Free Republic

Daily Readings from the USCCB“And I tell you, ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Luke 11:9–10Prayer is our lifeline to God. It opens the door to the outpouring of His grace. If we need grace every day—and we do—then, we need to pray every day. When we form a habit of prayer, it becomes the central foundation of our identity, enabling us to live as...

In the end, the Yankees really did run it back. From the bulk of their offseason all the way down to a repeat October exit in the ALDS against the division foe who was simply better than them all season. For the 17th straight year, the Yankees will not be World Series champions, this time falling woefully short of a 28th title as they were swept out of the ALDS in three games by the Rays in a 4-3 loss Wednesday night at a sold-out Yankee Stadium. After the Yankees lineup let them down in Game 1 and their defense...

On the evening of Friday 2 October, Daria Shipilova, an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, died in a district hospital in the Russian city of Shelekhov. Her place of work, and the rumoured circumstances of her death, have triggered a public health emergency in the region and a slew of questions: did the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, kill Shipilova? Could this metastasise into a plague epidemic in Russia? Should we – abroad – be worried? The Russian authorities have done their best to play down the link between the plague and Shipilova’s death. According to Russia’s public health watchdog,...

For decades, Palestinians have commemorated the Israeli declaration of independence in 1948 as their "nakba," a word that means 'disaster' in Arabic. That disaster resulted from the refusal of Arabs to accept the UN partition plan that made Israel a Jewish state, and five Arab countries attempted to eradicate Israel instead. The Israelis prevailed in that war, triggering massive displacement as Israel expelled Arabs from their country in response to the invasion. In the years since, as Arabs plotted wars against Israel, the Israelis have prevailed and punished their enemies, who insist that the lands of Israel belong to the...

Some 53% of Ukrainians think President Volodymyr Zelensky should not run for a second term, according to a poll published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) on Oct. 5. In turn, 42% think Zelensky should participate in Ukraine's next presidential election, while 5% were undecided, according to the latest poll. Ukraine's constitution does not allow elections under martial law, which was declared when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The survey shows a steady decline in support for Zelensky's second term. In December 2023, 59% of respondents said the incumbent president should run again, and...

It’s been three years since the savage Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks, which killed 1,200 people, often in barbaric, inhuman ways.As we reported, Democratic Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated the occasion by firing off an incendiary statement accusing Israel of committing war crimes and genocide in Gaza. (See: Morally Bankrupt Mamdani Spits on October 7 Victims to Demonize Israel.)If he wanted to stoke a response, he succeeded, because anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protests broke out throughout the Big Apple Wednesday. Not surprisingly, Columbia University and NYU once again played their part in the twisted response to the anniversary...

It’s four weeks until Election Day and Donald Trump is doing his utmost to dig Republicans out of their polling hole. In theory, anyway. Trump has been rallying through red states – Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas – to try and secure existing Senate seats. But today’s Democratic pile-on concerns a throwaway comment he made last night in Nebraska. Mid-weave, of course. The President said: “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They could take out a city… ‘let ’em, let ’em take Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego, that’s…’ this is...

More than 2,700 conversions and baptisms have been recorded across Germany’s Federation of Free Evangelical Churches.Congregational life in these churches has largely rebounded following the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic.The growth reflects a renewed hunger for the Gospel and traditional Christian community in Germany.Germany’s Federation of Free Evangelical Churches is reporting strong signs of spiritual renewal. Baptisms and conversions have risen significantly in recent months, pointing to a fresh openness to the Christian faith across the country.“We are seeing people come to Christ in numbers we haven’t experienced in years,”church leaders stated as they released the latest figures. The 2,700...

Ancient Greek papyri show that people used diagrams to solve and understand practical math problems nearly 2,000 years ago. A study led by Thomas Kelly finds that the drawings helped readers organize numbers, follow calculations, and check results. The research examines Greek mathematical papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt, mainly dating from the first four centuries A.D. The texts contain practical geometry problems involving land, buildings, and three-dimensional objects. Unlike formal proofs, these problems usually provide measurements followed by steps for calculating an answer. They offer another view of mathematics in ancient Greece, showing how geometry could be applied to practical calculations....

The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, has repeatedly said that the fall of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine is inevitable and will happen faster than Kyiv thinks. Recent trends on the battlefield paint a different picture. A monthslong Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northern part of the Donbas has thwarted Russian efforts to encircle the remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the region. Russia, Western analysts say, has lost dozens of square miles of territory during the Ukrainian campaign, which Kyiv is calling Operation Vivaldi. In the southern Donbas, Russia continues to mount furious assaults to break through Ukrainian lines. But Kyiv...

The U.S. trade deficit widened sharply in August amid an influx of goods related to the artificial intelligence build-out and the vagaries of import tariffs, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. Imports swelled 4.3% for the month, pushing the total imbalance to $105.6 billion. That marked a 13.7% jump from July and was ahead of the Dow Jones consensus estimate for $102 billion. It also was the steepest deficit since the all-time gap in March 2025, recorded just before President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” announcement of “reciprocal” tariffs against U.S. trading partners. Though the monthly total was up, the year-to-date deficit...

AI firms say simulations are being used to identify which pharmaceutical programs are worth moving forward and to assess the value of acquisition targets. As AI tools get better at flagging clinical risks, they say unexpected trial failures may become less frequent. Novartis' experimental del-desiran for a rare type of muscular dystrophy was expected to be a winner, with the Swiss company's CEO predicting annual peak sales of $5 billion. When a late-stage trial missed its goal last month, shares fell 11%, erasing $30 billion in market value. AI start-up BioinvestGPT was not surprised. In July, it ran a simulated...

Republican Byron Donalds holds a 7-percentage-point advantage over Democrat David Jolly in the Florida governor’s race, according to a new NBC South Florida/Telemundo Station Group poll, while Republican Sen. Ashley Moody is up by 10 points in her matchup against Democratic challenger Angie Nixon. Donalds, a congressman from the southwest corner of the state, is at 48% in the poll, compared with Jolly’s 41%, in a race in which Donalds has had a commanding financial advantage. (That advantage is just inside the poll’s margin of error, but Donalds has the edge in most of the range of possibilities.) Moody is...

Novel medicines can’t be treated in the same zero-sum way as semiconductors or electric vehicles, where one competitor’s win comes at the expense of the other, says Juliana Liu for Bloomberg Opinion.As Washington and Beijing tussle for dominance in frontier technologies, there’s one area in which competition shouldn’t preclude collaboration: innovative medicines. Beijing’s latest five-year plan for the biotechnology sector details how the country wants to lead the field globally. Unusually for an industrial blueprint, it comes with numeric targets. By 2030, Chinese drugmakers are expected to have made a “major leap” in competitiveness with sales of new medications growing...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani was berated and booed at an Oct. 7 candlelight vigil in Union Square on Wednesday night by anti-Israel protesters who believe he turned his back on Palestinian causes. Hizzoner, with a candle in hand, was heckled by the angry mob, including some waving Hamas flags, who marched from City Hall to crash the event meant to honor Jewish victims killed by Hamas terrorists — and Palestinians in the subsequent war. “You coward!” some of the keffiyeh-clad agitators shouted at Hizzoner. “How do you let this happen?” “Zohran you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” the protesters...

Former Charles Manson follower Patricia Krenwinkel, who is serving a life prison term for her role in the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, has again been recommended for parole, state officials confirmed today. Krenwinkel, 78, was preliminarily granted parole Tuesday at her 18th subsequent suitability hearing, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “All grants of parole are proposed decisions and become final only after a thorough and comprehensive review by the Board of Parole Hearings and the Governor,'” CDCR officials said in a statement.

[Catholic Caucus] The Deceptive Tactics of the Silent Revolution Engulfing the Church - by Bishop Robert Mutsaerts The Deceptive Tactics of the Silent RevolutionBy Bishop Robert MutsaertsAux. Bishop of the Diocese of 's-Hertogenbosch, NetherlandsThe Catholic Church has experienced, over two thousand years, virtually everything that can befall an institution: bad popes, corrupt bishops, heresies, schisms, revolutions, persecutions, decadent monasteries, dissolute clergy, and theologians so determined to be original that ultimately only they themselves understood what they meant.And yet the Church endures. Not because Catholics have always been wise — that would be a rather audacious historical hypothesis. The Church survived...

This seems to be the current state of FR's home page. The link to "https://freerepublic.com/donate/" yields (for me, at least) the following: 404 Not Found nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)

A 71-year-old cyclist was killed after he collided with an off-leash dog in Central Park’s East Drive roadway Monday morning, according to the NYPD. Police said around 8 a.m. they received a call of a cyclist struck near East Drive and 84th Street just steps from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While riding his bike, the man collided with a dog that was unleashed and ran onto the roadway, police said. The cyclist, who was wearing a helmet, fell to the ground and suffered trauma on his head and body. The unidentified man was transported to NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical...

Hundreds of infuriated parents and staff members descended on Portland Public Schools’ headquarters Tuesday night to protest far-reaching proposals to close up to 14 schools, shift grade configurations and programs and redraw attendance boundaries. In numbers not seen since the Portland Association of Teachers strike, demonstrators chanted and cheered outside the district headquarters and scolded school board members during their meeting inside the building. about half of the district’s elementary schools have fewer than 300 students and a handful have only half that number — it gets harder to afford stable staffing.