Free Republic

Russia "doesn't give a s**t" about the risk of Western sanctions if it were to invade Ukraine, the country's ambassador to Sweden has said. "Excuse my language, but we don't give a shit about all their sanctions," Viktor Tatarintsev told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in an interview published on Saturday. "We have already had so many sanctions and in that sense they've had a positive effect on our economy and agriculture," the diplomat said, according to the AFP news agency. It comes as President Joe Biden told Russia's Vladimir Putin during a phone call on Saturday that the U.S. was committed...

A Texas baseball coach was chased and beaten by a group of middle-school students in an act of retaliation against him, news outlets report. The attack was captured on cell phone video now circulating on social media, and shows a Houston high school employee running from four students, who can be seen punching the man and knocking him to the ground. (Warning: This video contains graphic language.) Officials with Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District confirmed to TV station KTRK that the assault took place at Langham Creek High School on Feb. 10. The attackers are students at Aragon Middle School, the...

A retired Marine general spoke out about critical race theory training in the armed forces, arguing that the Marxist ideology will ultimately weaken the U.S.’s military capability.Writing for military magazine Task and Purpose, retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold argued that critical race theory and related ideologies run counter to the “stone-cold pragmatism” needed to win conflicts. “Wars must be waged only with stone-cold pragmatism, not idealism, and fought only when critical national interests are at stake,” he wrote. “Hopes for changing cultures to fit our model are both elitist and naive. The failures of our campaigns in Iraq...

Passengers on an AirAsia flight had their trip rerouted after spotting an uninvited passenger on the plane. In a video shared on TikTok by user @edal8808, what appears to be a long snake can be seen slithering through an overhead light fixture. In the caption, the user wrote that the flight, which was headed from the Malaysian capital city of Kuala Lumpur to Tawau, had to instead make an emergency landing in Kuching, according to a translation of the text. AirAsia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NPR. However, the airline's chief security officer Liong Tien...

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Stewart Rhodes will return to court next week, seeking to avoid a transfer to the Washington D.C. jail. Stewart Rhodes was moved from his Plano, Texas holding cell to the Cimarron Prison and Correctional Facility in northeast Oklahoma two weeks ago. Cimarron is a medium-security facility in Cushing, Oklahoma. Rhodes is the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, a group that describes itself as a non-partisan association of current and formerly serving military, police, and first responders who pledge to fulfill the oath all military and police take to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The...

On Wednesday, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever claimed on Twitter that 'it may be that today's largest neural networks are slightly conscious,' ... He didn't name any specific developments, but is likely referring to the mega-scale neural networks, such as GPT-3, a 175 billion parameter language processing system built by OpenAI for translation, question answering, and filling in missing words. Sutskever faced a backlash soon after posting his tweet, with most researchers concerned he was over stating how advanced AI had become, Futurism reported. 'Every time such speculative comments get an airing, it takes months of effort to get the conversation...

In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters on February 8, scientists said that a total of five earthquakes, including one massive, "hidden" tremor, created the tsunami after striking close to the South Sandwich Islands on August 12, 2021, in the remote Southern Ocean off the coast of the continent of South America. The study showed that tsunami-causing earthquakes such as the August 12 incident had complex patterns that could confound how scientists measure major tectonic activity Researchers described an initial rupture that happened deep below the oceanic crust in between the South American and South Sandwich tectonic plates at...

Yesterday morning I expressed some pessimism in terms of what sort of progress might be made during Joe Biden’s anticipated phone call with Vladimir Putin. After all, weeks of shuttle diplomacy Washington, Moscow, Paris, and Vienna haven’t appeared to move the needle noticeably. Did Biden have some new offer that would be acceptable to our NATO partners while convincing Putin that there was a viable compromise available? Well, the calls between Putin and both Biden and Emmanuel Macron took place as scheduled. In a rare instance of transparency from the Biden administration, the White House put out a statement summing...

“And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.” ~ Revelation 20:9 KJVAmerica is in crisis more than our country has ever been, since the 1850s and much worse than the 1960s, and most of the freedom-loving conservative and independent Americans recognize the Biden regime’s willingness to break the Constitution and act lawlessly, with horror and disgust, along with his high-handed tyrannical edicts and mandates declared with nothing more than a wink and a nod,...

Warning: This story quotes several racist slurs allegedly directed at Black workers at Tesla’s California plant, according to a lawsuit filed against the company. The N-word and other racist slurs were hurled daily at Black workers at Tesla’s California plant, delivered not just by fellow employees but also by managers and supervisors. So says California’s civil rights agency in a lawsuit filed against the electric-vehicle maker in Alameda County Superior Court on Thursday on behalf of thousands of Black workers after a decade of complaints and a 32-month investigation. Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas that its employees referred...

President Trump’s team hired Auditor Bryan Geels after the 2020 Election to look into Georgia’s results. Geels identified 97,000 ballot issues in the state. When the President spoke of these issues with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the issues were misrepresented but Raffensperger’s team promised President Trump that they would get with the Trump team (i.e. Geels) to go over the results. Raffensperger’s team never addressed the issues and never contacted Geels. Instead, they lied to the press about the President’s phone call. Last week Garland Favorito from VoterGA held a presentation in Georgia showing thousands of ballot issues...

It seems that the extent of the head trauma is more extensive than was originally suggested. “This is significant trauma,” Dr. Gavin Britz, the neurosurgery chair at Houston Methodist, told The New York Times. “This is something I find with someone with a baseball bat to the head, or who has fallen from 20 or 30 feet.”

Another Sunday, and Biden's national security adviser is at it again making the rounds on the big network news shows, warning the Russian invasion will invade Ukraine "any day now" - at this point a familiar refrain we've heard for multiple weeks running..."We cannot perfectly predict the day, but we have now been saying for some time that we are in the window, and an invasion could begin, a major military action could begin by Russia in Ukraine any day now -- that includes this coming week, before the end of the Olympics," Jake Sullivan told CNN's Jake Tapper.This latest...

13 February 2022 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time Basilica of Saints Vincent and Caterina de 'Ricci, Prato, Italy Readings at MassLiturgical Colour: Green.First readingJeremiah 17:5-8 ©A blessing on the man who puts his trust in the LordThe Lord says this:‘A curse on the man who puts his trust in man,who relies on things of flesh,whose heart turns from the Lord.He is like dry scrub in the wastelands:if good comes, he has no eyes for it,he settles in the parched places of the wilderness,a salt land, uninhabited.‘A blessing on the man who puts his trust in the Lord,with the Lord for...

INDEPENDENCE, Missouri — The half-circle of 13 chairs that framed the statue of President Harry Truman in the heart of the historic Independence Square this past fall was placed there in the days after 13 American soldiers were killed in the attack on the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, in late August. The loss of these brave service members marked the beginning of an awakening. Many people stepped outside the comfort of their political beliefs and began to question everything coming out of the government. Few national journalists noticed it at its inception because few national journalists leave their desks or...

In a letter, signed by 37 of his Republican colleagues in Congress, Texas Rep. Dr. Ronny Jackson warns that President Biden's "mental decline and forgetfulness have become more apparent over the past two years," and urges the 79-year-old to take a cognitive aptitude test (just as former President Trump did).“My colleagues and I are again asking President Biden to immediately undergo a formal cognitive screening exam, such as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment,” Jackson said.“As a former physician to three Presidents of the United States, I know what it takes mentally and physically to execute the duties of Commander-in-Chief and Head...

Team USA’s Erin Jackson is a medal contender in the 500 meters. Her teammates from the ‘New Jax City Rollers’ will be watching. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to a couple of Jackson’s former teammates: Shady Godiva and Fancy Schmancy. “She’s just tough,” Shady Godiva says. “Super strong,” says Fancy Schmancy. Shady and Fancy know. Before Jackson made her case as the fastest woman on ice, before she became one of Team USA’s best hopes for gold, she was a star in the rollicking world of roller derby, trading collisions and bruises with teammates who maintained aliases like...

AMISH IN SARASOTA, FLORIDA As with elsewhere in Florida, snowbirds are a regular sight here. But intermixed with the more stereotypical visitors to Sarasota, a city and county on the Gulf of Mexico coast in southwest Florida, is a large community of Amish. Like other snowbirds, the Amish come from locales with cold winters. Think central Ohio, northern Indiana and, of course, the unofficial Amish capital of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania. At the height of the season, about 5,000 winter-weary Amish and Mennonites call Pinecraft, an enclave about 20 minutes from the popular St. Armand’s Circle, home. In the summer,...

The National Chicken Council expects Americans will eat nearly 1.42 billion chicken wings while watching the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams this weekend, but many restaurants and bars, including a local business, are having trouble getting a hold of this fan favorite food. The Growler Guys in Eau Claire said throughout the pandemic and even before the big game, they've had a difficult time sourcing certain cheese curds and one of their wing sauces. Because of this, they've had to discontinue those items from their menu. Co-owner Greg Haugen said it's also hard to get a hold of chicken...