Free Republic

Was it only a month ago that someone was, yet again, stuffing an ice cream cone into his maw and snapping back at a reporter’s question? “Our economy is strong as hell.” …Companies added just 127,000 positions for the month, a steep reduction from the 239,000 the firm reported for October and well below the Dow Jones estimate for 190,000. It also was the lowest total since January. This doesn’t bode well for either the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies attempting to stem inflation and stave off a deep recession, nor encouraging for the job market going forward. The big...

Ukraine has hit back at a claim by the European Commission's president that 100,000 of Kyiv's troops have been killed since Russia's invasion in February Ursula von der Leyen used the number in a video address, prompting Kyiv's armed forces to state that the death toll was "classified information." Footage of her speech has since been edited to cut the reference. In Russia, the state-owned news agency Tass was among the media outlets to seize on the high figure and to say the European Commission had "removed information about 100,000 dead Ukrainian servicemen.

Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, held a video call with Mr. Musk on Wednesday to discuss the new legislation, called the Digital Services Act. He said Mr. Musk—who completed his purchase of Twitter in October—stated he planned to get the service ready for the new rules, but Mr. Breton added that more work would be needed. “There is still huge work ahead, as Twitter will have to implement transparent user policies, significantly reinforce content moderation and protect freedom of speech, tackle disinformation with resolve, and limit targeted advertising,” Mr. Breton said, according to a summary of...

Frank Tartaglia, a filmmaker and beloved fixture in the south Philadelphia arts scene, died suddenly last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Here's how writer Mike Newall described Tartaglia's passing: On Thanksgiving Day, just weeks after his first major film headlined the Philadelphia Festival to positive reviews, Frank Tartaglia died suddenly in his sleep at his family home in South Philadelphia. He was 45. The family said they did not yet know the cause of death. Family members said they were shocked — and that he had been in good health and excited about the success of his film. Who was...

An Indiana couple who struggled with infertility adopted a baby that was dropped off at a hospital's Safe Haven Box. Bruce and Shelby Faltynski, 39 and 35, coped with their infertility by becoming foster parents before welcoming two adopted children this year, including nearly newborn baby Myah on November 18. Myah was anonymously dropped off at a Chicago hospital's Safe Haven Box per Chicago law that allows mothers to give up their child until 45 days after birth without legal repercussions. 'A lot of people have nine months to prepare for a baby,' Bruce told Fox News. 'We had nine...

ong-range bombers from Russia and China have conducted “joint patrols” over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea, with South Korean and Japanese fighter jets being scrambled to intercept them. While combined bomber missions of this kind are by no means unprecedented, today’s exercises included Russian and Chinese aircraft landing on each other’s airfields, for the first time in this type of exercise, in a sign of expanding cooperation.

Gay and bisexual men in monogamous relationships would be allowed to donate blood without abstaining from sex under guidelines being drafted by the Food and Drug Administration, people familiar with the plans said. The change would be a departure from U.S. policy that for many years barred men who have sex with men from donating blood. The FDA policy originated in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic, when tests for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, weren’t considered sensitive enough to protect the blood supply. The FDA lifted the ban in 2015 but said gay and bisexual men had to...

San Francisco city officials unveiled a new self-cleaning toilet last week. Designed to reflect San Francisco values, the toilet stopped working within days of its inaugural flush. This latest dysfunction in the Democrat-run city casts doubt not only on the whether the designers followed through on their aim of coming up with something as "indestructible as possible," but also on the utility of the city building 24 toilets just like it. Touted by the San Francisco Chronicle as the "future of public toilets," a so-called self-cleaning "Amenipod" was recently installed at the edge of Embarcadero Plaza and opened to the...

In the wake of the Balenciaga child sex ad campaign scandal, take a look at this. It's about Lotta Volkova, Balenciaga's senior stylist, once declared by W magazine "the coolest stylist in the industry." The fashion house tried to blame the photographers for the child sex controversy, but it seems clear that the real fault is with Volkova, who has been working closely with the head of Balenciaga since his days as the founder of the Vetements brand:

Returning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised former President Donald Trump Wednesday for his contributions to Israel, but said the former president’s decision to dine with disgraced rapper Kanye West​ and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago last week was “wrong and misplaced.”​ “I condemned Kanye West’s anti-Semitic statements. Straight away, I thought that was just wrong and misplaced,” Netanyahu said in an interview published Wednesday on the website “Common Sense.” “And I think that that’s what I would say about President Trump’s decision to dine with this person. I think is wrong and misplaced. I think it’s a mistake....

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve will push rates higher than previously expected and keep them there for an extended period, Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday, in remarks likely intended to underscore the Fed’s single-minded focus on combating stubborn inflation. Powell also signaled in a written speech to be delivered to the Brookings Institution that the Fed may increase its key interest rate by a smaller increment at its December meeting, only a half-point, after four straight three-quarter point hikes. But Powell also stressed that the smaller hike shouldn’t be taken as a sign the Fed will let up on...

Dr. Eric Fleegler of Boston Children’s Hospital, one of the authors of a study looking at firearm-related deaths in the United States, observed that it took coronavirus just a “couple of years” to kill as many people as died in firearm-related incidents over the past three decades. The study, published on the JAMA Network, found 1,110,421 people intentionally or accidentally died in firearm-related incidents from 1990 to 2021. The Hill quoted Dr. Fleegler commenting on the number of firearm-arm related deaths. “That is roughly the number of people who have died from COVID in the last couple of years,” he...

Corporate profits in the nonfinancial sector hit a record high of $2.08 trillion in the third quarter even as 40-year-high inflation continues to squeeze American consumers. Profits adjusted for inventories and capital consumption rose $6.1 trillion from the second to third fiscal quarters, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday, continuing a red-hot recovery from the flash recession caused by pandemic shutdowns. Following a two-quarter dip in 2020, quarterly profits have surged by more than 80 percent over the last two years, from around $1.2 trillion to more than $2 trillion, adding weight to arguments that the private sector is driving inflation...

How’s this for irony? The biggest obstacles right now to fast-tracking the Mountain Valley Pipeline are Republicans and the biggest proponents are Democrats, one of whom has declared that “climate change is an emergency.” You’ll recall that back in July, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, shocked both parties when he announced he’d vote for his party’s climate bill – more formally but perhaps inaccurately known as the Inflation Reduction Act. Manchin is a longtime lover of fossil fuels so the notion that he’d back a bill pushed by environmental interests (among others) didn’t seem to quite fit. What we...

The former Twitter executive and safety chief who played a key role in censoring The Post’s October 2020 exposé on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop has admitted it was a mistake — more than two years later. Yoel Roth, who was Twitter’s head of trust and safety until he quit earlier this month in the wake of Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover, confessed Tuesday that the company erred in restricting people from sharing the scoop. In an interview with journalist Kara Swisher, Roth appeared to deflect the blame from himself — insisting that even though he had concerns about the authenticity...

Each year around mid-summer, somewhere between December and mid-January, the skies of South Africa's Gauteng province, including the city of Johannesburg, fill with small white butterflies. Some land in people's gardens, allowing a closer look at the thin brown markings on their wings. Those markings give the butterflies their name: the brown-veined white butterfly (Benenois aurota). This year, the butterflies have arrived early. That may seem unimportant. But, to phenologists like myself, it's evidence of changes in the environment that require close attention. Climate change is intangible to many people. We know it is happening, but our larger surroundings look...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken called recent barrages of Russian missile strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure “barbaric” on Wednesday, accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of trying to “freeze and starve Ukrainians.” Ukraine says Russia has stepped up its attacks against energy infrastructure targets in recent weeks, leading to rolling blackouts across the country and leaving many residents without heat and water as freezing winter temperatures set in. “Heat, water, electricity — for children, for the elderly, for the sick — these are President Putin’s new targets. He’s hitting them hard,” Blinken said in Romania while attending a NATO foreign minister...

Following Uvalde, a small group of Republican senators broke with the rest of the party and negotiated a bipartisan gun control deal. It wasn’t the broad, sweeping anti-gun measures that many wanted, but it was gun control. Now, following a series of mass shootings, there’s a renewed push for anti-gun legislation, this time in the form of an assault weapon ban. Unfortunately for those pushing it, the Republicans behind the last bill aren’t interested in a repeat performance.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee seems to keep promoting the tired, partisan line that white supremacists are the leading threat to America’s survival. As PJ Media noted on Tuesday, the Democrat-led committee noted in a report this month that the FBI has “repeatedly identified domestic terrorism, in particular white supremacist violence, as the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland, including in multiple threat alerts provided to Congress and law enforcement agencies across the country.”