Free Republic

US threatens to halt arms shipments to Ukraine over attacks on Russian oil refineries – FT The Trump administration is reportedly considering halting the PURL program, through which Ukraine receives US weapons, to pressure Kyiv to stop attacks on Russian oil refineries.

Governments caution flying to Saudi Arabia, or through its airspace, after weekend attack left at least 12 deadCommercial air travel has been dragged into the front lines of escalating conflicts across the globe, with airports, planes and airspace becoming the deliberate target of missile and drone attacks on a scale not seen before.Since the U.S. and Israel started the Iran war in February, major airports across the Middle East have been repeatedly targeted. Parked aircraft have been hit by missiles or falling debris from interceptor systems, killing crew members and passengers. The threat culminated Saturday in a Houthi missile strike...

Democrat James Talarico held a narrow lead over Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in a new Trafalgar poll of the Texas Senate race, following his first public appearance in more than a week as the flu kept him off the campaign trail. Talarico, a state legislator, was up by more than 3 points in the poll of 1,086 likely voters in Texas, which was conducted from October 6 to 8. Talarico’s support stood at 47.1 percent, while 43.6 percent of respondents said they would vote for Paxton. Libertarian Ted Brown received 1.8 percent support, while 7.6 percent were undecided in...

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who serves as the Senate Pro Tempore, has filed for reelection at the age of 93. Should he win reelection in 2028, Grassley would be 101 by the end of his next term.

The French are revolting. It’s a tradition with them. Riots are as French as croissants, adultery and the 35-hour work week. France’s current riots may, however, presage the fall of the Fifth Republic. Mobs of students in the streets. Schools going up in flames. Police using tear gas and flash-ball guns. Hundreds of injuries and thousands of arrests. The spark for the disorder was strikes by left-wing teachers and other public-sector workers, including firemen. The students besieged their schools at once. The truants claim they’re protesting overcrowded and underfunded schools. Nothing says “Please address schoolroom overcrowding” like setting fire to...

Woke 1 was so crazy? No, Woke 1 is still so crazy. It’s so crazy that not only did the Daughters of the American Revolution accept transgender men as members (that is men who falsely claim to be women), but that the organization leadership threatened and has now moved to disband the Martha Laird Chapter which was fighting to keep men out. A DAR chapter in Texas recently sent a letter to its national leadership pushing back against their decision to allow biological men who identify as transgender to participate in the DAR. On Saturday, however, the DAR National Board...

A democratic socialist congressional candidate claimed it “doesn’t even matter” that the illegal immigrant wounded by ICE agents has a violent criminal history — and accused the NYPD of villainizing him. DSA darling Darializa Avila-Chevalier told lefty blogger Hasan Piker that accused gangbanger Oscar Belgal was just being a good dad when he tried to flee the feds with his 5-year-old son in the car in the Bronx on Thursday — and was somehow a victim of his own rap sheet being revealed. “I was just so angry,” Avila-Chevalier, the Democratic candidate for the 13th Congressional District, said of hearing...

A Biden-appointed federal judge has once again stepped in to shield dirty voter rolls from federal scrutiny, striking down the Justice Department’s nationwide effort to collect registration records and identify suspected non-U.S. citizens on the rolls. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, ruled that the Department of Justice overstepped its bounds by demanding unredacted voter registration lists and cross-referencing them using federal databases. According to the 78-page ruling, the DOJ began requesting complete, unredacted statewide voter registration lists (including names, dates of birth, addresses, and driver’s license or partial Social Security numbers) from 49...

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov has delivered a blistering rebuke of the Norwegian Nobel Committee after it awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to controversial South African jurist Navi Pillay, whose record of attacking Israel has sparked fierce condemnation from Israeli leaders and supporters of the Jewish state. Kasparov, the 13th World Chess Champion and longtime opponent of authoritarian regimes, took to X with a devastating one-line response to the committee's decision. “Maybe next year they’ll give the Chemistry prize to a Hamas bomb maker.” Maybe next year they’ll give the Chemistry prize to a Hamas bomb maker. —...

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Only Russia is responsible for the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday as he vowed to press ahead with strikes on Russian oil refineries, despite criticism from U.S. President Donald Trump, who blamed him for high diesel prices and said he should be replaced. The exchange came as Kyiv pressed its campaign against infrastructure deep inside Russia, with a drone attack on Sunday shutting down a data center run by Russian technology giant Yandex, the third strike on the company’s facilities in four days. Russia and Ukraine are locked in a long-range aerial...

Can we still see evidence of the Bible today? Biblical archaeology uncovers ancient objects that help connect the people and the events of the Bible to the real world. Join Dinesh D’Souza on a thrilling journey through thousands of years of biblical history, available as a full-length documentary or a 12-part series.

Country music legend Willie Nelson has thrown his support behind Democrat James Talarico in Texas’ closely watched U.S. Senate race. The 93-year-old singer urged Texans to vote for Talarico in a newly released endorsement video. Talarico is facing Republican Ken Paxton as Democrats seek to capture a Senate seat in a state long dominated by the GOP. The endorsement emerged Thursday, October 8th, ahead of the November 3rd election. The announcement came through a short video provided to the Houston Chronicle, with Nelson seated in a kitchen wearing his trademark red bandana. Talarico had already appeared onstage with the singer...

[snip] Trump’s remarks sparked a wave of condemnations, including from CNN chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, who said that “socialism, much less democratic socialism, is not communism.” Statements like Collins’s highlight how little attention the press has given to the Democratic Socialists of America and its national leadership. The majority of the DSA’s governing board, the National Political Committee (NPC), openly identifies with Communist ideology. [snip] The 2025 convention marked another turning point for the NPC, as the committee expanded in size and Communist-aligned caucuses secured a majority. Far-left news aggregator Fight for a Future reported that the NPC...

It doesn’t happen. That’s what we’ve been told for years. Illegal voting in America is a myth, a fairy tale, a bedtime story conservatives tell themselves after losing. Anyone who asked about it got a pat on the head and a diagnosis. Then the Department of Justice went looking.

Where I’ve been, followed by some brief thoughts about politics and news. Trying to act on my much-repeated message that the world is crazy but you don’t have to be, I just jumped on an invitation to hitchhike on an old friend’s backcountry permit. It’s an area I’ve been camping in for decades, but not a part of it that I’ve walked, so I went online and read about the place we were going before we started a few days of backpacking. Then I went there, and I’m still not convinced that the Internet connects very well to real life....

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said it is investigating five major TV broadcast networks for potentially violating federal antitrust laws after the networks temporarily declined to provide pool coverage of President Donald Trump, a department spokesperson said. The investigation into the networks that make up the White House TV press pool — NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox News — is underway, and the department sent out “civil investigative demands” on Friday, according to a Justice Department official. “Members of the television press pool have boycotted covering White House events. Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act....

Oct. 17 Revolution France MEDIA MANDATE MOVES UP A GEAR For October 17, I evolved the site with new tools to participate, share and follow the mobilization: PERSONALIZED PROFILE PICTURE Add a yellow frame or drawn vest to your photo, then download it for free. REAL-TIME COUNTER See how many visitors are on the site, even without joining the chat. INTERACTIVE MAP Select your department and declare your intention to participate, without sharing your specific location. RANKING OF DEPARTMENTS Discover the departments which record the most participations declared on the site. This is not an estimate of the number of...

Trump announces an immediate “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine, saying both sides have agreed to the arrangement.

It would have been hard to improve the backdrop for Marco Rubio’s foreign policy address on October 7 in Athens, Greece. Standing on the Pnyx with the ruins of the Parthenon rising up behind him, the Secretary of State delivered a speech that won almost universal plaudits. Let me toss my vote in with the overwhelming majority and affirm that Rubio’s speech was simply splendid: robust, heartfelt, honest, masculine, and true. Is it still permissible to praise such a public performance for being “masculine”? It was part of Rubio’s accomplishment to render that question moot. His speech was statesmanlike but...

it seems like a great example of how JD Vance tries to be everything to everyone. He enthusiastically supports executing Nidal Hasan for committing the worst crime ever, but he is going to keep himself away from the actual execution.