Free Republic

In an extensive interview with an Italian TV network, the foreign minister discussed a whole range of problems in relations between Moscow and the collective West. In particular, comprehensive sanctions against Russian business and the oil and gas sector, that arose after the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Sunday that over $300 billion was stolen from Russia, the majority of which was payments for oil and gas supplies, because energy giant Gazprom had to store money in Western bank accounts. "They wanted to ‘punish’ Russia, so they stole it," Lavrov...

As of Wednesday, cashiers at the store will no longer be bagging bottles for them, though they might supply empty boxes when available. All New Jersey retail, grocery, and pharmacy stores, along with restaurants and other food service businesses, are banned from giving out single-use plastic bags, as well as foam containers, though there are some exceptions. What about switching to paper bags? Supermarkets can no longer provide those either. “We have long-term customers that still probably don’t know there is going to a be a bag ban,” Millington said. “So we’re trying to educate everybody as they come in....

The special grand jury that will help investigate former President Donald Trump for possibly criminal meddling in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election was seated Monday after a selection process that took less than 90 minutes. The probe employing the grand jury, seated in Atlanta, likely represents the biggest threat of criminal prosecution that Trump currently faces. While still president, and waiting for Congress to confirm President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, Trump in a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in that state. That call, and...

... The microprocessor unleashed a torrent of technological change. Much of it was ornamental, but some of it was truly novel, which triggered our collective amnesia about the human condition. It seems ridiculous now, but at the dawn of the internet age people thought it would usher in the long-promised age of democratic tranquility and equality. Instead, America has become despotic and authoritarian. If you could transport fascists from a century ago to this age, they would assume that fascism had carried the day in the great ideological wars of the 20th century. Everything in American life is now controlled...

(Reuters) - Ricardo Aguirre sits near his two taco trucks and laments the soaring cost of tomatoes, onions, meat and cilantro, which have doubled in price in recent months, hammering his Phoenix-based catering business. Aguirre, 43, usually votes for the Democratic Party. But with inflation hitting a 40-year high in February he has a stark warning for Democrats as they seek to keep control of the U.S. Congress in November's elections. "If the Republican Party has something better to offer us, I will vote Republican," said Aguirre. Republicans, he believes, are generally better economic stewards who could have more success...

President Joe Biden reportedly told former President Barack Obama he will run for re-election. It doesn’t matter what Biden tells anyone today. What matters is what is about to happen in November. That’s the day the Democrats will turn on President Biden. It’s the day that the whispering campaign among Democrats about whether a soon-to-be 80-year-old man is in good enough health, politically and cognitively, to be the man at the top of the ticket in 2024, will burst into the open. It’s inevitable. The stop Biden drumbeat will grow every day, whether it takes weeks or a few months,...

MEYERSDALE, Pa. (WTAJ) —The Maple Festival in Meyersdale is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Dr. Mehmet Oz made the trip out and said a tradition like the Maple Festival in a small town shows why those types of communities are so important. “Folks are actually experiencing life and sometimes the difficult part of life that happens when you’ve been waiting in line for your turn and the federal government comes in and pushes you out of the way for reasons you don’t understand,” said Oz. “So sometimes parts of Pennsylvania seem forgotten and I want to make sure they’re not forgotten....

The White House press corps' annual gala returned Saturday night along with the roasting of Washington, the journalists who cover it and the man at the helm: President Joe Biden. The White House Correspondents' Association dinner, sidelined by the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, featured Biden as the first president in six years to accept an invitation. Donald Trump shunned the event while in office. “Just imagine if my predecessor came to this dinner this year,” Biden told an audience of 2,600, among them journalists, government officials and celebrities. “Now that would really have been a real coup.” The president...

Joe Biden is desperately casting about for a way to cancel student loan debt in order to boost his standing with younger voters and stave off a Democratic disaster at the polls. The current scuttlebutt is a plan that would forgive $10,000 in debt for borrowers who earn less than $125,000 a year.But Biden’s radical allies won’t be satisfied with only partial forgiveness of the debt. They have been insisting that Biden has the power to cancel all $1.6 trillion worth of college debt currently on the books. About five million borrowers owing $110 billion are in default, up from...

There’s been a move over the past few years to help young Americans learn how to manage their money better. And it’s long overdue. It can be easy to wonder what sort of problems financial literacy courses could have prevented for the generations before those who are in school now. In recent months, Florida, Nebraska, Ohio, and Rhode Island have signed laws creating a requirement that high school students take financial courses in order to graduate. In all, a dozen states have similar laws on the books. Georgia joined the ranks of those states this week. Gov. Brian Kemp signed...

Some of the biggest companies in the world, including Facebook and Google, are planning to spend almost $1 billion on a new climate change strategy. It's not renewable energy or planting trees. It's pulling carbon dioxide emissions right out of the air. The world has moved so slowly over the last 40 years to rein in greenhouse gases that scientists are now finding that cutting the use of fossil fuels alone may not be enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change. The world is on track for increasingly destructive heat waves, floods and storms. That means heat-trapping...

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) released a new report on Wednesday that showed that roughly 1.9 million illegal immigrants who entered the United States throughout the first year of the Biden presidency were apprehended. "Based on FAIR's most recent comprehensive fiscal cost study, illegal aliens are likely imposing a net fiscal burden of at least $143.1 billion," FAIR writes in the report. "That's an increase of approximately $9.4 billion over the past year." The number of illegal immigrants living in the US increased from 14.5 million at the end of 2020 to 15.5 million at the end of...

Chris Christie doubts the leaked tapes of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy telling GOP colleagues he'd urge former President Donald Trump to resign after the Capitol riot will sway voters. The former New Jersey governor got into an argument with ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl on Sunday about the particulars of the audio, revealed by a pair of New York Times reporters, and what it means for McCarthy and the GOP outside the nation's capital.

This Norwegian UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process told the truth. This is a rare quality among UN officials when it comes to getting to the heart of why there is no progress to peace with the Palestinians: they always point the finger of blame at Israel, and never at the perpetrators of hate and violence. Mr. Wennesland is a brave exception. His report identified what really happened on the Temple Mount during Ramadan and Passover and pointed to the real perpetrators.“On 15 April, during the early morning hours, a large number of Palestinians gathered at the...

"...The 2nd of May, 2014, began as a day like any other. Although many had seen that in previous days, fascist thugs from the neo-Nazi group Right Sector, the neo-fascist party Svoboda as well as far-right football hooligans from outside the region had descended on Odessa. They continued to pour in on the morning of the 2nd. By the afternoon, the fascist gangs started violently attacking the anti-fascist protesters. As the anti-fascists come under increasingly violent attacks, the peaceful protesters ran into the Trade Unions House, eventually barricading themselves inside for protection. As the afternoon wore on, fascists were seen...

Welcome to the Third World… especially if you live along America’s West Coast. After all, it was really closer than you once thought it was. “Encampments” of squatters abound in parks, parking lots, under and along freeways, wherever they can get away with it. Why? Nothing more complicated than the combination of mild weather and a woke political establishment. A fact of climatology is that the west coasts of continents have much milder weather than the east coasts. A fact of politics is the existence of guilty middle-class liberals who form a base of support for all kinds of dystopic...

The promises arrived at a rapid clip over two weeks in Glasgow last fall. There, along the banks of the River Clyde, leaders from nearly 200 nations vowed to do more — and move faster — to combat climate change. But nearly six months later, no large nation has come forward with a bolder climate plan, and none of the world’s top emitters has committed to doing so this year. “What we have seen so far is very, very little,” said Niklas Höhne, a German climatologist who created the Climate Action Tracker, which monitors the commitments and policies of countries,...

Even before the Ukraine war began, people were speculating that something was physically wrong with Putin. He looked puffy, not as if he’d gained weight, but as if he were reacting to medicines. Speculation escalated with recent videos showing him clutching a table and with a badly shaking hand. Now, The Sun, a British tabloid, is claiming that Putin is going under the knife for a cancer operation, as well as suffering from Parkinson’s. As early as January 3, Britain’s Telegraph paper was suggesting that Putin is seriously ill. The five pieces of evidence it reported were his puffy face;...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday announced that, beginning May 1, the state’s low-income health insurance would extend full coverage to all qualifying people who are 50 or older, regardless of immigration status. The Medi-Cal expansion is expected to provide full coverage to more than 185,000 Californians, according to Newsom’s office. The May 1 expansion is expected to cost the state $1.3 billion a year. The May 1 expansion includes all people 50 years of age or older who are eligible for Medi-Cal whose immigration status is unsatisfactory. It also includes people 50 or older currently enrolled in restricted-scope Medi-Cal....

A detailed list of the destroyed and captured vehicles and equipment of both sides can be seen below. This list is constantly updated as additional footage becomes available.