Free Republic

Forced to do more with less and learning from the war in Ukraine, U.S. special operations commanders are juggling how to add more high-tech experts to their teams while still cutting their overall forces by about 5,000 troops over the next five years. The conflicting pressures are forcing a broader restructuring of the commando teams, which are often deployed for high-risk counterterrorism missions and other sensitive operations around the world. The changes under consideration are being influenced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including lessons learned by British special operations forces there. ... The United States is “taking a lot of...

WASHINGTON (AP) — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem described in a new book having met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during her time in Congress. But her office said Friday that the story of the meeting was an error as further scrutiny was put on the Republican governor’s life story. ... In her soon-to-be-released book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” Noem describes instances where she has stood up to international leaders — anecdotes that would have bolstered her foreign policy experience — but those were called into...

As Twitchy reported, Ray Epps' sentencing Tuesday was a clown show. Epps, who is on video inciting people to enter the Capitol, was sentenced to a year's probation and a $500 fine. President Joe Biden gave his January 6 anniversary speech a day early and bragged last week that the "insurrectionists" had been sentenced to a collective total of 840 years in prison. That total stands, as Epps won't spend a single day in jail. Grandmothers who simply walked into the Capitol Building a stood there have been sentenced to a year's probation and a $500 fine after being found...

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in history. In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.

DENVER (AP) — The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.

[Giuliani's] lawyer has argued there is no evidence Giuliani himself encouraged the harassment. Sibley told jurors that right-wing website Gateway Pundit was “patient zero” in spreading the conspiracy theory about the women, and said Giuliani was sued because he is “patient deep pockets.” “Just because these things happened — and they did happen — doesn’t make my client responsible for them,” Sibley said.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — The mother of a transgender girl sobbed in federal court Wednesday as she contemplated having to move away from her Navy officer husband to get health care for her 12-year-old if Florida's ban on gender dysphoria treatments for minors is allowed to take affect The woman, who testified as Jane Doe to protect the identity of her child, said her daughter went from being anxious and upset to a thriving, happy straight-A student after being allowed to live as a girl about eight years ago, a decision she made with her husband after multiple visits to...

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — The birth of their daughter should have marked the beginning of a joyful chapter for the young Palestinian couple. Instead, the devastating war in Gaza, now in its third month, has turned childbirth and parenthood into a time of worry and fear for Salim and Israa al-Jamala. First, they endured a perilous journey, dodging missile fire, to reach a maternity ward. And now, the couple is sheltering with their newborn in the partially tented courtyard of another hospital where they can’t care properly for their now 3-week-old daughter, her mother’s namesake. His wife’s breast...

The link I posted is for a random AP article. At the top of the page, you can see the red donate button. "EVEN WHEN THE NEWS IS FREE, JOURNALISM IS NOT. SUPPORT INDEPENDENT, FACT-BASED JOURNALISM." When you click on the red button it takes you to this donation page. AP Donation Page

Grain thunders into rail cars and trucks zip around a storage facility in central Ukraine, a place that growing numbers of companies turned to as they struggled to export their food to people facing hunger around the world. Now, more of the grain is getting unloaded from overcrammed silos and heading to ports on the Black Sea, set to traverse a fledgling shipping corridor launched after Russia pulled out of a U.N.-brokered agreement this summer that allowed food to flow safely from Ukraine during the war. “It was tight, but we kept working … we sought how to accept every...

The man who bludgeoned former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer last year consumed a steady diet of right-wing conspiracy theories before an attack that took place with the midterm elections less than two weeks away. As the 2024 presidential campaign heats up, experts on extremism fear the threat of politically motivated violence will intensify. From "Pizzagate" to QAnon and "Stop the Steal," conspiracy theories that demonized Donald Trump's enemies are morphing and spreading as the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination aims for a return to the White House. "No longer are these conspiracy theories and very...

INDIAN ROCKS BEACH, Fla. -- Just as they have for millions of years, sea turtles by the thousands made their labored crawl from the ocean to U.S. beaches to lay their eggs over the past several months. This year, record nesting was found in Florida and elsewhere despite growing concern about threats from climate change. In Florida, preliminary state statistics show more than 133,840 loggerhead turtle nests, breaking a record set in 2016. Same for green turtles, where the estimate of at least 76,500 nests is well above the previous mark set in 2017. High sea turtle nest numbers also...

The negative impact on the climate from passenger vehicles, which is considerable, could have dropped by more than 30% over the past decade if not for the world’s appetite for large cars, a new report from the Global Fuel Economy Initiative suggests. Sport utility vehicles, or SUVs, now account for more than half of all new car sales across the globe, the group said, and it’s not alone. The International Energy Agency, using a narrower definition of SUV, estimates they make up nearly half. Over the years these cars have gotten bigger and so has their cost to the climate,...

By most accounts, Speaker Mike Johnson inherited a House Republican majority in disarray after the sudden ouster of his predecessor last month. But as Johnson, R-La., tries to rebuild that slim majority, he’s fast running into the same hard-right factions and divisions that Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was unable to tame. That’s disrupting the party’s agenda, shelving priorities and leaving gnawing questions about any leader’s ability to govern. Capitol Hill devolved into fresh scenes of political chaos this past week as tensions soared. A Republican senator challenged a Teamsters union boss to a brawl, one of several outbursts involving lawmakers,...

NEW YORK (AP) — Preston Cabral eats meat nearly every day at home, but his favorite meals at school are served on “Meatless Mondays” and “Vegan Fridays.” “Today I ate chips, tangerines and this thing that looked like chili but without the meat — just beans,” the 12-year-old said after lunch. Programs like these are among the few proven to work for one of the thorniest problems of the 21st century: How to get people to eat less meat. Experts agree that the urgency of climate change and the demands of a surging global population call for an overhaul of...

The Republican Party’s once-crowded 2024 presidential primary field has suddenly shrunk to just a handful of viable candidates. But a day after Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina stunned many of his own staff by suspending his campaign, it’s unclear whether the GOP is any closer to coalescing behind a clear alternative to former President Donald Trump. Instead, the fight between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis for a distant second place appears to be intensifying. And some lower-tier candidates insist on battling for relevance, despite growing pressure to bow out of the race altogether. Meanwhile, Trump’s team is cheering on...

On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working… ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions. What were they doing there so early on...

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...

It was neither the place nor the time for a proper goodbye, said Omar Dirawi. Not here, in this dusty field strewn with dead people wrapped in blankets and zipped up in body bags. And not now, as Israeli airstrikes crashed around him for the third week, erasing more of his neighborhood and sundering hundreds of families and friendships. Yet on this October week in Gaza’s central town of Zawaideh, the 22-year-old Palestinian photojournalist buried 32 members of his family who were killed in Israeli air raids last Sunday. Dirawi’s aunts, uncles and cousins from Gaza City had heeded Israeli...

The Associated Press has some nerve browbeating readers over the alleged scourge of Israel-Hamas war “misinformation” on social media despite its own guilt of pushing terrorist propaganda. AP pontificated in its Oct. 24 headline how “Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is flooding social media. Here are the facts.” The leftist outlet lectured how “[i]n the days since Hamas militants stormed into Israel early Oct. 7, a flood of videos and photos purporting to show the conflict have filled social media, making it difficult for onlookers from around the world to sort fact from fiction.” Yes, AP actually sought to humanize...