Free Republic

A young woman who escaped the perils of war was brutally stabbed to death for no apparent reason on a popular light rail train in North Carolina last week, Tar Heel State law enforcement say. Decarlos Dejuan Brown, Jr., 34, stands accused of one count of murder in the first degree, according to the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department. On the night of Aug. 22, Iryna Zarutska, 23, died on the Charlotte Area Transit System's LYNX Blue Line train. She was repeatedly stabbed, at least once in the throat, police claim. The victim, an artist, had recently arrived in the United...

Opinion With AI's rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills. How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots. Cloud services company Fastly agrees. It reports that 80% of all AI bot traffic comes from AI data fetcher bots. So, you ask, "What's the problem? Haven't web crawlers been around since 1993 with the arrival of the...

GAZA — Following news that the diminutive eco-geopolitical activist was once again planning to set sail to arrive in support of the Palestinian cause, Hamas terrorists released an official statement distancing themselves from Greta Thunberg. Apparently not wanting the negativity that would come with any association with Thunberg, the infamous terrorist organization sought to clarify that they had absolutely nothing to do with her and that any connection was entirely manufactured on Thunberg's part. "Please do not lump us in with her," said Hamas spokesterrorist Abu Muhammad Akhtar. "We're completely fine with being viewed by everyone around the world as...

It has been a long feminist trope that marriage and motherhood are garbage chutes to misery for women. Feminist sociologist Jesse Bernard warned in her 1972 book, The Future of Marriage, “[M]arriage introduced such profound discontinuities into the lives of women as to constitute genuine emotional health hazards.” Lyz Lenz, in her 2024 New York Times bestseller This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life, holds the same hellish view of matrimony. Early in, she explains, “Marriage, it seemed, was this: the eternal return of trash on my floor.” It is no wonder that only 32...

The background issues highlight the inevitability of the latest developments. Before talking specifically about Ukraine, let’s first consider the individual parties within the so-called “coalition of the willing,” Great Britain, France and Germany.All three major European economies are in trouble, along with the aggregate economy in Brussels which is heavily influenced by Germany, France and Italy.Within Great Britain, Prime Minister Kier Starmer is in a hot mess. “Starmer faces populists both left and right, with Brexit veteran Nigel Farage’s Reform UK consistently ahead in the polls. Inflation has ticked up. Unpopular tax rises loom. Starmer’s backbenchers are nervous about planned...

[Catholic Caucus] Ohio bishop: Latin Mass is a ‘beautiful part of the Church’s tradition’Ohio Bishop Earl Fernandes shared why he supports the Traditional Latin Mass while encouraging the faithful to pray the Rosary and study the Bible.The Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) is a “beautiful part of the Church’s tradition,” according to Columbus Bishop Earl Fernandes.His Excellency made the comments recently in an interview with Catholic World Report. Appointed by Pope Francis in 2022, Fernandes has previously expressed his support for the TLM, having offered it regularly as a pastor.In the interview, Fernandes shared how the 1970s, the time following the...

Proving yet again that the Democrat train has jumped its tracks, far-left Representative John Larson of Connecticut compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Nazis. The narrative that enforcing federal immigration law resembles Nazi Germany has become a key narrative among Democrats. Illegal aliens are key constituents, and someday, Democrats hope, voters. So Larson joins the long line of crackpot Democrats — Boston Mayor Michelle and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz among them — who can’t stand to see those future voters deported. Larson represents the norm in the Democrat party: pro-illegal alien, but anti-federal immigration law.Days ago, for instance, he...

The government is temporarily suspending new applications for a scheme allowing refugees to bring their family members to the UK. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the move, in force from this week, would mean refugees face the same restrictions as other migrants hoping to bring family to join them in the UK. This generally means someone must earn at least £29,000 a year and provide suitable accommodation, while their family member may need to demonstrate a basic level of English. Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp said "tweaking the family reunion rules are not enough" to deal with the scale...

BlackRock has finally come for our utilities.Here’s this, from a new article by Katya Schwenk at Jacobin:BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has its tentacles in all facets of American life. The behemoth is buying up grocery brands, dental practices, apartment buildings, and nursing homes. But the opaque industry of private equity has mostly stayed away from electric utilities, the regulated companies that supply power to homes and businesses, because they often don’t yield quick returns.That’s changing. Last year, the BlackRock subsidiary Global Infrastructure Partners and a Canadian pension fund announced a $6.2 billion deal to buy Minnesota Power….That deal...

VIDEOFatima was much different than I had imagined it would be. Most likely it is because my impressions of it were formed by the film, "The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima" starring Gilbert Roland. Therefore I expected a very small village. Well, there was a small village about 2 kilometers away from the Sanctuary of Fatima which you can see in this video. We also visited that as well.Anyway, later that day we left Fatima and took the bus to Porto without giving much further thought to Fatima UNTIL a few days later when something amazing happened. In fact,...

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi held warm meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday, sending Washington a clear message after President Donald Trump's heavy tariffs against India went into effect last week. Xi hosted Modi, Putin and other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at the port city of Tianjin. China has long sought to build up the group in a challenge to U.S. and NATO dominance. Modi was pictured having friendly exchanges and holding hands with both leaders, and he emphasized that India sees itself as a "partner" of China's rather than...

Unfortunately, this headline doesn't refer to Washington, D.C., Chicago, or any city in the United States. I'm sure the picture of el presidente Nayib Bukele gave it away, but this headline is about El Salvador. Over the weekend, Bukele announced on X that El Salvador has gone "1,000 days without homicides" since he took office. These aren't consecutive days, mind you, but they're a major improvement over what was going on in that country before his leadership began. Here is his full statement (translated from Spanish): 1,000 days without homicides.I was recommended to make a national broadcast and give a...

President Donald Trump has no issue with sending Obama-era FBI Director James Comey and CIA chief John Brennan — one of the 51 "spies who lie"— to prison. "I don't know if there's going to be" arrests, Trump told The Daily Caller in excerpts of an interview that will be released in full on Monday, adding, "there should be. "What they did is a disgrace. They cheated, they lied, they did so many bad things, evil things that were so bad for the country, and because they did something to me that should have never been done, nobody thought they'd...

Probably the strangest, saddest specter on the employment front in the U.S. is the inability of U.S. engineering graduates and older engineers to secure jobs in today's market.All that talk about STEM majors, and taking a demanding degree instead of a gut major in college rings hollow given that even liberal arts and fine arts college graduates have a better chance of getting a meaningful job than today's computer engineering majors.Seriously.According to Raghavan Mayur's TIPP Insights:This fact was documented by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York earlier in the spring.A link to the study and an anecdotal news report...

Two Republican losses in state senate special elections this year, first in Pennsylvania during March and then in Iowa this August, have sent tremors through conservative circles. Both seats were previously held by Republicans, both were in areas that strongly supported Donald Trump, and both slipped away despite the Democrat party enduring its worst period of public standing in decades.These results are not signals of a collapsing Republican coalition, but they are warnings against complacency.Between 2020 and 2024, Democrats faced a voter registration crisis that left their party infrastructure gutted in states across the country. In every state that tracks...

England’s migrant hotel protests escalated on Sunday as clashes broke out between demonstrators and police in Epping, Essex. The unrest followed a Court of Appeal decision to overturn an injunction that would have temporarily stopped the Bell Hotel from housing asylum seekers. Sunday’s events culminated in the arrest of Sarah White, a candidate for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, after she hung a Union flag from a nearby public building. Protests at the Bell Hotel have been ongoing since July, when an illegal migrant staying there was arrested and charged with multiple offences, including the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl....

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News in an exclusive interview that "all options are on the table" as the Trump administration weighs sanctions on Russia after President Vladimir Putin continued to bombard Ukraine despite recent talks about peace. Bessent spoke with Senior National Correspondent Rich Edson at Martin's Tavern in Washington, D.C., responding to a question about potential sanctions on Russia. "I think everything's on the table," Bessent said. "President Putin, since the historic meeting in Anchorage, since the phone call, when the European leaders and President Zelensky were at the White House the following Monday, has done the...

🚨BREAKING: British citizens are organising a mass march to the Home Office on October 1, 2025, to demand change. Activists, bikers, veterans, Pink Ladies, and farmers have declared they will be present. A British revolution is underway.

A key leader in the world economy is warning that undue interference in the Federal Reserve’s operations by President Donald Trump could pose a serious economic risk to the U.S. and the rest of the world. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said in an interview with Radio Classique on Monday that efforts to remove Fed Chair Jerome Powell or Fed Governor Lisa Cook would “represent a very serious danger for the U.S. economy and the world economy.” “If U.S. monetary policy were no longer independent and instead dependent on the dictates of this or that person, then I believe...

The UK looks like it's on the brink of civil war. This is pretty astonishing stuff. It's all revolving around the town of Eping, just northeast of London. Since May, about 140 male asylum seekers have been staying at the Bell Hotel. Britain's been spending about £170 per night to house each asylum seeker. That's over like £6,200 per month per person. Now, you compare that to the 27 per day. That's the cost of standard accommodation. And you can see why taxpayers are so upset. In fact, the government spent 3 billion pounds on asylum hotels in just the...