Free Republic

The video surveillance system is used in Moscow to ascertain where potential recruits reside, Moscow’s chief military enlistment officer Maxim Loktev told TASS. “The video camera surveillance system is used in Moscow to determine where conscripts live, organisations where they work report their personal details to military enlistment offices on the Moscow mayor’s orders. Educational institutions help us find out where conscripts study,” he said. According to him, the key reason why people refuse to show up at their designated military draft offices is because they do not reside at the place they are registered at. This prevents them from...

A Moscow military garrison court has fined Colonel Ivan Mertvichshev, who was responsible for overseeing draft procedures, 400,000 rubles (€4,470) for extortion in the form of attempting to obtain a Bosch washing machine worth 72,000 rubles (€800) as a bribe, Kommersant reports. Mertvichshev was employed in the main organisational and mobilisation department of the General Staff. He was also banned from serving in official positions for two years. The colonel was initially charged with receiving a washing machine bribe in exchange for a positive review of a military enlistment office’s operation over the course of the mobilisation in Russia. However,...

A federal appeals court says honking isn't First Amendment–protected activity. There's no constitutional right to honk your car horn, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The case involves Susan Porter, who repeatedly honked her car horn while driving past protesters in California in 2017. A deputy with the San Diego County Sheriff's Office issued Porter a ticket, saying she had violated a state law against misuse of car horns. Porter pushed back, filing a federal lawsuit in 2018. In it, she alleged that honking her horn in solidarity with the protesters was protected First Amendment...

Joe Biden, TransCatholicLast June, Joe Biden boasted to the AFL-CIO that his administration was “changing people’s lives.” He didn’t add that American Catholic lives were “Target Number One” — we’ve had to learn that the hard way. The fact that Joe is a baptized Catholics holding in thrall the Georgetown Jesuit Community does raise eyebrows, to be sure, but it gets no rise from America’s Catholic bishops. We’re left to figure it out for ourselves. So, let’s give it a try. Joe Biden is a “spiritual tranny,” a Very-Devout-Catholic-While-Terrorist who angrily waves his Rosary in our face while commanding the...

A Michigan Senate bill currently under consideration aims to require employers to share employees' name, home address, cell phone number, work address location, and personal email address with labor representatives every 90 days. Sen. John Cherry, D-Flint, sponsored Senate Bill 169. “The intent here is to make sure that individuals who are legally required to represent employees have the information on who they are actually required to represent and the ability to contact them and fulfill their requirements of representation,” Cherry said during Thursday testimony in front of the Senate Labor Committee. Sen. Thomas Albert, R-Lowell, said the bill is...

Dozens of Cook County employees have resigned or been fired in ongoing investigations of fraud in COVID-19 relief programs. Forty-eight employees of Cook County Clerk of Court Iris Martinez “no longer work” for the office after they were found to have defrauded the federal Paycheck Protection Program, which was enacted to provide forgivable loans to help struggling businesses stay in business in 2020 and 2021 during the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic. Nationally, most of the loans in the federal Small Business Administration’s fraud-plagued program were forgiven, meaning the businesses’ owners didn’t have to pay back any of...

This list only includes destroyed vehicles and equipment of which photo or videographic evidence is available. Therefore, the amount of equipment destroyed is significantly higher than recorded here. Small arms, ATGMs, MANPADS, loitering munitions, drones used as unmanned bait, civilian vehicles, trailers and derelict equipment are not included in this list. All possible effort has gone into avoiding duplicate entries and discerning the status of equipment between captured or abandoned. Many of the entries listed as 'abandoned' will likely end up captured or destroyed. Similarly, some of the captured equipment might be destroyed if it can't be recovered. When the...

A video of a 13-year-old working at Chick-fil-A went viral recently after an advocacy group called More Perfect Union uploaded it to Twitter and then pointed the finger at the "National Restaurant Association—a lobby group funded by big food corporations," calling it "a key driver behind new bills letting kids work dangerous jobs." Sure, taking drive-thru orders and slinging waffle fries at a Chick-fil-A your dad owns sounds like the definition of danger. Exactly like working in a coal mine. Over the past year, to help deal with labor shortages, several states have pushed for legislative changes that would let...

Multi-Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk is again sounding warning bells on the dangers of artificial intelligence to humanity — and claiming that a popular chatbot has a liberal bias that he plans to counter with his own AI creation. Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a segment aired Monday night that he plans to create an alternative to the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT that he is calling “TruthGPT,” which will be a "maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” The idea, Musk said, is that an AI that wants to understand humanity is...

As many Americans who waited until the last minute will likely rediscover this weekend, filing federal taxes is a complicated and frustrating task. No matter how much care is taken, mistakes happen—and fairly often. During the 2021 tax filing season, for example, the IRS "suspended and reviewed 35 million returns with errors," according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which annually reviews the IRS' performance and makes recommendations for improvement. Those errors can be the result of taxpayers failing to include a necessary form or complete information, though they can also be the results of mistakes...

The transgender culture war sure has taken off since those ornery conservatives, snubbed by Obergefell, grabbed hold of the issue and thrust it into the spotlight and down the throats of Americans everywhere — so say the media.It wasn’t a misprint, a Babylon Bee joke, or one of Sonny Hostin’s brainless musings. This claim came from none other than paper-of-record The New York Times, which attempted to make the case that after conservatives lost the same-sex marriage fight at the Supreme Court in 2015, “the religious right went searching for an issue that would re-energize supporters and donors,” and found...

Virginia Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine gave the FBI his approval to investigate Catholic parishes in his own state on Monday. When asked by a local ABC affiliate about the FBI’s Richmond division infiltrating Catholic communities to spy on the church for alleged extremism, Kaine called the revelations a misunderstanding. “I think the key is communication,” Kaine told ABC13. “If the FBI has a concern like that, then go to the church leaders and say, ‘Hey look, we have a concern and we don’t want your members to get unwittingly caught up in something.'”Former FBI Special Agent Kyle Seraphin blew the...

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has invested tens of millions of dollars into a radical nongovernmental organization (NGO) that is pushing for young children to be considered “sexual beings.” Not to be confused with the pro-abortion organization, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) is a group that campaigns for kids to be sexualized from an early age. IPPF claims that children are “born sexual” and lobbies for children under 10 years of age to be taught about “commercial sex work.” The NGO wields significant influence on global sex education and comprises 120 independent organizations in over 146 countries. The organization, including...

Alarm! America’s mega bank, The Federal Reserve, is slowing M2 Money growth so rapidly that it looks like it is depthcharging the US economy. Inflation in the US has been booming since 1) Biden attacked fossil fuels, 2) The Fed’s overresponse to Covid (+27.48% YoY on February 22, 2021 near the beginning of Biden’s Reign of Error). and 3) out of control Federal spending under Biden, Pelosi and Schumer. Fed Funds Futures point to two more Fed rate hikes before The Fed drop rates like a depthcharge. This depthcharge will help create a rekindling of asset bubbles. The Taylor Rule...

Every schoolkid knows -- or used to know -- that the United States has three branches of government. At least that's what the textbooks say. But really, we have four branches of government. That's because Congress -- the legislative branch -- has for decades delegated lawmaking authority to the unconstitutional fourth branch of the U.S. government: independent regulatory agencies. By some estimates, there are more than 300 of these agencies sticking their nose into every aspect of American life and business, from what kind of car you can buy to the temperature setting on your thermostat to what you can...

A prison ministry that was the recipient of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin's first-quarter salary praised his action, saying it will help "bring the Gospel to inmates in over 350 jails and prisons worldwide.”While touring Prince William County's Adult Detention Center on March 31, Youngkin announced his decision to donate his first quarter salary to Good News Jail & Prison Ministry, which his office identified as “an organization dedicated to supplying faith-based resources for jails and prisons in the Commonwealth of Virginia and worldwide.”Youngkin presented the ministry, based in Henrico, Virginia, with a check for $43,750.The governor of Virginia receives an...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (WDAF) — In just over a day, more than $2 million has been raised for a Missouri teen who was shot after going to the wrong address. As of Tuesday morning, more than $2.7 million had been raised through a GoFundMe campaign to support 16-year-old Ralph Yarl. Kansas City police say just before 10 p.m. on Thursday, Ralph was picking up his younger siblings at a home on N.E. 115th Terrace when he mistakenly went to a house on N.E. 115th Street. Ralph didn’t have a phone with him and went to the wrong block, his aunt,...

The continued — an increasingly curious — absence of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) from her duties in the upper chamber of Congress is becoming a growing thorn in the sides of the Democrats. Feinstein is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and her prolonged recovery from shingles has ground to a halt the Democrats’ ability to further pollute the judicial system with activist judges who have been nominated by Joe Biden’s puppeteers. Over the weekend, Matt wrote a VIP column about Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asserting that the Republicans on the committee not let Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer...

CHICAGO (AP) — When the U.S. prisons director visited the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, this past week, she stopped by the federal death row where Bruce Webster is in a solitary, 12-by-7 foot cell, 23 hours a day. Webster’s not supposed to be there. A federal judge in Indiana ruled in 2019 that the 49-year-old has an IQ in the range of severe intellectual disability and so cannot be put to death. But four years on, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Prisons haven’t moved him to a less restrictive unit or different prison.

Summer is upon us, and America beckons, but not all of it! Let's face it, if the Rose City was on your bucket list, you outlived it.... Perhaps you should have been on Portland's bucket list instead. Forget about Orlando, Disney, San Francisco, Seattle, Honolulu and Denver too; deplorable dollars aren't welcome! But they aren't the only places that label you a fascist; Durango, Tucson, Flagstaff, Gallup, Moab, Wisconsin Dells, Boston, the Hamptons, Telluride, Stowe, and Santa Fe are all woked up as well. Forget about Aspen, Atlantic City, Savannah, Palm Beach, Jackson Hole, Helena, Williamsburg, and even Anaheim...they think...