Free Republic

First son Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer told lawmakers this week that Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings brought the political scion onto its board so that “people would be intimidated to mess with them … legally.” ... Archer also revealed that then-Vice President Joe Biden met twice with his son’s shady post-Soviet business partners at DC’s Café Milano, not once as previously reported. These and other revelations blow new holes in Biden’s claim that he never discussed business with his now-53-year-old son — as House Republicans move closer to launching an impeachment inquiry. The transcript also confirms...

The Washington, DC, police chief described Wednesday’s active shooter call as “bogus,” but the Brady Campaign–and campaign president Kris Brown–are using it to push gun control anyway. The call police received was of an active shooter near Senate office buildings. NBC News quoted DC police chief Thomas Manger reacting to the reports of a shooter, saying, “We found no confirmation that there was an active shooter, and that this may have been a bogus call.”

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...

Police discovered the naked body of a 32-year-old man inside a barrel at Malibu Lagoon State Beach on Monday. Authorities identified the deceased victim as Javonnta Murphy, an aspiring musician from Sylmar, California, according to the Los Angeles Times. A lifeguard allegedly discovered the 55-gallon drum in the lagoon at around 10 a.m. Monday, according to Lt. Hugo Reynaga. Upon inspection, Murphy’s body was found sealed within the barrel, showing no signs of decomposition, the Times reported. While the origins of the barrel remain untraced, detectives observed distinctive markings that may link it to a printing company, the outlet noted....

Working in law enforcement is a dangerous job, as is protecting the president of the United States. Being the personal chef to the president might be a close second, as these guys keep dying under eerie circumstances. In late July, Chef Tafari Campbell drowned while paddle boarding near the Martha’s Vineyard estate of former President Barack Obama (via Associated Press):Former President Barack Obama’s personal chef has drowned near the family’s home on Martha’s Vineyard. Massachusetts State Police confirmed that the paddleboarder whose body was recovered from Edgartown Great Pond on Monday was Tafari Campbell, 45, of Dumfries, Virginia. Campbell was...

On this date in 1976, the real-life Soviet political officer whose naval mutiny inspired Tom Clancy’s Cold War thriller The Hunt for Red October was shot in Moscow for treason. No, unlike his fictional counterpart Marko Ramius (Sean Connery, in the 1990 cinema adaptation excerpted above), Valery Sablin didn’t make it to the West. But the real Valery Sablin wasn’t trying to make it. Sablin was the political officer aboard the submarine-killer Storozhevoy. He was also a dedicated Leninist incensed at the notoriously corrupt gerontocracy of the Leonid Brezhnev era. When he led his mutiny in Riga, his plan was...

Could God’s power for salvation be for the Jew, the Gentile, and the extraterrestrial?In the past few years, this question has grown in prominence following a series of high-profile events. In 2020, the Navy confirmed that videos circulating on the internet of “unidentified” flying objects from 2004 and 2015 were authentic. These videos show images of objects flying in ways that defy known physics, leaving the pilots stunned.When interviewed by CNN, the former U.S. Navy pilot, David Fravor, described the encounter as, “something I have never seen in my life.” On July 26, 2023, Fravor and former intelligence official David...

The fatal crash on the evening of June 9 in Riverview, Fla., sparked a hunt for the truck's driver, the Tampa Bay Times reported. Investigators tracked down the suspect using an unlikely clue: a scathing one-star review of a business on Google. "Just doing this review because the owner or son of the owner had a big accident on 301 and Balm River involving a couple on a motorcycle," the review read, according to court documents. "The thing is he [fled] the scene and all I got was his company name on his white truck. Please if anyone seen his...

It seems like it was only Monday that Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) told the entire country Devon Archer testified that Joe Biden merely exchanged pleasantries with Hunter Biden’s foreign business partners. According to Goldman, Joe Biden merely spoke of the weather and didn’t even know who he was talking to during the more than twenty times he participated in their meetings. Without a transcript of the testimony, Goldman could claim anything, no matter how absurd, and the media would echo those claims — which they did. Even the White House attempted to laugh off the testimony as a nothingburger. “It...

New York City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan announced that illegal immigration has been ushering a new wave of tuberculosis and polio to the city. In a citywide letter to physicians and healthcare administrators last week, Vasan said that the more than 50,000 illegal immigrants that have come to New York City since last year caused a spike in contagious diseases like tuberculosis and polio. “Many people who recently arrived in NYC have lived in or traveled through countries with high rates of TB,” he wrote, as reported by the New York Post. Tuberculosis can be cured with antibiotics and generally...

The number of Americans claiming unemployment benefits climbed slightly last week amid broader strength in the U.S. labor market. Claims rose to 227,000 for the week ending July 29, up 6,000 from the previous week, ahead of more comprehensive jobs data to be released Friday by the Labor Department. Despite the uptick, U.S. employers cut just 23,697 jobs in July, the lowest number in 11 months, according to employment research firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. “Companies, weary of letting go of needed workers, are finding other ways to cut costs. Many have slowed hiring, but wages continue to rise, particularly...

Geoscientist Judith Curry says that in 2007 she "accepted the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report as authoritative." Now she is convinced that "politics and personal agendas have corrupted the so-called science behind their projections. A changing climate has been the norm throughout the Earth's 4.6-billion-year history. The human influence on climate change is far smaller than the advocates for more government control over our lives assume." Dr. John Clauser, winner of a 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, says "the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation. Contrary to what they claim, climate...

Jack Smith was in charge of the public integrity section of the Justice Department during five of the Obama-Biden years, which was a massively corrupt administration. He must have had blinders on. He was there when Lois Lerner and the IRS corruptly targeted Obama's opponents, who wanted smaller government and lower taxes. Lerner violated their Constitutional rights to free speech and freedom of association with her targeted harassment. Then she lied to Congress and destroyed evidence. She clearly obstructed justice. Yet she, nor no one else surrounding her were ever charged and Lerner went off to retire at her beltway...

Remember all the speeches about apartheid? As I recall, Jesse Jackson got involved in South African politics. It was the issue of our time, as they often say. For the record, apartheid was terrible and a correction was needed. However, it's hard to see what's happening in South Africa today. The country is a financial mess and the extremes seem to be doing all the talking. This is the sad story: South Africa's Marxist-Leninist political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, celebrated its 10th anniversary over the weekend.After the radical group's demagogic leader emphasized, "We are with President Putin... We are...

Well, the sun came up again today, so that means we have to publish yet another story about the seemingly endless string of nightly armed robberies in Chicago. Once again, Chicago police officers radioed that they had located the robbers driving around the area. And, once again, Chicago police supervisors ordered the cops to terminate efforts to pull the robbers over. Near West’s robberies are up 50% this year. Last week, the district had 26 robberies, up 100% from the same week last year. In the 28 days ending July 30, the district had 94 robberies, up 77% from 2022....

See also: US credit rating sinks as national debt increasesWhen Fitch, the securities ratings agency, downgraded US sovereign debt, it was a huge story in the financial world. The Wall Street Journal’s initial coverage noted that it was:…clouding the outlook for the $25 trillion global market for Treasurys. Fitch’s rating on the U.S. now stands at “AA+”, or one notch below the top “AAA” grade.America’s reputation for reliably making good on its IOUs has cast Treasury bonds in an indispensable role in global markets: a safe-haven security offering nearly risk-free returns. Treasurys serve as a critical benchmark for returns on...

A report published by India’s Union Home Ministry last week revealed that over a million women and girls disappeared between 2019 and 2021. 250,000 of the disappearances involved girls under the age of 18.Roughly 80,000 of the women went missing in the national capital of New Delhi.India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which provided data for the report to parliament, blamed “forced marriage, domestic work, sexual exploitation, and child labor” plus “mental illness, miscommunication, misadventure, domestic violence, and being victim of a crime” as the main reasons for the huge number of missing women.The NCRB said many of the women...

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Many white evangelical Christians love Donald Trump — a fact of American politics that has shaped the makeup and rulings of the Supreme Court, the culture and morality wars waged by the Republican Party and the political evolution and power of evangelicals themselves. At the same time, some forms of evangelical Christianity are becoming less Christian, with believers less likely to attend church and less likely to embrace some of the faith’s most bedrock beliefs. How did this happen? How did millions of Americans go from “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” to Mr. Trump, who appeared on the cover of Playboy...

In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, on November 25, 2022, Larry Morse and Theodore Ray Buck, Jr. filed a lawsuit against the state of Illinois, claiming the state ban on the sale and possession of silencers violates the Second Amendment. A similar lawsuit was filed by Carlin Anderson and David Clark on February 27, 2023, backed by the American Suppressor Association. The two lawsuits, Morse v Raoul and Anderson v Raoul, have been consolidated as of June 15, 2023. The parties involved have agreed the principle area of contention is whether silencers are arms...