Free Republic

On this date in 1939, Romanian Prime Minister Armand Calinescu was gunned down on a Bucharest street in an ambush by the Iron Guard. (Romanian link) Before the day was out, six of members of the hit squad were lined up and machine-gunned on the very same spot. Calinescu was a conservative politician trying to fight off the rising fascist movement in his country — that aforesaid Iron Guard — and preferred to keep Romania in politic neutrality and friendly with England and France rather than hitching its fate to Nazi Germany. This entailed an increasingly acrimonious struggle throughout the...

A North Carolina woman is suing Google after her husband died after driving off a collapsed bridge while following GPS directions, according to a lawsuit filed this week. Philip Paxson died after driving off "an unmarked, unbarricaded collapsed bridge" on the night of Sept. 30, 2022, in Hickory, his widow, Alicia Paxson, said in the suit filed in Wake County on Tuesday. Paxson was not aware the bridge had collapsed and was following GPS directions from Google, which had not been updated, the lawsuit says.

In the Land of White Death, by Valerian Albanov, English translation published in 2000 by Random House, 205 pages. Original published in Russian in 1917. This is the story of an ill-fated ship, as written by one of only two survivors, the officer who was the navigator of the Santa Clara. The ship went to sea ill prepared, without key provisions and trained personnel. Trapped in Arctic ice for two years, the navigator lead a group attempting to reach land over the pack ice. This is his story, a direct, first person account of survival against daunting obstacles.The dismal fate...

Since early 2021 we have witnessed somewhere between 7 and 8 million illegal entries across the now nonexistent U.S. southern border. The more the border vanished, the more federal immigration law was rendered inert, and the more Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas spun fantasies that the “border is secure.” He is now written off as a veritable “Baghdad Bob” propagandist. But how and why did the Biden administration destroy immigration law as we knew it? The Trump administration’s initial efforts to close the border had been continually obstructed in the Congress, sabotaged by the administrative state, and stymied in the courts....

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Republicans will try again to move forward on fiscal 2024 spending legislation on Thursday, with a procedural vote on a defense appropriations bill. After a 2-1/2 hour closed-door meeting with members of his Republican majority, the California Republican also said lawmakers were "very close" to agreement on a short-term stopgap measure to avert a government shutdown on Sept. 30. break On Tuesday, opposition from five Republicans defeated a vote intended to open debate on a $886 billion defense spending bill. Those five Republicans were hardliners who wanted assurances that fiscal 2024 appropriations...

Chicago has taken the first concrete step to deliver on Mayor Brandon Johnson’s controversial plan to get more than 2,000 migrants off the floors of police stations, O’Hare and Midway airports and into giant tent cities he prefers to call “winterized base camps” before temperatures plummet. Piggybacking onto an existing state procurement, the city has signed a $29.3 million contract with GardaWorld Federal Services LLC for “migrant temporary housing.” “The purpose of this Purchase Order is to allow the City to purchase from the State Contract temporary housing solutions and related services … to provide critical services to asylum seekers,”...

UPDATED 9/18/2023 at 7:24 pm ET with Joint Base Charleston’s announcement that the F-35’s “debris field” was located in South Carolina. WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump once referred to the F-35 as “invisible.” At least as far as officials in South Carolina are concerned, he might have been right. On Sunday, a pilot from Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort punched out of his F-35B near Charleston. The pilot is safe, a spokesman for the station told Breaking Defense, but what’s unusual is that his Joint Strike Fighter wasn’t found until a full day later, with officials announcing its recovery Monday...

Thousands of migrants have been camping out beneath a bridge in Eagle Pass, Texas — though you wouldn’t be able to tell by viewing the city’s livestream where the overflow facility is obstructed by a giant black box. The alteration was visible in live footage shared by the border city, which experienced an unpreceded surge of some 4,000 migrants on Wednesday — prompting officials to declare a state of emergency. “I am aware that there are 2,000-4,000 [migrants] under the Bridge and more are coming,” Mayor Rolando Salinas told The Post Wednesday. “We’ve also been in contact with Union Pacific...

Rumble, standing firm on their dedication to free speech, found themselves on the receiving end of a right proper scolding from the U.K. Parliament for not barring Russel Brand from their platform. Brand is currently being tried in the court of public opinion by the media for alleged rape, sexual assault, and emotional abuse. It is important to note, however, that as of this writing, these are accusations. Serious accusations but nothing has been proven in a court of law as of yet. Read the letter here: Attached is the letter from the UK Parliament. pic.twitter.com/MdeYrlt06J — Rumble - 🏴‍☠️...

The socialist specter of FDR apparently never wraps up his unfinished business, and for that, we producers have to pay. As the superstitious say, when someone leaves this world with “unfinished business” they come back from the dead and haunt the living—now I don’t believe in ghosts, but maybe I should because the socialist specter of Franklin Roosevelt’s refuses to rest in peace, and frankly, I’m ready for this curmudgeon to die. Yesterday, Joe Biden spoke at the United Nations annual summit in New York City and emphasized the “urgent” need to brandish the government against the little guy who...

NFDM NCXLR VDECQD JMEKDPX, G RFPKK UCEJR NGAF HFCACTXPHFR. —PMRDK PLPQR

WASHINGTON — The US Senate tonight confirmed Air Force Gen. CQ Brown as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and is poised to approve two other top military officers to key posts, the first break in a logjam caused by a blanket hold on promotions placed by Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville. In a surprise twist in the months-long political saga, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced today the legislative body would hold a vote to confirm Brown, alongside Army Gen. Randy George and Marine Corps Gen. Eric Smith to serve as leaders of their respective...

A shocking video showed tourists being thrown off a vehicle while trying to stop brazen thieves from speeding off with their belongings during a violent robbery in a popular San Francisco area. Dmitry Koval, a victim who posted the video to Instagram, told The Post that he and his friends were hoping to take in the scenery and get something to eat at the Fort Mason Center lot in the Marian District on September 13. The group was already across the parking lot at about 4 p.m. when they saw a black SUV park pull up next to their two...

President Joe Biden’s border chief is providing quasi-amnesty and work permits to 470,000 more Venezuelan illegal migrants who are now crowding New York and other cities. Biden’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) expansion will add one worker for every nine Americans who will begin to seek jobs this year. In combination with Biden’s massive inflow of legal and illegal migrants, the temporary amnesty will further force down wages for most Americans — after three years of shrinking wages. A Texas Department of Public Safety official told Breitbart Texas that Rio Grande Valley Sector Border Patrol agents took nearly 21,000 Venezuelan migrants...

Global debt has surged to a staggering $307 trillion, marking an increase of $10 trillion in just the first half of 2023. This soaring debt level is ringing alarm bells and has pushed liabilities to record highs, up by an astonishing $100 trillion over the past decade. It’s becoming increasingly clear that we are on the brink of a monumental debt crisis. S&P Global’s recent revelation that global debt has breached the $300 trillion mark for the first time in history is nothing short of jaw-dropping. To put it in perspective, this debt load represents a mind-boggling 349% of the...

I’ve spent two decades consulting extensively for consumer packaged goods companies. Early in my career I gathered some data for a client on cooking. This research found that consumers fell into one of three groups: (1) people who love to cook, and cook often, (2) people who hate to cook, and avoid that activity by heating up convenience food or outsourcing their meals (by ordering out or dining in restaurants), and, finally, (3) people who like to cook sometimes, and do a mix of cooking and outsourcing, depending on the situation. At the time, the sizes of the three respective...

Does anyone believe that it will not have gun control as its top agenda item? In the leftist lexicon, preventing gun violence is code for “gun control.” That’s why we should all view with deep suspicion the report that the White House is creating an office that will focus on “preventing” gun violence. Since the White House’s policies all encourage gun violence, the only avenue left to the White House to “curb” this violence is to grab guns from law-abiding citizens. If you read the article at The Hill, you see that, while it talks constantly about how the White...

TOKYO -- Chinese EV giant BYD has filed 16 times more patents over the past 20 years than industry leader Tesla, using legal frameworks to protect its battery technology while its U.S. competitor relies on production advances that are difficult to imitate. Tesla applied for 836 patents from its founding in 2003 to 2022, while BYD applied for over 13,000 during the same period, according to Tokyo-based Patent Result. An automaker of Tesla's size usually would apply for "at least 10 times as many," said patent lawyer Hideto Kono. Over half BYD's patents are battery related. The Shenzhen-headquartered automaker manufactures...

"Take the helmet of salvation" (Eph. 6:17). The key to conquering doubt is to focus on the preserving power of God. Doubt comes to Christians in many ways. After you've sinned, your conscience might hiss at you, saying, "Surely you're not a Christian. Why would God save you anyway? You don't deserve His mercy. You're not good enough. How presumptuous to think God could ever use you!" Such doubts are common among Christians who focus on their performance rather than God's power. All too often we're quick to acknowledge God's power to save us but slow to understand His power...

Odds are, they were Hugo Chavez's shock troops, engaging in the invasion Hugo envisioned. A few weeks ago, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre assured a press questioner that Joe Biden "had done more than anyone to secure the border." (The wry Spanish comment, by noted Venezuelan film director Jonathan Jakubowicz, says: "At the rate we are going, there will soon be more Venezuelans in the U.S. than in Venezuela.") They are all single young men, marching in single file, the way people do who are certain they will not be cheated, so no need to rush, and one of them...