Free Republic

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, thousands of Americans and other foreign nationals have signed up to fight for Ukraine, answering a call to action by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Now, as the conflict enters its fourth week, a growing number of foreign volunteers are flowing into the capital, signing contracts and receiving weapons and combat training before getting deployed to one of the numerous front lines of the war.They have been compared to the 32,000 foreigners, mostly Americans and Europeans, many of them equally unprepared, who joined the republican forces in Spain’s 1936-39 civil war. That conflict became a losing battle...

Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog battles King Richard, West Side Story and more at this year's Academy Awards. The winners are anyone's guess, so here are mine... And the winner is... The 2022 Academy Awards will honor the best films of the year on March 27. The Power of The Dog has already swept a number of awards ceremonies, earning prestigious gongs for Benedict Cumberbatch, Netflix and writer-director Jane Campion. Maybe Campion will follow Chloe Zhao's success with Nomadland last year, but the Netflix film faces fierce competition from King Richard, West Side Story and Dune -- not...

Jerry Smith, the athletic director at St. Thomas Aquinas, received one of the cruelest phone calls of his life at 11:30 Thursday morning. Brian Meeney, head football coach at his school and a man who’d long regarded Smith as somewhat of a father figure, died this morning at the age of 46. As Meeney’s brother told Smith, it was the result of a massive heart attack en route to school. No arrangements have yet been announced. Meeney, who had a particular knack for reviving flagging programs, guided St. Thomas to an undefeated regular season this past fall and an overall...

Sharing a locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has become a point of contention for some of her University of Pennsylvania teammates, who feel uncomfortable changing in the private space with someone undergoing gender transition, the DailyMail.com can reveal. 'It's definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,' one swimmer on the team told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview. Lia has told her teammates that she dates women. While Lia covers herself with a towel sometimes, there’s a decent amount of nudity, the swimmer said. She and others have had a glimpse...

Earlier this month, on International Women's Day, President Joe Biden announced he will request $2.6 billion for foreign assistance programs to promote "gender equality" abroad. A week before that, during his State of the Union address, he pleaded with Congress to pass the Equality Act—a piece of legislation he vowed to enshrine as law within his first 100 days in office. The bill would, among other things, create federal protections against discrimination based on the concept of gender identity. It passed the House of Representatives last year, but is currently pending approval of the Senate. Biden had already established the...

There’s been a shift in Washington. The talk is no longer about sanctions on Moscow but how best to escalate U.S. involvement in the war. The day after Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky addressed Congress, the American press was understandably filled with paeans to his courage and leadership, his clarity of purpose and firm resolve in the face of mortal danger. As Bari Weiss noted in a thoughtful response to the speech, Zelensky knows what he’s fighting for, and he stands as an inspiring counterexample of things we hope for in our own political leaders, but do not have. But there...

A number of Ukrainian refugee women taken in by multicultural Sweden still fear for their safety, after at least two separate groups of men tried to gain access to their living quarters. Having escaped Vladimir Putin’s ongoing invasion of their country, a number of Ukrainian refugee women are still living in progressive Sweden. In one example recorded by local media, a woman described the fears she and her associates had after at least two different groups of men tried to gain access to the living quarters of a number of Ukrainian refugee women. She reported one instance of a group...

Ukraine is holding its own: On Day 23 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian advance has largely stopped on all fronts. More than three weeks into the invasion and stiff Ukrainian resistance and the seemingly never-ending Russian supply issues have prevented Russian forces from achieving their primary objectives. Over the past week, the Russian advance was stalling, a result of extremely poor logistical arrangements and stiff Ukrainian resistance. But in the last 24 hours, there has been almost no progress at all. “[The] Ukrainians are putting a lot of effort into defending Kyiv as you would expect them...

The 11-year investigation into the disappearance of British tot Madeleine McCann is set to end later this year, according to reports. Operation Grange, the British taxpayer-funded probe launched four years after Madeleine’s 2007 disappearance from her family’s vacation rental in Portugal, will be shut down by London’s Metropolitan Police when funding runs out this fall, the Sun reported Saturday. “There are currently no plans to take the inquiry further,” a source close to the matter told the outlet. “The end of the road for Operation Grange is now in sight. The team’s work is expected to be completed by autumn.”...

Folks, we are in a world of trouble. America has faced tough odds before. America beats impossible odds all the time. We are resilient and relentless. We are a nation of people who believe nothing is impossible. So, never count us out. There is always hope. But make no mistake, we are now in the fight of our lives. The odds may be worse than we have ever faced. Our nation is being destroyed from within. America is hanging by a thread. The attacks are relentless and ominous. The nation is divided like never before. You’d have to go back...

The current backlash against Critical Race Theory in K–12 schools has been mischaracterized as an attempt to ban teaching about slavery. Actually, the proper teaching of the history of slavery undermines CRT. Few other topics, when deeply understood, reveal the moral and economic evolution of Western civilization more than does the topic of slavery and the West's crushing of it.Students need to know that slavery has been nearly universal. Slavery can be found throughout the world and in every era, including in Africa, well before the Europeans ever attached themselves to this already well established system practiced on members of...

A 50-year-old man has died after he collapsed during a 5,000m walk event at Singapore Athletics' (SA) All Comers Meet 2 on Saturday morning (March 19). The Straits Times understands he dropped to the ground within the first kilometre of his event, which began at 8am. First aiders from the medical providers stationed at the Home of Athletics in Kallang rushed to the man's aid, before ambulance and paramedics arrived shortly after. They sent the man to Tan Tock Seng Hospital, where he died.

Last week's presidential election in South Korea featured two candidates who advanced radically different visions to the electorate. Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party of Korea campaigned on a platform of progressive policies such as 30% gender quotas for females. "I think it's very important to acknowledge the inequalities and issues of gender inequality that women suffer structurally in our society," he emphasized. Lee's opponent was Yoon Suk-yeol of the conservative People Power Party. Yoon ran on an openly anti-feminist platform. He called for the abolition of the Ministry of Gender Equality and accused its officials of treating men like...

Vladimir Putin has been accused of deporting Ukrainians to 'filtration' centres before forcibly taking them to remote Siberian towns after confiscating their phones and documents. 'Several thousand' people have so-far been taken, Mariupol city council claimed, before being processed through 'filtration camps' and sent to 'remote cities' in Russia where they will be obliged to stay for years and work for free. -snip- Russian news agencies have reported that buses carrying hundreds of refugees from the besieged southeastern port city Mariupol had arrived in Russia in recent days. Moscow officials also said a trainload of over 280 Ukrainians were being...

An assistant professor of business at Southern California's Chapman University has filed a lawsuit against five students, whose identities remain unknown, alleging copyright infringement for posting exam questions anonymously in an online forum. According to professor David Berkovitz's attorney Marc Hankin, the students, who took midterm and final exams remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic during the spring semester of 2021, are alleged to have posted elements of the tests on Course Hero, a crowdsourced website dedicated to course-specific study supplements. Because the professor grades on a curve, Hankin said, Berkovitz believes by posting exam-specific questions on Course Hero, "students...

Rep. Liz Cheney on Sunday agreed with Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the use of chemical weapons should be a “red line” for NATO to intervene in Ukraine.“I think that we in the West, the United States and NATO — we need to stop telling the Russians what we won't do,” Cheney (R-Wyo.) said. “We need to be very clear that we are considering all options, that the use of chemical weapons is certainly something that would alter our calculations.”Russian forces have bombed schools, hospitals and other civilian centers within the four weeks of their assault on...

In my email on March 19, a Medscape “Perspective” post by William G. Wilkoff, MD titled “Waiting for the Under-5 COVID-19 Vaccine“ caught my attention. He opens by noting that “Pfizer and BioNTech announced that they were delaying the application for their COVID-19 vaccine for children under the age of 5.” He goes on to say that “earlier evidence suggests that two doses may not provide adequate protection in the 2- to 4-year old age group.”Wilkoff might be forgiven for not knowing that the FDA and CDC have carefully avoided allowing facts to escape their lairs but the English NHS...

Hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a bitter speech to the Israeli parliament on Sunday condemning Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s mediation efforts with Russian President Vladimir Putin as an attempt to mediate “between good and evil,” the Ukrainain leader reversed course and said his country was “grateful” to Israel’s prime minister.

LVIV, Ukraine — Firing rockets and bombs from the land, air and — probably for the first time — from warships in the Sea of Azov, Russian forces broadened their bombardment of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol on Sunday and have forcibly deported thousands of residents, according to city officials and witnesses.Among the freshly devastated was an art school, where about 400 residents were hiding, according to city officials who claimed it had been bombed by Russian forces targeting civilians. The number of casualties was not known.Into the fourth week of the Russian assault on the country, the coastal...

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian security council, on Monday threatened Poland in a lengthy letter... "The interests of the citizens of Poland have been sacrificed due to Russophobia of 'mediocre politicians' and their 'puppeteers from across the ocean' with clear signs of senile insanity," the former Russian president and prime minister wrote in a post on his Telegram channel... "It's absolutely and completely right that it is expensive and thoughtless. But Poland can no longer take into account the costs. Everything that Poland could lose due to its long-term pathological Russophobia has already been lost," he continued. Poland,...