Free Republic

Next week, DeSantis will resume his political travel in the next week with visits to Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. [cut] Speculation about an official kickoff date has been rampant, covering much of the calendar between now and July-4 with potential locations ranging from his childhood hometown of Dunedin, Florida, to somewhere along the Rust Belt where his parents are from. [cut] The circle has expanded out of necessity as DeSantis builds out a nationwide campaign. Never Back Down, a super PAC expected to play an outsized role boosting DeSantis, has beefed up its staff and is already raising money and...

The Navajo Nation Council voted Thursday to oppose plans by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the country’s first-ever Native American Cabinet member, to ban oil and gas drilling on 351,000 acres of public land around New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park and establish a buffer zone surrounding the site. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management formally proposed withdrawing the 351,000 acres of public land surrounding Chaco Canyon in January 2021, with Haaland and other New Mexico congressional Democrats having co-sponsored legislation in 2019 to establish a 10-mile buffer zone around the historical park. The Navajo Nation Council passed a...

According to the American Heritage dictionary, this is the definition of Stupid: Slow to learn or understand; obtuse.Tending to make poor decisions or careless mistakes.Marked by a lack of intelligence or care; foolish or careless. That applies to a lot of Americans… Democrat voters in general and in particular a majority of blacks, college students and white college educated women. Notice I said Democrat voters, not Democrat politicians. Democrat politicians may be many things, hypocrites, liars, traitors, and more, but they’re not stupid as defined above. Why? Because they do exactly what they need to do in order to win...

The US government has announced it’s sending 1,500 troops to the southern border with Mexico to “supplement” Border Patrol forces, but the troops aren’t there to protect the border and have instead been tasked with “data entry”, logging information about illegal aliens before they’re turned loose and let into the United States. With Title 42 border protections, which allow for the rapid deportation of illegal aliens, expiring in the coming days, the Biden Administration has claimed it’s moving to secure the southern border, but new information confirms that Joe Biden and company are preparing to do the exact opposite and...

I don’t sleep much after chairing a Braver Angels college debate. There’s a surge of excitement that reverberates for hours after I guide the collision of highly charged, diverse viewpoints that students carry into the classroom or auditorium. It defies gravity and buoys me up—which explains why I began writing this essay late at night in my hotel room after leading a debate on the campus of UNC Greensboro this past semester. Launched in 2018, the national College Debates and Discourse program is an alliance between Braver Angels, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), and BridgeUSA—organizations that believe...

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday announced it was ending its declaration of COVID-19 as a public health emergency of international concern, more than three years after it was first declared. “For more than a year, the pandemic has been on a downward trend, with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing and the pressure on health systems easing. This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19,” WHO DIrector-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press briefing Friday.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives intentionally overstated the duties of dozens of employees, labeling them as law enforcement agents so it could pay them more money and costing the government tens of millions of dollars.Investigators said ATF has been making overpayments since at least 2003. They identified more than 100 jobs in human resources and other administrative areas that were misclassified as criminal investigators.They said the government wasted roughly $20 million on overpayments in just one five-year period.ATF officials disputed the exact numbers but admitted to the overall nature of the scam. Officials said they are still...

LIKE MANY GREAT SPY STORIES, this one begins with a brief, mundane scene whose significance only becomes apparent later on. Around lunchtime on February 1, 2000, a man dropped a piece of paper near a table in a Middle Eastern restaurant outside Los Angeles and paused long enough to strike up a conversation with two Arabic-speaking men dining nearby. It would take FBI agents nearly 20 years to understand the full meaning of that small event. The man who dropped the piece of paper was Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence asset, recently declassified FBI documents show. And the two Arabic-speaking...

U.S. federal and state officials are assessing whether "market manipulation" caused the recent volatility in banking shares, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday, as the White House vowed to monitor "short-selling pressures on healthy banks." Shares of regional banks resumed their slide this week after the collapse of First Republic Bank , the third U.S. mid-sized lender to fail in two months. Short sellers raked in $378.9 million in paper profits on Thursday alone from betting against certain regional banks, according to analytics firm Ortex. Increased short-selling activity and volatility in shares have drawn increasing scrutiny by...

'In the absence of ammunition they're doomed to perish senselessly,' Yevgeny Prigozhin saysYevgeny Prigozhin, leader of Russia's Wagner Group mercenary force, said in a sudden and dramatic announcement on Friday that his forces would pull out of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut that they have been trying in vain to capture since last summer. Prigozhin said they would withdraw on May 10 — ending their involvement in the longest and bloodiest battle of the war — because of heavy losses and inadequate ammunition supplies. He asked defence chiefs to insert regular army troops in their place. "I declare on behalf...

A pair of state representatives are calling for an investigation into the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) for misuse of power against a local farm opposed to the Gotion battery plant. MDARD is investigating Majestic Friesians Horse Farm in Green Charter Township in Mecosta County. The investigation comes nearly two weeks after the owner of the farm, Lori Brock, hosted a rally against the proposed battery plant. “I feel like we’re being harassed,” Brock exclaims. “They are trying to shut me up. They’re trying to scare me and I’m not going to put up with it.” The rally...

A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts.An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war.The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday avoided commenting on the statement by the head of the private military company Wagner threatening to withdraw from the battlefield in the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut, saying the matter is related to a "special military operation" of Russia. "We have seen it in the media, but I cannot comment on it because it concerns the course of a special military operation," Peskov told reporters at a press briefing in Moscow.

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner resigned on Thursday after years of accusations that she willfully neglected the duties of her office. Gardner announced her resignation in a letter to Republican Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri, in which she did not reference any of the criticism her office faced but instead said she was resigning in order to deter Republicans from appointing a special counsel in her stead. "The most powerful weapon I have to fight back against these outsiders stealing your voices and your rights is to step back," she wrote. "I took this job to serve the people...

A man covers his face while mourning in the village of Dubona, Serbia, on Friday after a mass shooting, the second in the country in two days. Photo by Andrej Cukic/EPA-EFE *********************************************************************** May 5 (UPI) -- Serbian authorities captured a suspect early Friday in a mass shooting in a rural area near the capital of Belgrade, the second in two days. Police conducted a manhunt for the 21-year-old suspect overnight before taking him into custody near the city of Kragujevac, about 40 miles south of where the attacks occurred in the small village of Dubona. Eight people were killed and...

A Catholic health system in Oklahoma has threatened to sue the federal government for violating its First Amendment rights over a decision to deny re-accreditation to one of its hospitals if it doesn’t follow an order to extinguish a long-lit sanctuary candle for safety purposes. Following a hospital inspection in February, a federal surveyor deemed that a living flame in the Saint Francis Hospital South chapel – part of the Saint Francis Health System – violated code, as it is “an open flame burning unattended 24/7.” The surveyor issued a citation demanding the candle be extinguished. Saint Francis Health Systems...

As a convicted felon, Ramos was prohibited from owning any firearms. An investigation into a string of graffiti incidents culminated with Portland Police busting a ghost gun workshop operated by one of the taggers. Jacob Ramos, 43, was arrested and hit with a slew of charges, including eleven counts of manufacturing firearms. His tagging partner, 26-year-old Shelaleh Rostami, was also charged, but only for the graffiti. The investigation, launched by Mayor Ted Wheeler, sought to track down those responsible for defacing the city's infrastructure. Authorities were able to identify Rostami via her tag, "THUJA," and connect her to Ramos, "BIER,"...

PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) -- Investigators say a man is in custody in connection to the murder of a woman on a north Phoenix trail. Investigators confirmed the suspect in his early 20s was arrested around 6:30 p.m. at his apartment near Scottsdale and Bell roads on Thursday, less than a mile from the trail where 29-year-old Lauren Heike’s body was found. Officers haven’t released his name. Sources tell Arizona’s Family the suspect is 23 years old and is linked to the crime through DNA. They also say the suspect stabbed Heike multiple times.

The Twitter Files gave us a window into how government agencies, civil society, and tech companies work together to censor social media users. Now, key nations are attempting to enshrine this coordination into law explicitly. Around the world, politicians have either just passed or are on the cusp of passing sweeping new laws, which would allow governments to censor ordinary citizens on social media and other Internet platforms. Under the guise of preventing “harm” and holding large tech companies accountable, several countries are establishing a vast and interlinked censorship apparatus, a new investigation by Public finds. Politicians, NGOs, and their...

The U.S. economy added 253,000 jobs in April, surpassing analyst forecasts of 180,000 new jobs, according to Labor Department data released Friday. The unemployment rate remained historically low at 3.4 percent, down from 3.5 percent the previous month. The jobs report reveals that the economy is slowing, but the labor market remains surprisingly robust. The unemployment rate for Black Americans dipped slightly to 4.7 percent, a record low. That’s a huge recovery from the onset of the pandemic, when the Black unemployment rate spiked to 16.8 percent in May 2020. Wage gains also came in slightly stronger than expected. Hourly...