Free Republic

Breaking from tradition, the populist Freedom Party will not be given a chance to form a government despite winning last month’s elections. Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen announced Tuesday that incumbent Chancellor Karl Nehammer would be granted the chance to form a new government, despite his centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) coming in second place at 26 per cent of the vote behind the Freedom Party of Austria’s (FPÖ) 29 per cent. The 80-year-old president argued that even though tradition dictates that the winner be given the first crack at forming a coalition because the other parties have ruled...

Austria’s Freedom Party has secured the first far-right national parliamentary election victory since the Second World War, beating conservatives in power. Political analysts say the far-right achieved this electoral victory by tapping into voters’ concerns over immigration, inflation, and the war in Ukraine. It must be said, however, that the Freedom Party’s chances of governing are unclear at this stage. Preliminary election results show that the Freedom Party finished first in the election with 29.2 percent of the vote, while the ruling Christian-democratic and liberal-conservative Austrian People’s Party came in second with 26.5 percent of the vote. The center-left in...

Could Finland´s next President be a foreigner? Finland´s current President Alexander Stubb speaking to the public. Finland´s President Alexander Stubb Credit: Alexander Stubb, Facebook Finland´s future President may be a foreigner, said current President Alexander Stubb during a recent presidential Q&A session on the local Yle Radio Suomi. The Finnish President emphasised that 10 per cent of residents in Finland have foreign backgrounds and argued that the future could see a foreign national leading the country. “Racism should not be politicised. Every nation has to go through this discussion,” emphasised Stubb. “In Finland, 10 per cent of people were not...

An international team of astronomers has overturned a longstanding belief that stars and dark matter interact in a mysterious way to create uniform density structures across different galaxies. This finding, published in 'Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS)', challenges a theory that had perplexed scientists for 25 years. The research team, which includes scientists from Australia, the UK, Austria, and Germany, utilized the Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe and analyze 22 galaxies that are approximately four billion years old. The results revealed that the perceived uniformity in galaxy density may not be a real phenomenon but...

The ISIS teen who plotted a terror attack on a Taylor Swift concert has been pictured for the first time as neighbours say he completely changed his look recently. The 19-year-old ISIS fanatic has been identified as Beran A., who lived in a newly-built end-terraced house in Ternitz, nearly 50 miles south of Vienna, where he spent his childhood. A few years ago, Beran A.'s parents - who immigrated to Austria from North Macedonia - moved into a new-built house in the Neunkirchen district of Ternitz with him and his younger sister. Beran A. and his accomplice had planned to...

Both suspects in a foiled plot to attack Taylor Swift shows in Vienna appeared to be inspired by the Islamic State group and al-Qaida, Austrian authorities said Thursday, and investigators found bomb-making materials at one of their homes. Officials said one of the two confessed to planning to “kill as many people as possible outside the concert venue.” Three sold-out concerts were canceled a day earlier because of the plot, devastating Swifties from across the globe. Many of them had dropped thousands of euros (dollars) on travel and lodging in Austria’s expensive capital city to attend the Eras Tour shows...

CELLAR monster Josef Fritzl is enjoying life in a luxury prison cell with an en-suite shower and his own minder. Fritzl, 89, was jailed for life in 2009 after keeping his daughter locked up as his sex slave for 24 years. The Austrian fiend, who fathered seven kids with her, was moved from a high-security psychiatric unit to a normal prison earlier this year. Now his lawyer Dr Astrid Wagner has told The Sun on Sunday the beast is “thrilled” with a “nice and spacious” cell to himself with a shower. And he has reportedly grown close to another inmate...

Swift was scheduled to perform at the Ernst-Happel-Stadion in Vienna on Thursday, Friday and Saturday for the international leg of The Eras Tour...Officials said two men were arrested Wednesday...Officials said both men had become radicalized through the internet, and allegedly had specific and detailed plans on how to carry out an attack.

ROME — Pope Francis warned Sunday democracy is in “crisis” around the world, likely with an eye to a rise in right-wing parties across Italy, Austria, Argentina, Netherlands, and Germany. It is evident that in today’s world, democracy “is not in good health,” the pontiff told a group of 900 participants in the 50th annual Social Week, celebrated in the northern Italian city of Trieste. The pope went on to compare the modern “crisis of democracy” to a wounded heart that has suffered a heart attack, manifested by “various forms of social exclusion” that “limit participation.”

CV NEWS FEED// A controversial, explicit statue of the Blessed Mother giving birth was decapitated only four days after it was displayed in the “New Cathedral,” in the Austrian city of Linz. The statue depicted the Blessed Mother in the moments before birth, with her abdomen and lower body completely exposed. The statue was part of an exhibition celebrating the New Cathedral’s 100th anniversary, the news agency Kronen Zeitung reports. Completed in 1924, the cathedral is the largest in Austria, and it can fit up to 20,000 people. Theologian Martina Resch explained during the exposition that the statue “is a...

BOLIVAR, Mo. (KY3) - At the peaceful Parkview Residential Facility in Bolivar. Inside every door, there’s a great story. “Pretty soon the school bell rang,” resident Bill Pool said, “knew right then, gonna be tardy again.” Inside Bill’s room is a book full of his poems. It sits right next to the shadowbox full of World War II medals. “I think he’s a great man,” Bill’s daughter Carolyn George said. “He still has love,” Bill’s other daughter, Jeanie Price added. Bill Pool enlisted in the Army in 1941 and, after basic training, was off to the heart of the ground...

A man who was renovating his wine cellar in Austria has made an extraordinary discovery. It wasn't a vintage red or white - but the remains of prehistoric mammoths...The winemaker, Andreas Pernerstorfer, came across a number of huge bones, buried deep in his wine cellar in the village of Gobelsburg, in the district of Krems, west of Vienna.He reported his find to the authorities, who identified them as the bones of at least three Stone Age mammoths..."I thought it was just a piece of wood left by my grandfather. But then I dug it out a bit and then I...

Portrait of Fräulein Lieser', which the Austrian modernist artist started in 1917, sold to an unknown buyer at an auction in Vienna yesterday. The portrait of a young woman was one of Klimt's last works, as the artist died in early 1918 after suffering from a stroke, meaning the painting has small unfinished areas. The Jewish Lieser family, who had commissioned the painting, received the artwork unfinished, but soon after were forced to flee Austria amid the rise of Hitler and antisemitism.

Explanation: Discovered by accident, this manuscript page provides graphical insight to astronomy in medieval times, before the Renaissance and the influence of Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho de Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo. The intriguing page is from lecture notes on astronomy compiled by the monk Magister Wolfgang de Styria before the year 1490. The top panels clearly illustrate the necessary geometry for a lunar (left) and solar eclipse in the Earth-centered Ptolemaic system. At lower left is a diagram of the Ptolemaic view of the Solar System with text at the upper right to explain the movement of the planets according...

While Germany and Austria were the first countries to use DST in 1916, it is a little-known fact that a few hundred Canadians beat the German Empire by eight years. On July 1, 1908, the residents of Port Arthur, Ontario—today's Thunder Bay—turned their clocks forward by one hour to start the world's first DST period......Germany introduced DST in 1916. Clocks in the German Empire, and its ally Austria, were turned ahead by one hour on April 30, 1916—two years into World War I. The rationale was to minimize the use of artificial lighting to save fuel for the war effort.Within...

The parents trusted the doctor that their unborn child was healthy and were looking forward to the birth of their daughter. But then the shock: the girl is born without a left arm. The left chest and shoulder area is also misformed and the collarbone shortened. The desperate parents wondered: How could the gynaecologist overlook this malformation during ultrasound examinations? He even noted twice that the fetus has both arms and legs. The parents complained to the Carinthian specialist. “The doctor had overlooked the child’s severe disability. If the diagnosis correctly made the parents, the parents decided to abort," says...

The infamous Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter locked in a cellar for 24 years and forced her to endure unimaginable abuse, may soon walk free. Fritzl was sentenced to ‘life’ in prison in 2009 after admitting that he had held his daughter Elisabeth prisoner under his house for over two decades and forcibly fathered seven children with her. He was only caught after staff at a hospital became suspicious when attending to his and Elisabeth’s eldest daughter during an emergency visit. His sentence is currently being carried out at Stein Prison in Austria, a high-security facility for mentally ill...

If you inherited $27 million dollars, what would you do? For Austrian heiress Marlene Engelhorn, 31, she's determined to give it all away. "I have inherited a fortune, and therefore power, without having done anything for it," she said in a statement, per BBC. "And the state doesn't even want taxes on it." (In 2008, Austria got rid of its inheritance tax.) Engelhorn is descended from Friedrich Engelhorn, a German industrialist who, in 1865, founded BASF, a chemical and pharmaceutical company. Engelhorn's grandmother, Traudl Engelhorn-Vechiatto, was estimated to have a net worth of around $4.2 billion. This week, Engelhorn...

Several Muslim suspects have been arrested in France, Germany and Austria for allegedly planning Christmas terror attacks, according to reports, which say there’s a “very high level of terrorist threat” from Islamic terrorists in France. Spain is also on alert.In France, five men, aged 20 to 23, were apprehended in Meurthe-et-Moselle, Le Parisien reported, saying French intelligence services had been surveilling the men for links to criminal terrorist associations and they were found scouting Strasbourg Christmas market.A video filmed at the market featuring one suspect saying, “And there, we shoot,” was found during a raid. These men are believed to...

A pro-vax doctor has blown the whistle to warn the public about the soaring cases of side effects she’s seeing from the Covid mRNA injections. Dr. Cornelia Tschanett has apparently had a crisis of conscience after administering up to 4,000 shots in her practice. However, the Austrian doctor says that roughly ten percent of the people she injected have come back to her suffering from side effects. Tschanett admits that she came to the chilling realization that she couldn’t “continue to vaccinate here” after a teenager she vaccinated suffered heart failure. Instead, the health professional is now raising the alarm...