Free Republic

The man accused of breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s California home and severely beating her husband with a hammer appears to have made racist and often rambling posts online, including some that questioned the results of the 2020 election, defended former President Donald Trump and echoed QAnon conspiracy theories. David DePape, 42, grew up in Powell River, British Columbia, before leaving about 20 years ago to follow an older girlfriend to San Francisco. A street address listed for DePape in the Bay Area college town of Berkeley led to a post office box at a UPS Store. DePape was...

Republican Rep. Liz Cheney on Thursday endorsed and plans to campaign for Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, the first time that the critic of former President Donald Trump who lost her GOP primary has crossed party lines to formally support a Democrat. Slotkin is competing against Republican state Sen. Tom Barrett in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District. Their race is considered a toss-up by both sides and one of the Republicans’ chief targets in their campaign to win the House majority on Nov. 8.

Looking around Memorial Stadium before Game 1 of the 1983 World Series, Philadelphia Phillies star Gary Matthews saw a lot of Black talent. Joe Morgan. Eddie Murray. Garry Maddox. Ken Singleton. Al Bumbry. Disco Dan Ford. And plenty more that night in Baltimore. “There were quite a few of us,” Matthews recalled. When fans watch the Houston Astros and Phillies line up this week to begin the Fall Classic, it will be a much different picture. To be sure, Houston’s Jose Altuve and Philadelphia’s Jean Segura are among scores of Latin players helping keep big league rosters diverse. But for...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Dave Foreman, a self-proclaimed eco-warrior who was a prominent member of the radical environmentalism movement and a co-founder of Earth First!, has died. He was 74. The New Mexico-based Rewilding Institute, which Foreman founded as a think tank to develop long-term land conservation plans, said on its website that he died peacefully at his home in Albuquerque on Monday. A cause of death wasn’t immediately released, but friends of Foreman said he had battled a lung illness for several months. “There will never be another like him. One of the greatest conservationists ever,” the institute said....

Trump moves to general election mode with Pennsylvania rally Supporters of former President Donald Trump cheer as they wait in line outside a political rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) 1 of 6 Supporters of former President Donald Trump cheer as they wait in line outside a political rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) WILKES-BARRE, Pa. (AP) — Larry Mitko voted for Donald Trump in 2016. But the Republican from Beaver County in western Pennsylvania says he has no plans to back his party’s nominee for Senate, Dr. Mehmet Oz...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department said Tuesday it had uncovered efforts to obstruct its investigation into the discovery of classified documents at Donald Trump’s Florida estate, saying “government records were likely concealed and removed” from a storage room even after the former president’s representatives had assured officials that they’d thoroughly searched the property. The FBI also seized 33 boxes containing more than 100 classified records during its Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago and found three classified documents stashed in office drawers, according to a filing that lays out the most detailed chronology to date of stained interactions between Justice...

Robert Reich, who served as Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration and is currently a Professor of Public Policy at University of California, Berkley, expressed interest on Tuesday in making the last name of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis an official synonym for "fascist." Reich is not the first left-wing person to dub the governor a fascist. It has become a more common occurrence as DeSantis has increased his national profile, some think with an eye toward running for the presidency in 2024. "The View's" Sunny Hostin previously called DeSantis a "fascist and a bigot," MSNBC host Joy Reid call...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Hate crimes driven by homophobia and racism resulted in a 33% surge in reported incidents in California last year, following a similar spike in hate-driven attacks the year prior and confirming what officials have been hearing anecdotally since the pandemic began, the state’s attorney general said Tuesday. Attorney General Rob Bonta said that crimes against Black people were again the most prevalent in 2021, climbing 13% from 2020 to 513 reported incidents. Hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation bias increased nearly 50% to 303 incidents while crimes against Asian Americans were up 178% to 247 incidents....

NEW YORK (AP) — Several mainstream Republican Senate candidates are drawing on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory once confined to the far-right fringes of U.S. politics to court voters this campaign season, promoting the baseless notion that there is a plot to diminish the influence of white people in America. In some cases, the comments have gone largely overlooked given the hard-line immigration rhetoric that has become commonplace among conservatives during the Trump era. But a weekend mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, that may have been inspired by the racist theory is drawing new attention to the GOP’s growing...

Israeli police on Friday moved in on a crowd of mourners at the funeral of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, beating demonstrators with batons and causing pallbearers to briefly drop the casket. The crackdown came during a rare show of Palestinian nationalism in east Jerusalem — the part of the holy city that Israel captured in 1967 and that the Palestinians claim as their capital. Israel says east Jerusalem is part of its capital and has annexed the area in a move that is not internationally recognized. Israel routinely clamps down on any displays of support for Palestinian statehood.

It's time for America to stop letting the coronavirus “dictate how we live,” President Joe Biden’s White House declared Wednesday, outlining a strategy to allow people to return to many normal activities safely after two years of pandemic disruptions. One highlight is a new “test to treat” plan to provide free antiviral pills at pharmacies to people who test positive for the virus. The 90-page National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan spells out initiatives and investments to continue to drive down serious illness and deaths from COVID-19, while preparing for potential new variants and providing employers and schools the resources to remain...

Millions of Americans watched the events in Washington last Jan. 6 unfold on live television. Police officers testified to the violence and mayhem. Criminal proceedings in open court detailed what happened. Yet the hoaxes, conspiracy theories and attempts to rewrite history persist, muddying the public’s understanding of what actually occurred during the most sustained attack on the seat of American democracy since the War of 1812. […] Unfounded claims that the rioters were members of antifa went viral first, only to be overtaken by a baseless claim blaming FBI operatives. Other theories say the rioters were peaceful and were framed...

The presidential election, pandemic and racial reckoning were stories that drove intense interest and engagement to news outlets in 2020. To a large degree, 2021 represented the inevitable hangover. Various metrics illustrate the dwindling popularity of news content. Cable news networks were the main form of evening entertainment for millions of Americans last year. In 2021, weekday prime-time viewership dropped 38% at CNN, 34% at Fox News Channel and 25% at MSNBC, according to the Nielsen company. The decline was less steep but still significant at broadcast television evening newscasts: 12% at ABC’s “World News Tonight” and the “CBS Evening...

CHICAGO (AP) — Federal immigration agents will end mass workplace arrests of immigrant employees suspected of living in the U.S. without legal permission, according to a memo issued Tuesday by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Instead, the focus will shift to pursuing “unscrupulous employers who exploit the vulnerability of undocumented workers” and emphasize fighting worker abuse including paying substandard wages, unsafe working conditions and human trafficking. The three-page memo directs the heads of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and Citizenship and Immigration Services to draw up a plan within two months to increase employer penalties, encourage workers...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection has subpoenaed 11 officials who were involved in planning rallies in support of former President Donald Trump ahead of the violent attack, including one the day of the siege at which the president told his supporters to “fight like hell.” The announcement follows a first round of subpoenas last week that targeted former White House and administration officials who were in contact with Trump before and during the insurrection. The committee said in a release Wednesday that the subpoenas are part of the panel’s efforts to collect information...

WASHINGTON — Since the Taliban seized the Afghan capital on Aug. 14, more than 82,000 people have been evacuated from Afghanistan in one of the largest U.S. airlifts in history. Here’s a look at where the situation stands: HOW DID WE GET HERE? President Donald Trump signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020 as part of an effort to end what he called the “endless wars” in the Middle East. He agreed to a May 1 deadline to have all troops out of the country. Biden, who says he no longer wants to risk American lives in...

ATLANTA (AP) — Jimmy Carter is sometimes called a better former president than he was president. Nodding to Carter’s decades of work as a globe-trotting humanitarian but with a glaring reminder of his landslide defeat in 1980, the backhanded compliment rankles Carter allies and, they say, the former president himself. Yet now, 40 years removed from the White House, the most famous resident of Plains, Georgia, is riding a new wave of attention as biographers, filmmakers, climate activists and Carter’s fellow Democrats push to recast his presidential legacy, even as Republicans sometimes try to remind voters of the volatile economy...

(The Associated Press called (Aug/2021) terrorists in Gaza throwing incendiary balloons onto Israeli civilians as "activists.")___ HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) Tweeted: "Activists" @AssociatedPress. https://t.co/Jl6QYU0hR7

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Since the pandemic began, just 26 of the 11,600 people in Alabama who have died of COVID-19 were fully vaccinated, State Health Officer Scott Harris said Friday. And most of the nearly 2,000 COVID-19 patients currently in state hospitals are also unvaccinated, he said. Harris released the numbers as the state tries to boost lagging vaccination rates. Health officials say recent cases resulting in severe illness and death could have largely been prevented if people had gotten inoculated.

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A day after it recorded the most new daily cases since the start of the pandemic, Florida on Sunday broke a previous record for current hospitalizations, as the number of patients in hospitals because of COVID-19 once again broke through the 1,000-person threshold.The Sunshine State had 10,207 people hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 cases, according to data reported to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.The previous record was from more than a year ago, July 23, 2020, more than a half-year before vaccinations started becoming widespread, when Florida had 10,170 hospitalizations, according to the Florida...