Free Republic

KYIV, Ukraine — While the mood on the streets is calm and collected, behind the veil of composure, Ukrainians are in training for the fight of their lives. Tens of thousands of ordinary people across the Eastern European nation are learning to handle weapons, render first aid and perform other combat-related skills, as the threat of Russian invasion grows each day. Citizens are turning to experts in firearms, and even just family members, in hopes of surviving an attack and facing down their belligerent neighbor. “My daughter, now 23, taught me how to shoot,” Vlad Horbovetz, a surgeon and volunteer...

Climate change is going to wreak havoc on the world’s oceans, according to two new studies, depleting the warming waters of the oxygen that fish and other sea life depend on to survive. By 2080, around 70 percent of the oceans on the planet will suffer from a lack of oxygen due to warmer temperatures, a study published in November by researchers with the American Geophysical Union’s journal Geophysical Research Letters concluded. The study’s models show deoxygenation will begin affecting all ocean depth zones by 2080, and that deoxygenation may be irreversible. The researchers also found that oceans closer to...

Elliot Tommingo, director of the Washington, DC Mayor’s Office of Veterans Affairs, said it is a “necessary evil” to allow ‘Darwinism to kill off” unvaccinated Americans, blaming them for the city’s coercive mandates, deeming them “foolish,” and accusing them of eating horse dewormer and “their own p**s.” Breitbart News on Thursday obtained screenshots from one of Tommingo’s conversations on a Facebook post. The commenter, Jonathan Lubecky, who on Twitter describes himself as a “Nonpartisan Political Consultant,” remarked that he “may go to anywhere that doesn’t have the stupid mandates DC has.” Currently, Mayor Muriel Bowser’s (D) D.C. requires businesses to...

An anthropology professor is suing San Jose State University in federal court in California, claiming the school smeared her as a racist and colonialist, and punished her because she’s been critical of a federal antiquities law. The legal complaint (pdf) in the case, Weiss v. Perez, court file 5:22-cv-641, was filed on Jan. 31 with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lead defendant, Stephen Perez, is being sued in his official capacity as interim president of San Jose State University (SJSU). The public university “retaliated against” SJSU professor Elizabeth Weiss “for her views,” attorney Daniel...

As you sit down to watch the Winter Olympics in Beijing this week, remember that the Chinese government is watching too. Under the pervasive surveillance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), entire populations cannot take a single free step. Uyghur Muslims are facing genocide in modern-day concentration camps. Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors and newspaper editors are being silenced and thrown in jail. The people of Tibet are victims to a cultural genocide as the CCP destroys their Buddhist temples and sacred cultural sites. Even well-known celebrities like Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai are forcibly disappeared after accusing party officials of...

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has negotiated a secret deal to give Kaiser Permanente a special Medicaid contract that would allow the health care behemoth to expand its reach in California and largely continue selecting the enrollees it wants, which other health plans say leaves them with a disproportionate share of the program’s sickest and costliest patients. The deal, hammered out behind closed doors between Kaiser Permanente and senior officials in Newsom’s office, could complicate a long-planned and expensive transformation of Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, which covers roughly 14 million low-income Californians. It has infuriated executives of other managed-care insurance...

Roger Stone, a prominent ally of former President Donald Trump, attacked former Vice President Mike Pence in a Thursday post on the messaging platform Telegram, calling him a "disloyal POS."Pence drew Trump's ire after he declined to go along with an unconstitutional effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election result on January 6, 2021. Trump on Tuesday called for Pence to be investigated for declining to help. In an official statement, the former president said House investigators should probe why Pence "did not send back the vote for recertification or approval" to the states, insisting that his vice president had...

The Conservative Party of Canada has named Portage-Lisgar MP Candice Bergen as its interim leader. The announcement came Wednesday evening after a vote by caucus members. The Conservative Party ousted Erin O'Toole as its leader earlier in the day following a secret ballot vote in a caucus meeting. Bergen is among a growing number of Conservatives allying themselves with the protesters – a position that politicians across the political spectrum have criticized. The protesters want governments to end all pandemic restrictions and vaccination and mask mandates. On Thursday, organizers again said they won’t leave until their demands are met, which...

Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., are blasting the Republican National Committee for moving forward with a resolution to formally censure them for their work on the House select committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol and former President Donald Trump’s role in the insurrection. “The leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to overturn a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy,” Cheney said in a statement. “I’m a constitutional...

The largest cut diamond in the world is about to go up for auction. The extraordinary jewel, nicknamed "The Enigma" is a billions-year-old Fancy Black diamond that is rumored to originate from space. According to the auction house, the stone is a carbonado black diamond, which are extremely rare, occur naturally, and usually date from 2.6 to 3.8 billion years old. It contains nitrogen and hydrogen but also a mineral called osbornite usually found in meteorites, which suggests an outer space connection. What that connection is exactly is unclear, however. Extraterrestrial diamonds from meteorites are tiny, usually nano-sized. This diamond...

CHICAGO – The one thing that post-'60s liberalism killed in the black underclass was the spirit of entrepreneurship. This spirit of creating opportunities and inventing new products had largely defined black life during the first half of the 20th century. The segregationists had no care for blacks as long as they stayed on their side of the color line, and blacks made the South Side of Chicago thrive with their entrepreneurship. When America admitted its profound racial wrongdoings in the 1960s, many whites sought to redeem themselves of America’s racist history by patronizing blacks. They ushered in an era of...

Catching up with some amazing people who were at Ottawa today.

The conspiracy to take down President Trump through any means necessary spilled over from the Obama regime into the Trump administration. We knew that already. But a newly released email obtained by Just The News was kept hidden from the public for five years and was likely overlooked by anyone in the Trump White House who could have helped him during his first impeachment. According to Just The News: In an email kept from public view for more than five years, a top U.S. State Department official in Kiev wrote to Washington superiors at the end of the Obama-Biden administration...

With violent crime increasing over the last two years, Americans want a solution. But resident Joe Biden constantly frames violent crime as only a gun problem. Again, it was the sole focus of Biden's speech in New York City on Thursday. Even when he mentions police or prosecutors, it was in terms of enforcing gun control laws. But this "guns first" approach ignores a basic fact – over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms. And while Biden blames guns for the increase in violent crime, the latest data show that gun crimes fell dramatically. Biden's proposal...

Summary Putin and Xi present assertive manifesto to counter U.S. Leaders back each other on Taiwan, NATO enlargement 'No forbidden areas' in Russia-China cooperation MOSCOW, Feb 4 (Reuters) - China and Russia proclaimed a deep strategic partnership on Friday to balance what they portrayed as the malign global influence of the United States as China's President Xi Jinping hosted Russia's Vladimir Putin on the opening day of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Reporting by Andrew Osborn in Moscow, Mark Trevelyan in London, David Brunnstrom and Alexandra Alper in Washington Writing by Mark Trevelyan Editing by Angus MacSwan and Frances Kerry

A Tennessee pro-life group is applauding a federal appeals court after it reinstated a much-debated ban that prohibits abortions based on a specific prenatal diagnosis... The ban, part of a law known as HB 2263, makes it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion on a woman if the doctor knows she is doing so because of the child’s sex, race or Down syndrome diagnosis. A federal judge previously struck down the ban, and a three-judge appeals court panel subsequently upheld the lower court decision. But on Wednesday, the full U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the...

"It is getting worse," David Curry, president and CEO of Open Doors, told Christian Headlines.... Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping "knows that he cannot stamp out" the nation's Christians, Curry said. There are an estimated 96 million Christians in China, the report says. "And so he is slowly strangling Christian faith, and he's doing it with high-tech surveillance. They watch, and they track everybody in what they're doing – through facial recognition and other things. Imagine if the IRS owned every camera in every restaurant on every street in America. We would be very concerned that the IRS has...

As threats of a Russian invasion of Ukraine continue to spread, Christians in Ukraine are contemplating how they should respond to the possible danger.... Despite threats of a possible invasion and war, some Christians are choosing to wait out the threat instead of evacuating immediately. Jane Hyatt, an American missionary living in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, said she doesn't presently plan to leave...."We have over 20 some children at our rehab center, and I have many responsibilities, and I feel that I need to do as many of those responsibilities as I can," she asserted... Pastor Anton Tishenko, who leads New...

The Pew Research Center survey found that only 34 percent of U.S. adults believe society is better off if "people make marriage and having children a priority," while 64 percent believe society is "just as well off if people have priorities other than marriage and children." Yet among white evangelicals, 56 percent say society is better off with marriage and procreation being prioritized, while 41 percent say other priorities are fine. White evangelicals are the only religious subgroup with majority support for the marriage and procreation segment of the poll. Catholics (35 percent), black Protestants (36 percent) and white non-evangelical...

U.S. paratroopers, armored vehicles and jets arrived in Poland on Friday as part of the deployment of 3,000 troops into Eastern Europe in a major show of force to try to deter Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. Some of the lethal military equipment the U.S. is moving into Eastern Europe was on display, as the military positions the first troops meant to shore up NATO allies amid Russia's continuing troop buildup along the Ukrainian border. More than 200 pieces of equipment including wheeled Stryker combat vehicles from the Army National Guard 1st Battalion, 185th Infantry regiment could be seen being...