Free Republic

MANAGUA: At least 121 people have been killed in a wave of protests since Apr 18 against President Daniel Ortega's government, Nicaragua's main human rights group said Tuesday (Jun 5), calling it a "human tragedy." The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH) said another 1,300 people have been wounded in the protests, which have met with a violent crackdown from the government. "This is now a massacre, a human tragedy where the goal is to exterminate all those young people who think differently than or are critical of the government," the group's executive secretary, Marlin Sierra, told AFP. "It amounts...

Will 2026 be a year of great shaking for the United States? Coming into 2025, I thought that seismic activity would be a major global theme, and that has certainly turned out to be the case. This has been an extremely unusual year for earthquakes along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and volcanoes that have been dormant for ages are suddenly roaring to life all over the world. Here in the United States, we have been experiencing lots and lots of little earthquakes, but thankfully we have not been hit by a really bad one yet. Will our luck run...

Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani, a member of the National Security Committee in the Iranian parliament, said on Wednesday that some of his fellow lawmakers are urging the Iranian regime to rapidly develop nuclear weapons to halt President Donald Trump’s agenda for the Middle East. “A few months before Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, several experts said that Iran needed to build a nuclear bomb,” Ardestani told an Iranian news website. “In this context, several members of the Majles wrote to the Supreme National Security Council, and also a number of clergy and government members appealed to the supreme leader...

This is the genocide that no one will talk about.Islamic terrorism is the outcry of the oppressed, apologists tell us. If the perpetrators only had access to more advanced weapons, they wouldn’t feel the need to massacre civilians with everything from machetes to rockets. Terrorism is a local phenomenon, not a global one.Jihadist terrorism only grabs our attention when it occurs on a large scale, like 9/11 or Oct 7, and then its allies, apologists and appeasers quickly redirect attention by indicting the response to the attacks as ‘oppression’, faking atrocities, complaining about ‘Islamophobia’ and a police state, and quibbling...

The million-selling ‘My Sharona’ became America’s biggest-selling song of 1979, and one of the catchiest rock numbers in memory.In the closing months of the 1970s, Capitol Records had its fastest-selling debut release in the US since The Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” It was a million-seller that went on to be America’s biggest-selling song of 1979, and one of the catchiest rock numbers in memory. On August 25, The Knack went to No.1 in the US with “My Sharona.” Written by the Los Angeles group’s lead guitarist Berton Averre and lead singer/rhythm guitarist Doug Fieger, the track also...

Reams have been written about the latest revelations in the Russian collusion hoax that so hamstrung President Trump’s first term. I will summarize below the most important revelations. It’s clear the Administration is taking its time to reveal the investigation’s conclusions for maximum impact -- an impact that I, like Scott Adams, believe will result in arrests of a number of people who pulled off this fraud. But first I want to discuss something which has not received the kind of attention it deserves -- the death of the legal consequences for disparate outcomes and credentialism. The Death of Disparate...

On the eve of the 2016 Presidential election, Issue #464 of Revolution announced in its headline, “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America. . .Rise Up. . .Get Into The Streets. . .Unite With People Everywhere to Build Up Resistance in Every Way You Can. . .Don’t Stop: Don’t Conciliate. . .Don’t Accommodate. . .Don’t Collaborate”.Revolution is an online newspaper published by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a Maoist group descended from splinters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1969, RCP founder Bob Avakian and fellow Maoist H. Bruce Franklin had cofounded the...

ROME - Police raided homes across Italy before dawn Friday and arrested seven alleged members of the radical Red Brigades suspected of the 1999 killing of a Labor Ministry consultant. Authorities said the arrests struck at the heart of the left-wing terror organization, which sprang back into action a few years ago after more than a decade of silence. The suspects, officials said, might also have had a role in the slaying of another government adviser last year. Police arrested three men in Rome and one in Florence, prosecutors said. A woman was picked up in Pisa and another near...

The far left’s disgraceful response to September 11—it has temporized about terror, embraced moral equivalence between the Islamist fanatics who killed thousands of innocent Americans and the military actions of the democratically elected U.S. government, and even blamed the U.S. for the atrocity—shows that its hatred of democratic capitalism and, more broadly, Western civilization itself remains fierce more than a decade after the collapse of socialism. The intensity of this hatred will come as no surprise, however, to anyone who has paid attention to the praise that the academic left and its sympathizers in the liberal media have been showering ...

Skylab was America’s first space station and first crewed research laboratory in space. The complex consisted of four major components: the Orbital Workshop (OWS), the Airlock Module (AM), the Multiple Docking Adapter (MDA), and the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM). The Apollo Command and Service Module transported crews to and from Skylab and remained attached to the station throughout a crew’s occupancy. The OWS, converted from the upper stage of a Saturn rocket, served as the main working, living and sleeping compartment for the crews, and contained exercise equipment, a galley, and many of the scientific experiments, in particular for the...

Syria decided on Tuesday to postpone releasing the findings of its investigation into the Feb. 12 assassination of Hezbollah operations chief Imad Mughniyah just as Iranian media outlet, Fars News Agency, reported through its Persian language service that Syrian authorities had detained a Saudi Arabian intelligence official for allegedly participating in the assassination. According to the Fars report, the Saudi official’s Syrian girlfriend bought the two vehicles used in the bombing that killed Mughniyah. We are also told that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a top Saudi national security official, masterminded the operation. While Damascus is refraining from officially implicating Riyadh...

“Robbie” Stethem was born into a proud Navy family on November 17, 1961, in Waterbury, Connecticut. His father Richard served for 26 years and retired as Senior Chief Petty Officer. After retiring, he continued to work for the Navy as a civilian for another 20 years. Robert’s mother Patricia served in the Navy before leaving active duty to raise the family. Brother Kenneth served for 20 years and retired as a Navy SEAL. Brother Patrick, like Robert, was a “Seabee” diver and served for 10 years in the same Underwater Construction Team One.

World leaders either become known for quickly learning life’s lessons–or not. The latter category is largely a product of one’s personal lust for power intertwined with an ideology allowing it to flourish. But membership is at times encouraged by the former’s failure to appropriately discourage the latter’s aggressive behavior early on.Falling into the latter category is Iran’s mullahs. It has taken them nearly a half century to learn an important lesson, coming after testing two U.S. presidents—one weak, one strong—who served in two different centuries. That lesson employs a simple rule of thumb concerning who has a foreign policy backbone:...

There is an shocking amount of misinformation and misunderstanding going on right now regarding Iran and Israel, and what brought us to this situation. We need to unpack this and be brutally honest as this is much bigger than you think and affects literally the whole world.You need to sit down and read this the entire way through and share widely — because this affects your life whether you want to admit it or not.To understand what is going on, we need to go back 46 years, to 1979, when Ruholla Khomeini established the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) during...

“America can’t do a damn thing against us,” Ayatollah Khomeini bragged while holding our hostages. The Carter administration had undermined the Shah’s government in favor of the Islamists who seized power and then prevented the embassy’s Marine guards from defending the facility and the people inside against the Muslim ‘student’ groups who claimed to be coming in peace. The “peaceful” student activists took over our embassy and held our people hostage. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei taunted President Trump with the same slogan in June after being asked to give up Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “Our response to the US nonsense...

Below is a list of notable attacks attributed to Iran and its proxies against the United States or U.S. interests since 1970, based on available information. Iran’s proxies include groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and various Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, often supported by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) or its Quds Force. The list focuses on direct attacks, proxy actions, or plots with credible evidence of Iranian involvement. Note that some incidents involve plausible deniability by Iran, and the extent of their control over proxies varies. Attacks and Incidents by Iran and Its Proxies Against the...

For 40 years, Iran’s relentless hostility toward the U.S. has fueled proxy wars, terror attacks, and nuclear ambitions. Now, after diplomatic overtures were rejected, America’s decisive strike on Iran’s nuclear sites signals a historic turning point in the Middle East power struggle. For 40 years, Iran has reverberated with the menacing chant of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” a rallying cry born from the 1979 Islamic Revolution under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Last night, Saturday, June 21, 2025, that decades-long hostility faced a decisive response when President Donald Trump authorized a U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities at...

“America can’t do a damn thing against us,” Ayatollah Khomeini bragged while holding our hostages. The Carter administration had undermined the Shah’s government in favor of the Islamists who seized power and then prevented the embassy’s Marine guards from defending the facility and the people inside against the Muslim ‘student’ groups who claimed to be coming in peace.The “peaceful” student activists took over our embassy and held our people hostage.Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei taunted President Trump with the same slogan in June after being asked to give up Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “Our response to the US nonsense is clear:...

From the oral history collections of the University of Georgia. Recorded in 1983

Former Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), who was the first Vietnam veteran to serve in the United States Senate, is the latest Republican to back Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, Politico learned Sunday. Pressler, who said that in addition to casting an absentee ballot for Obama he'd donated $500 to the Illinois senator's campaign, cited the Democrat's response to the financial crisis as the primary reason for his decision. "I just got the feeling that Obama will be able to handle this financial crisis better, and I like his financial team of [former Treasury Secretary Robert] Rubin and [former Federal Reserve...