Free Republic

They have shown up whenever women rallied against sexual violence and gender biases in South Korea. Dozens of young men, mostly dressed in black, taunted the protesters, squealing and chanting, “Thud! Thud!” to imitate the noise they said the “ugly feminist pigs” made when they walked.“Out with man haters!” they shouted. “Feminism is a mental illness!”On the streets, such rallies would be easy to dismiss as the extreme rhetoric of a fringe group. But the anti-feminist sentiments are being amplified online, finding a vast audience that is increasingly imposing its agenda on South Korean society and politics.These male activists have...

On the year’s shortest day, hundreds of Israelis ventured deep into the desert to witness a strange natural phenomenon atop an ancient pilgrimage site that some argue is where God spoke to Moses. The mountain kept its secrets for centuries, its air of sacred mystery enhanced by a remote location in the Negev Desert in southern Israel. But one day last week, hundreds of Israeli adventurers headed deep into the wilderness to reach Mount Karkom, determined to get closer to answering a question as intriguing as it is controversial: Is this the Mount Sinai of the Bible, where God is...

The president’s son was part owner of a venture involved in the $3.8 billion purchase by a Chinese conglomerate of one of the world’s largest cobalt deposits. The metal is a key ingredient in batteries for electric vehicles. An investment firm where Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was a founding board member helped facilitate a Chinese company’s purchase from an American company of one of the world’s richest cobalt mines, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr. Biden and two other Americans joined Chinese partners in establishing the firm in 2013, known as BHR and formally named Bohai Harvest...

Longtime field laborers in the Mississippi Delta said in a lawsuit that they were asked to train white guest workers from South Africa before losing their jobs to them. For more than a quarter-century, Richard Strong worked the fertile farmland of the Mississippi Delta, just as his father and his grandfather did, a family lineage of punishing labor and meager earnings that stretched back to his enslaved ancestors brought from Africa. He tilled the soil, fertilized crops and irrigated the fields, nurturing an annual bounty of cotton, soybeans and corn for a prominent farming family. “I’ve been around farming all...

By studying tree rings and using a dash of astrophysics, researchers have pinned down a precise year that settlers from Europe were on land that would come to be known as Newfoundland. Six decades ago, a husband-and-wife team of archaeologists discovered the remains of a settlement on the windswept northern tip of Newfoundland. The site’s eight timber-framed structures resemble Viking buildings in Greenland, and archaeological artifacts found there — including a bronze cloak pin — are decidedly Norse in style.Scientists now believe that this site, known as L’Anse aux Meadows, was inhabited by Vikings who came from Greenland. To this...

The sword, recovered off the coast of Israel, most likely belonged to a knight who fell into the sea or lost the weapon in battle, experts said. Shlomi Katzin attached a GoPro camera to his forehead, slipped on his diving fins and jumped into the waters off the Carmel coast of Israel, eager to go exploring. On the sandy floor of the Mediterranean Sea, he found a sword. Archaeologists would later determine that it was about 900 years old. It weighed four pounds, measured about four feet long and originated from the Third Crusade, experts said. “Oh yes, he was...

Economic woes from the Covid-19 pandemic drive more-affluent people from Brazil and Venezuela to join poor migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. More migrants illegally entering the U.S. to apply for asylum are members of South America’s middle class who fly to the border by plane, according to authorities and aid workers.While the majority of people who come to the U.S. through Mexico are among the world’s poorest fleeing poverty and crime, such as the thousands of Haitians who recently formed a makeshift camp in Del Rio, Texas, the growth in middle-class migrants reflects continued hardship in nations such as...

THAT VIKINGS crossed the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus is well established. Their sagas told of expeditions to the coast of today’s Canada: to Helluland, which scholars have identified as Baffin Island or Labrador; Markland (Labrador or Newfoundland) and Vinland (Newfoundland or a territory farther south). In 1960 the remains of Norse buildings were found on Newfoundland.But there was no evidence to prove that anyone outside northern Europe had heard of America until Columbus’s voyage in 1492. Until now. A paper for the academic journal Terrae Incognitae by Paolo Chiesa, a professor of Medieval Latin Literature at Milan University, reveals...

U.S. Senate leaders have agreed to raise the Treasury Department's borrowing authority until early December, averting a potential debt default later this month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced on Thursday. "We have reached agreement to extend the debt ceiling through early December and it's our hope we can get this done as soon as today," Schumer said referring to a vote on passage of the legislation. A Senate aide, who asked not to be identified, said the deal calls for a debt limit increase of $480 billion from the current $28.4 trillion. If approved by the Senate and House...

Long before last month’s release of a 2016 FBI report about Operation Encore, the bureau’s probe into possible Saudi complicity in 9/11, top Trump administration officials swore under “penalty of perjury” that information in the report was a “state secret” whose public release was likely to cause “significant harm to the national security.”But when the 16-page report was finally made public on Sept. 11 following a declassification review ordered by President Biden the week before, no state secrets were apparent. A “redaction key” provided by the FBI to explain some deletions shows that only a few short bits and pieces...

A member of the far-right Proud Boys texted his F.B.I. handler during the assault, but maintained the group had no plan in advance to enter the Capitol and disrupt the election certification. As scores of Proud Boys made their way, chanting and shouting, toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, one member of the far-right group was busy texting a real-time account of the march.The recipient was his F.B.I. handler.In the middle of an unfolding melee that shook a pillar of American democracy — the peaceful transfer of power — the bureau had an informant in the crowd, providing an inside...

Florida’s version of the American dream, which holds that even people of relatively modest means can aspire to live near the water, depends on a few crucial components: sugar white beaches, soft ocean breezes and federal flood insurance that is heavily subsidized. But starting Oct. 1, communities in Florida and elsewhere around the country will see those subsidies begin to disappear in a nationwide experiment in trying to adapt to climate change: Forcing Americans to pay something closer to the real cost of their flood risk, which is rising as the planet warms. While the program also covers homes around...

Human footprints found in New Mexico are about 23,000 years old, a study reported, suggesting that people may have arrived long before the Ice Age’s glaciers melted. Ancient human footprints preserved in the ground across the White Sands National Park in New Mexico are astonishingly old, scientists reported on Thursday, dating back about 23,000 years to the Ice Age.The results, if they hold up to scrutiny, would rejuvenate the scientific debate about how humans first spread across the Americas, implying that they did so at a time when massive glaciers covered much of their path.Researchers who have argued for such...

The lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a 2016 meeting about Trump and Russia. He denies wrongdoing. John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation, has told the Justice Department that he will ask a grand jury to indict a prominent cybersecurity lawyer on a charge of making a false statement to the F.B.I., people familiar with the matter said.Any indictment of the lawyer — Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor and now a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm, and who represented the Democratic National...

Agencies’ growing use of purchased data without warrants raises new legal questions In January 2020, a 14-year-old girl was reported missing from her home in Missouri and classified as a runaway by local police. Her phone had been wiped of data and left behind, leaving few clues about her whereabouts. Several hundred miles away in Fayetteville, Ark., a local prosecutor named Kevin Metcalf heard about the teenager through his professional network and suspected she might have been abducted or lured into leaving. Using widely available commercial data, he pursued that hunch in a way that is now in the sights...

The FBI, complying with President Biden’s recent executive order, made public late Saturday night a previously classified April 4, 2016 “review and analysis” report about Operation Encore, the bureau’s highly sensitive investigation of possible Saudi complicity in the 9/11 terrorist attack.The 16-page report is nevertheless heavily redacted in ways that will likely disappoint members of the 9/11 Families who have pushed to learn more about Encore since its existence was first disclosed in December 2016 in documents released to Florida Bulldog amid Freedom of Information Act litigation.For example, the names of many persons who were interviewed by FBI agents during...

A long-secret report, written 18 months before 9/11 by senior members of President Clinton’s national security team, concluded that U.S. intelligence were failing in their attempts to break al Qaeda, and warned that agencies were not structured or adequately funded to meet the threat posed by Osama bin Laden.U.S. counterterrorism policy, the team judged, required “immediate revision,” and laid out a series of recommendations – some “time-critical”– needed to stop future al Qaeda attacks on U.S. interests. By Sept. 11, 2001, though, key recommendations had still not been acted upon.The report, known as the Millennium Alert After Action Review (MAAR),...

The U.S. government’s recent reset of its position to consider declassifying many FBI secrets about 9/11 is being strongly resisted in court by Saudi Arabia.Lawyers for thousands of 9/11 family members who are suing Saudi Arabia in federal court in New York, citing the “extraordinary circumstances” arising from the government’s about-face, asked the court late last month for an extension of a Sept. 15 deadline to submit reports from experts who have reviewed the evidence.“It is imperative that plaintiffs’ experts be afforded an opportunity to review this additional evidence before serving their reports,” wrote members of the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committees...

The number of men enrolled at two- and four-year colleges has fallen behind women by record levels, in a widening education gap across the U.S. Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels. At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline. This...

A missing videotape of two 9/11 al Qaeda hijackers partying in Southern California with a suspected undercover Saudi agent. Records of interviews with key witnesses and phone records among 9/11 co-conspirators that have vanished from FBI files. An unredacted copy of a joint FBI-CIA Intelligence Report about Saudi Arabia’s 9/11 involvement that’s nowhere to be found.The U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General has been asked to investigate the FBI’s apparent mishandling of such critical 9/11 evidence by more than 3,500 victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.“The Inspector General should examine whether one or...