Free Republic

Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klitschko on Friday ordered the closure of 74 churches belonging to the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), citing its alleged “direct ties” to the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Klitschko’s decree is similar to that used to seize the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, or Monastery of the Caves, which Ukrainian police stormed last month. The world-famous holy site, which is nearly 1,000 years old, was handed over to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, a rival organization set up by the government in 2018.

YouTube has terminated the account of former US spy Scott Ritter and deleted all of his videos on the platform. According to Ritter, the Google-owned social media giant accused his channel of violating the terms of service. Writing on X (formerly known as Twitter), Ritter stated that his channel, 'The Scott Ritter Show', through which he attempted to "import Russian voices to an American/Western audience," had been flagged for 'hate speech' and taken down without prior warning or any specific examples of the offense. "There was never any hate speech involved in any of the episodes of 'The Scott Ritter...

Two firefighters were killed battling a blaze that began when cars caught fire deep inside a cargo ship carrying 5,000 cars at a New Jersey port, Newark's fire chief said Thursday. Five other firefighters were injured but were expected to recover. Responding firefighters found five to seven vehicles already on fire when they reached the 10th floor of the cargo ship at Port Newark around 9:30 p.m. Wednesday night. The blaze quickly extended to the 11th and 12th floors, and as firefighters were pushed back by the intense heat, two of them were lost, Fire Chief Rufus Jackson said at...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met Thursday with Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg and prominent European figures who are forming a working group to address ecological damage from the 16-month-old Russian invasion.

Jurors have reached a unanimous not guilty verdict in the trial of former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School resource officer Scot Peterson. Peterson wept as the verdict was read. Not guilty on all counts. Families of the Parkland victims were seen shaking their heads in disbelief.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) removed the “entire investigative team” working on the Hunter Biden case at the request of President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), a whistleblower told Congress on Monday. The whistleblower has supervised the Hunter Biden investigation since 2020, the New York Post reported.

Twenty Republicans voted with Democrats to kill motion to censure Adam Schiff.

Russian forces fought off a mass attack by Ukrainian high-speed marine drones on a Russian naval ship in the Black Sea, the defense ministry said on Sunday. Ukrainian Armed Forces made an "an unsuccessful attempt" to attack the Priazovye ship, Russia's defense ministry wrote in a Telegram post, saying Ukraine had used six unmanned boats. The warship was monitoring "the situation and ensuring security along the routes of the TurkStream and Blue Stream gas pipelines in the southeastern part of the Black Sea," the defense ministry said.

Attorney Trusty, appearing on NBC on Friday morning, said Trump is ready for a battle. “He’s a fighter, and he’s going to come out swinging, and he’ll be fine,” Trusty said. “He’s not afraid of this thing.” Hours later, in a shocking turn of events, Trusty and another attorney on the team, John Rowley, resigned from the case.

Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows will reportedly plead guilty as part of a plan to indict former President Donald Trump. Sources told Andrew Feinberg of The Independent that Meadows' decision to plead guilty was connected to his testimony to a grand jury hearing evidence about Jan. 6 and the mishandling of classified documents. "It is understood that the former North Carolina congressman will plead guilty to several federal charges as part of a deal for which he has already received limited immunity in exchange for his testimony," Feinberg wrote.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to censor social media users and obtain their personal information, leaked emails reveal. In March 2022, an FBI Special Agent sent Twitter a list of accounts on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ukraine’s main intelligence agency. The accounts, the FBI wrote, “are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation.” In an attached memo, the SBU asked Twitter to remove the accounts and hand over their user data.

Instagram’s recommendation algorithms have enabled a “vast” network of pedophiles seeking illegal underage sexual content and activity, according to a Wall Street Journal exposé. In a 2,800-word article published Wednesday, the Journal said it conducted an investigation into child pornography on Instagram in collaboration with researchers at Stanford and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them,” the Journal reported.

Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate. Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year, the Ukrainian government and NATO allies have posted, then quietly deleted, three seemingly innocuous photographs from their social media feeds: a soldier standing in a group, another resting in a trench and an emergency worker posing in front of a truck. In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of...

In a shocking turn of events, the Rushingbrook Children’s Choir was interrupted and stopped while singing the National Anthem in Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol. The children, part of the esteemed Rushingbrook Children’s Choir, had traveled to Washington, D.C. last Friday, May 26th, for a scheduled Capitol tour and had received prior approval to sing a short set of patriotic songs inside the historic Statuary Hall.

Russia's Defence Ministry said on Wednesday that the Russian warship Ivan Hurs had been attacked by Ukrainian uncrewed speedboats in the Black Sea, on the approaches to the Bosphorus strait. In a statement posted on Telegram, the ministry said the warship had been protecting the TurkStream and Blue Stream gas pipelines, which carry gas from Russia to Turkey, partly across the Black Sea. "All enemy boats were destroyed by fire from the standard armament of a Russian ship 140 km northeast of the Bosphorus," the statement added.

Shares of First Republic Bank were in free fall in early trading on Wednesday, continuing an astonishing decline that poses a fresh challenge for the Biden administration and industry regulators. After losing roughly half of their value on Tuesday, First Republic’s shares fell by an additional 40 percent Wednesday. First Republic, which caters to a wealthy clientele, peaked at $147 per share in early February before the failure in mid-March of two midsize banks threatened to ignite a wider financial contagion. By late morning on Wednesday, its share price had dipped below $5.

A new report from the National Security Council largely blamed former President Donald Trump's administration for the breakdown that occurred after U.S. troops withdrew.

A four-year investigation of Baltimore’s Catholic archdiocese reveals the scope of 80 years of child sex abuse and torture and how church officials often covered it up and, in some cases, paved the way for further abuse. Among the accounts: A deacon who admitted abusing more than 100 children. A priest who chained and whipped boys for his gratification. Another priest who, after receiving psychiatric treatment, went on to abuse 20 students at a Baltimore boys’ school.

Recently, National Public Radio (NPR) in the US published a story titled ‘Live free and die? The sad state of US life expectancy’ that explored the great divide between the United States and peer countries on life expectancy. While most countries experienced a dip during the Covid-19 pandemic and rebounded after vaccines and other treatments were rolled out, American life expectancy has essentially fallen off a cliff and never came back. The graph published by NPR is shocking. It shows that US life expectancy is lower than in Cuba or Lebanon. The number has been known since just before Christmas...

Former President Donald J. Trump secured another legal victory over Stormy Daniels on Tuesday, with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reportedly ordering the pornographic actress to cover an additional $121,972.56 of his legal fees incurred during her failed defamation lawsuit.