Free Republic

EXACTLY ONE WEEK before the primary election, the Associated Press dropped a bomb on the Senate campaign of Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno. The AP told Moreno’s campaign that it confirmed a profile on the “sex-and-swingers” Adult FriendFinder website had been established in 2008 by someone using Moreno’s email account from his car dealership. The Moreno profile was set up to search for “Men for 1-on-1 sex,” the AP reported. The subject matter and timing of the story were terrible for Moreno, a 57-year-old married man and father. He was about to appear on stage with Donald Trump to get a...

Officials in Moldova’s Russia-backed breakaway region of Transnistria appealed to Moscow for protection Wednesday, as tensions escalate with the pro-Western government. ... On Wednesday, members of the Transnistrian congress used a rare meeting in the regional capital, Tiraspol, to ask the Russian Duma to “implement measures for defending Transnistria amid increasing pressure from Moldova, given the fact that more than 220,000 Russian citizens reside in Transnistria." A short war in the early 1990s led pro-Russian forces in Transnistria to declare a breakaway state. To this day, Russia stations about 1,500 troops in the region as so-called peacekeepers, who guard huge...

Republicans are challenging extended mail ballot deadlines in at least two states in a legal maneuver that could have widespread implications for mail voting ahead of this year's presidential election. A lawsuit filed last week in Mississippi follows a similar one last year in North Dakota, both brought in heavily Republican states before conservative federal courts. Democratic and voting rights groups are concerned about the potential impact beyond those two states if a judge rules that deadlines for receiving mailed ballots that stretch past Election Day violate federal law. They say it's possible such a decision would lead to a...

Below is my column in the New York Post on the Associated Press guideline for reporters to avoid calling Hamas a terrorist organization. Voice of America and other media outlets have made the same decision. This is not about supporting the Palestinian cause. It is about correctly describing a group that commits terrorist attacks as a terrorist organization. Here is the column: Confucius once said that “the beginning of wisdom is the ability to call things by their right names.” That does not appear to be the approach of the Associated Press this week after the media organization told its...

The new leader of one of the chambers of Congress that will certify the winner of next year’s presidential election helped spearhead the attempt to overturn the last one, raising alarms that Republicans could try to subvert the will of the voters if they remain in power despite safeguards enacted after the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

A man illegally brought a handgun into the Wisconsin Capitol, demanding to see Gov. Tony Evers, and returned at night with an assault rifle after posting bail, a spokesperson for the state said Thursday. The man, who was shirtless and had a holstered handgun, approached the governor's office on the first floor of the Capitol around 2 p.m. Wednesday, state Department of Administration spokesperson Tatyana Warrick said. The man was demanding to see the governor, who was not in the building at the time, Warrick said. The man was taken into custody for openly carrying a firearm in the Capitol,...

NEW YORK (AP) — The second Republican presidential debate will be broadcast Wednesday on Fox Business Network and Univision, but the exclusive online livestream will take place on Rumble, an alternative video-sharing platform that has been criticized for allowing— and at times promoting — far-right extremism, bigotry, election disinformation and conspiracy theories. By bringing viewers to Rumble to watch the GOP debate, as it did with the first one last month, the Republican National Committee is driving potential voters to a site crawling with content that flouts the rules of more mainstream ones such as Facebook, uh Instagram and YouTube.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Transgender youth in North Carolina lost access Wednesday to gender-affirming medical treatments after the Republican-led General Assembly overrode the governor’s vetoes of that legislation and other bills touching on gender in sports and LGBTQ+ instruction in the classroom. GOP supermajorities in the House and Senate enacted — over Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s opposition — a bill barring medical professionals from providing hormone therapy, puberty-blocking drugs and surgical gender-transition procedures to anyone under 18, with limited exceptions. The law takes effect immediately. But minors who had begun treatment before Aug. 1 may continue receiving that care if...

NEW YORK -- Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said definitively that rival Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, an acknowledgement the Florida governor made after years of equivocating answers.“Of course he lost,” DeSantis said an interview with NBC News posted Monday. “Joe Biden's the president.”DeSantis has often sidestepped questions about whether he believes the 2020 election results were legitimate. But in recent days he has started publicly questioning the lies that Trump and his allies have made about the election's legitimacy.Federal and state election officials and Trump’s own attorney general said there was no credible evidence the election’s outcome was...

Russia halted a breakthrough wartime deal on Monday that allows grain to flow from Ukraine to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where hunger is a growing threat and high food prices have pushed more people into poverty. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would suspend the Black Sea Grain Initiative until its demands to get its own food and fertilizer to the world are met. While Russia has complained that restrictions on shipping and insurance have hampered its agricultural exports, it has shipped record amounts of wheat. “When the part of the Black Sea deal related to...

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to attend an economic summit in South Africa next month and the country is desperately trying to persuade him to stay away to avoid the legal and diplomatic fallout over his international arrest warrant, South Africa’s deputy president said in an interview with a news website on Friday. As a signatory to the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, South Africa is obliged to arrest Putin on an indictment the court issued against the Russian leader in March for war crimes involving the abduction of children from Ukraine. Moscow has dismissed the warrant. South African...

MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace said Wednesday on her show “Deadline” that former special counsel John Durham, former Attorney General Bill Barr and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe are “a nightmare for the rule of law.” Wallace said, “Durham never had anything except a tip to open an investigation into Donald Trump. And that was something he couldn’t even answer for today.”

A fake AP ‘fact-checker’ is hiding the real threat a California mental health services bill poses to parents and their vulnerable children.On April 4, Karena Phan of the Associated Press wrote an article attempting to debunk “social media distortion” of Assembly Bill 665, which was introduced as, “Minors: consent to mental health services.” This bill, authored by Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo and state Sen. Scott Wiener, is making its way through the California Legislature. Phan contends that hysterics on social media claim the bill “would allow school mental health professionals to remove minors [12 and older] from the custody of their...

Ukrainian troops are probing Russian defenses as spring gives way to a second summer of fighting, and Kyiv's forces are facing an enemy that has made mistakes and suffered setbacks in the 15-month-old war. But analysts say Moscow also has learned from those blunders and improved its weapons and skills.Russia has built heavily fortified defenses along the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line, honed its electronic weapons to reduce Ukraine's edge in combat drones, and turned heavy bombs from its massive Cold-War-era arsenal into precision-guided gliding munitions capable of striking targets without putting its warplanes at risk.The changing Russian tactics along with...

The wall of a major dam in a part of southern Ukraine that Moscow controls collapsed Tuesday after a reported explosion, sending water gushing downriver and prompting dire warnings of ecological disaster as officials from both sides in the war ordered residents to evacuate. Ukraine accused Russian forces of blowing up the dam and hydroelectric power station, while Russian officials blamed Ukrainian military strikes in the contested area. The fallout could have broad consequences: Flooding homes, streets and businesses downstream; depleting water levels upstream that help cool Europe’s largest nuclear power plant; and draining supplies of drinking water to the...

American Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin vowed Saturday that Washington would not stand for any “coercion and bullying” of its allies and partners by China, while assuring Beijing that the United States remains committed to maintaining the status quo on Taiwan and would prefer dialogue over conflict. Speaking at the so-called Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual forum bringing together top defense officials, diplomats and leaders, Austin lobbied for support for Washington’s vision of a “free, open, and secure Indo-Pacific within a world of rules and rights” as the best course to counter increasing Chinese assertiveness in the region. The U.S. has...

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says there can be no cease-fire in the war in Ukraine unless it is part of a “just and lasting” peace deal that includes Russia’s military withdrawal. Blinken said Friday that “a ceasefire that simply freezes current lines in place” and enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin to “rest, rearm, and re-attack” would not be “a just and lasting peace.” In a speech during a visit to Finland, Blinken said that Russia must also pay for part of Ukraine’s reconstruction and be held accountable for its full-scale invasion of its neighbor...

The Associated Press has been running wild with leftist climate change propaganda while being paid millions by eco-extremist organizations. And yet AP still has the audacity to pretend it's engaging in objective reporting. MRC Business analysts found that from Feb. 15, 2022 through Feb. 15, 2023, The Associated Press (AP) pushed climate change alarmism and promoted woke environmental, social, governance (ESG) efforts across 64 climate-related stories after the legacy outlet received an $8 million grant from leftist nonprofit organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation, Quadrivium (the activist organization of News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch’s estranged son and climate activist James...

A judge on Monday dismissed the only remaining legal claim in Republican Kari Lake's challenge of her loss in last year's race for Arizona governor, affirming the election of Democrat Katie Hobbs. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter A. Thompson said Lake failed to prove her claim that Maricopa County did not verify signatures on mail ballots as required by law. Lake was among the most vocal of last year's Republican candidates promoting former President Donald Trump's election lies, which she made the centerpiece of her campaign. She has built a loyal following among Trump supporters and is openly considering...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A special prosecutor has ended his four-year investigation into possible FBI misconduct in its probe of ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign with withering criticism of the bureau but a meager court record that fell far short of the former president’s prediction he would uncover the “crime of the century.” The report Monday from special counsel John Durham represents the long-awaited culmination of an investigation that Trump and allies had claimed would expose massive wrongdoing by law enforcement and intelligence officials. Instead, Durham’s investigation delivered underwhelming results, with prosecutors securing a guilty plea from a...