Free Republic

Los Angeles has any number of problems: crime, homelessness, and productive people are leaving due to the idiot policies of the city and the state of California. Now, we can again add that ancient curse of big cities: Disease. The other thing Los Angeles shares with so many other large cities throughout human history is rats. Rats have accompanied humans almost everywhere, and they bring disease with them. That, too, is happening right now in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles County (L.A.), rats abound. You may see only an occasional rat dart across an alley or root through a restaurant...

Citadel Cadet Dustin Rose, childhood best friend Samson Campbell gunned down by 17-year-old Keyan Rundell in Florida =============================================================== A Citadel cadet and South Carolina Army National Guard member and his childhood best friend were gunned down in a vacant Florida lot by a 17-year-old killer last week. Citadel cadet Dustin Rose and his childhood friend Samson Campbell were fatally shot in DeLand, Florida, last Wednesday night. Samson Campbell came home to DeLand to mourn his family’s dog who recently died. Dustin Rose joined Campbell to spread the dog’s ashes. The two young men were fatally shot at an industrial park...

The Montgomery riverfront brawl began on August 5, 2023, after a co-captain of the Harriott II riverboat attempted to move an improperly parked pontoon boat that was blocking the dinner cruise ship's dock space. This triggered a physical confrontation from the pontoon boat's owners against the crew member, escalating into a massive public altercation

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Nashville drivers could soon face new restrictions at red lights across much of the city. Metro Council is weighing a proposal that would ban most right turns on red within the Urban Services District as part of a broader effort to reduce traffic deaths and serious injuries. District 16 Council Member Ginny Welsch, one of the bill's sponsors, said Nashville's roads have become increasingly dangerous. "We know overall that the streets of Nashville are extremely dangerous. For the past several years, we've had over 100 people killed on our roads," Welsch said. The bill is led...

Two Durham teens were arrested Tuesday after the female teen allegedly took abortion-inducing medication while 31 weeks pregnant. Syeisha Jadan Johnson, 18, is charged with assault inflicting serious bodily injury on an unborn child, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and negligent child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury, court records show. Elijah Jshaun Speight, 19, the child’s father, is charged with negligent child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury, according to court records. Johnson is accused of taking mifepristone and misoprostol July 26 “in an attempt to terminate her pregnancy early,” her arrest warrant states. Mifepristone and misoprostol...

The Trump administration said Wednesday it will shut down a Kentucky organ donation group accused of continuing plans for organ retrieval from some patients who unexpectedly showed signs of life.While those surgeries were canceled, the cases made headlines several years ago, prompting a spike in people around the country revoking their organ donor registrations.Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the nonprofit Network for Hope “a bad apple” and accused it of “persistent safety failures” in announcing the government was starting the process to decertify it.Network for Hope is one of about 55 organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, that coordinate...

Payment processing giant Visa recently conducted a brutal layoff of 2,600 jobs — and not even top executives were spared. The San Francisco-based credit card titan filed a notice with California on July 31 revealing that 320 employees will lose their jobs at its Foster City campus. The bloodbath hit well beyond rank-and-file workers: The filing shows 37 senior directors are being cut, along with 16 chief engineering and architect positions, as well as dozens of senior software engineers, researchers and other technical employees. Six vice presidents also lost their jobs; LinkedIn job postings cited by SFGATE show those VP...

Two baby-faced Westchester arsonists who admitted to torching a beloved Hudson River lighthouse will get to avoid jail time thanks to a plea deal that allows them to buy their freedom. Elvin Ayavaca, 19, and Richard Joseph Barrero, 20, both pleaded guilty on Monday in exchange for a sweetheart deal that allows the arsonists to dodge any time in prison — as long as they cough up nearly $81,000 each and stay out of trouble for the rest of the year, according to the Westchester DA’s office. If the pair, who caused roughly $100,000 in damage to Westchester’s historic Tarrytown...

Democrat voters in Michigan are jumping ship in droves after radical progressive Abdul El-Sayed narrowly clinched the Democratic Senate nomination Tuesday night. Even loyal MS NOW viewers and self-described liberals are openly declaring they will not vote for the socialist-backed candidate and will instead support Republican Mike Rogers in November. MS NOW host Chris Jansing herself reported the stunning defection: "And I want to tell you really quickly, as I was getting on the plane this morning, A guy who was a big fan of MSNOW said to me, 'I'm anxious to see who wins... I voted for Haley Stevens...

The gangbanging son of a Westchester County police bigwig had a Bronx court date just minutes before he allegedly opened fire on a rival – with his cop mom and ex-con dad as getaway drivers, prosecutors said Wednesday. Chase Lackard, 20, faced a judge on a 2024 gun rap just 20 minutes before the alleged June 29 drive-by gang shooting – with help from his mom, disgraced Mount Vernon Deputy Police Commissioner Jennifer Lackard, and drug-dealing dad James Lackard, according to prosecutors. “He’s captured on cameras running into this courthouse,” Bronx Assistant District Attorney Keturah Ladd told the judge. “He...

PICKER: A lot of people have criticized market structure right now, levered ETFs, positioning and so forth. How concerned are you about the proliferation of levered ETFs on single stocks? DIMON: Well, leverage ETFs on their own are quite small. So I’d say not really. But there is what I call market leverage, prime broker leverage, hedge fund leverage, ETF leverage, treasury arbitrage leverage. I’m double-counting some of that. So, the market leverage is pretty high. Now, of course, we manage it client by client. And so you have seen disasters that people lose a lot of money, nothing really...

WASHINGTON — Iran’s mysterious, “probably gay” supreme leader is so elusive that even his own president isn’t convinced he met him in a bizarre one-on-one in the back of a dark car. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was whisked to a secret location in Tehran, shoved into the back seat of a dark car with blacked-out windows and told he was sitting next to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei — except he never actually saw the man, according to a bombshell report from Iran International. The bizarre cloak-and-dagger meeting reportedly lasted just a few minutes, not the cozy two-and-a-half-hour sit-down Pezeshkian bragged...

Wednesday's Morning Joe gave Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed a friendly platform, and failed to press him on the radical implications of two of his signature positions: Medicare for All, and his condemnation of Israel as an "illegal apartheid state" that is "bloodthirsty" and commits "genocide." [snip] El-Sayed also accused Israel of "genocide” and described its conduct under Netanyahu as “bloodthirsty,” the latter accusation having ugly echoes of antisemitic blood libels. Politicians who oppose support for Israel often claim they’re not anti-Israel—just anti-Netanyahu. Not El-Sayed. By branding Israel an “illegal apartheid regime” that predates and outlasts Netanyahu, he made explicitly...

The governments of Japan and the United States agreed in 2012 to move more than 9,000 of the nearly 19,000 Marines stationed in Okinawa more than 2,200 miles east to Guam, a U.S. territory.2 This process—finally begun in 2024—amounts to a withdrawal of forces from territory the United States has pledged to defend, and a de facto retreat from the most pernicious threat: the People’s Republic of China.National defense strategies from multiple administrations and both major U.S. political parties agree: China is the greatest threat to the United States and its interests.3 Few issues generate as much robust bipartisan support...

Federal and state officials are racing to address an assault on the nation’s water supply that they believe is the work of Iranian hackers.In 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration proposed creating stronger cybersecurity guidelines to better safeguard the nation’s water supply from hackers.The steps were modest, but necessary, officials said at the time: Many municipalities lacked even basic protections, and the computers that monitor and adjust water quality, including chemical-treatment levels, were easy-to-find targets for a would-be intruder.The E.P.A. rescinded the order, however, after Republican-led states and industry groups sued to block its enforcement. They argued...

Explanation: Don’t get spooked by Saturn’s ghostly spokes! Today we feature a nearly two-hour timelapse of Saturn and its rings looping forwards and backwards. A day on Saturn is only 10 hours long, so two hours of observation covers quite a bit of its rotation. If you look closely, a ghoulish shadow appears and disappears as Saturn’s B ring rotates. Decades of observation with Voyager 2, Cassini, and Hubble show the appearance of Saturn’s spokes varies with the planet’s seasons. Like Earth, Saturn’s spin axis is tilted compared to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. During Saturn’s equinox,...

"The conservatives on here denying the affordability crisis are engaged in what I can only describe as an act of political suicide. They're also lying, which is the worst part. Grocery prices are up. Housing. Energy. Insurance. Health care. Basic living expenses. It's real. It's happening. Denying it just makes you look out of touch, deceitful, and untrustworthy. It's also a completely unnecessary and unforced error. No credible person is claiming that Trump caused these price surges. You don't have to disgrace yourself by denying the reality in front of your face just to prove your loyalty to Trump. The...

A Florida man was arrested after authorities say he stalked a woman he met on a dating app and stole a teddy bear containing the woman’s son’s ashes. According to the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, deputies were dispatched on Aug. 1 to help Flagler Beach Police Department officers with an investigation into a suspect, identified as Justin Fountain, after a woman went to Flagler Beach police and said Fountain had “become increasingly controlling and aggressive.” “According to the victim, Fountain tracked her location, following her around Flagler County, and stole her child’s ashes from her despite her asking to stop...

Photons traveling through a cloud of atoms can emerge so early that they appear to have spent a negative amount of time inside. Researchers tested whether this was merely a misleading feature of the light pulse by making extremely weak measurements of the atoms. Surprisingly, the atoms confirmed the same negative dwell time. The finding does not break standard physics, but it reveals that one of quantum mechanics’ strangest effects is physically measurable. ... Our experiment used photons – quantum particles of light – and the against-the-odds journey they must undertake to pass straight through a cloud of rubidium atoms....

Churchill Downs Incorporated and The New York Racing Association Introduce a Six-Race Championship Series, Running Across Three Iconic Racing Venues and Crowning One Champion CDI and NYRA Leaders to be Available for Joint News Conference Monday at 4 p.m. ET LOUISVILLE, Ky. (August 3, 2026) – Churchill Downs Incorporated (“CDI”) (Nasdaq: CHDN) and The New York Racing Association, Inc. (“NYRA”) announced today the creation of the “Thoroughbred Championship Series.” The new six-race competition will begin in 2027 and establish an annual season-long championship for America’s leading three-year-old Thoroughbreds. The country’s most iconic racing venues – Churchill Downs Racetrack, Belmont Park...