Free Republic

The shift to the right across South America has been stopped. One of President Trump’s key regional allies has been defeated. The global left, and most of the centre, has been celebrating the victory of President Lula over Flávio Bolsonaro in a closely fought election this weekend. There is just one problem. As the brutal sell-off of financial assets demonstrated, Brazil has also voted for economic chaos. That rarely ends well. While the left were toasting victory on Monday morning, investors were furiously dumping Brazilian equities and, more importantly, debt. On Monday the Bovespa – Brazil’s main stock market index...

A nonprofit daycare that claims to have “over 40 locations” across California and received an $18.2 million award “for more [than] 1,048 children in at-risk" communities” actually has just one facility providing care for no more than six children, an investigation by The Center Square found. The William Law Foundation did not open its first daycare until October 2026, according to Executive Director William Edwards — more than three years after the nonprofit was awarded $18,216,131 through the California Department of Social Services’ 2022-23 General Child Care and Development Program grants. "It's been a slow start," Edwards conceded to The...

Initial finding: Catholic Charities USA's national finances warrant detailed examination, particularly its program expenses, federal grants, transfers to other organizations, and financial disclosures.

Leftist gaming site commentator Hasan Piker and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., met up in Minnesota to cohost a campaign event on Monday night, bashing President Donald Trump's administration as well as Democrats who are willing to work with him. Piker, who streams his commentary on Twitch, called Republicans "terrorists" during the event, and Omar referred to the party as the "pedophile protection party." They made the comments during a Q&A session led by failed Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh. "Trump's obsession with us started in 2016, when he arrived at the airport and begged for our vote. We said, no...

A Chicago man has been put in the slammer for two years for conducting a fake robbery scheme to help noncitizens obtain U-visas, which can be offered to those in the US if they are victims of specific types of crimes. Parth Nayi, 29, of Woodridge, has been sentenced for organizing hundreds of these fraudulent robberies between 2022 and 2024, and was found out after one of them took a turn for the worse, and a "suspect" accidentally shot a store clerk in the abdomen, critically injuring the victim. Nayi recruited people to pose as "victims," would pay the store...

A brief tour of Troy, one of the most famous - and confusing - archaeological sites in Turkey. The Ruins of Troy | 7:27 Scenic Routes to the Past | 62.7K subscribers | 30,203 views | October 23, 2026

A box of blank Maine absentee ballot return envelopes, part of a shipment of sensitive election materials that never arrived at the state’s Bureau of Corporations, Elections, and Commissions, was delivered to a residential house in Cambridge, Maryland. That house is the listed headquarters address for the Center for Civic Design, a left-wing election-design nonprofit with documented funding ties to George Soros-backed grantmakers and the Arabella Advisors network, as well as direct connections to Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. State investigative records obtained by The Maine Wire and detailed in reporting by Steve Robinson show detectives recovered 498 of...

The U.S. has been running a real-time experiment on two approaches to criminal justice: the Biden-era emphasis on social justice versus the Trump administration’s embrace of traditional law and order. The results are now in. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported this morning that felony violent crime fell 25% in 2025. Rape declined 13%, robbery fell 27%, and aggravated assault dropped 31%. Property crime fell 19%. Except for rape, these are the largest one-year reductions recorded since data collection began 53 years ago. The reductions followed substantial increases during the previous four years, when felony violent crime rose 59%...

“Oh,” said the DMV employee, studying Itzel Zavala’s papers. “It’s one of you.” It was early October, and Zavala* had driven across town to the DMV in Dickson, based on a rumor. The previous Friday, she’d tried to renew her license in Lebanon, closer to her home. She’d gathered her papers, including a recently renewed work permit, and handed them to the lady at the counter. “Hey,” the woman told her. “I can’t renew your license.” Since Oct. 1, she explained, a new law was in effect. The state would no longer grant driver’s licenses to DACA, short for Deferred...

Two British nationals have been charged over an alleged plot to assist Iran's intelligence service as part of the investigation into the incident at RAF Fairford in September. Mohmed Ahmad Abdulkarim, 24, from Westminster, has been charged with assisting a foreign intelligence service under Section 3 of the National Security Act. Nouman Essghir, also 24 and from Westminster, has been charged under Section 4 of the same act with entering a prohibited place for a purpose prejudicial to the UK on 22 August - weeks before he was arrested near the airbase in Gloucestershire alongside four other men. The pair...

A Nashville judge temporarily blocked Tennessee health officials from requiring immigration status checks of HIV-positive individuals enrolled in a healthcare safety-net program. Chancellor I’Ashea L. Myles issued the temporary restraining order late Wednesday. The order prevents the Tennessee Department of Health from moving forward with a demand that organizations revise their contracts to include immigration status verification as a condition of serving patients in the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program. The order extends to a companion program known as HOPWA, or Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS. Myles set a Nov. 4 hearing in the case.

House Republicans are preparing to deploy dozens of congressional staffers to closely contested districts nationwide on Election Day, launching what they describe as the most extensive election oversight operation in House history. Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., chairman of the House Administration Committee, told Fox News Digital that the initiative is designed to safeguard election integrity, document potential irregularities and ensure election officials follow the law as control of Congress hangs in the balance. “We’re building on the success that we had last cycle and recognizing that a large number of House races are likely to be close,” Steil said. The...

A campaign staffer for Abdul El-Sayed, the radical leftist running for Senate in Michigan, was recently caught on an undercover camera saying that 'Americans are idiots.' The staffer is apparently angry about the scrutiny El-Sayed is getting over his family's reported ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. To make matters even more ironic, this staffer is supposedly El-Sayed's 'conservative and independent outreach captain.' The Midwesterner reports: U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s staffers have no issue with his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an issue he waves off as a genuine concern “because Americans are idiots.” T.J. Wolfgram, Independent and Conservative Outreach...

HHS' health information technology arm finalized a rule that streamlines the health IT certification program, projecting to save billions in compliance costs. The deregulatory rule is an explicit effort to carry out President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14192 "Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation," according to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) within HHS. The rule, called Health Data, Technology and Interoperability: ONC Deregulatory Actions to Unleash Prosperity (HTI-5), is projected to save more than $1.5 billion in regulatory costs, according to ONC. As part of the ONC Health IT Certification Program, developers must certify that their...

Federal authorities raided a California mansion related to an investigation into disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., on Tuesday morning, Fox News has learned. Swalwell resigned from Congress and withdrew from the California gubernatorial race earlier this year after facing multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. The FBI's raid targeted a mansion in Beverly Hills. In August, the FBI searched Swalwell's D.C. home and seized his electronic devices at San Francisco International Airport during an operation. The operation was related to a probe into sexual misconduct, according to sources familiar with the incident. He was not arrested or detained. At least...

Voter Protection Corps wants social-media monitoring treated as core election infrastructure, backed by lawyers and networks that deliver rebuttals before voters encounter the claims. ======================================================================= A group founded by an Obama campaign veteran has built a program to recruit lawyers to help get election posts removed from social media ahead of the 2026 midterms. The organization, Voter Protection Corps, is combining volunteers who flag election content with attorneys who review posts and help prepare requests for platforms to take them down. Its September 8 recruitment notice spells out why it wants lawyers involved: “lending legal credibility to formal removal requests.”...

Two of the FBI agents most closely identified with the FBI’s politicized operation to smother the Hunter Biden corruption scandal are facing their first taste of accountability. Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides were charged Friday with allegedly lying to Congress about Hunter Biden’s laptop. ... Floris had been the deputy assistant director of the FBI and “functional head” of the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which ran a covert operation before the 2020 election called “Round River,” specifically to collect all derogatory reports about Hunter Biden from FBI informants and falsely flag them as “Russian disinformation.” Benavides was the Section...

The Ukraine war’s mounting casualties, Western divisions, and dwindling prospects for victory make a negotiated peace increasingly urgent before the conflict spirals into an even greater catastrophe. The Ukrainian Gordian KnotAfter crossing with his army into Asia, Alexander the Great stopped at Gordium (in modern-day Turkey). He approached the famous Gordian knot—a tangled mass of bark tying an ox cart to a pole, so intricate and tight that no one could unravel it. When told that anyone who could untie the mess would rule all of Asia, Alexander simply pulled out his sword and cut through it—solving the problem and...

Supreme Court lawyer and BJP leader Nazia Elahi Khan on Thursday hinted at converting to Hinduism. Khan, who arrived in Madhya Pradesh's Indore, is slated to perform the rituals of Tarpan and Shraddha for ancestors during the 'Shraddha Paksha' in Ujjain. Speaking to the media here, she raised the issue of the safety of women during Garba programmes and pointed out Pakistan connection to love jihad. Khan said her ancestors may have been converted from Hinduism to Islam during the Mughal period, and she now wants to be free from the sin. She said she has relatives in Madhya Pradesh,...

Susan Saint James, best known for her roles in TV series “Kate & Allie” and “McMillan & Wife,” has died. She was 80. A rep for the actress confirmed her death to People Tuesday, sharing she passed away on Monday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. In a statement shared with the outlet, her family remember Saint James as someone who was “generous with her time and energy, which she valued more than money, and instinctively drawn to whoever needed lifting up. She taught her children to pause, be kind and look out for other people.” They continued, “She never...