Free Republic

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Thursday warned North Korea that U.S. forces are ready to "fight tonight" after the dictatorship condemned military drills taking place in South Korea. The U.S. and South Korean militaries have resumed springtime drills in South Korea after pausing exercises last February due to coronavirus concerns. Austin discussed the U.S. military's commitment to "denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" and "the importance of maintaining military readiness" during a press conference Wednesday. "Our force remains ready to 'fight tonight,' and we continue to make progress toward the eventual transition of wartime Operational Control to a [Republic of Korea]-commanded,...

Camille Noûs first appeared on the research scene 1 year ago, as a signatory to an open letter protesting French science policy. Since then, Noûs has been an author on 180 journal papers, in fields as disparate as astrophysics, molecular biology, and ecology, and is racking up citations. But Noûs is not a real person. The name—intentionally added to papers, sometimes without the knowledge of journal editors—is meant to personify collective efforts in science and to protest individualism, according to RogueESR, a French research advocacy group that dreamed up the character. RogueESR had a subversive idea: What if they slipped...

Three of the nation’s biggest banks are asking shareholders to reject racial-equity resolutions after they expressed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement last year. Citigroup Inc. C, 3.22%, Wells Fargo & Co. WFC, 3.83% and Bank of America Corp. BAC, 4.87% were among the many large U.S. companies to make public statements of support in response to widespread protests last summer after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In recent days, they have all officially opposed shareholder groups’ calls for them to conduct and publicize racial-equity audits and other changes, saying they are already doing enough...

NORTH Korea's been playing hard to get, its vice-minister confirmed - saying the country has been intentionally dodging the Biden Administration's calls and even e-mails asking for a sit-down between the two countries. "The U.S. has tried to contact us since mid-February through several routes including New York," North Korean First Vice Minister Choe Son Hui said in a statement on Wednesday. "It recently requested to contact us by sending e-mails and telephone messages via various routes," she continued in the statement released by the official Korean Central News Agency. "Even in the evening before the joint military drill it...

What really predicted fertility, the authors find, are attitudes about work and family.The world’s richest countries typically have the world’s lowest birth rates. The highest-income people in those wealthy countries on average have the smallest family sizes. Those two facts conflict with the broad perception, especially among lawmakers, that Americans aren’t having babies because they’re worried about how expensive kids are. So may the results of a new study out today, which finds that the more career-oriented individuals and wealthy societies become, the more their fertility declines. “Highly work-focused values and social attitudes among both men and women are strongly...

<p>Leftist administrations see the military foremost as a tool for accelerating their own progressive domestic changes.</p><p>The U.S. military has now turned its wrath inward on Fox News host Tucker Carlson.</p><p>The new secretary of defense relayed his “revulsion” for Carlson’s questioning the role of women in combat—a position that had been the military’s centuries-long orthodoxy until about seven years ago.</p>

The witness sent the subcommittee a draft of her remarks after a congressional staffer sent her the messaging that Democrats wanted in correspondence that provides a window into congressional stage management. =================================================================== Awitness at a virtual forum hosted last year by a U.S. House subcommittee was given talking points in advance by majority Democrats, according to correspondence obtained by Just the News that provides a rare window into how Congress stage manages its proceedings behind the scenes. The correspondence was obtained under New Mexico open records laws and involved an event arranged by then-Rep. Deb Haaland, the New Mexico Democrat...

An Arizona sheriff said the border crisis under Joe Biden is worse than the Obama years as the migrant surge is expected to hit a 20-year high. Pinal Country Sheriff Mark Lamb said it was "ridiculous" that illegal immigrants are able to enter the country while schools and businesses remain closed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to U.S. counterpart Joe Biden’s claim he is a killer at a press conference on Thursday. “I remember in my childhood, when we argued in the courtyard we used to say: it takes one to know one. And that’s not a coincidence, not just a children’s saying or joke,” Putin said, according to Reuters. “We always see our own traits in other people and think they are like how we really are. And as a result we assess (a person’s) activities and give assessments,” he said. “We know each other personally,” Putin said of Biden....

A 20-year-old Philadelphia man who was released from prison early Thursday was shot and killed after gunmen in a car chased him back onto prison grounds, authorities said. ---SNIP--- Police told FOX29 that this latest homicide "shows the height of ongoing gun violence and a complete and brazen lack of fear of being captured on video or by law enforcement."

HARRISBURG — Former Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine is under pressure from U.S. House Republicans to provide more details about the state’s missing nursing home data ahead of her confirmation to a post in the Biden administration. At the same time, House and Senate Republicans are also calling on the state Department of Health to provide more details about its overall approach to nursing homes, citing Spotlight PA reporting on how historically weak oversight and failed plans hampered the response. Levine, who oversaw the state health department during the first year of the pandemic, was nominated by President Joe Biden...

Scientists at UC San Francisco have detected 109 chemicals in a study of pregnant women, including 55 chemicals never before reported in people and 42 "mystery chemicals," whose sources and uses are unknown. The chemicals most likely come from consumer products or other industrial sources. They were found both in the blood of pregnant women, as well as their newborn children, suggesting they are traveling through the mother's placenta. "These chemicals have probably been in people for quite some time, but our technology is now helping us to identify more of them...It is alarming that we keep seeing certain chemicals...

Ignoring and conceding small battles like six Dr. Seuss books or Mr. Potato Head is what empowers the left's culture warriors to take control of everything.Bill Maher made an interesting point on his show last Friday, arguing that America’s obsession with political correctness is crippling its institutions, leaving the country hobbled in the geopolitical race with China. That’s an accurate assessment, one that also tasks the defenders of cultural sanity with resisting wokeness while not getting bogged down by trivialities at the cost of basic efficiency. That’s an impossible balance to strike. Despite the left’s false but emergent narrative that...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United Auto Workers union criticized Ford Motor Co’s plan to build a new vehicle in Mexico rather than at an Ohio plant, suggesting it might be in violation of the automaker’s contractual commitments.In a letter made public on Tuesday, UAW Vice President Gerald Kariem said Ford intends to build a next-generation vehicle in Mexico. “We 100% reject the company’s decision to put corporate greed and more potential profits over American jobs and the future of our members. We expect the company to honor its contractual commitments to this membership and when it fails to do so...

The Woke Corporation I work for has decided to need to speak out "Supporting Our AAPI communities" triggered by the Big Lie the killer in the ATL was motivated by race. Even the Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer Political Officer has sent out her own statement. If the killer was motivated by race how about the 2 non-Asians murdered?

In 2014, Professor Gerald Horne of the University of Houston published a book with a startling thesis: that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. This was no genuine revolution, Horne argued, but rather a counter-revolution waged to defend slavery against the true revolutionary force, the abolitionist British Empire—hence the name of the book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776. The American victory was not a progressive or world-historic event. It was a catastrophe. Horne suggests an analogy: the American Revolution created “the first apartheid state.”

A group of current and former teachers and others in Loudoun County, Virginia, compiled a lengthy list of parents suspected of disagreeing with school system actions, including its teaching of controversial racial concepts — with a stated purpose in part to “infiltrate,” use “hackers” to silence parents’ communications, and “expose these people publicly.” Members of a 624-member private Facebook group called “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” named parents and plotted fundraising and other offline work. Some used pseudonyms, but The Daily Wire has identified them as a who’s who of the affluent jurisdiction outside D.C., including school staff and elected...

America has been battling illegal street drugs for decades, but we have never seen anything like this. When the COVID pandemic hit the U.S., illegal drug use dramatically surged, and that has carried over into 2021. As I discussed a few days ago, the amount of meth that CBP agents have seized is up 9 percent so far in fiscal year 2021 and the amount of cocaine that CBP agents have seized is up 64 percent so far in fiscal year 2021. But the largest increase has been in fentanyl traffic. At this point, CBP agents have seized “more than...

A New Jersey school district is paying $325,000 to a former New Jersey teacher who claimed she was forced to digitally edit a Donald Trump T-shirt worn by a student in a yearbook photo. The Wall Township school board approved the settlement agreement with Susan Parsons on Tuesday, NJ Advance Media reported. The district made no admission of wrongdoing or liability. The money will be paid by the district's insurance carrier. Parsons was the high school's yearbook adviser when she said a secretary acting on behalf of the principal ordered her in 2017 to remove "Trump Make America Great Again”...

A double-barreled bow? 500-fps bolts? A digital range-finding scope? The top new crossbows from Excalibur, Ravin, and TenPoint have bowhunters asking if we’ve crossed a line. In truth, we crossed it a long time ago Arguments between vertical-bow hunters and crossbow hunters over what qualifies as archery equipment have been going on for 20 years. (Maybe longer if you count the Medieval Ages, when legend has it Pope Urban II banned the unholy things from being used in combat.) But particularly in the past five years, during which time crossbow developments have accelerated at breakneck speed, some have asked, “Where...