Free Republic

At Greece's largest coal mine, controlled explosions and the roar of giant excavators scooping up blasted rock have once again become routine. Coal production has been ramped up at the site near the northern Greek city of Kozani as the war in Ukraine forced many European nations to rethink their energy supplies. Coal, long treated as a legacy fuel in Europe, is now helping the continent safeguard its power supply and cope with the dramatic rise in natural gas prices caused by the war. Electricity generated by coal in the European Union jumped by 19% in the fourth quarter of...

Israel’s weakened coalition government announced Monday that it would dissolve parliament and call new elections, setting the stage for the possible return to power of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or another period of prolonged political gridlock. The election will be Israel's fifth in three years, and it will put the polarizing Netanyahu, who has been the opposition leader for the past year, back at the center of the political universe. “I think the winds have changed. I feel it,” Netanyahu declared. The previous four elections, focused on Netanyahu’s fitness to rule while facing a corruption investigation, ended in deadlock....

It looks like not even The Associated Press is buying President Joe Biden’s seemingly never-ending list of excuses on the inflation-plagued economy. AP ripped Biden’s unfounded economic optimism as risking “contribut[ing] to a dissonance between Washington and people across the country who are confronting genuine and growing economic pain.” In addition, Biden’s predictions of a “rosy political future for the Democratic Party” seem at “odds with a country that he acknowledged this week was ‘really, really down,’ burdened by a pandemic, surging gas prices and spiking inflation,” AP critiqued.

PHOENIX (AP) — … After experiencing global warming’s firsthand effects, U.S. Latinos are leading the way in activism around climate change, often drawing on traditions from their ancestral homelands. “There has been a real national uprising in Latino activism in environmentalism in recent years,” said Juan Roberto Madrid, an environmental science and public health specialist based in Colorado for the national nonprofit GreenLatinos. “Climate change may be impacting everyone, but it is impacting Latinos more.” U.S. Latinos often live in ignored, lower income neighborhoods that are degrees hotter than nearby areas because they have a higher population density and limited...

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has authorized Russian troops, planes and ships to deploy to Nicaragua for purposes of training, law enforcement or emergency response. In a decree published this week, and confirmed by Russia on Thursday, Ortega will allow Russian troops to carry out law enforcement duties, “humanitarian aid, rescue and search missions in emergencies or natural disasters.” The Nicaraguan government also authorized the presence of small contingents of Russian troops for “exchange of experiences and training.” Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, told the Russian news outlet Sputnik that the measure was...

DALLAS -- A man broke into the Dallas Museum of Art and caused more than $5 million in damage, including smashing three ancient Greek artifacts before he was arrested, police said. Brian Hernandez, 21, is charged with criminal mischief of more than or equal to $300,000, which is punishable by five years to life in prison. He was booked Thursday into the Dallas County jail with bond set at $100,000. Jail records list no attorney for Hernandez. According to police, Hernandez used a metal chair to break into the museum about 9:45 p.m. Wednesday and began a destructive rampage. He...

SEATTLE (AP) — Seattle has paid $500,000 to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the father of a 19-year-old man shot and killed after police abandoned a precinct in the city during racial justice protests in June 2020. Horace Anderson and the estate of his late son, Horace Lorenzo Anderson, filed the complaint in King County Superior Court in November 2021, naming as defendants former Mayor Jenny Durkan, Councilmember Kshama Sawant and the city of Seattle. The lawsuit alleged the city and those leaders encouraged participants in the so-called CHOP — Capitol Hill Occupied Protest — to break the law...

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. (AP) — A government panel has renamed a Yellowstone National Park mountain that had been named for a U.S. Army officer who helped lead a massacre of Native Americans. Mount Doane will now be called First Peoples Mountain after the unanimous vote by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the National Park Service announced Thursday. The 10,551-foot (3,200-meter) peak in southeastern Yellowstone in Wyoming had been named for Lt. Gustavus Doane, who in 1870 helped lead an attack on a band of Piegan Blackfeet in northern Montana. Doane bragged for the rest of his life about...

Elon Musk may walk away from his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter Inc if the social media network fails to provide data on spam and fake accounts, the billionaire warned in a letter to the company Monday. Twitter was in a "clear material breach" of its obligations and that Musk reserves all rights to terminate the merger agreement, said the letter from the Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom law firm representing the Tesla and SpaceX CEO . The letter to Twitter, dated Monday, was included in Twitter a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Earlier in March,...

Douglas K. Uhde, the 56-year-old felon who is accused of murdering retired Wisconsin Judge John Roemer in his own home, urged people to vote for President Donald Trump and advocated against gun confiscation on Facebook. He also posted graphics that referred to both Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno as a “b****” Online records show that Douglas Keith Uhde, also known as Doug Uhde and Douglas K. Uhde, most recently lived in Saint Helen, Michigan, but had previous Wisconsin addresses in Adams, Marshfield, and Friendship, Wisconsin. Uhde had multiple Facebook pages. Some of them contain innocuous photos of cats or trucks....

“Enough, enough,” President Joe Biden exclaimed over and over Thursday night, as he delivered an impassioned address to the nation imploring Congress to take action against gun violence after mass shootings he said had turned schools, supermarkets and other everyday places into “killing fields.” If legislators fail to act, he warned, voters should use their “outrage” to turn it into a central issue in November’s midterm elections. [Snip] “How much more carnage are we willing to accept?” Biden asked after last week’s shootings by an 18-year-old gunman, who killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde,...

PITTSBURGH (AP) — The victory party took on the feel of an evangelical worship service after Doug Mastriano won Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial primary this month. As a Christian singer led the crowd in song, some raised their arms toward the heavens in praise. Mastriano opened his remarks by evoking Scripture: “God uses the foolish to confound the wise.” He claimed Pennsylvanians’ freedom would be “snatched away” if his Democratic opponent wins in November, and cast the election in starkly religious terms with another biblical reference: “Let’s choose this day to serve the Lord.” Mastriano, a state senator and retired Army...

ASHINGTON (AP) — When Gail Curley began her job as Marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court less than a year ago, she would have expected to work mostly behind the scenes: overseeing the court's police force and the operations of the marble-columned building where the justices work. * * * Earlier this month, however, Curley was handed a bombshell of an assignment, overseeing an unprecedented breach of Supreme Court secrecy, the leak of a draft opinion and apparent votes in a major abortion case.

ATLANTA (AP) - The Republican head of Georgia’s election board said Tuesday a recently released film alleging ballots were illegally collected and dropped off during the 2020 presidential election falsely suggests there were tens of thousands of illegitimate votes in the state. Still, State Election Board Chairman Matt Mashburn promised a “fair” investigation of its claims. “It’s not going to be a witch hunt,” he said at a meeting of the board. “It’s going to be done soberly and with great care by people who know what they’re doing.” The movie, called “2000 Mules,” paints an ominous picture suggesting Democrat-aligned...

Disgraced California lawyer Michael Avenatti wants leniency at his sentencing for defrauding former client Stormy Daniels out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, his lawyers say, citing a groveling letter in which he told Daniels: 'I am truly sorry.' The emailed letter, dated May 13, was included in a submission his lawyers made late Thursday in Manhattan federal court in advance of a June 2 sentencing. Avenatti, 51, should face no more than three years in prison for his latest conviction, or 4 1/2 years in all, because two convictions have destroyed his life, the lawyers said.

The Associated Press desperately tried to defend the self-proclaimed “Mary Poppins of disinformation” from her own words and ended up undercutting itself in the process. AP put out one of its so-called “fact-checks” headlined: “Old comments by disinformation board director misrepresented online.” The outlet took issue with users and outlets claiming Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) Executive Director Nina Jankowicz “said she wants verified Twitter users to be able to edit other users’ tweets” during a January 2021 video conference on “disinformation.” AP complained that such claims were “missing context.” According to the AP’s spin: “[Jankowicz] was explaining an existing program...

The Associated Press is well known — and rightfully so — for writing long, detailed articles on “what it all means.” They’re called “thumbsuckers” in the news business, and the AP has perfected them.A thumbsucker article presupposes that the reader is an ignorant rube and needs to be guided from Point A to Point B of a topic in order to have it explained to them. The problem for the reader is that the AP reporter writing the story — or most other mainstream reporters writing the story — almost always allows his or her own bias to permeate the...

Israeli police on Friday moved in on a crowd of mourners at the funeral of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, beating demonstrators with batons and causing pallbearers to briefly drop the casket. The crackdown came during a rare show of Palestinian nationalism in east Jerusalem — the part of the holy city that Israel captured in 1967 and that the Palestinians claim as their capital. Israel says east Jerusalem is part of its capital and has annexed the area in a move that is not internationally recognized. Israel routinely clamps down on any displays of support for Palestinian statehood.

A film debuting in over 270 theaters across the United States this week uses a flawed analysis of cellphone location data and ballot drop box surveillance footage to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election nearly 18 months after it ended. Praised by former President Donald Trump as exposing “great election fraud,” the movie, called “2000 Mules,” paints an ominous picture suggesting Democrat-aligned ballot “mules” were supposedly paid to illegally collect and drop off ballots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But that’s based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cellphone location data,...

CHICAGO (AP) — Chicago has announced a bid to bring the Democratic National Convention that will choose the party’s presidential nominee to the city in 2024. The announcement Tuesday morning was accompanied by endorsements from top Illinois Democrats, including Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Gov. J.B. Pritzker on down.