Free Republic

General or partial assessments of the number of victims in the war in Ukraine reveal the high human cost of an armed conflict unprecedented in Europe in the last eight decades. With estimates of nearly two million military casualties, it is reminiscent of the worst conflicts experienced in the 20th century on the Old Continent. The most conservative figures — around half a million deaths on the Ukrainian side — are five times higher than those of the Balkan War (1992-1995), which totaled 100,000, of whom 13,500 were civilians. The Ukrainian Commissioner for Missing Persons in Special Circumstances has just...

Huge explosion of 24 shipping containers of sodium perchlorate received from China for use in Iranian missiles in the port city of Bandar Abbas, Iran. This chemical is more explosive than ammonium sulfate. He estimates it is about 2X the size of the Beirut Lebanon explosion. This shipment by China was illegal. Israel was aware of the shipment.

In December of 2016, President Obama turned to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan with a request to change the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) and blame the Russians for election interference in the prior presidential election. Brennan gave the task of assembling the fraudulent intel to a CIA analyst named Julia Gurganus. Subsequently, inside the CIA the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and the Directorate of Analysis began working on a pretext that would create the impression for the misleading Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) as demanded by Obama, Clapper and Brennan; ultimately it was constructed by...

Online sleuths think they have uncovered missing retired Air Force general William Neil McCasland’s anonymous social media account — which claimed another general was murdered for his dealings with nuclear material. McCasland, 68, went missing from his Albuquerque, NM, home on Feb. 27 — which is the same day that the person behind a conspicuously credentialed X account centered on spacecraft and advanced science made their last post. The account @tmbspaceships claims to be run by a “retired 38-year active duty” United States Air Force with a PhD in engineering — listing the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), the...

Tuesday’s State of the Union address gives President Trump a big platform to tout the economy’s performance on his watch. He has already given himself a grade—“A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus,” he told Politico in December. The report card for the economy is a bit more mixed, however, after his first year back in office. Here are the grades for some key metrics. JobsNeeds improvement It is rough out there for job seekers, unless they are looking for work in healthcare. U.S. employers added only 181,000 jobs in 2025, down sharply from the prior year to the lowest figure outside of a recession in...

Whistleblower says that Tulsi Gabbard blocked agency from sharing report and delivered it to White House chief of staff Last spring, the National Security Agency (NSA) flagged an unusual phone call between two members of foreign intelligence, who discussed a person close to Donald Trump, according to a whistleblower’s attorney who was briefed on details of the call.The highly sensitive communique, which has roiled Washington over the past week, was brought to the attention of the director of national intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard.But rather than allowing NSA officials to distribute the information further, Gabbard took a paper copy of the...

On January 20, 2025, the first day of his second presidential term, Donald Trump signed an executive order: “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” The bad old days of the “censorship-industrial complex,” allegedly responsible for suppressing online speech under President Joe Biden, were over.Except they weren’t. The driving force behind online censorship had never been the U.S. government, which meant that freedom of speech could not be restored by the stroke of a president’s pen. Rather, the European Union has wielded its Digital Services Act (DSA) to restrict the speech not just of Europeans but especially of Americans...

Vice President JD Vance was suspended from the left-leaning social media platform Bluesky on Wednesday, just minutes after joining and sharing his first post. “Hello Bluesky, I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis,” Vance wrote in his first post on the X competitor. “So I’m thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.” The vice president went on to weigh in on the Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld Tennessee’s restrictions on transgender medical treatments for minors. “To that end, I found Justice [Clarence] Thomas’s concurrence on medical...

According to unconfirmed reports, General Zhang Youxia, China’s vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), sent a company of troops (over a hundred or more) to the government’s Yingxi Hotel in western Beijing on 18 January. Their mission was to arrest Xi Jinping. A few hours before, the Chinese president – alerted by an informant – set in motion countermeasures. Troops under the command of Cao Qi, head of Xi’s Central Guards Bureau, ambushed Zhang’s soldiers. In the ensuing gunfight at Yangxi Hotel, nine guards were reportedly killed along with dozens of Zhang Youxia’s soldiers. Throughout China, military movements have...

FBI Director Kash Patel said on Oct. 15 that the agency is cracking down on espionage by foreign adversaries, with an increase in arrests as high as 50 percent. “We have gone after espionage activities against our main counterparts in China, Russia, and Iran,” he said at a press conference. “In China alone, we’ve had over a 50 percent increase in espionage arrests alone, and prosecutions,” Patel said. “In Iran, we have had a 50 percent increase, again, in espionage cases. And in Russia, we had a 33 percent increase in espionage cases alone.” State Department employee Ashley Tellis, arrested...

The State Department formally determined this month that the Palestinian Authority paid more than $200 million to terrorists and their families in 2025, the same year PA president Mahmoud Abbas claimed he ended the "pay-to-slay" program, according to a nonpublic notice provided to Congress and obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon. Rather than ending these payments, the PA shifted to a new system that it hoped to hide from international donors at a time when the Ramallah-based government is jockeying for a role in postwar Gaza, the State Department disclosed for the first time. Israeli intelligence assessed that the...

When the Trump administration sent some 2,000 immigration agents to the Twin Cities area, they were met by activists who trailed their movements and harassed them outside their hotels. The activists are members of radical groups that together have received millions of dollars from the Left's premier foundations and dark money networks, including George Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a Washington Free Beacon review found. At the center of the unrest is the Sunrise Movement, a left-wing group founded to fight climate change that has since directed its local chapters...

Criminal illegal aliens with ties to foreign terrorist organizations, according to the Department of Homeland Security. (DHS). FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Department of Homeland Security in the past year has arrested multiple illegal aliens it says have known ties to terrorist organizations, including ISIS and al-Qaeda. According to the agency, the illegal aliens include members of al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Islamic Republic Guard Corps of Iran, and MS-13, which President Donald Trump designated a foreign terrorist organization when he returned to office. “Just a year ago, under [President] Joe Biden, our border was wide open, and criminals, gang members, and...

Denmark’s foreign minister had the top U.S. diplomat in the country summoned for talks after the main national broadcaster reported Wednesday that at least three people with connections to President Donald Trump have been carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland. Trump has repeatedly said he seeks U.S. jurisdiction over Greenland, a vast, semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. He has not ruled out military force to take control of the mineral-rich, strategically located Arctic island. Denmark, a NATO ally of the U.S., and Greenland have said the island is not for sale and condemned reports of the U.S. gathering intelligence there.

More than half of Americans in a survey released Friday rated President Trump’s first year back in office as a “failure.” The CNN/SSRS survey found that 58 percent of U.S. adults said 2025 was a failure for the president on a number of issues. Another 42 percent said the year was a “success,” and about 1 percent had no opinion. Overall, 61 percent of respondents said they disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job. Of that number, 35 percent cited personal behavior — including putting self-interests above the nation, bullying and being disrespectful, erratic behavior, allegations of racism,...

(Note: I re-edited this and removed all the time stamping from the YouTube rolling transcript so errors may be present.) The Supreme Court just issued a 6-3 emergency ruling that's sending shock waves through Washington and every state capital right now. This decision could fundamentally reshape federal power versus state sovereignty. THE EMERGENCY RULING BREAKDOWN The emergency ruling breakdown. Here's what actually went down late last night. The Supreme Court released a 6-3 emergency decision that directly challenges how federal courts have been operating for the past two decades. The majority opinion makes it clear that lower court judges no...

An eastern Russian volcano has erupted for the first time in more than 500 years, which may have been related to an 8.8 magnitude earthquake last week... The Krasheninnikov Volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula emitted a plume of ash 3.7 miles into the sky overnight. The last recorded eruption of the volcano happened in the 15th century.. ... Last week's massive earthquake was the latest in a series of seismic events in the region, including another temblor that shook a region 11 times zones away from Moscow on the Pacific peninsula ... Krasheninnikov is one of 8 volcanoes nestled among...

A volcano in Ethiopia erupted for the first time in at least 12,000 years on Sunday, sending a cloud of ash and smoke northeast across the Red Sea. Hayli Gubbi, a volcano in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, erupted at around 8:30 a.m. UTC (3:30 a.m. EST) on Nov. 23. By 8 p.m. UTC (3 p.m. EST), the explosive phase of the eruption had stopped, according to the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC) in France. This is the first time Hayli Gubbi is known to have erupted in the Holocene — the present geological epoch that began at...

A popular Mexican musician who sang the praises of drug lords was shot dead in a parking lot in the west of the country, police said late Tuesday. Ernesto Barajas, a singer with the group Enigma Norteno, which has four million monthly listeners on Spotify, was gunned down in the city of Zapopan in Jalisco state. He is among several performers of so-called "narco-corridos" — a controversial sub-genre of regional music that celebrates the exploits of infamous drug cartels — to have been killed in recent months. In May, five members of the group Fugitivo were murdered by suspected drug...

Listening to the usual legacy media suspects, one might think 2025 was an apocalyptic wasteland of sorts -- an authoritarian fever dream brought on by the return of Donald J. Trump to the Oval Office. The reality looked very different. This past year was, in many ways, a pretty great and clarifying one. Let's take stock of what happened when our government remembered whom it serves, as well as what unfinished business remains as we flip the calendar. First, the obvious: Political sanity was restored to the nation's capital. After years of leftist elite-driven chaos -- wide-open borders, hyper-vindictive lawfare,...