Free Republic

The U.S. State Department is warning travelers about strict new laws in Turks and Caicos Islands that carry a mandatory minimum sentence of 12 years for bringing guns or ammunition to the island. An Oklahoma woman was reunited Tuesday with her young children after being detained for almost two weeks in Turks and Caicos Islands for allegedly violating their strict guns and ammunition law. Her husband is being held in the British Overseas Territory near the Bahamas. Ryan and Valerie Watson, who live in Oklahoma, left for Turks and Caicos Islands on April 7 to celebrate the 40th birthdays of...

Outraged Papua New Guinea academics have slammed President Joe Biden for his 'unacceptable' suggestion that his uncle was eaten by cannibals in the country after his plane was shot down during World War II. Biden implied on two occasions Wednesday that his maternal uncle 2nd Lieutenant Ambrose J. Finnegan had met a grisly end at the hands of cannibals after his plane was shot down by the enemy over New Guinea in 1944. But the White House and official defense records confirmed that Finnegan died when the military plane he was in experienced engine failure and crashed into the Pacific...

Uri Berliner, the veteran NPR editor who accused the outlet of liberal bias earlier this month, announced his resignation on Wednesday. NPR suspended Berliner after he criticized the public radio network in an op-ed and interview with The Free Press. “I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years,” he wrote in his resignation, which he posted to X, formerly Twitter. “I don’t support calls to defund NPR,” Berliner wrote. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a...

NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had "lost America's trust" by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset. Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported. Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner's essay for the online news site The Free Press. It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including...

My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. “You are invited to join the Northeastern community for a special celebration honoring Michael S. Dukakis.” But someone eventually did send it along to me, and tomorrow’s “celebration” will of course be the social event of the season – NOT! M. Stanley Dukakis is 90 years old now, 33 years after his retirement from politics due to ill health – the voters got sick of him. But how can we miss the Duke when he won’t go away? The featured session, as it’s described, is entitled “Succession: Governors’ Reflections on the...

Forget black-tie dinners or summits at picturesque locales. The irascible leaders of some of Latin America’s biggest countries are instead taking a decidedly disdainful approach to diplomatic relations. In a region far from global conflicts, presidents here are instead embroiled in the kind of verbal spats commonly found on schoolyards—a war of words playing out on television and via posts on X. “Ignoramus,” Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, said last week of his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “Fascist,” López Obrador shot back. And Venezuela’s government—never apprehensive about issuing put-downs—had caustic words for those criticizing strongman Nicolás Maduro, who last...

This Easter Sunday is the 33rd anniversary of what the late Sen. Ted Kennedy would soon be describing as his family’s “traditional Easter weekend” in Palm Beach. And indeed it was traditional, in the Kennedy meaning of the phrase, which is to say rape accusations, cruelty and epic drunkenness, not to mention entitlement and depravity of the sort that characterized the entire squalid life of Sen. Ted Kennedy. But before recounting Ted Kennedy’s lost Easter weekend, consider that his fondest dream, our worst nightmare, is finally on the verge of being realized. I refer, of course, to the fundamental transformation...

A 62-year-old man suffering from end-stage kidney disease received a genetically modified pig kidney in an unprecedented transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, a step forward in the effort to help people waiting for organs. The pig kidney was genetically edited by eGenesis, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company, which removed pig genes that can harm people, including the gene that produces a sugar molecule on the surface of pig cells that can trigger the human system to attack pig organs. The company added human genes to try to improve the odds that the patient won’t reject the transplant. The patient,...

OCALA, Fla. (WCJB) - A man was arrested for stealing more than $800,000 from a business owned by John Travolta in Jumbolair Aviation Estates, and Marion County Sheriff’s deputies are putting out a call for his co-pilot. Marion County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Jean Lacruz-Romero, 28, of St. Cloud, on charges of money laundering more than $100,000, organized fraud of property of more than $50,000, and grand theft of more than $100,000 on Friday. They also have an arrest warrant for Jorden Coursey, who is wanted for grand theft. MCSO deputies say on Dec. 29, they made contact with an employee...

In 2021, after Joe Biden had been President for just seven months, I published an article in The Federalist asking, “If Joe Biden’s Team Will Lie About His Dog Biting People, What Won’t They Lie About?” The President himself has now – once again – answered that question with a resounding “Nothing!” WHAT HAS HE DONE NOW? One of the latest examples of this lack of discipline and honesty, is Biden’s testimony in the course of his two-day interview by Special Counsel Robert Hur. To an eye practiced in reviewing the transcript of those interviews and Joe Biden’s fitness for...

Brazil’s federal police accused former President Jair Bolsonaro and his closest aides over allegations they falsified their Covid-19 vaccination records to travel to the U.S. at the height of the pandemic, according to a person close to the investigation. The criminal accusations, which could carry a jail sentence of up to 15 years if they lead to a conviction, come as authorities crack down on Bolsonaro and his fellow conservatives in a barrage of criminal cases, angering supporters who have threatened nationwide protests if he is arrested. Bolsonaro and 16 other people, including his former adviser and military official Mauro...

How did this nation ever get to the point where a man once considered nothing more than a tacky, loud, nouveau-riche liberal NYC real estate mogul/celebrity, with an orange complexion and a crazy pompadour/combover, would be transmogrified into the ultimate scapegoat for the failings, crimes, and corruption that have plagued our government and society since at least the end of the Second World War; the locus and symbol of the most unbridled hatred by the very same global elite that, in point of fact, are guilty of those sins and that he once perhaps was a part of? If I...

A cockpit seat mishap might have pushed a pilot into the controls on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner that took a sudden, terrifying plunge on a flight to New Zealand this week, according to U.S. industry officials briefed on preliminary evidence from an investigation of the incident. A Latam Airlines flight attendant hit a switch on the pilot’s seat while serving a meal, leading a motorized feature to push the pilot into the controls and push down the plane’s nose, these officials said. The switch has a cover and isn’t supposed to be used when a pilot is in the seat....

Special Counsel Robert Hur stood by his assessment that President Joe Biden was a "well-meaning, elderly man" whose failing memory would have made it untenable to pursue prosecution of his willful retention of classified records during testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden released Tuesday and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon support Hur’s assessment that there are "significant limitations" surrounding Biden’s memory. Throughout the five hours of interviews on Oct. 8 and 9, Biden struggled to recall relevant details about his handling of classified records or when he served as vice president....

We can only hope that Dementia Joe Biden is recuperating this weekend after these past few disastrous days, not only at the State of the Union address but also during his follow-up trip to Philadelphia Friday. In case you missed it (and state-run media are doing their best to make sure you do), Biden made an impassioned plea to his minions in the Keystone State: “Pennsylvania, I have a message for you. Send me to Congress!” Then he referenced his speech the previous night to that same Congress he soon hopes to be a member of. “The U.S. Capitol —...

Greenland start-up is being accused of doing titanic damage to the environment by shipping ice from glaciers over 100,000 years old to be used in cocktails served at high-priced bars in Dubai. Arctic Ice, which started this year, touts its product as the “oldest and purest” ice in the world as it is harvested from icebergs in Greenland — a distance of more than 4,730 miles from the Middle Eastern megalopolis. Though the makers say they hope to highlight global warming’s effects on ice sheets with the their business model — and even stop sea levels from rising — the...

The sheriff of the Georgia county where a Venezuelan migrant has been charged with murdering nursing student Laken Riley had campaigned on refusing to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, a resurfaced interview shows. “It is not my intention, when elected sheriff, to cooperate with those detainers,” John Williams, now the sheriff of Athens-Clarke County, said in a 2020 interview with Athens Political Nerds. He was referring to detainers ICE placed on illegal immigrants who were arrested on criminal charges. “I see it as the sheriff’s responsibility, any law enforcement, to protect and serve the community,” Williams continued. “We...

The revelation that the U.S. intelligence community, under the Obama administration, sought the assistance of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Donald Trump’s associates before the 2016 election is a chilling reminder of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to protect its interests and challenge its adversaries. (The Five Eyes countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) This bombshell, reported by a team of independent journalists, exposes a dark chapter in American political history, where foreign intelligence services were reportedly mobilized against a presidential candidate. The alleged operation against Trump...

All dialogue guaranteed verbatim. That is my guarantee to you, the readers, whenever I present Dementia Joe Biden’s unedited, unexpurgated remarks for your edification. Let's begin this chapter of the Weekend at Brandon’s chronicles with some of his more recent comments. On Friday, he denounced the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. “What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s putality.” May we quote you on that, Mr. President? Speaking of foreign affairs, on Monday he met with King Abdullah of Jordan. “He’s been a good friend, King Abdul, welcome back to the White House.” Then he...

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin said Friday that he is not running for president, according to his spokesman Jonathan Kott. Manchin announced his decision in a speech at West Virginia University, as part of a national listening tour he was making. “I will not be seeking a third-party run. I will not be involved in a presidential run,” he said in his speech in Morgantown. The centrist Democrat who often bucked his party's leadership had been considering a run for the presidency and had said he thought it would be clear by March if there was a path for a...