Free Republic

The signs are abundant of how Ukraine frustrated Vladimir Putin’s hopes for a swift victory, and how Russia's military proved far from ready for the fight. A truck carrying Russian troops crashes, its doors blown open by a rocket-propelled grenade. Foreign-supplied drones target Russian command posts. Orthodox priests in trailing vestments parade Ukraine’s blue and yellow flag in defiance of their Russian captors in the occupied city of Berdyansk. Russia has lost hundreds of tanks, many left charred or abandoned along the roads, and its death toll is on a pace to outstrip that of the country’s previous military campaigns....

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s campaign to unite the globe against the Russian invasion of Ukraine is being challenged not only by adversaries such as China but also by the world’s most populous democracy, India. An Indian government official said on Friday that the country will increase its imports of Russian oil, allowing it to boost energy supplies at a discount as its economy struggles to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Although India isn’t alone in buying Russian energy — several European allies such as Germany have continued to do so — the decision conflicts with Biden’s efforts to...

CLAIM: Members of Congress gave themselves a 21% pay raise in early March. AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Social media users are misrepresenting a government spending bill that increased funding for legislative office budgets, not lawmakers’ salaries. Members of Congress use these budgets to hire and pay staff, and to manage other official expenses. Annual salaries for members of the House and Senate will remain the same this year, as they have since 2009.

Climate change has already made allergy season longer and pollen counts higher, but you ain’t sneezed nothing yet. Climate scientists at the University of Michigan looked at 15 different plant pollens in the United States and used computer simulations to calculate how much worse allergy season will likely get by the year 2100. It’s enough to make allergy sufferers even more red-eyed. As the world warms, allergy season will start weeks earlier and end many days later — and it’ll be worse while it lasts, with pollen levels that could as much as triple in some places, according to a...

Far-right activist Ammon Bundy, who’s running for governor in Idaho, has been arrested after refusing to leave a hospital in connection with a child-welfare case, police said Saturday. Bundy was arrested at about 1:15 a.m. on suspicion of misdemeanor trespassing at St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center in Meridian, west of Boise, the Idaho Statesman reported. Bundy is well-known for participating in armed standoffs with law enforcement, notably at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016, which left one man dead, and on federal land near his family’s ranch in Nevada in 2014.

Reporters revolted and protested in the White House after Press Secretary Jen Psaki pulled the plug early on a briefing before others had a chance to ask questions. The press briefing lasted 40 minutes, but most of that time was taken up by just a few reporters in the first two rows who were allowed to ask Psaki multiple questions and follow-ups. During the Monday briefing, Associated Press reporter Josh Boak signaled to Psaki that time was up. “Thanks, Jen,” Boak shouted out as a reporter asked Psaki a question about whether the U.S. intended to get oil from Venezuela.

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — They railed against politicians, conducted military-style exercises and spoke darkly of confronting tyrants scheming to seize their guns and enslave them. Yet historian JoEllen Vinyard says the “citizen militia” activists she got to know in the 1990s didn’t seem like the types who would abduct a governor or stage a coup. “I don’t think they were dangerous,” said Vinyard, an Eastern Michigan University professor emeritus and author of a book about far-right movements in the state. “They reminded me of the good old boys I knew growing up in Nebraska.” But as four men charged...

For people around the world, the killing of George Floyd was about race. A white police officer, with three other officers nearby, kneeled on the neck of a Black man until he stopped breathing, and protests erupted across the country. Corporations and governments promised change, and a new generation of civil rights leaders rose up. Yet in the courtrooms where those officers faced trial for their roles in Floyd’s killing — including the three who were convicted Thursday — race was rarely mentioned, at least explicitly, and lawyers and judges told jurors not to consider it. The disconnect between the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of children in America living in poverty jumped dramatically after just one month without the expanded child tax credit payments, according to a new study. Advocates fear the lapse in payments could unravel what they say were landmark achievements in poverty reduction. Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy estimates 3.7 million more children were living in poverty by January — a 41% increase from December, when families received their last check. The federal aid started last July but ended after President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill stalled in the sharply divided Congress.

OTTAWA, Ontario (AP) — Police arrested scores of demonstrators and towed away vehicles Friday in Canada’s besieged capital, and a stream of trucks started leaving under the pressure, raising authorities’ hopes for an end to the three-week protest against the country’s COVID-19 restrictions. By evening, at least 100 people had been arrested, mostly on mischief charges, and nearly two dozen vehicles had been towed, including all of those blocking one of the city’s major streets, authorities said. One officer had a minor injury, but no protesters were hurt, interim Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell said. Police “continue to push forward...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is hoping to use his upcoming State of the Union address to nudge the pandemic into the nation’s rear-view mirror. But it could turn into yet another disruptive display of national tensions and frustration over trying to move past COVID-19. The White House has taken extraordinary precautions to keep Biden from getting the virus, including requiring high-quality masks in his vicinity and limiting his travel and participation in large events. A speech to a full House chamber would be by far the densest audience of his presidency to date.

The world's biodiversity is constantly being threatened by warming temperatures and extreme changes in climate and weather patterns. And while that "doom and gloom" is the typical discourse surrounding how climate change is affecting biodiversity, another interesting aspect of the warming temperatures is how different species have been adapting over the decades, as the warming progresses, experts say. Here are some unusual ways climate change is affecting nature: Higher temperature extremes may increase the risk of outbreaks of tuberculosis in Kalahari meerkats by increasing physiological stress, as well as the movement of males between group, according to a study published...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Friday blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to put greater emphasis on the potential damage from greenhouse gas emissions when creating rules for polluting industries. U.S. District Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana sided with Republican attorneys general who said the administration’s raising the cost estimate of carbon dioxide emissions threatened to drive up energy costs while decreasing state revenues from energy production. The judge issued an injunction that bars the administration from using the higher cost estimate, which puts a dollar value on damages caused by every additional ton of...

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — A toxicologist testified Wednesday at the federal trial of three former officers charged with violating George Floyd’s civil rights that it wasn’t drug use, heart disease nor an agitated state known as “excited delirium” that caused Floyd’s death after officers pinned him to the pavement in May 2020. Dr. Vik Bebarta, an emergency physician and toxicologist and professor at the University of Colorado in suburban Denver, bolstered the prosecution’s contention that Floyd died because of how Officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee down on the Black man’s neck. Bebarta said he concluded that Floyd “died...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court’s decision to halt efforts to create a second mostly Black congressional district in Alabama for the 2022 election sparked fresh warnings Tuesday that the court is becoming too politicized, eroding the Voting Rights Act and reviving the need for Congress to intervene. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority put on hold a lower court ruling that Alabama must draw new congressional districts to increase Black voting power. Civil rights groups had argued that the state, with its “sordid record” of racial discrimination, drew new maps by “packing” Black voters into one single district and “cracking”...

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — George Floyd died because his breathing was restricted as he was restrained while handcuffed and facedown, a lung expert testified Monday at the federal trial of three former Minneapolis police officers charged with violating Floyd’s civil rights. Dr. David Systrom, a pulmonologist and critical care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said Floyd’s upper airway was compressed by Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee, while his position on the hard asphalt with his hands cuffed behind his back did not allow his lungs to expand, cutting off the flow of oxygen. “Oxygen delivered to the...

NEW YORK (AP) — For all the potential peril of a workplace romance, the most common source of trouble, experts say, is allowing it to remain a secret. A case in point was this week’s abrupt ouster of longtime CNN chief executive Jeff Zucker, who said he was ’’wrong” in not being upfront with the network about a consensual relationship he was having with another executive. Zucker is hardly alone in finding love at the office. About a third of U.S. workers say they are in a workplace relationship or have been in one — and the trend has been...

Former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday directly rebutted Donald Trump’s false claims that he somehow could have overturned the results of the 2020 election, saying that the former president was simply “wrong.” In a speech to a gathering of the conservative Federalist Society in Florida, Pence addressed Trump’s intensifying efforts this week to advance the false narrative that, as vice president, he had the unilateral power to prevent President Joe Biden from taking office. “President Trump is wrong,” Pence said. “I had no right to overturn the election.” In a statement Tuesday, Trump said the committee investigating the deadly...

FARGO, N.D. (AP) — The interior solicitor in the Biden administration said in an opinion released Friday that the mineral rights under the original Missouri River riverbed belong to a North Dakota tribal nation. The 68-page memorandum posted by the U.S. Department of Interior is contrary to a May 2020 Trump administration opinion concluding that the state is legal owner of submerged lands beneath the river where it flows through the Fort Berthold Reservation. The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation had sued over that memo, which rolled back an Obama administration opinion favoring the nation, also known as the Three...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Last month, U.S. employers might have shed jobs for the first time in about a year, potentially raising alarms about the economy’s trajectory. Yet even if the January employment report coming Friday were to show a deep loss of jobs, there would be little mystery about the likely culprit: A wave of omicron infections last month that led millions of workers to stay home sick, discouraged consumers from venturing out to spend and likely froze hiring at many companies — even those that want to fill jobs. Still, most economists expect a relatively quick rebound in hiring,...