Free Republic

America is not powerful enough to stand up to China and Russia, according to Vladimir Putin's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. During a rambling press conference in which he praised joint military drills between Moscow and Beijing, Lavrov compared the US to Adolf Hitler and Napoleon, who he said mobilised European countries against the Russian empire.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has hailed joint military drills between Moscow and Beijing as a move that strengthens the pair’s new strategic partnership. Addressing reporters in Moscow on Wednesday, Lavrov also accused the West of searching for ways to anger China on a host of issues, such as the status of Tibet and Taiwan.

Last year saw the arrest of nearly 350 public-school educators for alleged sex crimes against children, with a hideous 75% (at least!) crimes against students. Strangely absent from the public discourse around this, however, are any calls to defund public education. The left, it seems, is perfectly tolerant when certain public employees commit monstrous abuses of the power the people have entrusted to them. And these alleged abuses are monstrous, including sexual assault and outright rape, with the vast majority — some 290 — committed by teachers. We’re sure the lack of fiery outrage around these crimes has nothing to...

Given the opportunity to search President Joe Biden’s office and residences, the Department of Justice declined to do so, The Wall Street Journal reports. Instead, it allowed potentially uncleared and unnamed private counsel to search for classified material after the discovery of the highly classified documents in the Penn Biden Center office. It was a decision that could benefit Biden greatly, but at a considerable cost to the department itself. If true, the decision raises additional questions over the independence of top law enforcement personnel. This follows a litany of controversies involving both Donald Trump and Biden where the FBI...

Former President Trump is seeing a double-digit lead in a hypothetical 2024 Republican primary as potential challengers, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), are polling at one or zero percent, a Morning Consult survey released this week found.The survey found Trump taking a sizable lead among his potential challengers, as nearly half, 48 percent, of potential GOP voters choose Trump as their nominee. .Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) comes in a distant second, falling 17 points behind with 31 percent support. Former Vice President Mike Pence places third with 8 percent support, and the rest of the potential challengers listed...

A California college professor is fighting back after he says his job has been threatened due to allegations of racism and hate speech that he said were “completely fabricated.” Tenured Bakersfield College history professor Matthew Garrett said he and other faculty members of a free speech coalition were targeted with false allegations after they asked questions during a campus diversity meeting last October. Shortly afterwards, Garrett received a notice of unprofessional conduct by the administration that claimed he had caused “real harm” to students and said he was being removed from the diversity committee “effective immediately.” In December, vice president...

Just turned ninety-one, a proud traditionalist and very close to Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph Zen, Archbishop Emeritus of Hong Kong, has always criticised the provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops that the Holy See signed with China in September 2018, renewed last October. He talks about Ratzinger's sanctity, agrees with Monsignor Georg Gänswein on the issue of the Latin Mass, asks Bergoglio for a change of pace and tells how he is living this moment of trial, after the police arrested him last May, later releasing him on bail - for "colluding with foreign forces" in the context of managing...

"And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: "But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets." "For I rejoiced greatly, when the brethren came and testified of the truth that is in thee, even as thou walkest in the...

The Justice Department decided against having FBI agents watch over a search for classified documents conducted by President Biden’s lawyers at his Delaware homes — in part because the attorneys were deemed to be cooperating with the DOJ’s investigation, according to a report. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that DOJ officials also opted for the hands-off approach in order to avoid complicating future phases of the probe and to not interfere with special counsel Robert Hur’s work. According to the Journal, Biden’s attorneys were given permission by the Justice Department to search the 80-year-old president’s Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach...

He also thinks that post-conciliar liturgical abuse has died out (a convenient fiction), that the Council still has another sixty years before it is properly implemented (maintaining wrongly that historians teach that Council's always take this long to implement and that a nun is acting like a Bishop.....all underlined below. His approach to cultures generally is uncritical, seeing only good- an impossibility since the Fall. "Africa is original. Africa is a soup to be tasted". Two days before his 86th birthday, Pope Francis receives MUNDO NEGRO in the private library of the Apostolic Palace. When we handed him a copy...

Van Conner, co-founding bassist of alternative rock band Screaming Trees, has died at 55. Conner’s brother and bandmate, Gary Lee Conner, shared the news in a social media statement. “Van Conner, bassist and songwriter of Screaming Trees, died last night of an extended illness at 55,” he wrote. “It was pneumonia that got him in the end. He was one of the closest friends I ever had, and I loved him immensely. I will miss him forever and ever and ever.” Born in 1967 in Apple Valley, Calif., and raised in Ellensburg, Wash., Conner formed the band Explosive Generation in...

What do we know — so far, at least — about the Biden classified documents situation? The information provided to the public has come from people who work for, or are otherwise close to, President Joe Biden and has been filtered selectively through a media largely predisposed to protect the president.

A beloved New York City detective and Iraq War veteran died Tuesday at 38 following a months-long fight with liver cancer. Detective Sammy Lee, who was assigned to the NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau, was diagnosed in July last year, according to his friends. One police source described Lee — a dad of two with nearly a dozen commendations on his record — as “one of best guys in the world.”

U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday that the fight against climate change will only succeed if people around the world take on a wartime footing and accelerate action to curb carbon emissions. When asked if the world will meet the shared goal of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 Celsius by 2032, he said that target won’t be met given the current amount of effort being made. "We can’t hit 1.5," he said. "We’re not on track to do it now, and it’s not clear, absolutely clear that we will...

Northern California and the San Francisco Bay Area have seen a parade of storms since last December, and the rainfall totals are beginning to add up as the local reservoirs fill up. The National Weather Service said Monday morning that its gauge at the San Francisco International Airport had recorded 20.30 inches since Oct. 1, surpassing the average for a water year, the 12-month period running from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. This site, on average, records 19.64 inches in a water year. Water managers use the water year, which follows the water cycle starting in the rainy season and...

LONDON — Thousands of nurses in Britain walked out Wednesday in a new protest over pay, with no end in sight to a wave of strikes that has piled pressure on the UK’s overburdened public health system. Two 12-hour nursing strikes on Wednesday and Thursday affect about a quarter of hospitals and clinics in England. Emergency care and cancer treatment will continue, but thousands of appointments and procedures are likely to be postponed. With more walkouts by nurses planned for next month — and ambulance workers announcing a new slate of February strikes — the Conservative government is under growing...

Spending at retail stores fell in December by the most in a year as consumer demand cools in the face of stubbornly high inflation and rising interest rates. Retail sales, a measure of how much consumers spent on a number of everyday goods, including cars, food and gasoline, declined 1.1% in December, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Economists surveyed by Refinitiv expected sales to fall 0.8%.

In the wake of the 12th wettest start to a year on record, concerns over where that water is ending up have risen. Lake levels have risen as well, but have water releases from Shasta Dam hampered that storage? Well right now we’ve had a spectacular two weeks; the lake has come up 50 feet since the first of the year, which is tremendous news for us. What we’re doing right now though is holding back every last drop of water we can because we started so low. So right now we’re doing minimum releases out of Shasta, out of...

Nick Cave, the seminal Australian rock figure who helmed the Bad Seeds, had plenty to say about ChatGPT, the text-based chat tech developed by buzzy San Francisco startup OpenAI. In a letter published Monday in his "The Red Hand Files" newsletter, Cave talked about the humanity of art, the “emerging horror of AI” and ChatGPT’s “grotesque mockery” of his oeuvre. A New Zealand-based fan sent him a song “written” by the already notorious bot in the style of Cave’s work. To say that the songwriter was unhappy with the song would be underselling his fury. Cave begins by noting that...

A lawyer for former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin made his case on Wednesday for why his client's three convictions in the murder of George Floyd should be overturned, which the state vehemently rebutted.