Free Republic

Germany’s new foreign minister heads to Washington this week for talks likely to be dominated by the Russia-Ukraine crisis, amid reports that her boss, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, is looking to reset strained relations with Moscow and plans to meet with President Vladimir Putin this month. Germany has just assumed the rotating presidency of the G7 for 2022, and any disunity within its three-party coalition government over confronting challenges posed by Russia or China could have far-reaching implications. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, co-leader of the Greens, favors a tougher approach to Moscow and Beijing than does Scholz of the center-left Social...

"The bad news is, I tested positive for COVID (thanks, 2022!)," Meyers said in a tweet Monday. "The good news is, I feel fine (thanks vaccines and booster!)."

“What the Fathers and Saints valued and defended, we also feel called to value and defend”: Interview with Dr. Joseph Shaw The following interview first appeared in the pages of the latest issue (no. 15, Winter 2021) of Calx Mariae, a beautiful journal published by Voice of the Family. Rorate Caeli is grateful for VOTF's permission to republish it here for the benefit of our readers, whom I would encourage to subscribe to the print publication. Calx Mariae: Congratulations on your election as President of the Una Voce Federation. For people who don’t know about the Federation how would...

FT. WORTH, TX—While his wife was in bed with a stomach virus all day, local father Todd Fennick had high praise for his ability to care for their four kids without her. “She needs to stay in bed today, and that’s fine, because I think I’m doing a great job, frankly,” said Fennick as he served his children a lunch consisting of paper plates holding a handful of shredded cheese, a Slim Jim, a dollop of cookie butter, and some packets of crackers that he found in the junk drawer. Four-year-old Padme Fennick, who appeared to be wearing paper towels...

The Biden administration mask and COVID-19 vaccine mandates for the Head Start program have been blocked in additional 24 states by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump nominee, granted a preliminary injunction on Jan. 1 to Georgia and 23 other states against the mandates. Doughty said he thinks the government lacks the authority to impose the mask mandate on all children two years and older and the vaccine requirements on all workers and many volunteers and contractors. The law in question does not mention masks or vaccines, leaving the administration reliant on the health secretary’s ability...

When China put in place its one-child pol­icy four decades ago, pol­icy mak­ers said they would sim­ply switch gears if births dropped too much. That has turned out to be not so easy. “In 30 years, the cur­rent prob­lem of es­pe­cially dread­ful pop­u­la­tion growth may be al­le­viated and then [we can] adopt dif­fer­ent pop­u­la­tion poli­cies,” the Com­mu­nist Party said in a 1980 open let­ter to mem­bers and young peo­ple. With the num­ber of births de­clin­ing year af­ter year, China is now rac­ing in the op­po­site di­rec-tion, clos­ing abor­tion clin­ics and ex­pand­ing ser­vices to help cou­ples con­ceive. But a legacy of...

ARGENTINA—Communist dictators such as Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong have grown increasingly jealous of the attention Adolf Hitler is getting even though he’s killed so few people. “Six million jews?! That’s nothing,” commented Mao with the aid of an interpreter. “Yes, yes, [unintelligible] I know he killed gypsies too, but they don’t count. I kill in my sleep like a man. I blink and a million more are gone!” (Note: Mao was stoic as he spoke, but the interpreter waved her arms wildly to add further emphasis.) “You know,” said Stalin thoughtfully. “I don’t think he’s even killed anyone himself....

Everywhere you look, Democrats are warning about the threat to democracy currently posed by Trump or the GOP or some combination of the two. The panic seems omnipresent and is peaking as we approach the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riots at the capitol. Last week the NY Times published an editorial titled “Every day is Jan. 6 now.”One year after the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on...

A woman with a 'very dangerous' brain tumor broke down in tears as she revealed she cannot get surgery to remove it despite doctors saying she needs the procedure ASAP — because the hospital is full of COVID patients. Amanda Harris, from Portland Oregon, found out she had a brain tumor in October 2021, and was told by her neurologist that she needed to get it surgically removed as soon as possible or it could cause 'irreparable harm' to her brain. Her doctors are not sure if the tumor is cancerous or not, but because it is 'pressed up against...

Cats are known to sit on objects to mark their territory with pheromones, but a recent image of five felines huddled on Starlink dish is a more bizarre seating choice. Twitter user Aaron Taylor shared the snap online, noting the cats are using the dish to stay warm. ‘Starlink works great until the cats find out that the dish gives off a little heat on cold days,’ reads the tweet. The image shows a blanket of thick snow surrounding a SpaceX Starlink satellite dish with the cats huddled together on the device, which was using its Snow Melt Mode to...

Emmanuel Macron does not mince words to attack the unvaccinated in an interview published this Tuesday evening. He explains that he "really wants to *iss them off" and justifies the vaccine pass. Emmanuel Macron raises the tone. In an interview given to "Le Parisien" on Tuesday, the President of the Republic charges people who are still not vaccinated against COVID-19, some of them by deliberate choice. "I'm not to annoy the French. I plague the administration all day long when it it blocks them. Well there, the unvaccinated, I really want to annoy them" says Emmanuel Macron. "So we will...

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle spent more money on legal fees for their charities than they raised in 2020, filings reveal. The Sussexes' US charity Archewell told the IRS in December that it raised less than $50,000 in 2020 — only opening a bank account last January. And documents for their UK charity Sussex Royal, which changed its name to MWX Foundation in 2020 and is currently being dissolved, show that between June 2020 and June 2021 spent more than $55,000 on legal fees including attorneys' costs for wrapping up the nonprofit. Meghan and Harry's charities have been mired in...

Crusade: Our Response to Traditionis CustodesIn the history of the crusading movement we can observe certain factors which contributed to success or failure, whether in the early crusades of the so-called “Byzantine Empire,” or in the Reconquista, the Eastern Crusades and the Northern Crusades of Western Christendom.[1] One of these factors is rootedness about which I spoke last week.The other critical factor is freedom from earthly attachments. In the various crusading movements, those crusaders which were truly free from worldly attachments succeeded in their war against the enemies of Holy Church. But those that fell into fighting flesh and blood,...

Author Michael T. Cibenko said he once lived close to the site of an uprising of persecuted Christians in the 17th century. He was inspired by a 16-year-old samurai who helped lead the resistance. “Masaru” is an historical novel that follows the travails of the first Japanese Christians with excellent prose and descriptions. Author Michael T. Cibenko, who lives in Branchville, shares his expert knowledge of Japanese culture and language to create a memorable and authentic epic of early Christian Japan, a very interesting and complex period in history. Cibenko lived in southern Japan from 1996-2000 where he was an...

China's rapid military expansion in recent years has alarmed other countries. China's nuclear arsenal is much smaller than the US's, but US officials are warning about its growth. Experts say Beijing wants to have enough nuclear weapons to survive and respond to an attack. The US Department of Defense's annual report on China's military, released in November, again illustrated the breathtaking pace and scale of China's conventional military modernization.This year's report also highlighted a number of developments that could threaten the US more directly than China's conventional forces — namely China's "large-scale expansion of its nuclear forces."That expansion is well...

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan declared a 30-day state of emergency on Tuesday to fight a surge in COVID-19 cases, mobilizing 1,000 members of the Maryland National Guard to help state and local health officials. Hogan made the announcement as Maryland hit 3,057 hospitalizations for COVID-19 — a record high in the state and an increase of more than 500% in the last seven weeks. The governor said projections show that hospitalizations for virus cases could reach more than 5,000. “The truth is that the next four to six weeks will be the most challenging of the entire pandemic,” Hogan said...

We need to relax here, folks. We need to relax. COVID is contagious. Omicron is ripping through the US with 1 million new infections recorded yesterday, but the latter is mild. The overall virus has a very, very high survivability rate. Is it a walk in the park? No—but it’s not super Ebola. This isn’t The Stand or Station Eleven. It’s something we’re going to have to live with after China’s lab experiment gone awry. The experiment that Anthony Fauci’s NIH funded. So, given the hysterics concerning testing and a host of other COVID-related issues, we have a new way...

Twenty-six years after Israel became the first country to pass a state-supervised surrogacy law that included only married heterosexual couples, the Health Ministry has announced a change allowing same-sex couples, transexuals and single fathers to make arrangements for producing a baby with surrogate in Israel.“This is a historic day for the struggle of the LGBT community in Israel and for Israeli society as a whole. We are putting an end to years of injustice and discrimination – the surrogacy equality revolution is underway,” declared Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz, who himself is openly homosexual. He made the announcement along with ministry...

The future has arrived, and as we told you was coming, it includes a human implantable microchip for your COVID immunity health passport. We told you that before the vaccine was even finished. Human implantable microchip technology is the next frontier, and they have prepped you to receive it by getting you hooked on smart watches, FitBits, Alexa, Siri and all the rest. Step one was getting you in front of your computer (1994 – 2007), step two was getting the computer on you (2007-2021), and step three, currently underway, will be to put the computer inside you. Once you’ve...

On Monday, The Daily Wire’s “Morning Wire” podcast revealed that in wake of massive absences due to COVID-19, major airlines such as United and Spirit Airlines are reportedly offering employees more pay to help cover shifts for colleagues out of commission due to the illness. In a memo obtained by The Daily Wire, United specifically cited Omicron as having caused a “significant” increase in pilot illness, making the higher pay necessary to keep flights on track. Despite the airline industry being heavily vaccinated, the Omicron variant has caused an uptick in COVID-19 absences. As the Morning Wire reported, more than...