Free Republic

KEY POINTS • Four sources familiar with OPEC+ discussions told Reuters that additional production cuts were being discussed among options for Sunday’s session. • Three out of four sources said cuts could amount to 1 million bpd on top of existing cuts of 2 million bpd and voluntary cuts of 1.6 million bpd, announced in a surprise move in April and which took effect in May. • OPEC+ pumps around 40% of the world’s crude, meaning its policy decisions can have a major impact on oil prices.

Dual revelations about Jack Smith’s probe into the mishandling of records at Mar-a-Lago suggest the special counsel’s probe into former President Trump is advancing on several fronts, bolstering the case against him. Reporting from CNN this week indicates authorities have a recording of Trump discussing his inability to share the contents of a classified document he retained — undercutting his long-standing claim he declassified the records in his possession... The week was capped with a report from lawyers and former prosecutors who concluded, based on public reporting, that the DOJ has enough evidence in the case to merit charging Trump...

First, big box stores like Wal-Mart introduced self-service checkout stands. You know — the ones where we shoppers begrudgingly do the jobs of the stores for free while under intense electronic and in-person surveillance and all without so much as a discount or meaningful human interaction? Well, now — thanks to the Biden economy — the newest trend at restaurants and stores with self-service checkouts is to coerce and guilt consumers into adding unearned tips to their total.I don’t know about you, Dear Reader, but I grew up in an era when tipping was in direct proportion to the quality...

At least 11 cancer drugs are currently in short supply, FDA data shows.Just six weeks ago, Greg DeStefano began a new chemotherapy combination. The 50-year-old, from Northbrook, Illinois, had recently been diagnosed with his fourth round of cancer and doctors were hopeful the medication would treat the tumors growing in his neck. DeStefano was responding well, but then, in late May, he got a call from his doctor and was told one of the three drugs he was receiving -- carboplatin -- was under a global shortage and because of the way the hospital had to prioritize treatments, he wouldn't...

The “climate change” ideology increasingly takes on pseudo-religious aspects, demanding sacrifices from its adherents at its altar. God is dead in the West, after all, but He must be replaced with something as humans are inherently inclined to seek transcendence and meaning.Via The Telegraph:The collateral damage of net zero is now getting uncomfortably close to home. First Dutch farmers were threatened with compulsory purchases to satisfy EU emissions targets, fomenting a new revolt in the process. Now it’s Ireland’s turn, where the government is reportedly looking at plans to cull around 200,000 cows to meet its climate targets. The scheme...

A far-left international group that encourages groups of people to deflate tires on parked sports utility vehicles (SUV) in an effort to combat global warming has expanded its operations to 18 countries. The group, named the Tyre Extinguishers and based in the U.K., has claimed credit for tire-deflating operations in American cities including New York City, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, and cities in England, Canada, France, Spain, Germany and Italy among others. And most recently, on Thursday, members affiliated with the Tyre Extinguishers conducted an action in Lisbon, Portugal.

Ooooh, this is turning out to be such a good show. Before I get into the latest, let’s recap quickly, shall we? The Missouri v Biden lawsuit sprang from underhanded censorship dealings the Biden administration began with the social media companies almost the second they ascended to the throne. Literally 3 days after Biden took office, the government’s censorship operation was flying. The White House immediately launched a pressure campaign on social media platforms to suppress supposed “COVID misinformation.” The Surgeon General launched his signature “disinformation” initiative at a Virality Project event at the Stanford Internet Observatory. And, Biden himself...

A senior Ukrainian government official expressed "disbelief" on Sunday after learning that nearly half of Kyiv bomb shelters inspected during an initial audit were closed or unfit for use. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy ordered an inspection of all Ukrainian shelters on Friday, a day after three people were killed in Kyiv when they were unable to access one during a Russian air strike. Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine's minister of strategic industries, said that out of 1,078 shelters examined on the first day, 359 were unprepared and another 122 locked, while 597 were found to be usable.

Praise the Lord. The Republic is saved. We have a debt ceiling deal. The high-paid help in Washington finally exercised their 1st Amendment right and talked to each other. They hammered out a deal at the last minute. By the grace of God (or perhaps some other celestial from a warmer climate), the extinction-level event became a "near miss" rather than a Deep Impact.Our fearless secretary of the Treasury has been taking "extraordinary measures" to extend the debt ceiling deadline since January of this year. But her ability to sell "the check's in the mail" to the debt collectors was...

Speaker McCarthy fearlessly unveils all the footage of January 6th to journalists, finally revealing the truth about Ashli Babbitt! Prepare for a shocking revelation that will expose the hidden agenda behind the events at the Capitol. The truth is out, folks! An interview with Julie Kelly of American Greatness who thanks MTG for getting her and others access to the J6 footage. She also explains how that access works.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Sunday said he’s “seriously considering” a Senate bid, with plans to make a decision on whether to run for an upper chamber seat by July 4. “I’ve not decided. I love the House of Representatives. I love the people I serve. And I love being in the people’s House. But, as some of my House colleagues have pointed out, these Senate seats only open up every 25 or 30 years,” Raskin said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Cotton said, “Well, Biden administration officials should stop chasing after their Chinese Communist counterparts like lovestruck teenagers. It’s embarrassing and it is pathetic. In fact it projects weakness to China and encourages them to do things like buzz our aircrafts or come within a few hundred yards of our ships and send spy balloons floating across America. Reducing tariffs will send that same message. To get back to this bill we just voted on, the single best way to deter China, Iran and Russia have military capable of deterring them. That is one of the core lessons of history.”

In the wake of the Bud Light boycott, something interesting is happening in the military, too. According to Politico:The Pentagon will no longer allow shows involving drag performers to be hosted at military facilities, a spokesperson said Thursday, enforcing a longstanding policy amid intensifying pressure from Republican lawmakers to cancel the practice.Drag shows on military bases have been a contentious issue in recent months as part of a larger push by some Republican lawmakers who say personnel policies including diversity training and racial-justice education distract from warfighting and harm recruiting efforts.There's also this, reported on Fox News:The U.S. Navy has...

When did morality become relative? When did good and evil stop being black and white — and become shades of gray? When did thieves and murderers stop being predators and become the oppressed victims of a corrupt system? Those are the fruits of moral relativism. It holds that there is no absolute right or wrong — what one culture considers "wrong," another will consider "right." It is the philosophy that good and evil are constructs of human beings — not laws of God. There are two social frameworks for occupants of our world — "might makes right" and divine law....

Certain images have power that goes way beyond what a thousand words can convey. One example is an image tweeted on June first this year by LifeNews.com showing a smile on a baby that hasn’t been born yet next to a similar smile on the baby after birth. That makes expressions like “fetal tissue mass” as descriptors of in-utero children look like the sick jokes they are.Baby before birth. Baby after. pic.twitter.com/2ARhNjJOO6 — LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) June 1, 2023Perhaps understanding the potential to undermine the logic of abortion, someone wrote to the so-called “fact-checking” website Snopes asking if it was genuine....

Chilling video captures the moment a group of criminals armed with makeshift machine guns opens fire on a crowd in Chicago, killing a 14-year-old boy and wounding three other people. The four armed suspects — including at least one possibly 16 — are seen sneaking across an empty lot Wednesday night before jumping out from behind a building and firing off multiple rounds down the street, then running off, according to the surveillance footage obtained by CWB Chicago.

Ukrainian forces continued to shell Russia's border region of Belgorod overnight into Sunday after two people were killed the previous night and hundreds of children were evacuated away from the border, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said. "Overnight, it was quite restless," Gladkov said on the Telegram channel, adding that the Shebekino and Volokonovsky districts had suffered "lots" of damage from the latest shelling. Gladkov later wrote that fires had broken out in the town of Shebekino after Ukrainian forces shelled a market area in the centre, adding that nobody had been injured. Shebekino is about 7 km (4 miles) from the...

In a phase 2 clinical trial of the immune checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab, investigators found that 42 percent of patients with metastatic brain cancer benefited from the therapy, with seven patients in the trial surviving longer than two years. "There are very few effective treatments for patients with brain metastases. Our overarching objective is to find improved therapies for this patient population," said Priscilla K. Brastianos, MD. "With this trial, we investigated pembrolizumab, which is an immunotherapy for patients with brain metastases. We showed that pembrolizumab was tolerated and showed clinical benefit in the brain in 42 percent of patients, which...

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, said he was prepared to send his mercenary troops to the Russian border region where raids from Ukrainian territory have taken place. In an audio post on Telegram, Prigozhin reiterated on Saturday his criticism of the Russian Defense Ministry's handling of the war in Ukraine, this time about how it was dealing with armed incursions into the Russian region of Belgorod, from where thousands have fled. Belgorod has been hit by numerous attacks with the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, saying on Friday, there were more than 500 projectile weapons fired, most of...

Australia’s most decorated living war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith quit his corporate job Friday after a civil court blamed him for unlawfully killing four Afghans, escalating calls for the tarnished national hero to be stripped of his revered Victoria Cross medal. Roberts-Smith, who retired from Australia’s elite Special Air Service Regiment a decade ago, quit his job as state manager of Seven West Media after losing a landmark defamation suit Thursday against newspapers that had accused him of an array of war crimes. The 44-year-old had taken leave since 2021 to focus on his federal court case, which has been financed...