Free Republic

Switzerland was among the western countries which decided to voluntarily seize funds belonging to Russian companies, business leaders and even the Central Bank under the pretext of sanctions over Russian special military operation in Ukraine. Bern has released nearly $3.4 billion in Russian assets over the last month, which had been frozen under new sanctions, a recent report from the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) indicates. After seizing a number of additional Russian accounts worth $2.2 billion, tallies show a net reduction of $1.17 billion in total frozen assets compared to April 7, demonstrating that close to $3.4...

Benefits ticked up 5.9% this year, but they're not keeping pace with rampant inflation. The Senior Citizens League predicts Social Security benefits will increase 8.6% in 2023. Social Security benefits got a big boost in January thanks to soaring inflation: The Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) increased payments by 5.9%, or $93 a month for most beneficiaries. Now a report from The Senior Citizens League predicts another bump is coming in 2023 that could raise benefits by 8.6%, the biggest increase since 1981. Impacting roughly 70 million Americans, this year's increase raised the average benefit for a retired worker to...

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.

Steve Gruber: It is time for the progressives and left-wing media to take ownership for getting Joe Biden elected. You bought him, you should be proud of what you bought!

Wisconsin school district filed sexual harassment complaint against 3 middle school students for using improper pronouns

Russia will halt power supply to Finland on Saturday due to lack of payment. According to Reuters, Russian utility Inter RAO will suspend the power supply to Finland due to non-payment since May 6. The Finnish grid company said it can replace Russian electricity supply by importing more electricity from Sweden. Sweden and Finland are both looking to join NATO. Reuters reported:

Trial is set to begin Monday in a federal court in Washington, D.C. An attorney for an ex-New York Times reporter being called to testify next week in special counsel John Durham’s case against ex-Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann is asking that his client be protected from having to testify about some matters related to the case. The motion for protective order for journalist Eric Lichtblau was filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by attorney Chad Bowman of the Washington, D.C., firm Ballard Spahr LLP. The four-page court document points out that Lichtblau...

In the final weeks of the Senate campaign, Kathy Barnette has taken to campaigning with the phrase, “I am you, Pennsylvania.” But as her candidacy ascends in recent polls, we have to ask ourselves: what do we really know about Kathy Barnette? Renowned Pennsylvania reporter, Saleno Zito, couldn’t even get basic information out of Barnette and her campaign this week. Barnette’s campaign refused to supply information on when she was accepted into military Officer Candidate School, or when she moved here from Virginia (which she claimed was her residency in a book published in 2020). She refuses to release her...

US House Majority Leader says "in a time of war” it is "unfortunate" to criticize Biden

HELSINKI — An orbital launch attempt by Chinese startup iSpace suffered failure early Friday, following on from two failures last year. The fourth Hyperbola-1, a four-stage solid rocket, lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 3:09 a.m. Eastern May 13. Apparent launch footage appeared on a Chinese social media site shortly after launch but a period of silence followed, extending well past the time at which a similar launch could have been declared successful. The failure was confirmed by Chinese state media Xinhua four hours after launch. Teams are investigating the specific reasons for...

Parts of the Northern Plains experienced a rare weather phenomenon on Thursday evening called a “haboob.” A haboob is a dust storm commonly seen in deserts, though one was spotted sweeping across parts of Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota. While the Northern Plains doesn’t have deserts, there’s been plenty of dust following a megadrought that has consumed parts of the Central US. The National Weather Service tweeted footage of a fast-moving haboob traversing Sioux Falls, South Dakota, transforming the day instantly into the night. 63 mph wind gust here at the office shortly after 4 pm, but many reports of...

The IRS destroyed data for an estimated 30 million filers in March 2021, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The decision, prompted by a backlog of paper filings, has sparked anger in the tax community. “It just further damages the IRS’ reputation in the business community and in the public,” said Larry Harris, director of tax services at Parsec Financial. An audit by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed the IRS has tossed data for millions of payers, sparking anger from the tax community. The material, known as paper-filed information returns in accounting parlance, is...

I’ve written about Zac Kriegman before. He’s a former Director of Data Science for Reuters who was fired after he challenged some of the assumptions behind the claims made by Black Lives Matter proponents. Today, Bari Weiss published Kriegman’s first hand account of how he changed his mind about BLM and what happened when he brought those concerns to his co-workers in the form of a 12,000 word argument posted on an internal discussion board. In 2020, I started to witness the spread of a new ideology inside the company. On our internal collaboration platform, the Hub, people would post...

Norm Macdonald, the deadpan "Saturday Night Live" alumnus and stand-up comedian, recorded an hour of new material before he died — and it will soon be available to watch on Netflix, the streaming giant announced Thursday. "Norm Macdonald: Nothing Special" will debut May 30, the company confirmed in a news release

Russia’s radioactive, chemical, and biological protection forces chief, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, claimed that in 2020, Ukraine biolabs gave fake money infected with tuberculosis to village children in the Lugansk People’s Republic.Moscow claims Ukraine tried to infect the people of the Russia-aligned Lugansk People’s Republic with tuberculosis (TB) and permitted the US government to conduct human experiments in psychiatric institutions in Kharkov.Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, Chief of Russia’s Radioactive, Chemical, and Biological Protection Forces, claimed during a briefing on the findings of the Russian Defense Ministry’s investigation into the purportedly US-funded bioweapon labs in Ukraine that Russian forces had obtained...

It’s going to be a very busy morning May 24 for Chuck Ardito, the clerk-magistrate of the Barnstable District Court. So many questions for the Barnstable Police Department, if only he’s willing to actually ask them. Clerk Ardito has scheduled one of those very, very rare open hearings at 11 a.m. The Barnstable PD, much to their chagrin, will be seeking a criminal complaint for improper storage of a firearm against Reid Mason, the 22-year-old son of the $267,210-a-year colonel of the Massachusetts State Police, Christopher Mason. I hope Ardito asks some of the questions that the cops have been...

US Senate Endorsement: Kathy Barnette About a year ago I met with Kathy Barnette, a homeschooling Christian mom and veteran who had a big vision for the state of PA. Kathy was relatively unknown at the time, but I knew there was something special about her when I learned that Kathy filed a federal lawsuit related to mail-in ballot issues before the chaos of the 2020 election even happened. Kathy is also a Gab user and even wrote a guest post for our blog last year. Kathy’s testimony is incredibly powerful. She is the “byproduct of a rape” and celebrates...

Germany warns of GLOBAL famine, blames green energy, lockdowns & conflict in Ukraine: "Economic Cooperation & Development Minister Svenja Schulze told the Bild: .."we are facing the worst famine since World War II," which could see "millions" die"

I'm baffled by men, particularly white men, who enthusiastically support the most extreme politicians from the unhinged Democrat Party.Is there any platform that this party offers that actually benefits white men? Or are Democrat-supporting white men just sadomasochists? A severe case of cognitive dissonance?

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