Free Republic

The U.S. private sector lost 33,000 jobs in June, according to new data from payroll-processing firm ADP, marking a sharp reversal from expectations of continued employment growth and raising fresh concerns about the labor market’s trajectory. Economists surveyed by Econoday had forecast a gain of 103,000 jobs for the month. Instead, the report released Wednesday morning showed the first monthly decline in private-sector employment since January 2021. Manufacturing, which had been a weak spot in the labor market, added a solid 15,000 jobs. Construction added 9,000 jobs. Natural resources and mining, which includes oil and natural gas extraction, added 8,000...

AI-driven ­vehicles stand the chance of being hijacked by terrorists and used to deliver mass casualty attacks without the need for a suicide bomber, a U.N. report warns. The report, Algorithms and Terrorism: The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence for Terrorist Purposes, details ways emerging AI technologies could be weaponised by extremists and was first covered by The Times. Self-driving cars, drones and other automated systems to target crowded public spaces could all be seized and remotely controlled by terrorists to deliver deadly consequences in crowded public spaces. U.N. Report Warns Terrorists Could Weaponize Driverless Cars as ‘Slaughterbots’ LOS ANGELES,...

Executives with Disney and ABC News have reportedly asked The View hosts to tone down their bashing of Presdient Donald Trump and political rhetoric overall. While The View hosts have never shied away from bashing Trump and Republicans in general, executives within the company have reportedly grown weary with the show’s over-emphasis on politics, feeling that it has strayed from its original inception as a talk show for women. According to the Daily Beast, two sources confirmed that Disney CEO Bob Iger and ABC News President Almin Karamehmedovic recently held a meeting with The View hosts and executive producer Brian...

A bombshell report out of Stanford University shed light on the influence of spies from the Chinese Communist Party that the student newspaper says have likely infiltrated the prestigious institution and other universities nationwide to gather intelligence. The report, published by the Stanford Review, tells the story of a Stanford student working on sensitive research at the school – and given the name "Anna" to protect her identity – receiving unexpected messages from a man with the alias Charles Chen asking about seemingly harmless topics like networking opportunities. Those messages soon took a "strange turn," according to the outlet when...

A recent survey reveals that over 40 percent of Tesla owners say they have experienced vandalism targeting their vehicles, but less than 20 percent regret buying a car from Elon Musk. Kelley Blue Book reports that a new study conducted by Guardian Service, a company specializing in helping consumers find insurance plans, has found that a significant portion of Tesla owners are facing vandalism and targeted hostility. The survey, which polled 508 Tesla owners, aimed to shed light on how these incidents, coupled with rising insurance costs, are reshaping the EV ownership experience in America. According to the findings, 40...

Wall Street kicked off Friday with another brutal stretch of losses driven by President Trump’s new tariffs despite stronger than expected March jobs data. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down more than 1,200 points shortly before 10:30 a.m. EDT Friday, a day after the market suffered its worse single-day of trading in five years. The S&P 500 index was down 3.6 percent, and the Nasdaq composite was down 3.5 percent. All three major indexes took serious losses Thursday, the first full day of trading after Trump’s announcement of up to $600 billion in new import taxes. The scale and...

Stocks ended the with with steep losses after new federal data showed prices rising faster than expected, reigniting inflation fears on Wall Street. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 715 points on the day, falling 1.7 percent. The Nasdaq composite lost 2.7 percent and the S&P 500 index fell 2 percent. The stock slide began shortly after the Commerce Department released data showing an unexpectedly steep increase in consumer prices. The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index rose 2.5 percent over the past year, but 2.8 percent without food and energy prices included. On a monthly basis, the...

It’s a big score for the north shore. Nearly a dozen affluent Nassau County enclaves on the Gold Coast, or just a few miles south, made a newly released list of the best places in the US to raise a family. Kensington, a neighborhood on Manhasset Bay near the Queens border, placed second in the nation out of 18,084 towns in Niche’s 2025 rankings. The small but elite section of Great Neck — it has a population under 1,500 — trailed only the Philadelphia suburb of Chesterbrook and earned top marks for its overall safety and high-performing public schools.

Senate Republicans may not be able to pass President Donald Trump’s border security, energy, and tax agenda until July at the earliest due to internal differences, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) reportedly warned. Thune has told fellow Republicans in the Senate that he wants a budget resolution moved forward in the “next work period” before the April recess, but added that the “finished product” is still months out from completion, a source told the Hill. “Thune and others have said they don’t think it’s realistic we’ll move the finished product until the end of July,” another Republican senator said...

It feels more like two years than two months that the frenetic Trump administration has been in power, and, by extension, the dithering and shambolic Biden administration seems ancient history. But a new study from the Media Research Center (MRC) detailing the widespread censorship of Americans by former President Joe Biden is a sobering reminder of how close we recently came to losing our most basic freedom. The shocking report exposes no fewer than 57 initiatives by the Biden White House to censor the speech of American citizens. These initiatives spanned an incredible 93 separate government agencies. The most egregious...

ICERAID.US, a new interactive app operating on the blockchain, now lets everyday American citizens to report illegal immigrants and illegal activity in real-time. According to their website… “ICERAID is a GovFi protocol that delegates intelligence gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies. ICERAID rewards citizens for capturing and uploading images of criminal illegal alien activity as well as 6 other categories of criminal activity to the ICERAID Explorer. The more images and locations you upload, the more ICERAID you earn.” Founder and Lead Architect at AuditChain Labs @JasonMeyersNYC explains to @MattGaetz the functionality of...

Ukraine’s future membership of the NATO alliance may play the role of both carrot and stick to encourage more civilised behaviour from Russia in future, a report claims. Unfortunately for Ukraine itself, which makes a great deal of wanting to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to guarantee itself against future Russian aggression, it now seems all but impossible as war peace talks begin. While Russia is obviously against the idea, the United States is also reluctant under President Trump, just as it was under President Biden. Even European states, who are generally the most enthusiastic backers of Kyiv...

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., faced widespread mockery after launching a tipline to “expose corruption, abuses of power, and threats to public safety.” On Monday, Schumer shared a link calling on “whistleblowers” to report violations, arguing they “are a vital part of Congressional oversight to hold the administration accountable.” The categories whistleblowers can report include “retaliation,” “wasteful spending,” “fraud,” “criminal activity,” and “other.” “Today, I’m calling on our brave public servants,” the Senate Majority Leader wrote as he shared the tipline form on X. “I’m launching a new portal for anyone who wants to expose corruption, abuses of power,...

The US Department of Defense is developing plans to withdraw all US troops from Syria, NBC News reported on Wednesday, citing two US defense officials. President Donald Trump and officials close to him recently expressed interest in pulling US troops out of Syria, leading Pentagon officials to begin drawing up plans for a full withdrawal in 30, 60 or 90 days, the report added.

Elon Musk, director of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and his staff are sleeping in the federal personnel office to save taxpayers about $1 billion a day, a person familiar with the situation told the New York Times. Sleeping in office buildings is not unusual for Musk, who deployed the same cost-saving measure at Twitter and Tesla. “Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend, so it’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days!” Musk posted on X over the weekend. “Working the weekend is a superpower.”

British government estimates have claimed that nearly a tenth of all English farmland will need to be ‘rewilded’ by 2050 to hit green agenda targets. Projections in the government’s “land use framework” said that approximately 760,000 hectares, or around nine per cent of agricultural land in England, will need to “change away from agricultural land for environmental and climate benefits,” the Financial Times reports. The government report said that to meet climate goals, an additional nine per cent of agricultural land would need to adopt so-called ‘sustainable’ farming practices.

The birthright citizenship debate exploded back into the national discourse this week after President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning it. Trump's ban was slated to take effect on Feb. 19, but a federal judge in Seattle on Thursday temporarily blocked the order. Some experts believe the issue will eventually be settled by the Supreme Court. Should the ban eventually go into force, it would likely impact tens of thousands of children born to the parents of illegal immigrants. The Center for Immigration Studies, a non-profit research organization that focuses on immigration, said Friday that based on its preliminary...

The administrative state is petrified that President Donald Trump will fulfill his promise of purging the government of rogue and corrupt actors within the “deep state.” Many establishment media outlets reported Wednesday about Trump’s early stages of the purge with more than 1,000 firings, raising hopes among America First voters that the federal bureaucracy will be accountable to their new boss, who won a landslide election. “Bureaucracies hate the American people,” Trump’s OMB nominee Russ Vought previously told Tucker Carlson. “The American people currently are not in control of their government, and the President hasn’t been either.”

U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday allowed the release of the volume of special counsel Jack Smith’s report dealing with President-elect Trump’s efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power. In a five-page ruling, Cannon denied an effort by Trump and his two co-defendants in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to block the release of both volumes of the report, noting that prosecutors argued the election inference report has little to do with the ongoing trial against the two men. “Based on these representations, the Court sees an insufficient basis to grant emergency injunctive relief as to Volume I,”...

(NEXSTAR) — While the national housing supply recently reached a four-year high, buying a home in some U.S. cities may be especially difficult in 2025, a new Zillow report suggests. To make its predictions, Zillow reviewed multiple factors — including how quickly homes have been selling, and its own forecast for home value growth — in the 50 most populated cities nationwide. Overall, Zillow’s analysis determined cities primarily on the East Coast could have the hottest housing markets of 2025. For the second year in a row, Buffalo, New York, held the top spot on Zillow’s list. The company pointed...