Free Republic

Imagine you are the parent of a 13-year-old daughter in the Commonwealth of Virginia. You love and care for your child and you and your spouse work two jobs to provide for your family. Life is busy, with work, school, sports, and other recreation. You are an involved and caring parent, but family time is curtailed and, after all, no family is perfect. Occasionally something goes awry and you face a challenge you didn’t expect — this time it’s the fact that your daughter was pregnant. Was. You only know this because you have taken her to the emergency room...

Critics, including parents of athletes, expressed outrage Friday after Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger's administration quietly shut down a rulemaking process that would have required school sports to be divided by sex. The move to end protections for scholastic sports based on sex is the latest development in the debate over whether biological males who identify as transgender should compete in girls' sports. "My jaw dropped when I saw the news," former Del. Kim Taylor, R-Petersburg, told Fox News Digital on Friday. "As a mom of a daughter, I’m furious that protecting the privacy, safety, and opportunities of Virginia’s girls has...

The widow of an elderly Filipino-American man has relived the devastating attack inside a Virginia Walmart which led to the death of her husband. Bert Atienza, 77, died a day after he was suddenly assaulted inside the store on June 7. Erika Mitchell, 42, and Travis White, 44, now face second-degree murder charges, according to court records seen by News 3. Both are being held without bond. A 17-year-old Walmart employee also faces charges for assault and battery, aggravated malicious wounding, and conspiracy to commit a felony, according to the outlet. Josephine Atienza, Bert's wife of 42 years, spoke about...

'What about Tate?' Dave Adamiak, whose son Patrick “Tate” Adamiak has 17 more years left to serve in federal prison, is confused, perplexed and nearing his wit’s end. While he appreciates all the support his son’s case has drawn—there are hundreds of videos and stories chronicled on his “Freedom for Tate” website—Tate remains is prison. To date, there has been no formal move to secure his release—despite the kind words of more than a few elected officials. Adamiak’s family sent a pardon request to Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Justice Department Pardon Attorney Edward J. Martin Jr., along with...

A wealthy Washington, D.C., suburb's public school district is advising teachers not to link 9/11 with radical Islam and to be sure to create "safe spaces" for Muslim students as the nation somberly marks the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. The guardrails in a six-page instructional guide, "25th Anniversary and Commemoration of 9/11" and distributed to teachers, has prompted critics to accuse Fairfax County (Virginia) Public School's liberal leaders of coddling post-9/11 sensitivities rather than teaching history. "It's sort of a vanilla way to do things," retired Navy Vice Admiral Lou Crenshaw, who was...

A Virginia mother of five was convicted of "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" last week for allowing her 5-year-old son to walk from home to a nearby pond to collect goose feathers in their gated community earlier this summer. Karyann Parkinson, a law clerk who was eight months pregnant at the time of the incident, was also placed on a government child abuse and neglect registry, where she will remain for seven years. The judge immediately suspended a six-month jail sentence, but the charge remains. Now her attorney is planning an appeal that's expected to go to trial...

Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones is creating a four-attorney unit dedicated to challenging actions by the Trump administration that his office says exceed federal authority or threaten the commonwealth’s interests. The Federal Accountability Unit will work across the Office of the Solicitor General and Civil Litigation Division and will be led by Deputy Solicitor General Megan Keenan. Jones’ office said the unit will give the Attorney General’s Office permanent staff dedicated to identifying federal actions, responding to them and pursuing litigation. “I have a fundamental responsibility as Attorney General to defend the Commonwealth and protect Virginians when the federal government...

Drive from Buffalo into Genesee County and you will pass fields that have grown corn and soybeans for generations. Soon, thousands of those acres will be covered by steel and glass. New York state is forcing industrial-scale solar plants onto rural communities that never asked for them, and the people who live there are discovering just how little their voice counts when a governor decides differently. The Mandate Behind The Mess.. New York is tearing up rural communities, wiping out wildlife sanctuaries, and burying prime agricultural soil under solar installation in the name of green energy. The root of this...

The Department of General Services (DGS) has been directed to remove all three Confederate monuments and memorials from Capitol Square on Friday, Aug. 28, including one of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, one of Gov. William “Extra Billy” Smith, a former Confederate general and another of Confederate Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire.

A Democratic prosecutor backed by George Soros faces a recall effort after an angel mom urged voters in her county to remove him from office "before another family pays the price." Earlier this year, Stephanie Minter, 41, was stabbed and killed at a bus stop in Fairfax County, Virginia. An illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone, Abdul Jalloh, is accused of killing her. Jalloh had a lengthy criminal record, including convictions for malicious wounding, identity theft, trespassing and assault. He also had a prior charge of forcible rape. The case comes as violent and sexual crime has increased in Fairfax County...

A Reston woman was found fatally stabbed in a parking lot near trails in the Great Falls area Monday morning (Aug. 17), Fairfax County police say. Officers responded at around 7 a.m. to the 8800 block of Georgetown Pike after a community member in the area for a morning run reported seeing a woman “lying unconscious outside her vehicle,” according to Fairfax County Police Department Capt. Jason Chandler, commander of the public affairs bureau. “When officers arrived, they noticed she had trauma to her upper body,” Chandler said. “She was pronounced deceased at the scene.” The FCPD initially publicized the...

NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — The city and Norfolk Police Chief Mark Talbot are named in a pair of related lawsuits over the hiring of a transgender police recruit. The lawsuits, totaling $20 million and filed last week and Monday in Circuit Court, were brought by a current officer on suspension and another officer who was fired earlier this year. Officer Meghan Grabow’s lawsuit alleges she was in a women’s locker room in 2024, when a department recruit she describes as a “biological male self-identified as a woman” entered that locker room. According to the lawsuit, Grabow was in her underwear,...

There’s not much to say here, since the woman posted the full account of the encounter on Facebook. Then the video was uploaded. Jessica Watson just wanted to get her eyebrows done at a salon in Alexandria, Virginia. As is common at these establishments, a conversation started, but when she mentioned her Jewish heritage, the owner of the salon, an Afghan, decided to go full terrorist on her. Jessica got kicked out. I’m nauseated even having to write this, but I won’t be quiet about it. I want my friends—Jewish and non-Jewish—to know what I experienced at a salon in...

For most Virginians, three more years of Governor Abigail Spanberger (D) feels like an eternity. The mom-next-door-turned-radical-Democrat has spent the last seven months shedding her moderate skin and pushing policies that are wildly out-of-step with her middle-of-the-road state. And while voters can’t send her packing any time soon, they can deliver an emphatic rebuke to the historically unpopular governor on two issues that matter most: abortion and marriage. In November, Virginians have a chance to beat back the extremists in Richmond on a pair of ballot initiatives that could turn the Commonwealth into a deep-blue stronghold on core social values....

STERLING, Va. (7News) — Federal immigration agents say a truck that crashed into a Virginia townhome during an enforcement operation was occupied by people who fled as officers were trying to make an arrest. The crash happened around 6:46 a.m. July 22 in the 900 block of Sherwood Court in Sterling. In a statement on Thursday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said officers were having a targeted enforcement operation to arrest what the agency described as a "criminal illegal alien." According to ICE, officers tried to pull over a truck occupied by someone matching the description of the target. The...

A coalition of progressive prosecutors promising to target federal immigration agents has amassed a war chest funded by secret donors with the help of left-wing networks. Legal experts said the arrangement is "terribly corrupt" and blurs the lines between legitimate law enforcement and politically motivated prosecutions. The Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach—or FAFO, an acronym that also stands for "f*ck around and find out" in internet lingo—was formed by two George Soros-funded prosecutors, Philadelphia's Larry Krasner and Mary Moriarty of Hennepin County, Minn., after federal officials shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti as they interfered with...

Culture Jul 13, 2026 Charlottesville's Lee statue melted down, transformed into 'racial diversity' monument "To transform the very material of a monument is to acknowledge that history cannot be erased, but it can be reimagined." Charlottesville's Lee statue melted down, transformed into 'racial diversity' monument Image Libby Emmons Brooklyn NY Jul 13, 2026 4 minute read A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was at the heart of the Charlottesville protests in 2017, followed by the Unite the Right rally where Heather Heyer was killed. The rally was funded in part by the SPLC, which paid for so-called informants...

A Virginia judge informed state officials in a Tuesday letter that a newly passed ban on modern semiautomatic firearms was blocked across the state, citing the potential for a “treacherous patchwork” within Virginia. Shortly after Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed the ban on so-called “assault weapons,” SB 749, into law on May 14, pro-Second Amendment organizations, including the National Rifle Association (NRA), Gun Owners of America (GOA), Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) filed lawsuits seeking to have the ban invalidated on Second Amendment grounds. The letter from Washington County...

Largest U.S. power grid operator PJM ​said on Friday ​it was ​under a federal alert to cut electricity consumption across its territory as ⁠it ‌battled generator outages, massive overloading ⁠on its transmission lines and a surge in air conditioning use from prolonged sweltering ‌heat. PJM said it told utilities to reduce electricity to customers ​who are under contract to reduce consumption during emergencies. PJM serves 67 million people ⁠in the Mid-Atlantic, South and Washington, D.C., area. Spot ‌wholesale electricity prices ‌in northern Virginia, home to the largest collection of data centers in the ⁠world, have surged beyond $2,000 per megawatt...

Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger's efforts to enact a sweeping gun-control agenda have been placed on hold by courts in June, while the state Legislature pushed back the effective date of another law. Since Thursday, judges in Lancaster County and Washington County issued preliminary injunctions preventing enforcement of a ban on modern semiautomatic firearms, while Spanberger had to request that the state Legislature delay the effective date of a ban on carrying such firearms. The National Rifle Association trumpeted their legal success in a Monday evening post on X. "The NRA's world-class legal team delivered a clear, powerful argument demonstrating...