Free Republic

ON A GOOD DAY Our worth is tested every day. We are given the choice of being nice to people or uncharitable. We are given the choice of doing our work as well as we can or of goofing off. Some days it seems the tests are harder than on others, but every day brings with it some kind of test. Even the really good days! To have everything go wonderfully for us, to feel like a million dollars, to have one of those days when nothing and nobody can upset us, they are days when we might think...

Vanna White fresh off the horror classic "Graduation" is a contestant on The Price Is Right.

Severe weather will focus across the High Plains into Saturday night before expanding to the Upper Midwest by later Sunday, then reload over the High Plains and Rockies and advance into the Midwest again next week. AccuWeather meteorologists warn that more storms packing tornadoes and big hail will continue to pose risks to lives and property. Areas of severe thunderstorms will shift back and forth from near the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River into next week. May typically brings a strong surge in severe weather across the United States. However, storm activity this past month has propelled the tally...

Flames from an electric vehicle that caught fire overnight damaged some power lines and scorched a home in the Granada Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. The fire was reported around 2 a.m. on Rinaldi Street near Haskell Avenue. Firefighters found flames engulfing a Mercedez-Benz, which proved to be difficult to put out. The electrical nature of the fire made it so intense that firefighters requested additional resources, Stringer News Service KNN reported. Flames from the burning vehicle spread to a nearby home and burned some power lines in the area. It was unclear if power was affected at any of...

House Speaker Mike Johnson stopped Tuesday in the Lehigh Valley to campaign for Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie’s congressional run against [the] Democratic incumbent …. Johnson and Mackenzie stopped at Cetronia Ambulance Corps in South Whitehall Township as part of National EMS Week. Johnson’s visit is the first of what likely will be many from high-profile Republicans on behalf of Mackenzie in what is expected to be a close race. The seat is considered one of the most competitive in the United States, and has been deemed a “toss-up” by election forecaster the Cook Political Report. Speaking with reporters at the...

Oregon state Rep. Janelle Bynum won the high-profile Democratic primary to take on Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR), setting the stage for what is considered to be one of the most competitive elections of the 2024 cycle. *** McLeod-Skinner’s primary defeat comes after she lost to Chavez-DeRemer in the 2022 midterm elections by just 2 percentage points. Bynum used that to her advantage throughout the primary cycle, positioning herself as a candidate who has previously defeated Chavez-DeRemer and could do so again. Bynum twice defeated Chavez-DeRemer in 2016 and 2018 for a state House seat, once by 2 points and then...

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to speak before the United States Congress and Senate in a joint meeting. Johnson announced on Friday that he was “honored” to invite Netanyahu to “address a joint meeting of Congress.” In a letter addressed to Netanyahu, Johnson wrote that “last year” Congress had proudly hosted Israeli President Isaac Herzog to visit Washington, D.C., and that Netanyahu was invited to speak before a “Joint Meeting of Congress.”

Ukraine is making it increasingly difficult for Russia to hang on to illegally annexed Crimea thanks to an ongoing campaign that's targeting air defenses, rail links and water connections. The latest blows were struck on Friday, when a joint Ukrainian navy and army operation hit a ferry crossing and oil terminal at the port of Kavkaz, located on the Russian side of the Kerch Strait that divides Crimea from Russia, Ukraine’s general staff said in a statement. Hours earlier, Ukrainians hit the Crimean side of the Kerch ferry crossing — damaging two rail ferries, the Avanguard and the Conro Trader,...

Colorado Democrats are once again running bogus ads to promote the Republican candidate they believe is least likely to win in a general election against their progressive candidate. This time it’s the 3rd Congressional District race and the GOP candidate that Democrat candidates are supporting is Ron Hanks. The TV ad and mailers deliver backhanded insults that really aims to suggest Hanks has been endorsed by Donald Trump (he has not), and claims Hanks is just too gosh darn Republican to represent the conservative district. One of the problems Hanks is already contending with, he doesn’t actually live in the...

Fareed Zakaria on CNN: “I doubt the New York indictment would have been brought against a defendant whose name was not Donald Trump.”

The Department of Justice pushed back on the releasing of the audio tapes of special counsel Robert Hur's interview with President Joe Biden, citing "deep fake" concerns. The DOJ stated that if the audio tapes were released, they could potentially be altered by artificial intelligence and passed off as authentic. “The passage of time and advancements in audio, artificial intelligence, and ‘deep fake’ technologies only amplify concerns about malicious manipulation of audio files,” a Friday filing obtained by Politico states. “To be sure, other raw material to create a deepfake of President Biden’s voice is already available, but release of...

I’m just going to throw out a bunch of factual datapoints that seemingly mean something, but the larger ‘intent’ picture is still opaque. Many readers may not be familiar with the connective tissue between the names, so I’ll just cut to the chase.According to media reports, Pershing Square Capital Management founder Bill Ackman is preparing to back Donald Trump in the 2024 election {LINK}. Bill Ackman is the Wall Street money guy backstopping Elon Musk, and Ackman created the financial vehicle to take the X-Platform back to the public market (unused mechanism).To wit, Elon Musk is reportedly in frequent communication...

A New York jury on Thursday found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records after a weeks-long trial. Former President Donald Trump on Friday announced a sizeable fundraising haul in the wake of his guilty verdict in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's hush money case.A New York jury on Thursday found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records after a weeks-long trial. The verdict appears to have energized his supporters, however, as the campaign's donation page crashed, evidently due to the volume of traffic.The campaign on Friday initially announced it had brought in $34.8 million in...

MALDEN — Asian American seniors play ping pong five times a week at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist church. Another group gathers Monday nights to dance at the Wah Lum Kung Fu & Tai Chi Academy. After years spent fitting in where they can across this city of 65,000, the growing Asian American community has no place to call their own. That’s about to change with $1 million in funding from Congress to jumpstart the process of creating Malden’s first community center for people of Asian descent, who account for 27.5 percent of the city’s population. Malden has the third-highest...

🎥 Who are the indigenous Ainu people of Japan, where did they come from, what do they look like, and where do they stand in the world today? 🇯🇵 Welcome to our deep dive into the fascinating world of the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan. In this video, we explore the unique aspects of Ainu culture, from their ancient history to their contemporary resurgence… 00:26 - 🌿 Indigenous Heritage: Explore the history of the Ainu, the original inhabitants of Hokkaido, and their presence in Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. 01:54 - 📜 Unique Language: Discover the endangered Ainu...

Joe Biden couldn’t even wait 24 hours before publicly gloating about the history-making criminal conviction of former president Donald Trump. Under the guise of announcing a proposed ceasefire agreement in the Israel-Gaza war, Biden took to a podium in the White House state dining room at 1:30 p.m. on Friday. He began his statement not with details of the peace plan but rather with a lecture about how the “rule of law” prevailed in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump. “Donald Trump was given every opportunity to defend himself,” Biden said of his 2024 Republican presidential rival. “And...

The military said on Wednesday that it now had full operational control of the Philadelphi Corridor, which runs along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. This effectively clamps down on any possible weapons flow to Hamas from the outside. Troops located 20 tunnels crossing into Egypt near the Philadelphi Corridor and 82 tunnel shafts. This information was passed on to Egypt. Egypt’s Al Qahera News denied the reports. “It doesn’t mean that we have boots on the ground across all of the corridors, but it means we can control and we have the ability to cut off the...

"And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine." "To whom ye forgive any thing, I forgive also: for if I forgave any thing, to whom I forgave it, for your sakes...

A white teacher in Sacramento County is suing his union for reserving one seat on its governing board for a non-white member — an issue of diversity versus discrimination that is percolating in courts across California. Isaac Newman, a high school social science teacher, said he wanted to run for a newly created position on the Elk Grove Education Association last December, but was barred from applying because the union created it last year as a “BIPOC seat,” available only to members who are Black, Indigenous or other people of color. “Union officials apparently believe that the best solution to...

George Washington University class-action settlement for COVID shutdown approved with more money for students, less for lawyers. Mere "overlap between a religious and political view" doesn't negate Title VII’s religious protections, 8th Circuit says.. If COVID-19 litigation were like the virus itself, George Washington University cleared its infection with a pricey therapeutic, the Mayo Clinic's infection rebounded, and Rutgers University faces an unusually virulent strain that could spread far and wide. A federal judge gave final approval to the $5.4 million class-action settlement submitted by GWU students and the private university blocks from the White House, in a tuition-refund lawsuit...