Free Republic

LONDON (Reuters) - Cold winters helped Moscow defeat Napoleon and Hitler. President Vladimir Putin is now betting that sky-rocketing energy prices and possible shortages this winter will persuade Europe to strong arm Ukraine into a truce -- on Russia's terms. That, say two Russian sources familiar with Kremlin thinking, is the only path to peace that Moscow sees, given Kyiv says it will not negotiate until Russia leaves all of Ukraine. "We have time, we can wait," said one source close to the Russian authorities, who declined to be named because they are not authorised to speak to the media....

A school district in northern Virginia is requiring all teachers to complete a training program that says all students - including preschoolers - can request to be addressed by different names or pronouns without parental permission. Fairfax County Public Schools - a school district that has made headlines for woke policies and clashes over teaching critical race theory - started the program 'Supporting Gender Expansive and Transgender Youth' on July 22. The training details requests students can make without parental permission, according to materials obtained by the Washington Examiner.

President Biden announced his his long-awaited student loan cancelation plan and an extension of the moratorium on payments Wednesday. Biden was long expected to announce plans to forgive up to $10,000 in student debt for those making up to $125,000, which he did, but he threw in another provision - $20,000 of debt forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients. In addition, borrowers will not be required to pay back loans until January 2023, marking the fifth extension of the payment pause. Pell Grants are usually not repaid unless a student drops out early or does not take the proper number of...

A Florida mail carrier who was attacked and savagely mauled by a pack of five dogs has died, officials announced. Pamela Jane Rock, 61, succumbed to her injuries at a hospital on Monday night, a day after the incident in Putnam County, sheriff’s Col. Joseph Wells said during a press conference on Tuesday. “A postal family member lost her life in a dog bite attack. The US Postal Service is deeply saddened at the loss of our employee,” a spokesperson for the United States Postal Service said in a statement. “Our thoughts and prayers are with her family and her...

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Google's Jigsaw subsidiary will next week launch a campaign aimed at tackling disinformation about Ukrainian refugees in Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic based on research by psychologists at two British universities. Working with Jigsaw, the psychologists from the universities of Cambridge and Bristol have produced 90-second clips designed to "inoculate" people against harmful content on social media. The clips, which will run in advertising slots on Google's YouTube video platform, aim to help people identify emotional manipulation and scapegoating in a news headline. The research was spread over seven experiments, including with a group of Americans...

President Joe Biden said forcefully on Wednesday that he had 'zero' advance notice of the FBI's raid on former President Trump's home at Mar-a-Lago – after a newly revealed document showed archival officials contacting White House lawyers about material that was earlier handed over by Trump. 'I didn't have any advanced notice. None. Zero. Not one single bit,' Biden said, making a zero sign with his hand for emphasis.' Biden's statement reflects what White House officials said earlier this month after the extraordinary raid, where FBI agents carted off 10 boxes of material, including some that the government says was...

Minneapolis Public Schools was sued Tuesday over a clause in its teachers contract that calls for laying off white teachers first. The contract was agreed to by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and the school district at the conclusion of a three-week teachers strike in March. The Minneapolis Board of Education approved the new contract in May. Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the school district, its superintendent, and the Board of Education on behalf of taxpayer Deborah Jane Clapp. The lawsuit claims that article 15 of the contract, which provides “protections for educators of color,” violates the Equal Protection...

Leave it to the clowns at The Washington Post, Politico and The New York Times to make the tyrannical Internal Revenue Service seem like a victim of those darn congressional Republicans. The Times decried the GOP for allegedly embracing “the notion that a bigger I.R.S. is poised to be weaponized against them, often distorting facts to make their points.” The Post published a whiny story headlined: “IRS launches safety review after right-wing threats.” Post business reporter Jacob Bogage fretted in the sub-headline how “Republicans in Congress are repeating baseless claims long made by extremists, experts say, potentially putting federal workers...

FLOYD COUNTY, Ga. - The Rome Police Department said Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was a victim of a swatting attack early Wednesday morning in Floyd County. Police said officers responded her home at around 1 a.m. after someone reported someone being shot multiple times, but determined that the call was a prank when they arrived. It's not clear how many officers responded.

We still have so much to learn about our cosmic neighborhood.There's no doubt that we've learned a lot about our solar system over the past six and a half decades of spaceflight, but there are still mysteries lurking around every corner. One of the biggest ones is the planet Uranus. Other than a brief flyby by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986, we haven't visited the planet at all.But that's soon going to change. According to this year's decadal survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a flagship orbiter and probe mission to Uranus should be NASA's...

"You’ve got this great idea to cater to the left wing market for news and you’ve conveniently never heard of FakeNewsCNN (which firing Brian ‘POE-TAE-TOE’ Stelter won’t fix if you don’t fire the rest too, Discovery) or PMSDNC (AKA MSNBC) but you just can’t figure out how to get started. Well we in the shed have your back. Well not literally as we can’t stand you, but we do have a plan you can follow and it isn’t even mostly ours. Imagine you are Rockstar. No not the video game company, the energy drink maker. That isn’t it? Okay imagine...

President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced a sweeping student loan forgiveness plan of up to $10,000 per borrower, or up to $20,000 for those with Pell Grants.But some policy experts say the plan has significant drawbacks, including higher costs to all taxpayers without solving the U.S. higher education system’s underlying issues.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is targeting crisis pregnancy centers amid a record number of attacks on pro-life groups. Ellison joined California and Massachusetts Tuesday in issuing a “consumer alert” about crisis pregnancy centers, citing a lone report written by abortion advocates as justification. “The Minnesota constitution guarantees the right to safe and legal abortion. Many crisis pregnancy centers claim to offer comprehensive health care, but their purpose is to prevent pregnant people from accessing that right — which sometimes they accomplish by misleading, misinforming, or deceiving people,” Ellison said in a statement. The consumer alert claims crisis pregnancy centers...

First lady Jill Biden tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday in what her spokeswoman described as a rebound case. The 71-year-old first lady, who is double vaccinated and twice boosted, tested positive for COVID earlier this month after experiencing mild symptoms. She was prescribed a course of Paxlovid and isolated at a private home on Kiawah Island, S.C., where she and President Biden were vacationing.

President Biden’s plan to cancel a portion of student loan debt has drawn mixed reactions from both far-leftists and conservatives across social media as some leftists contend it is not enough while others celebrate it as a victory for racial justice, and conservatives claim it will only benefit elites. President Biden on Wednesday announced his plan to forgive a portion of student loan debt for individual borrowers making less than $125,000.

The latest smear of Donald Trump being fabricated by many on the Left is that he cannot find any respectable lawyer to represent him. Salon.com trumpets that: All the respectable lawyers are] saying ‘No’ [so that] Trump is driven to hire a Florida insurance lawyer … The most visible Trump attorney has been Christina Bobb. … [whose] federal legal experience is largely limited to a handful of trademark infringement cases on behalf of CrossFit. … Trump's Florida-based lawyer is Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer that handles residential and commercial claims but has never handled a federal case. … Trump's attorney...

On Tuesday, a Florida judge informed two lawyers representing former President Donald Trump, neither of them licensed in the state, that they had bungled routine paperwork to take part in a suit filed after the FBI’s search this month of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club. Trump has projected his usual bravado, and raised millions of dollars online from outraged supporters, since federal agents descended on the property more than two weeks ago and carted off box loads of material including highly classified documents. But something is different this time — and the errant court filing offered a glimpse into...

As China’s property crisis deepens and Chinese homeowners across 100 cities refuse to pay their mortgages, some local government officials are taking matters into their own hands. Deng Bibo, a county party secretary of China’s Hunan province, encouraged everyone to buy multiple homes during his opening speech for a real estate exhibition fair in Shimen, a county of Hunan, on Tuesday. “I hope that today all comrades will take the lead in buying property,” Deng said. “Buy one property, then buy a second one. If you purchased a second one already, then buy a third. Bought a third? Then buy...

Yesterday’s election in Florida was a huge success in the first step replacing school board members. It is a model that needs to expand to colleges and universities by replacing Marxist board of trustees members.Education is the indoctrination ground that is destroying America. They perform their evils on the backs of hardworking American taxpayers. That needs to change.Local school boards need to be dominated by MAGA. Teacher union contracts should never be renewed. Leftist Administrators need to be fired. Leftist teachers need to be constrained and made miserable to the point they leave their jobs. State legislators need to pass...

When asked about his message for Floridians who support current GOP Governor Ron DeSantis and how he'd seek to win their vote in November, Crist didn't hesitate to disavow their support for his campaign. "Those who support the governor should stay with him and vote for him and I don't want your vote," Crist bellowed. "If you have that hate in your heart, keep it there," he added in something of a Hillary Clintonesque "basket of deplorables" comment. Nothing hollers "not in it to win it" like Crist kicking off his general election campaign by smearing a majority of his...