Free Republic

Hundreds of residents in southwestern Russia’s Ural region staged a rare protest Monday, demanding compensation for the flooding of their homes after a dam gave way because of rising floodwaters. The protest took place in the city of Orsk, located in the Orenburg region near the border with Kazakhstan. Chanting “Putin help us” and “shame,” the locals affected by the floods defied Russian laws that prohibit demonstrations without the permission of authorities. They gathered in front of the city’s administrative building Monday, demanding emergency assistance as the floods swallowed more than 10,000 homes. Denis Pasler, governor of the Orenburg region...

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy voiced support for a variety of far-right conspiracy theories at the fourth GOP presidential primary debate Wednesday, suggesting at one point that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was an "inside job." "Why am I the only person on this stage, at least, who can say that Jan. 6 now does look like it was an inside job?" Ramaswamy said, before he listed other topics popular in conspiracy circles. "That the government lied to us for 20 years about Saudi Arabia's involvement in 9/11? That the great replacement theory is not some grand right-wing...

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 Justice Department on Friday charged three Azerbaijani gangsters with plotting to murder a Brooklyn-based Iranian-American author and activist last year. The case stems from the July arrest of Khalid Mehdiyev, who was collared near Masih Alinejad’s home with an assault rifle after the beefy and bearded 24-year-old was filmed ringing Alinejad’s doorbell and lingering on her porch in a leafy part of the New York City borough. The other two men facing charges are 43-year-old Rafat “Rome” Amirov, a resident of Iran who was arrested on Jan. 26 in New York, and 38-year-old Polad “Haci Qaqa” Omarov, who was...

The sky is falling! A leftist state media outlet is using its massive budget to spread government propaganda about so-called “disinformation” possibly causing “election violence.” Voice of America, which is funded by taxpayers and boasted a $257 million annual budget in FY2021, ran a nutty story that read like a White House press release headlined: “Officials Fear Disinformation Could Spark US Election Violence.” VOA National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin teed up his propaganda: “With just one week to go until the U.S. midterm elections, a key senior U.S. official is expressing concerns that misinformation, or influence operations by U.S. adversaries,...

Ukrainian officials announced on Friday that they had exhumed more than 400 bodies at a mass burial site near Izium, Kharkiv region, from which Russian troops recently retreated after a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Many of those buried there, they said, apparently died a violent death — bodies were found with their hands tied behind their backs, ropes around their necks, broken bones and gunshot wounds; some men had their genitalia severed. VOA Eastern Europe Bureau chief Myroslava Gongadze visited the site.

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Lithuanian cybersecurity experts are urging the country’s government agencies to abandon the use of Chinese-made smartphones after an investigation identified security vulnerabilities and censorship concerns with certain devices. Lithuania’s National Cyber Security Center said it found four major cybersecurity risks for devices made by Huawei and Xiaomi, including two relating to pre-installed apps and one involving personal data leakage, and warned against using these two brands. There’s also the risk of possible restrictions on freedom of expression with Xiaomi phones, which contain a content-filtering feature for 449 keywords or groups of keywords in Chinese characters. The...

President Joe Biden's initial list of action items included sweeping changes to rid the federal government's international news organizations of top managers loyal to his predecessor....Within hours of being sworn in Wednesday, Biden forced out Michael Pack, the controversial head of the agency that oversees Voice of America and four other networks that broadcast news to millions of people abroad.Biden then removed VOA's director and deputy director on Thursday after both had their jobs only a few weeks.

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The media has normalized an anti-religious bigotry that threatens to remove faithful Christians, be they Catholic or anything else, from public service.In a series of articles by its editorial board, media columnist Margaret Sullivan, and former Voice of America Director Amanda Bennett, the Washington Post has mounted a coordinated attack on Robert R. Reilly, the new nominee for VOA director, claiming he is an existential threat to the organization’s mission to provide independent reporting to foreign audiences.The reason they deem Reilly disqualified to serve as VOA director isn’t about a lack of credentials. He was director from 2001 to 2002...

Richard Stengel, new ‘team lead‘ for Joe Biden’s agency for global media, wrote an op-ed last year arguing for free speech restrictions. Stengel, a former MSNBC political analyst until he was named to Biden’s transition team, argued that the First Amendment needed redefining and that “hate speech” should be a crime. “All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails,” he wrote. “I’m all for protecting ‘thought that we hate,’ but not speech that incites hate.” ‘Speech that incites hate’ was defined in Stengel’s op-ed by two examples – Burning the Quran,...

When I was a journalist, I loved Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s assertion that the Constitution and the First Amendment are not just about protecting “free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to...

Hello, it is the Fourth of July 2020. "Independence Day" or "Another Day In The Dictatorship Of Covid-19" There was a bicentennial in 1976 and Bob Hope entertained us for that occasion along with lots of stars..... No Meaningful Republican Party Opposition To DC 19, Instead Distraction With Cultural Warfare.... Burning The Muzzles (Masks) In Boise No tea to throw in the harbor this time around like 200 years ago but how about a mask burning to protest the chains we are in. The protest yesterday Friday over the mask order of the mayor in Boise Idaho...... Newsdump Update: Two...

Two senior executives at the US Congress-funded Voice of America resigned this week after a controversial ally of US President Donald Trump was confirmed as the new chief executive of the agency that oversees the media outlet, as well as Radio Free Asia and Voice of Europe. In another instance of Trump appointing a political loyalist for a nonpolitical job, the conservative activist and filmmaker Michael Pack was confirmed last week as the new head of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an agency independent of the US government responsible for taxpayer-funded news outlets. This came after a partisan-split...

The Trump administration is seeking to implement a series of major reforms at Voice of America's Persian News Network, an effort that comes after years of complaints alleging the outlet has exhibited a pro-Iran bias in its reporting, senior U.S. officials told the Washington Free Beacon. VOA Persian, a taxpayer-funded news service that broadcasts in Farsi with the mission of countering the hardline Iranian regime's anti-U.S. propaganda, has long been a source of frustration for Iranian dissidents and anti-regime voices in Congress. Its broadcasts, critics allege, consistently portray Iran's government in a glowing light, undermining the outlet's mission of providing...

Voice of America (VOA) director Amanda Bennett and her deputy Sandra Sugawara jointly quit on Monday following sharp criticism from President Donald Trump and the confirmation of his ally, Michael Pack, as the new head of the organization which oversees the US media outlet. The state-funded broadcaster is directed at audiences outside the US and produces news in 47 languages. Bennett and Sugawara said Pack has the right to name his own team of leaders as he prepares to take the reins at the US Agency for Global Media. The two veteran journalists did not address the conflict with Trump,...

President Trump was happy as heck at the news that Michael Pack, his choice for new director at the Voice of America, finally got confirmed by the Senate. It came as a sort of miracle, given the hideous protracted battle from deep state's Obama holdovers desperate to keep him out. It even involved a last-ditch Kavanaugh-style underhanded bid to smear him as corrupt in order to delay his confirmation battle to eternity. It failed. And now what's probably the last solid Obama bastion of government has been toppled like a Saddam statue. *snip* (Tweet images at source) But if you...

…..However, with the advent of the Obama administration and the start of a policy of appeasement towards the Iranian regime, there was a general change of atmosphere at the VOA and as such, entry into the Persian section for those with known affiliations to the Islamic republic were facilitated. This approach was justified on the grounds that it would help attain the compromise needed with Iran to secure a nuclear agreement with the ‘5+1’. These developments took a disturbing turn when the annual task of assessing ‘News Talk’ and other programs of the VOA Persian was assigned to Mr. Hooman...

Voice of America is a global news network funded by American taxpayers. It spends about $200 million each year on its mission to “tell America’s story” and “present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively” to people around the globe. Today, however, VOA too often speaks for America’s adversaries—not its citizens. The Coronavirus pandemic is no exception. Secrecy from the Communist Party of China allowed the deadly virus to spread across the world. Journalists should report the facts, but VOA has instead amplified Beijing’s propaganda. This week, VOA called China’s Wuhan lockdown a successful “model” copied by much...

Anti-Trump leftists reacted negatively on Twitter Wednesday to President Trump’s tweet of a photoshopped image honoring the hero dog that chased Islamic State (ISIS) founder and leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, into a tunnel. Trump tweeted an obviously photoshopped image depicting him honoring the dog, whose photo was released on Tuesday.“AMERICAN HERO!” Trump wrote alongside the photoshopped image:However, Trump’s decision to tweet the image, reportedly created by Daily Wire, prompted some to fact-check the obviously doctored image.“I’ve requested details from the @WhiteHouse on this photo. There was no such canine event on today’s @POTUS schedule but there is a Medal of Honor ceremony...