Free Republic

A Twitter executive hired to shake up the tech firm's 'kind but stagnant' culture left staff in tears with his tough talk and meetings where they were encouraged to slate each other. Chief Design Officer Dantley Davis, 43, was accused of making workers feel 'psychologically unsafe' after blasting poor work, firing staffers he was unhappy with - and sending scathing criticism of them to their former bosses. Davis, a top design executive with prior experience at Netflix, Yahoo! and PayPal, was hired by Twitter in 2019 as vice president of design, and has since been promoted. He has spearheaded a...

With Australia's lockdown spreading to Canberra and the surrounding capital area after the discovery of just one case, the entirety of New Zealand - which supposedly eradicated COVID months ago - will now enter lockdown after the country just discovered its first case in six months.The three day "snap" lockdown, which hasn't exactly proven effective in Australia, where health officials recorded the worst day of new infections earlier this week even as the country's biggest cities have been on lockdown for weeks...The results of seven weeks of lockdown in Sydney (NSW cases) pic.twitter.com/zQCdXzNy7q — Mike Bird (@Birdyword) August 16, 2021......

One of the beautiful things about burritos is that you can stuff them with pretty much anything. Some versions celebrate minimalism with just one or two ingredients, but then there are the burritos absolutely bursting at the seams with fillings—one of them being french fries, as is the case with the California-style burrito or the recently debuted White Hot Nacho Fries Burrito at Taco Bell. But just because you can add fries to a burrito doesn’t mean you should. Do french fries truly belong in a burrito, or are they a distraction from the stuff that really matters? We have...

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden ignored his own administration’s failures when he tried to explain why desperate civilians in Afghanistan’s capital have been left stranded and in danger from the Taliban because of the swift U.S. departure. While asserting “the buck stops with me,” Biden on Monday blamed Afghans in large measure for the chaotic evacuation at Kabul’s airport and conceded no missteps. A look at his remarks: BIDEN: “I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still...

In Twitter debates, people have no problem pointing to articles such as Newsweek’s: “White Supremacists Killed More Americans Than Muslim Extremists in Recent Years.” The article explains, “The mass shootings at a shopping center in El Paso, Texas, last August and at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand last March are just two high-profile examples [motivated by white supremacy].” But if you try to explain that this isn’t the whole story, you will get a warning from Twitter. On Saturday, after someone pointed to the Newsweek article, I responded that the El Paso and Christchurch murderers were both environmentalists/socialists who...

The Biden administration on Sunday froze Afghan government reserves held in U.S. bank accounts, blocking the Taliban from accessing billions of dollars held in U.S. institutions, according to two people familiar with the matter. The decision was made by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and officials in Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the people said. The State Department was also involved in discussions this weekend, with officials in the White House monitoring the developments. An administration official said in a statement, “Any Central Bank assets the Afghan government have in the United States will not be made available to the...

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military is coordinating with the Taliban while accelerating the airlift of Americans and Afghan allies from the Kabul airport, and also bringing in additional U.S. troops in a scramble to complete the evacuation in two weeks, Pentagon officials said Tuesday. The disclosure by Pentagon spokesman John Kirby that U.S. commanders are speaking with Taliban commanders is an indication that the new rulers of Afghanistan, who swept to power after 20 years of war against the U.S.-supported Kabul government, will not interfere with the evacuation. Kirby would not discuss details of the Taliban arrangement. “There are interactions...

It is easy to think the Taliban is the biggest winner in Afghanistan, since it has overtaken the entire nation in days as the United States, once clearly the most powerful nation on earth, pulled out of Afghanistan in the most humiliating fashion. But in the larger geopolitical context, the real biggest winner in Afghanistan is the Chinese Communist Party.The CCP has benefited from America’s military engagement in Afghanistan for the last 20 years. As the United States spent trillions of dollars and sent thousands of troops to fight a futile “war on terrorism,” successions of U.S. administrations, regardless of...

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have said the Taliban's advance in Afghanistan has left them 'speechless' and 'heartbroken' in a wide-ranging statement that also addresses the Covid-19 crisis and the humanitarian disaster in Haiti. The lengthy statement, released via the couple's slick Archewell Foundation website, calls on followers to support organisations including the World Central Kitchen, but failed to say how much they would be personally donating or details of how they will help. But the couple have been slammed by a royal expert who called it 'another attempt to form an alternate woke royal family' and by social media...

It's a rough week for President Biden who, despite a brief appearance at the White House in which he blamed others for his colossal mismanagement of our country's withdrawal from Afghanistan, has remained secluded at Camp David — and the hits just keep coming.In a stinging rejection issued Monday, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) denied Biden's request for more oil, saying that its member countries "and its allies, including Russia" — conveniently — think markets "do not need more oil than they plan to release in the coming months, despite U.S. pressure to add supplies to check an...

Several U.S. media reports have estimated somewhere between 10,000 to 40,000 American citizens are still in Afghanistan as of Tuesday. ..... Snip..... “Most are scrambling to escape. Some are dual nationals or children of Americans who may not have the proper passport or visas, but the State Department has not told them how to fix their paperwork.” The Daily Mail reported 40,000 Americans are stranded in Afghanistan, while a White House official reported only 700 Americans will be evacuated Tuesday. Monday saw 150 Americans evacuated, a Newsy reporter tweeted:

TAIPEI: Taiwanese authorities are investigating whether a former deputy defence minister may have been recruited by a Chinese spying network, officials and media reports said Wednesday (Jul 28). Chang Che-ping, in office from July 2019 to June 2021, was being probed for allegedly having multiple contacts with a Chinese spy organisation over meals, online news website Mirror Media reported citing sources, in what could be the island's highest level espionage case yet. Taiwan and China have been spying on each other since the Nationalists fled to the island to set up a rival government in 1949, having lost the civil...

I had the pleasure of meeting Eugene and Jan Peterson in the later years of their lives at The Glen Eyrie in Colorado Springs, the headquarters for the Navigators. I was invited by my friend Don Pape, who at the time was the senior acquisitions editor for NavPress.I, along with about forty or so other Christian leaders from across the United States, got to hear from Eugene and Jan, ask them questions, and celebrate the achievements of their lives and ministry for Jesus. It was a joyous occasion.Afterwards I had the privilege of meeting Eugene briefly and then being prayed...

Because her parents had attended the January 6 rally at the Capitol, a squad of 40 heavily-armed FBI agents held an 11-year-old girl at gunpoint while raiding her family’s Georgia home. The agents, who arrived in four armored trucks, broke into the property on August 10 about five miles north of Covington in Newton County, according to the girl’s father, Donnie Hyatt. Hyatt and his wife are accused of having ties to a far-right militia leader named Chris Hill, and they attended the rally in Washington, DC on January 6. They did not participate in the storming of the Capitol....

The Qatari Al-Jazeera channel receives from Taliban exclusive access to the presidential palace in Kabul. No need to be surprised pic.twitter.com/h53JupS8OP— roi kais • روعي كايس • רועי קייס (@kaisos1987) August 15, 2021

The Tim Tebow tight end experiment in Jacksonville has come to an end. Tebow was released by the Jaguars today, ending a very brief return to football and likely ending his NFL career. Anyone who saw Tebow’s “highlights” from the Jaguars’ preseason opener had little doubt that he was failing as a tight end. He did nothing as a receiver and was painfully bad as a blocker. Once among America’s most popular athletes, Tebow is probably now done in pro sports.

TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga officially expanded and extended the nation’s coronavirus state of emergency on Tuesday, as government advisers recommended legal changes that would allow penalties for violations. The measures, approved by a government task force, add seven prefectures to the six areas already under a state of emergency and extend it to Sept. 12. Ten other prefectures were put under a “quasi-emergency,” which had previously encompassed six prefectures, bringing about two-thirds of the nation under some form of emergency as COVID-19 infections “explode” across the nation, in Suga’s words. Hospitals have been stretched thin and some...

The scramble to airlift tens of thousands of foreign nationals and Afghan allies from Kabul entered a frantic new stage today - with military chiefs admitting they can only continue as long as the Taliban allows it. As desperate British and US citizens, and allies who helped Western forces during the two-decade intervention, try to flee reprisals, armed guards from the Islamist regime have surrounded the capital's airport and seized control of all access points. Underlining the abject humiliation of the West, the Taliban's political chief Mullah Baradar arrived in Kandahar province on Tuesday after 20 years of exile as...

Amid a massive surge of migrants at the United States-Mexico border, the outgoing Border Patrol chief told his 19,000 agents prior to retiring over the weekend that known or suspected terrorists are coming into America “at a level we have never seen before

The Navy SEAL who says he killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 is calling President Joe Biden a “disaster” and urging Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley to resign over the deadly aftermath of the U.S. military pullout in Afghanistan. In a Twitter tirade, Robert O’Neill ripped the decision and predicted a political reckoning. “So, @POTUS is a disaster,” he declared. “This is the worst loss in American history. Our most popular president has vanished. Prove me wrong,” he added. He also trolled Biden on the bin Laden raid, asserting “Joe Biden opposed the raid to kill...