Free Republic

WASHINGTON — More than 120,000 people of all nationalities were evacuated from the Kabul airport as the U.S. military withdrew, but initial figures suggest that only about 8,500 of those who left Afghanistan in recent months were Afghans, according to numbers released by the Biden administration and estimates from advocates. That is a small percentage of the tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government or U.S. organizations and applied for special U.S. visas, and an even smaller percentage of the Afghans eligible to apply.... ... The administration says U.S. and allied aircraft evacuated more than 123,000...

When Kabul fell, the Taliban offered the Biden administration a deal. Either the United States could control the city until August 31, the terror group’s deadline, or the Taliban would.The Taliban may have been testing Biden, wary of a direct military confrontation with a large concentration of American forces, but if so they quickly learned that they had little to worry about. Instead of maintaining control over Kabul so that Americans could be speedily evacuated, the Biden administration and its cronies turned over the city to the Taliban.And the Taliban turned to their most professional and deadliest assets. The Haqqani...

In the summer of 2020, the increasingly partisan and left-wing corporate media refused to acknowledge the nation was being consumed by violent riots. Because there were thousands of protests, many of them lawful and small, the media chose to call them “mostly peaceful” — even though several hundred large protests were documented as violent riots.... ...In many cities, mayors and police chiefs deliberately had their police patrols stand back and let the damage happen. They wanted to give the rioters, including the violent fascists ironically known as antifa , room to wreak havoc, set buildings on fire, and beat up...

President Biden appeared to get his math wrong during his address to the nation Tuesday on the withdrawal from Afghanistan by misstating the percentage of Americans who managed to get out of the war-torn country. In his remarks, Biden proclaimed the chaotic evacuation of Americans, Afghan allies and third-country nationals from Hamid Karzai International Airport outside Kabul to have been an “extraordinary success” and estimated that “about 100 to 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan with some intention to leave,” the same figure quoted by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday. “The bottom line: 90 percent of Americans in Afghanistan...

Photos emerged Tuesday showing Taliban supporters in Afghanistan holding a mock funeral while hoisting coffins draped with flags from the U.S. and other NATO countries. Reuters obtained some of the photos that were taken in Khost on Tuesday, less than a day after the last U.S. troop left the country after a nearly 20-year engagement.... ...The Reuters report said footage from the mock funeral was shared widely on social media.... ..."The world should have learned its lesson..," Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, said in a livestream video.

Five service members were missing Tuesday night after a Navy helicopter crashed into the sea off Southern California on Tuesday, the military said. The MH-60S helicopter, which was carrying six people, crashed around 60 nautical miles off San Diego at 4:30 p.m., the Navy said.... USS Abraham Lincoln..

Valerie Rupert raised her right arm, slightly shaking and unsure as she aimed at the paper target representing a burglar, a robber or even a rapist. The 67-year-old Detroit grandmother squeezed the trigger, the echo of her shot blending into the chorus of other blasts by other women off the small gun range walls. “I was a little nervous, but after I shot a couple of times, I enjoyed it,” said Rupert, among 1,000 or so mostly Black women taking part in free weekend gun safety and shooting lessons at two Detroit-area ranges. Black women like Rupert increasingly are considering...

District attorneys across the Big Apple last year declined to prosecute accused felons at nearly twice the rate of 2019 — letting more than 6,500 suspects off the hook, The Post has learned.Prosecutors dropped all charges in 16.9 percent of the 38,635 felony cases that were closed in New York City during 2020, according to data compiled by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.

A University of Georgia retiree-rehire professor resigned on Tuesday after one of his students refused to properly wear a mask in an upper division psychology seminar class held at the psychology building. During Irwin Bernstein’s second class of the semester, the student, who was not present on the first day of class, arrived at the 25-person class unmasked and was asked by Bernstein to retrieve one from the advising office. The student was given a spare disposable mask from a peer but did not wear it over her nose. Bernstein asked the student to pull her mask up to wear...

Taliban officials “expect” President Joe Biden to reopen the U.S. Embassy in Kabul despite U.S. insistence that future diplomatic relations will depend on Taliban behavior. “America should have only a diplomatic presence in Kabul,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said Tuesday , per an Afghan media outlet. “We have communication channels with them, and we expect them to reopen their embassy in Kabul, and we also want to have trade relations with them.”...

A loose network of conservative groups with ties to major Republican donors and party-aligned think tanks is quietly lending firepower to local activists engaged in culture war fights in schools across the country. While they are drawn by the anger of parents opposed to school policies on racial history or COVID-19 protocols like mask mandates, the groups are often run by political operatives and lawyers standing ready to amplify local disputes. […] This growing support network highlights the energy and resources being poured into the cauldron of political debate in the nation’s schools. Republicans hope the efforts lay the groundwork...

Israel is upping the vaccine ante, pressing citizens to get Covid-19 booster shots and saying those who don’t will face restrictions on traveling, dining out and other activities. Holders of Israel’s vaccine passports must get a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine within six months of their second dose, or lose the so-called green pass that allows them more freedom.

Simply put, the American Families Plan calls for banks and other financial institutions to report more than just a taxpayer’s interest earned, capital gains and losses. Banks and other financial institutions would also be required to report “aggregate account outflows and inflows.” In other words, the IRS will know about all of your bank accounts, whether you earned income on that account or not, how much is in the account in a given year, and how much was transferred in and out of the account.

The U.S. Treasury Department said the sale of Magnachip Semiconductor Corp. to a Chinese private equity firm poses “risks to national security,” as Chinese investments in critical technologies meet with enhanced U.S. scrutiny.Magnachip, a South Korean producer for display and power chips, sold its controlling stake in late March to Chinese private equity firm Wise Road Capital in an all-cash deal worth about $1.4 billion.The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the U.S. interagency panel overseen by the Treasury Department that scrutinizes foreign deals for national security implications, sent a letter to Magnachip on Aug. 27, saying...

Are the antibodies we produce to fight COVID-19 infection causing severe disease?A new paper—so new in fact that it hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed—from scientists in Hangzhou, China, appears to indicate just that.The researchers’ data suggests that at least two antibodies that target the spike protein that enables the COVID-19 virus to enter human cells are “pathogenic”—meaning these antibodies create illness all by themselves.It’s hard to think of antibodies—one of the body’s best infection fighters—as “pathogenic,” but that’s exactly what happens in autoimmune disease. Antibodies that the body develops in response to foreign invaders attach to body tissues instead, sometimes causing...

On the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conquest, people from Mexico’s smallest state Tlaxcala say their ancestors were liberators When people from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala travel to other parts of the country, they are sometimes insulted as traitors by their compatriots. Tlaxcala is Mexico’s smallest state in size, but it played an outsized role in Mexico’s early history, not least when indigenous Tlaxcalans allied with Hernán Cortés’ tiny band of invaders to bring down the Aztec empire. Now, as Mexico marks the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán on Friday, the role of the...

South African scientists have been keeping a close eye on a new COVID-19 variant because of “its concerning constellations of mutations.”The variant, called C.1.2, was first identified in May in South Africa. The scientists have posted a preprint study, saying the new CCP (Chinese Communist Party) Virus variant shares mutations with other more transmissible variants.“The reason we were worried about the kind of combination of mutations was that many of the mutations we see in this C.1.2 are the same mutations we’ve seen in some of the other variants of concern, particularly the Beta and the Alpha and the Gamma...

Former "View" co-host Meghan McCain tore into President Biden for his speech commemorating the withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying she does not "recognize" the longtime family friend. McCain then went personal, invoking Biden's decades-long relationship with her family as the president and her late father John McCain worked alongside one another in the U.S. Senate. "This is extremely difficult for me to say: I once thought I truly knew Joe Biden and he helped me through pain and grief, for which I am grateful," McCain wrote. "This man on tv giving this speech, I do not recognize this man." "God help...

<p>Joe Biden finally spoke today to mark the end of the war in Afghanistan. After showing up hours late for the originally scheduled event, something that has become a habit for this president, Biden took to the podium. What transpired was surprising and shocking at times.</p>

A few months ago US national debt exceeded $28 trillion. This number is certainly the one economists usually work with, but does this figure capture a long-term perspective?In March 2021, the Department of the Treasury published the 2020 Financial Report of the United States Government. In the initial message, Secretary Janet L. Yellen writes: “This Financial Report discusses not only current financial results but also important, long-term trends affecting our critical social insurance programs and fiscal health.” The report not only discloses the current debt level, but also projects the cost of the government’s future obligations to its citizens. It...