Free Republic

The judge who presided over a civil business fraud trial against Donald Trump and his company has issued his decision in the case. Judge Arthur Engoron ordered the former president and the Trump Organization to pay over $364 million in damages, and bars Trump "from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or other legal entity in New York for a period of three years." The judgment is the second this year against Trump after he was hit last month with an $83.3 million verdict in writer E. Jean Carroll's defamation case against him. The former...

A January 2024 court-authorized operation has neutralized a network of hundreds of small office/home office (SOHO) routers that GRU Military Unit 26165, also known as APT 28, Sofacy Group, Forest Blizzard, Pawn Storm, Fancy Bear, and Sednit, used to conceal and otherwise enable a variety of crimes. These crimes included vast spearphishing and similar credential harvesting campaigns against targets of intelligence interest to the Russian government, such as U.S. and foreign governments and military, security, and corporate organizations. In recent months, allegations of Unit 26165 activity of this type has been the subject of a private sector cybersecurity advisory

The U.S. Intelligence Community asked fellow members of the “‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies,” sources told a small team of independent reporters who broke the story yesterday. In “CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy on Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax, Sources Say,” journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag reported that top-line takeaway, along with several other key details. According to the authors, “multiple credible sources,” said that “the United States Intelligence Community (IC), including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), illegally mobilized foreign intelligence agencies to target...

Authorities were executing an arresting warrant at a home when the suspect opened fire, sources told NBC 4. Shortly before 10 a.m., the subject remained barricaded in the residence and continued to shoot at police, the outlet said. “This is still a very, very active scene,” the police spokesperson told The Post.

About 80,000 people had already cast ballots through Sunday, when the early voting period ended, a robust turnout for an off-cycle election. About 11,000 more registered Democrats cast ballots than registered Republicans, according to Democratic leaders. Mr. Suozzi’s advantage could well be narrower depending on how many voters are breaking with their party and on the breakdown of independent votes. “I’d rather be us than them,” Jay Jacobs, the state Democratic Party chairman, said before voting got underway. Many Republican voters still prefer to vote on Election Day, and their party is accustomed to closing a gap. The party has...

A hearing this week could prove to be a defining moment for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her election interference case. For the first time since misconduct allegations surfaced against Willis, the judge overseeing the case will weigh in. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee has scheduled an evidentiary hearing for February 15 to consider a motion from defendant Mike Roman that seeks to disqualify Willis and her office from the case and for the criminal charges against him to be dropped. Roman is arguing that Willis improperly benefitted financially from the case, which has ensnared former...

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher announced Saturday that he will not seek re-election to his post in the House. "Eight years ago, when I first ran for Congress, I promised to treat my time in office as a high-intensity deployment. Through my bipartisan work on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, chairing the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, and chairing the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, we’ve accomplished more on this deployment than I could have ever imagined," Gallagher said in a statement. "But the Framers intended citizens to serve in Congress for a season and then return to their...

<p>BAKER, Calif. (AP) — A helicopter carrying six people crashed near a small town in Southern California’s Mojave Desert, authorities said.</p><p>The helicopter went down Friday evening near Baker, a town of 700 people about 95 miles (153 kilometers) southwest of Las Vegas, KABC-TV reported.</p>

An abrupt shutdown of Atlantic Ocean currents that could put large parts of Europe in a deep freeze is looking a bit more likely and closer than before as a new complex computer simulation finds a "cliff-like" tipping point looming in the future. A long-worried nightmare scenario, triggered by Greenland's ice sheet melting from global warming, still is at least decades away if not longer, but maybe not the centuries that it once seemed, a new study in Friday's Science Advances finds. The study, the first to use complex simulations and include multiple factors, uses a key measurement to track...

A new IRS inspector general report said the nation’s tax collection agency continued to give 19 contractors access to sensitive systems despite having background reports that were returned as “not favorable.” Despite having the unfavorable rating returned as recently as July 13, 2023, “These contractors still retained their access to one or more sensitive systems because the IRS did not take action to suspend or disable the contractors from the IRS’s systems, as required,” according to a report issued this week by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration. IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel — who took over the agency...

Hurry, hurry, hurry! That’s the message of the Democratic Party to their minions in politics, from their overlords in the global governments — hurry up and pass as much legislation, policy and regulations that will kill America’s economy and Constitution before the 2024 elections. Time grows short. Donald Trump is coming back. And he’s bringing a double dose of America First prescription to cure all that’s ailed and continues to ail under Joe Biden. So Democrats are resisting all that’s beneficial to America’s freedoms, in a final-inning push to put into play all the not-so-easily destroyed globalist agendas before Biden...

An international team of scientists has created a tool that can aid in increasing climate awareness and climate action globally by highlighting messaging themes shown to be effective through experimental research. The web-based tool, and the methods undergirding its creation, appear in the journal Science Advances. The tool stems from a study involving nearly 250 researchers that drew more than 59,000 participants from 63 countries, including Algeria, China, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, and the United States. "We tested the effectiveness of different messages aimed at addressing climate change and created a tool that can be deployed by...

President Biden has extended Democrats’ sanctuary city policies to the southern border. It’s not complicated; the two are connected. Combined, Democrats have created a self-reinforcing crisis that is beyond their willingness to control. Instead, they are desperately trying to find someone else to solve what their leftist extremists won’t let them fix. Their hope now is that Sunday’s Senate bill will. America is in the throes of an undeniable illegal immigration crisis that continues to break records under Biden. Illegal crossings over the southern border in December hit 250,000, 31 percent higher than November’s number (119,112) and 13 percent over...

A new study provides the most compelling data yet to suggest that excess mortality rates from chronic illnesses and other natural causes were actually driven by COVID-19 infections, disproving high-profile claims that have attributed these deaths to other factors such as COVID vaccinations and shelter-in-place policies. Nearly 1,170,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the United States, according to official federal counts, but multiple excess mortality studies suggest that these totals are vastly undercounted. While excess mortality provides an estimation of deaths that likely would not have occurred under normal, non-pandemic conditions, there is still little evidence into whether the...

Several migrants were nabbed in Arizona Monday by federal authorities who are investigating if they are members of the same group who fled New York City following their arrests in the caught-on-camera beatdown of two NYPD cops, sources said. The migrants were picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at a Greyhound bus station in Phoenix, according to law enforcement sources and a Fox News report. ICE agents are working to determine if the migrants are any of the four men suspected to have hopped on a bus bound for California last Wednesday after they were freed without bail...

Country singer Toby Keith died Monday at the age of 62, his family wrote in a statement posted to his website and social media accounts early Tuesday. "Toby Keith passed away peacefully last night on February 5th, surrounded by his family," the statement read. "He fought his fight with grace and courage," it continued. "Please respect the privacy of his family at this time."

The largest growing criminal organization in the world has infiltrated its way into the United States, said an El Paso FBI agent. The Tren de Aragua, or the “Aragua Train,” gained notoriety after its founding in 2012 by Hector Guerrero, alias “Niño Guerrero” or Warrior Kid, in the state of Aragua located in the north-central region of Venezuela. Operating initially from Tocorón prison in Venezuela, the gang made headlines after 11,000 police officers raided the prison back in September, uncovering a zoo, nightclub, swimming pools, and a children’s playground. What they did not find was any sign of Guerrero, the...

Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the results. Whether they are good or bad news for the fight against global heating remains to be seen. The study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change. A surprisingly large number of people still downplay the impact of climate change or deny that it...

A migrant processing facility called “Firefly,” was evacuated after the FBI received alerts about threats from two known extremists planning to “overthrow it by any means necessary.” The facility, situated just outside Eagle Pass, is currently under FBI guard. The FBI’s involvement follows reports of potential danger, prompting the evacuation of migrants. Although the extremist groups have not attempted to breach the facility, law enforcement remains on high alert. Approximately 20 miles south in Quemado, Texas, tensions over the border crisis escalated as the “Take Our Border Back” convoy expressed their frustrations. The convoy, adorned with American flags and endorsing...

Mexico’s president suggested Thursday that talks with the U.S. government on migration and drug trafficking could suffer after media reports of a U.S. investigation into alleged drug money donations for his 2006 campaign. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador suggested U.S. officials should apologize for what he called baseless allegations, and said it would be hard to sit down and talk about some of the most pressing issues in bilateral relations until that happens. “I don't accept this, what I want is for the U.S. government to take a stand,” López Obrador said at his daily morning press briefing. “If they...