Free Republic

Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, unilaterally halted an agreed shipment of military aid to Ukraine due to baseless concerns that US stockpiles of weapons have run too low, it has been reported. A batch of air defense missiles and other precision munitions were due to be sent to Ukraine to aid it in its ongoing war with Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor in 2022. The aid was promised by the US during Joe Biden’s administration last year. But the Pentagon halted the shipment, with NBC reporting that a decision to do so was made solely...

Joe Manchin’s decision to kill off sweeping US climate legislation has been called “nothing short of a death sentence” for younger people and a livable climate on Earth, amid an outpouring of anger and despair from activists, scientists and even many of the US Senator’s Democratic colleagues. Manchin, the centrist West Virginia senator who has become a millionaire through his founding of a coal-trading company in his home state, dealt a crushing political blow to Joe Biden’s agenda on Thursday night when he made clear he would not support any spending to curb the climate crisis in a proposed bill....

Election officials in the Texas county that includes the state capital, Austin, have rejected about half of applications for mail-in ballots, following new voting restrictions brought in by Republicans. The voter identification rules have led to the rejection of about half of the 700 mail-in ballots requested in Travis county for primary elections in March, according to the county’s clerk. The denied ballots in Travis county follow a similar trend across Texas, with officials in Harris county, which includes the city of Houston, and Bexar county, which includes San Antonio, also turning down a substantial number of mail-in ballot applications....

Many of us will have felt the grip of claustrophobic isolation over the past year, but the lawyer Steven Donziger has experienced an extreme, very personal confinement as a pandemic arrived and then raged around him in New York City.On Sunday, Donziger reached his 600th day of an unprecedented house arrest that has resulted from a sprawling, Kafkaesque legal battle with the oil giant Chevron. Donziger spearheaded a lengthy crusade against the company on behalf of tens of thousands of Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest whose homes and health were devastated by oil pollution, only to himself become, as...

Trump touts hydroxychloroquine as a cure for Covid-19. Don't believe the hype The anti-malaria drug could be ‘one of the biggest game-changers’, Trump claimed, but there is no magic cure Faced with a global coronavirus pandemic that is increasingly centered upon the US, Donald Trump has touted several drugs that he claims can help tackle the outbreak. In March, the US president used a press conference to promote the use of hydroxychloroquine, a common anti-malaria drug, to treat Covid-19, saying: “I sure as hell think we ought to give it a try.” Chloroquine: Trump's misleading claims spark hoarding and overdoses...