radical activist who edited the landmark 1970 anthology “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” served as editor in chief of Ms. magazine for five years and helped organize one of the first protests of the Miss America pageant, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 85. The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her son, the musician Blake Morgan, who is her sole survivor. From the front lines of a much-splintered feminist movement, Ms. Morgan gave voice to women as a poet, journalist, novelist, memoirist, agitator and iconoclast. She came of age in the civil...

New financial reports released this week revealed the depth of the D.N.C.’s financial hole. The party is $2 million in debt, while the Republican National Committee has $128.5 million in cash on hand.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon reported on its casualties website that a total of 18 American service members had been killed during the war in Iran.By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number, reporting that 14 American troops had been killed in the war.Three military officials said that one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list — three in Jordan and one in northern Iraq — because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.The officials described sensitive internal...

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D., Ga.) has spent thousands of dollars in campaign funds on "makeup services" in 2026, and his artist of choice has a long list of Hollywood credits, including The Notebook and The Hunger Games, a Washington Free Beacon review found. Ossoff has paid makeup artist Stephanie Ponder $2,887 for "makeup services" since February, federal campaign finance disclosures show. The most recent payment of $900 came on June 10. An advertisement on the online production crew directory SHOOTS describes Ponder as an Atlanta-based freelancer and member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees who offers "Services for...

The incident, which targeted the computer systems of another company called Hugging Face, happened while OpenAI was testing the systems.OpenAI said on Tuesday that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of A.I. technology that is popular among developers.The incident, which happened last week while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity capabilities of its systems, displayed the kind of science-fiction potential that A.I. companies have warned would soon become a reality.A.I. labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have over the past year released A.I. models that are customized to expose cybersecurity problems,...

A prominent black Big Apple politician compared Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s cronies in the Democratic Socialists of America to white supremacists as a bitter rift among Democrats spilled out onto social media. Queens Borough President Donovan Richards went in on the DSA’s longstanding complaint among minority lawmakers of ignoring race in its crusade to grow its ranks and dismantle capitalism. “White supremacy comes in all forms,” Richards posted on social media late Sunday. The slap erupted from an debate online after a report in the New York Times that highlighted how the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party focuses on...

When President Trump tried to undermine and overturn the election results in 2020, he ran into stiff pushback — not just in the courts, but from many officials in his own government.He made sure there would be little room for such dissent when he returned to the White House. Those seeking to join Mr. Trump’s second administration had to pass a key litmus test: Did they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump?With like-minded allies now positioned in key roles throughout the government, Mr. Trump has trained the full arsenal of the federal government on one of his...

This is something I haven’t seen noted anywhere–the New York Times is expanding geographically, by adding “local newsletters” for metro areas outside of New York. The first one will be in the Twin Cities: The New York Times is piloting a local newsletter for the Twin Cities. It said: "Our hope is that The Local: Twin Cities can serve as a model for similar future efforts elsewhere around the country" https://t.co/6LvGQxgpZU — Press Gazette (@pressgazette) July 9, 2026Apparently the Times thinks the Star Tribune and other local left-wing news outlets are too weak to get the job done. They could...

Two American allies, Germany and Japan, already have permission to build the American interceptors, a license that President Trump says he will also grant to Kyiv. In 2022, as fears mounted over Europe’s missile defense capabilities against Russian strikes, the Biden administration granted permission for Germany to build a factory to manufacture state-of-the-art Patriot air defense interceptors. That factory has yet to produce a single Patriot — a sign of the time it can take and how difficult it can be to ramp up production of American weapons abroad, even after winning approval from the United States government to do...

From Judge Steven Merryday (M.D. Fla.) today in Trump v. N.Y. Times Co. (for the Complaint in the underlying case, which involves various statements about Trump's early life and business career, "A public figure, perhaps the world's most prominent public figure, whose actions and remarks routinely generate immediate global news coverage, sues a newspaper, perhaps the world's most prominent English-language newspaper, along with the world's largest trade book publisher and three authors. The plaintiff initiates in the Middle District of Florida an action for defamation arising from two articles and a book, researched, written, and edited in New York but...

Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion. The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a $636 million payout on the same crypto bet, part of a haul of at least $2.2 billion from all of his business ventures in 2025. Once a crypto skeptic, Mr. Trump embraced the profit-making opportunity of digital currencies in 2024, while he was running for...

More ignorance from the New York Times: “Without Climate Change, U.S. Heat Wave Called ‘Virtually Impossible.” Heat and humidity as severe, prolonged and far-reaching as this week’s would have been “virtually impossible” in the Northeast and eastern Canada before humans began warming the planet, a team of scientists said on Friday. *** To estimate how much climate change increased the likelihood of this week’s sweltering conditions, the scientists analyzed records of a measurement of heat stress called “wet bulb globe temperature,” a figure that accounts for humidity, wind and direct sunlight. Given that the heat wave is still unfolding, the...

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pressed President Trump earlier to cripple Iran. But as Iran asserted its power, the prince urged a cease-fire, and is now pursuing his security priorities.President Trump and his military commanders were in a bind.They had announced the start of a new mission to help guide commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had effectively closed early in the war. U.S. naval and air power would ward off any Iranian attacks during a tentative cease-fire, the commanders said.But U.S. Central Command was caught by surprise when officials from Saudi Arabia said American forces could...