Free Republic

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with French media this week that he would support the presence of Russia at a second iteration of the failed global peace summit for his country held this year. Ukraine led an meeting in Switzerland in June intended to discuss ways to end the two-and-a-half-year-old Russian invasion of his country, which began in earnest after nearly a decade of Russia colonizing Ukrainian territory and backing pro-Russian separatist groups in the nation’s east. Russia did not participate in the meeting, nor did key Russia allies such as China, Ukraine’s largest trade partner. The...

Simone Biles loves her "black job." The Olympic gymnast, who won two gold medals in Paris making her the most decorated U.S. gymnast, took a swipe at former President Donald Trump in a post Friday on X. The 27-year-old shared a post from singer Ricky Davila who celebrated Biles as she posed for photos clutching her medal and a "Goat" necklace. "Simone Biles being the GOAT, winning Gold medals and dominating gymnastics is her black job," Davila wrote. "I love my black job," Biles responded, adding a black heart emoji. The post appears to be in response to remarks Trump...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As the 2024 presidential race makes its turn into the final stretch, the White House assured journalists that they would only have to pretend Kamala Harris is likable for a couple more months. Members of the media, weary from the exhausting duty of portraying Harris as capable, experienced, qualified, and decent, were relieved to find out that they would only have to maintain the ruse until election day. "Don't worry, you don't have to do this forever," one White House insider told reporters. "We just have to make people think she's a bright, likable person until they...

Stocks fell sharply on Friday with the S&P 500 headed for its worst session in roughly two years, as a much weaker-than-anticipated jobs report for July ignited worries that the economy could be falling into a recession. The broad market index dropped 2.1%, on pace for its biggest one-day sell-off since 2022, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 2.3%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 911 points, or 2.3%. Friday’s sell-off pushed the Nasdaq into correction territory — down more than 10% from an all-time high set nearly a month ago. The Nasdaq-100, which is made up of the 100 largest...

FIRST ON FOX: Then-Sen. Kamala Harris’ 2019 presidential campaign website linked to a study touting what it called the "electoral implications" of not deporting some illegal immigrants, saying that the policy "could provide sizable contributions to the margin of victory in swing states." Harris’ campaign website touted a "new roadmap to citizenship for Dreamers," referring to illegal immigrants who came to the country as children. Her plan called for a pathway to citizenship for those who entered the U.S. illegally and protection from deportation for illegal immigrant parents of U.S. citizens and green card holders.

The Biden administration’s prisoner swap with Russia is being touted by the corporate press as “historic,” and in a way it is. Nothing like this, on this scale, has happened since the Cold War. But the swap is as lopsided as it is historic. All Americans should welcome the release of our three unjustly imprisoned compatriots: Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. They were among the 16 western prisoners released by Moscow in exchange for eight Russian nationals released by the U.S. and allies. But this...

According to a statement released by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Ilaria Caloi and Federico Bernardini of Ca’ Foscari University and Cretan potter Vassiliki Politakis replicated the shapes of Minoan pottery vessels using a type of potter’s wheel and techniques suggested by scholars of Minoan Crete.These techniques included hand-building methods and throwing-off-the-hump, wheel-throwing from a solid clay ball, wheel-pinching, and wheel-coiling. The experimental replicas were then examined with X-ray micro-computed tomography to produce detailed 3-D images of the joints, voids, and other components of the vessels.The researchers were able to identify specific differences in the finished pottery that will help...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in an interview with Punchbowl News compared President Biden’s proposed Supreme Court reforms to the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol. “That’s what some people were trying to do Jan. 6 — to break the system of handing an administration from one to the next,” McConnell said in the interview, referring to the proposed reforms. “We can have our arguments, but we ought to not try to break the rules.” The reforms that Biden has backed include 18-year term limits, which would allow a president to appoint a new justice every two...

Metal detectorists discovered a cache of ancient coins in a field in eastern Poland, according to a CBS News report. Three of the coins are Roman dinars minted between A.D. 138 and 161. These coins bear an image of the face of the emperor Antoninus Pius (reigned A.D. 138 and 161). Another silver dinar is imprinted with the face of his wife, Faustina the Younger, dated to A.D. 141. The face of the emperor Marcus Aurelius has been identified on another dinar dated to A.D. 174.A piece of one coin, which also bears the face of Antoninus Pius and has...

[Catholic Caucus] Was Archbishop Viganò silenced by the Vatican for exposing corruption in the Church?If the Vatican’s attempt to silence Archbishop Viganò is successful, whatever you think of the prelate, Catholics will have lost one of the few voices courageous enough to challenge the don’t-ask-questions mentality now prevalent in Rome.(Turning Point Project) — The excommunication of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for “his refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff” presents us with an opportunity to revisit Viganò’s claim that the pope is not valid.Among the many reasons Viganò offers for saying so is the possibility that the election...

U.S. job growth cooled sharply in July while the unemployment rate unexpectedly rose to the highest level in nearly three years. The Labor Department reported Friday that employers added 114,000 jobs in July, missing the 175,000 gain forecast by LSEG economists. The unemployment rate also unexpectedly inched higher to 4.3% against expectations that it would hold steady at 4.1%.

Kate McKinnon as Barbara DeDrew and musical guest Billie Eilish as Paw-bree Hep-purrn during the “Whiskers R We” sketch on "Saturday Night Live" on Dec. 16.Will Heath / NBC

Four key pillars of the global climate are melting in the heat trapped by rising fossil fuel emissions, a new study has found. The relatively stable climate that nurtured human civilization depends in large part on these structures: the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic currents that warm Europe. Under current policies, the world faces a scenario in which those pillars have roughly even odds of either surviving or collapsing during the next three centuries, according to results published Thursday in Nature Communications. The scientists warned that if the pillars are fatally undermined...

On Sunday, Venezuelans went to the polls to select a new president. By Sunday night the results were clear. Exit polls found that the Venezuelans voted two-to-one to end the communist dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro. The exit polls had communist tyrant Nicolas Maduro losing by a landslide. 66.6% for opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez and 30.86% for Nicolas Maduro. -- snip -- But on Monday, Maduro announced he was the clear winner. On Tuesday he called for the arrest of the two leading opposition figures. And by Thursday, the communist tyrant announce the construction of two maximum-security prisons where he will...

Footage has emerged of the second 'failed gender test' boxer landing a flurry of heavy punches on her opponent to win her opening fight of the Paris Olympics. Taiwan's Lin Yu-Ting put on a dominant display across three rounds at the North Paris Arena on Friday to storm to victory against Sitora Turdibekova of Uzbekistan. The 28-year-old showed off impressive striking and quick footwork to maintain dominance inside the ring and secure the unanimous decision victory. Afterwards, her opponent Turdibekova was overcome with emotion and could not hold back the tears as the decision was read out inside the arena....

I started a thread like this a couple of years ago when I bought a new computer and transferred all my music files to it. I didn't stick with it, but maybe this time I'll be more dedicated! One of the things that caught my eye was the "Play Count" number for each of the MP3 and MP4 files I moved from one computer to the other. As I went through these tracks on iTunes, I decided to rank them in the order of their play frequency to see if there were any interesting patterns in the number of times...

The Supreme Court is caught in a crisis of its own making.There is the gross corruption of Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, who have received millions of dollars in gifts and benefits from various billionaire benefactors.There is the court’s open assault on the basic rights of tens of millions of Americans, exemplified in its decision to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion on the basis of a vague and inconsistent standard of “text, history and tradition.”And there is the hubris of Chief Justice Roberts, who, the legal scholar Eric J. Segall writes, has “led the court to...

If it seems you’re getting more and more messages from co-workers, friends or attendees at that family barbecue about a positive COVID-19 test, it’s not in your head. While COVID-19 hospitalizations are still far lower than previous years, they’re steadily trending up this summer — both statewide and in the Capital Region. “We have seen a jump this month, but the good thing is we’re nowhere where we were two years ago,” Albany County Department of Health Interim Commissioner Maribeth Miller told the Times Union. With at-home testing prevalent, officials now rely on hospitalization rates to track the disease. Last...

The tap dancing, lies, and coverup of the Trump assassination attempt by the Secret Service, FBI, and now the mainstream media is so far beyond bureaucratic ass-covering that it's hard to conclude that the events in Butler were not desired. I still maintain that it is unlikely in the extreme that anybody inside the government recruited Crooks to take his shots at Trump because it seems so implausible that any sane person would recruit an untrained kid to do the deed, but it is now clear to me that the top levels of the Secret Service and Homeland Security wanted...

Tracy Nailor, a 56-year-old Atlanta pediatrician, wasn’t particularly impressed with Kamala Harris when she first ran for president. “I think I succumbed to the narrative about her,” she said. She thought Harris wasn’t experienced or accomplished enough to merit the Democratic nomination. “I just didn’t know enough,” she said. “I didn’t do my homework.” Instead of Harris, she supported the trusted, familiar Joe Biden in the last election.But as Biden’s most recent presidential campaign ground on, her faith wavered. She knew it was going to be hard for the aging president to win again. “I was not hopeless, but I...