Free Republic

Washington Post staffers walked off the job last week to protest their salaries failing to keep up with record inflation - despite the outlet repeatedly celebrating President Biden's 'miracle' economy. The strike on December 7 came after 18-months of negotiations failed to deliver a 'living wage' in that keeps pace with soaring prices, the paper's union said. Staffers released a much-criticized video explaining their reasons for going on strike, feeling they are 'worth raises that keep up with inflation' because they covered issues including the pandemic, climate change and the Ukraine war. But just days before the strike, the Post...

As fighting grows deadlier in the eastern city of Bakhmut, another big counteroffensive against Russia could cost more lives than Kyiv's forces can afford to lose, a Ukrainian senior official warned.The anonymous official told The Washington Post that all hope for a spring counteroffensive will rely on the arrival of Western military aid and trained troops.Currently, Ukraine doesn't have "the people or weapons" to push forward, the official said, as its most experienced soldiers continue to be killed or injured in battle."If you have more resources, you more actively attack," the senior official said. "If you have fewer resources, you...

As he made his final pitch to voters in western Wisconsin last week, Sen. Ron Johnson told a story about a truck driver who got stuck while navigating a tricky road. The senator said he was driving through Portage when he encountered a traffic snarl caused by the immobile truck. Johnson said he is typically impatient but was not in this case because he witnessed something “heartwarming”: The people of the small community in central Wisconsin sprang into action to help the truck driver get going again. He ended the story with this reveal: “You know, one little point really...

An emboldened cast of anonymous trolls spewed racist slurs and Nazi memes onto Twitter in the hours after billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over the social network Thursday, raising fears of how his pledge of unrestricted free speech could fuel a new wave of online hate. Twitter has struggled to enforce its rules against harassment and extremism, and the company has not yet published any broad-scale changes to its content-moderation policies. But Musk, a self-described "free speech absolutist," has fiercely criticized the company's previous leaders as overly rigid and suppressive and said he would work to overturn some of the...

Officials in Kyiv and several Western countries rejected claims made without evidence by the Kremlin that Ukraine is planning to use a “dirty bomb” — an explosive weapon designed to scatter radioactive material — on its own territory, characterizing them as an attempt by Russia to create a pretext for escalating the conflict. “We all reject Russia’s transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory,” foreign ministers from the United States, France and the United Kingdom said in a Sunday joint statement, after Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made the unfounded claim...

If you were to ask most conservatives what the worst newspaper in the country is, you’d get a lot of arguments between The New York Times and The Washington Post. But, despite the Times’ deep hatred of Republicans and its clear partisan reporting, in my opinion, the correct answer is the Post.No national newspaper has been as blatant of a mouthpiece for government corruption and political bias, and if you still have doubts, just remember that they also employ Taylor Lorenz, perhaps the worst “reporter” on the planet. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Times is a destructive entity,...

A hail of shrapnel from kamikaze drones ripped through the tent where off-duty Ukrainian border guards were sleeping near a crossing with Belarus, three hours north of Ukraine’s capital. Viktor Derevyanko woke to scalding pain, his body burning. Blood spilled from his hand as he tried to wipe his face. A piece of metal had traveled through his arm and stomach and into the muscle around his heart. “I couldn’t get my bearings,” said Derevyanko, the deputy head of the unit. “Only on the third explosion did I manage to fall out of bed and try to find at least...

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court is potentially poised to take down one of the nation’s oldest and most restrictive gun-control laws this summer. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen will be the court’s first major Second Amendment case in more than a decade and happens to be coming amid rising national gun violence and an uptick in gun sales in recent years. What the justices decide could unravel laws across the nation restricting who can carry guns in public. Here’s what’s happening. The case: Can New York place severe restrictions on who can carry a...

In the two months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the silence — and even acquiescence — of the Russian elite has started to fray. Even as opinion polls report overwhelming public support for the military campaign, amid pervasive state propaganda and new laws outlawing criticism of the war, cracks are starting to show. The dividing lines among factions of the Russian economic elite are becoming more marked, and some of the tycoons — especially those who made their fortunes before President Vladimir Putin came to power — have begun, tentatively, to speak. For many, the most immediate focus has been their...

Sometimes news is newsworthy not because it is particularly revelatory but because it confirms something obvious that lacked confirmation or because it provides something broadly understood with a sense of scale. This certainly applies to the revelation — uncovered by the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns and reported by CNN’s Brian Stelter — that President Biden views Rupert Murdoch, founder of Fox News, as “the most dangerous man in the world.” Obvious in broad strokes but now confirmed and with a sense of scale. But this top-line assessment of the face most associated with the right-wing cable...

Sarah Longwell serves on the Leadership Council for Conservatives Against Discrimination and is the chief executive of Longwell Partners. Last week, when I picked up my 3- and 5-year-old from school, I found myself drawn to the family pictures that adorn their classroom walls. The teachers asked us to send these photographs along with our children on the first day of school, as both a comfort measure as well as to help the kids get to know each other better. There’s me and my wife, smiling along with our two boys — all of us wearing helmets as we paused...

U.S. judges including those appointed by Republican presidents are increasingly sentencing defendants who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol to three-year terms of court supervision, fearing they could be misled into committing political violence in the 2024 presidential election.

You can always tell how insular a person has become in their politics when a term that has been used regularly regarding a topic that has been in the news for years strikes them as something "new."Of course, people who don't share columnist Monica Hesse's Bryn Mawr value system have actually been using the word for some time.Okay, I shouldn't be so hard on Bryn Mawr. After all, it has a politically diverse student body with only around 42% identifying as "liberal" and the rest identifying as Marxists.

Russia has effectively legalized patent theft from anyone affiliated with countries “unfriendly” to it, declaring that unauthorized use will not be compensated. McDonald’s said Tuesday that it would temporarily close its 850 restaurants in Russia, a significant decision for a company that gets 9 percent of its revenue from Russia and Ukraine. Without trademark protections, Russia could “take those McDonald’s that got shut down and … just let local operators operate the restaurants and call them McDonald’s,” Gerben said. Russia’s removal of intellectual property protections during wartime is not without precedent. Smithsonian Magazine describes how the German company Bayer lost...

TEL AVIV - Russian-Israeli oligarch Leonid Nevzlin announced on Tuesday that he planned to give up his Russian passport in protest of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Everything that Putin touches dies," Nevzlin wrote in a Facebook post. "I am against the war. I am against the occupation. I am against the genocide of the Ukrainian people." Nevzlin was among the first prominent Russian oligarchs to establish self-imposed exile in Israel, fleeing what he has described as a campaign of politically-motivated persecution by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2003, Nevzlin fled Russia for Israel amid a Kremlin-backed investigation into his Yukos...

Floundering in his attempts to wield political power while lacking a political office, Donald Trump looks increasingly like a stray orange hair to be flicked off the nation’s sleeve. His residual power, which he must use or lose, is to influence his party’s selection of candidates for state and federal offices. This is, however, perilous because he has the power of influence only if he is perceived to have it. That perception will dissipate if his interventions in Republican primaries continue to be unimpressive. So, Trump must try to emulate the protagonist of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”...

A recent alleged assassination plot against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was foiled over the weekend and the Chechen servicemen sent from Russia were “destroyed,” a Ukrainian security leader said Tuesday. Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said during a broadcast marathon airing on Ukrainian TV channels that officials were recently tipped off that a unit of Kadyrovites, elite Chechen special forces, was on its way to kill Zelensky. After Ukrainian officials were informed by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the Chechen special forces were killed Saturday on the outskirts of Kyiv, Danilov said. “We are...

Give Washington Post reporter Amy B. Wang credit for being very speedy -- specifically in writing up a slam of a Republican. At just after high noon on Tuesday, it was announced that Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds would deliver the Republican response to Joe Biden's State Of The Union address on March 1 and just a little over an hour later at 1:27 PM EST, Yang had completed her article on Reynolds along with the requisite slams.

Six months ago, the transatlantic alliance was on shaky ground, with President Biden’s promise of a reinvigorated NATO under U.S. leadership severely undermined by the Afghanistan debacle and a foreign policy that seemed unready for prime time. Today, Biden and his team have redeemed themselves in the eyes of many NATO allies, with a tough stance on Ukraine and the successful wrangling of the often-fractious alliance to support it. Ukraine’s fate, and Russia’s future relationship with the West, remain uncertain. Biden has said he is convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin, with more than 150,000 troops and massive weaponry amassed on...

Conservative figures have launched an online furor this week, claiming that the government planned to spend $30 million on pipes for smoking crack cocaine. The heightened concern came months after the Department of Health and Human Services announced a federal grant for local programs that provide myriad "harm reduction" tools, or services that minimize the risks associated with drug use. Republicans seized on "crack pipes," causing the phrase to trend on Twitter on Tuesday, the latest in continued resistance from the GOP against harm-reduction techniques at a time when people are dying of drug overdoses at record rates in the...