Free Republic

"The Chinese are imposing a kind of sanction on us. They don't officially declare it, but they are delaying shipments to Israel.... In electronic products, there are tens of thousands of components, but if even one component doesn't arrive, we cannot deliver the product." — Unnamed senior figure in a factory, Ynet, December 24, 2023. Also immensely disturbing is that "massive" amounts of advanced Chinese military equipment were found in Gaza by the IDF during its military operations there. "[I]f you set up systems with technology for critical infrastructure, like electricity, energy, water, transport, these are tied to one another....

Several days ago, after the New York police broke up the kill-the-Jews occupations at Columbia, NYU and other universities, it emerged that close to half of the arrestees were not students or otherwise affiliated with the schools in question. At a news conference on April 30, Mayor Eric Adams adopted the term “professional outside agitators” to describe the main organizers of the protests (“What should have been a peaceful protest, it has basically been co-opted by professional outside agitators."). The protests certainly give an appearance of being well-organized and equally well funded. For example, large numbers of identical newly-ordered tents...

Human remains were spotted in the mouth of a 13-foot, 8.5-inch alligator on Friday, in a canal just north of the Florida Botanical Gardens in Largo. The gator was extracted from the water and “humanely killed,” the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release, adding that a dive team had also “recovered the remains of a deceased adult from the waterway.” VIDEO AT LINK.............. So far, no details regarding the identity of the victim have been shared, as the investigation is still ongoing. It’s also unclear whether the alligator was directly responsible for the person’s death. One local...

Are you really better off? Get ready for the Biden reckoningFrom higher inflation and costs to lower trust in government and education, America looks much worse off today. November offers a chance for a course correction.Are you better off now than you were, say, five years ago? Is our country better than it was five years ago? These are the questions that really matter heading into the November election. If we judged the state of the nation solely by what Joe Biden says, we would think we are living in the greatest years of American history. The economy is booming....

Natalie Elphicke, the MP for Dover, has defected to the Labour Party, it has just been announced. She crossed the floor of the Commons shortly before Prime Minister's Questions began - the second Tory to do so in 10 days. In a statement, she said "many things have changed" since she joined the Tories in 2019, and now "the modern Labour Party looks to the future".

More than 200,000 people in North Carolina are on the state’s voter rolls despite missing the full details of their social security number.According to a report from The Federalist, the records of approximately 224,000 people are simply “missing” the last four digits of their Social Security number (SSN) and their driver’s license identification number.The report states: The 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) required states to verify certain “information of newly registered voters for Federal elections,” according to the Social Security Administration. “Each State must establish a computerized State-wide voter registration list and verify new voter information with the State’s...

Pray For The Peace of Jerusalem (5/8/24)[Prayer]The Names and Titles of God (The Advocate) 1 John 2:12 My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous:King James Version________________________God Bless America.ML/LTOS

ATLANTA (AP) — Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation Tuesday that makes additional changes to Georgia's election laws ahead of the 2024 presidential contest in the battleground state, including defining probable causes for removing voters from the rolls when their eligibility is challenged. Republican activists — fueled by debunked theories of a stolen election — have challenged more than 100,000 voters in the state in recent years. The activists say they are rooting out duplicate records and removing voters who have moved out of state.

PUTNAM COUNTY, Fla. – A man who is accused of trying to speed away from Putnam County deputies before he crashed into a utility pole was arrested early Monday morning on drug and gun charges. According to the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office, the 27-year-old Palatka man was first seen in an SUV on Gillis Street driving slowly with his lights off. When deputies tried to pull him over, he sped off, deputies said. The man reached speeds of 100 mph, deputies said, before he crashed into the concrete pole in front of ABC Liquor near Highway 17 and State Road...

Biden and Bidenomics is disastrous for the middle class and low wage workers. Food and housing prices through the roof, and now we have mortgage purchase demand declining -57% under Biden. Mortgage applications increased 2.6 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending May 3, 2024. The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, increased 2.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index increased 3 percent compared with the previous week. The seasonally adjusted...

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”This philosophy, announced by Brazilian President Getulio Vargas in the 1940s, is no longer just the favored approach of Latin American strongmen. It has become the openly practiced strategy of today’s Democratic machine.Laws that hamper Democrats are ignored. Laws that might be used to hurt Republicans are enforced to — and often well past — the limits of the law.One need look no farther than the absurd circus-clown show trial (one pundit prefers the term “goat rodeo”) in which the state of New York has gone so far in trying to turn...

AstraZeneca has said it had initiated the worldwide withdrawal of its Covid-19 vaccine due to a "surplus of available updated vaccines" since the pandemic.

Reading for fun sharply declines around age nine in an alarming trend that coincides with years of learning loss since the pandemic, data shows. Only 35% of nine-year-olds are reading at least five days a week compared to 57% of eight-year-olds, according to the latest Scholastic survey on the issue. “The number of kids who say they love reading drops significantly from 40% among eight-year-olds to 28% among nine-year-olds,” the Scholastic report notes. The trend, dubbed the “decline by nine” has concerned researchers, who note that reaching reading proficiency by third grade is a good predictor of academic success. [snip]...

@TopoGigio_sol Jack, honest question. How did you let it get so bad at Twitter? How did it become so captured with out you being able to step in and fix it. The algo needs help here on X, but directionally much better than it was, as a platform @jack only way to truly “fix it” is with open protocols. corporations can build upon them too. @wallstsavage80 Would be nice if you answered the original question without rhetoric Jack It’d be refreshing to read it @jack i've answered so many times. if it was "captured" it was by the advertising model...

The Port Authority announced on Monday a historic milestone in the ongoing $19 billion transformation of JFK International Airport, where a record $2.3 billion in contracts have been awarded to Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprises (MWBE). The JFK redevelopment also demonstrates a significant focus on working with local contractors, awarding more than $950 million in contracts to Queens-based businesses to date. “When we embarked on this historic, $19 billion public-private effort to transform JFK into a world-class international gateway, we pledged that the economic opportunities generated at the airport would flow fairly to the neighborhoods surrounding the airport,” Port Authority...

A nonprofit that provides services to homeless people in San Francisco has been accused of $100,000 fraud and nepotism. The industry built on supposedly helping the homelessness in San Francisco means that those raking in money from donations want to keep the crisis going.

‘Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors,’ headlined an article by Politico.. Politico’s editors are “surprised” to find the far-left demonstrations overwhelming college campuses this spring are funded by the same sources fighting to keep President Joe Biden in power. On Sunday, the Beltway magazine published an exposé on the financiers bankrolling the campus protests, for which demonstrators trained for months. “Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors,” the headline reads. “ Joe Biden has been dogged for months by pro-Palestinian protesters calling him ‘Genocide Joe’ — but some of the groups...

'Silencing' has become a way of life for Democrats when they govern. The Democrat Party has changed since Harry Truman said this: "Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." 'Silencing' has become a way of life for Democrats when they govern. For example, when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, they held a hearing on 'Disinformation...

Natalia Kruglova last spoke to her husband, Pvt. Ivan Petrov, on Sept. 29. The Russian army conscript told Kruglova he had been ordered back to the front lines in southeastern Ukraine. Then he disappeared. Kruglova wrote to her husband’s commanding officers, the Defense Ministry and even military prosecutors in search of news, but to no avail. Weeks later, the army declared Petrov missing but offered no explanation of what had happened to him. “It’s as if no one owes you anything, no one cares,” Kruglova, 45, said in an interview from her home in the Russian far eastern city of...

Stronger-than-expected economic growth helped boost the financial health of Social Security and Medicare over the past year, though the safety-net programs will still face a funding crisis in about a decade, according to the government’s latest projections.Federal officials on Monday said they expect Social Security will deplete its combined reserves and run out of money to fully pay beneficiaries in 2035, a year later than projected last year. At that point, if Congress fails to act, the program would have only enough money to pay about 83 percent of scheduled benefits.