Free Republic

GOSHEN, Ind. (WNDU) - An Indiana man convicted of shooting and killing a sex offender who assaulted one of his relatives has been sentenced to 80 years in prison. According to the Elkhart County Prosecutor’s Office, Nicholas Stanley received 65 years for murder and 15 years for a firearm enhancement he admitted to during his trial. Stanley, 36, was found guilty last month of killing Allen Cogswell, 35, at the Daylite Inn on Cassopolis Street on June 24, 2025. Cogswell was released from prison in May 2025 and was living at the motel. Court records showed Stanley was a close...

Belarus has freed Sergey Tikhanovsky, a key dissident figure and the husband of exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, following a rare visit by a senior US official, Tikhanovskaya’s team announced on Saturday. Tikhanovsky, a popular blogger and activist who was jailed in 2020, arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania, alongside 13 other political prisoners, his wife’s team said. The release came just hours after Belarusian authorities announced that authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko met with US President Donald Trump’s envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, in Minsk. A video published on his wife’s official Telegram account showed Tikhanovsky disembarking a white minibus, with a...

Newly declassified State Department emails and documents show former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch received frequent briefings from top aides on Burisma and Hunter Biden, conflicting with her congressional impeachment testimony. Internal emails also show her deputy in Kyiv believed the Burisma/Biden relationship was adversely affecting U.S. policy. ======================================================================= Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, one of the Democrats’ star witnesses in their first impeachment of Donald Trump, received repeated briefings, emails and memos related to the Ukrainian energy company that employed Hunter Biden, according to declassified documents that directly conflict with her and other witnesses’ testimony in the failed...

Gabbard described an operation in which intelligence provided to Mexican law enforcement led to the arrest of an alleged Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) associate known as “La Diabla.” The individual is accused of leading a criminal network involved in human trafficking, illegal medical procedures, and the sale of newborns. irector of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard praised recent U.S. and Mexican law enforcement operations that she said were supported by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) through intelligence sharing. According to Gabbard, actionable intelligence from the NCTC assisted both U.S. and Mexican authorities in the arrest of a Sinaloa Cartel leader...

Major banks closed accounts and refused credit to MAGA merchants, pro-life causes, religious groups, conservative organizations and sectors disfavored by the Biden administration, such as firearms, oil and gas, and private prisons, a bombshell report from the federal banking regulator has found. The Debanking Review by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) investigated 100,000 complaints and scrutinized 50,000 internal bank records to reveal how customers were “debanked” based purely on their political, social, or religious beliefs. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Capital One, PNC, TD Bank, and BMO Bank were found to...

Panamanian authorities have a 1994 bombing’s suspected Iranian-backed Hezbollah mastermind in custody, with a trial ensuing soon. For more than three decades, the mystery of who blew Alas Chiricanas Flight 901 out of the Panama sky, killing all 21 aboard, including 12 top Jewish businessmen and three U.S. citizens, remained unsolved and mostly forgotten by the outside world. The small commuter plane to Panama City exploded July 19, 1994, shortly after takeoff from Colon, leaving only one body in the wreckage, not positively identified for years: a Middle Eastern male thought to have carried the bomb aboard. But now...

Young teenagers are less likely to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual than they were a few years ago, according to a new analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The decline is particularly striking among ninth-grade girls, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University who published her analysis of the 2025 data on her Substack “Generation Tech.” In 2021, 30 percent of ninth-grade girls identified as lesbian or bisexual. Last year, 17 percent did. “It really does look like a free fall,” Twenge said. “But what’s causing it is unclear.” Twenge...

GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo, Jan 28 (Reuters) - Dead bodies lay in the streets, gunfire rang out and hospitals were overwhelmed in east Congo's largest city Goma where M23 rebels backed by Rwanda faced pockets of resistance on Tuesday from army and pro-government militias. A day after the rebels marched into the lakeside city, protesters in the capital attacked a U.N. compound and embassies including those of Rwanda, France and the United States, expressing anger at what they said was foreign interference.

The president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Félix Tshisekedi, has reached out directly to President Donald J. Trump with a historic proposal: help defeat a brutal rebel force terrorizing his nation, and in return, America will gain direct access to one of the world’s richest untapped troves of critical minerals—worth an estimated $24 trillion. According to a letter obtained by The Wall Street Journal, President Tshisekedi offered Trump exclusive mining opportunities through the newly launched U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund, a Trump-led initiative aimed at reshaping global investment through pro-American partnerships. “Your election has ushered in the golden age...

RUBAYA, Democratic Republic of Congo - Under the watchful eye of M23 rebels in the hills around the Congolese town of Rubaya, a line of men in rubber boots ferry sacks full of crushed rocks up winding paths cut into the slopes.The laborers are hauling coltan ore, a mineral that powers the modern world. The ore will be loaded onto motorbikes and eventually shipped thousands of kilometers away to Asia. There it’s processed into tantalum, a heat-resistant metal that fetches more than $300 a kilogram and is in high demand by makers of mobile phones, computers, aerospace components and gas...

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was involved in yet another heated exchange on Capitol Hill Wednesday as the department readies its budget proposals for the fiscal year 2026. This time, Rubio sparred with Rep. Pramilia Jayapal (D-WA) over the administration’s immigration policies, particularly the revocation of student visas for individuals who demonstrate animus towards the United States and its people. Jayapal — who enthusiastically supported former President Joe Biden’s de facto open border policies that saw more than seven million illegal aliens flood the United States — took issue with the Trump Administration’s decision to resettle a small number...

There’s about to be fewer feet sticking to frat floors and hands slapping the bag. US colleges are facing an enrollment cliff after the population of Americans aged 18 peaked last year. Undergraduate enrollment is projected to decline by 13% in the next 15 years, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Meanwhile, many schools are already in a pickle: Families are increasingly bargain hunting for the most generous financial aid as they doubt the value of a higher education. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has restricted international student visas, denting enrollment in the process.

The White House is gearing up to hit the International Criminal Court with “sweeping sanctions,” months after President Donald Trump said his administration is aiming to dismantle the organization in order to “defend” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from bogus charges. Trump’s big move against the ICC: forbidding it from making transactions in U.S. dollars, The Wall Street Journal first reported on Sunday. The Trump admin would block most transactions with the ICC after a grace period of about six months — a move which could “potentially cripple” the court and isolate it from the global financial system, according to...

Did you know that recently released Census Bureau statistics show the poverty rate in the United States fell to a record low in 2025? That's an extraordinary development, but it has so far not attracted a lot of media coverage and discussion. What about a big White House event featuring President Donald Trump touting a welcome decline in poverty and increase in income? There hasn't been one. "I dunno, but if I were president and the poverty rate dropped to the LOWEST RATE ON RECORD, I might make a big deal out of it — a lot bigger deal than...

The International Organization for Migration, or IOM, sent out pink slips — notice of dismissal from employment — to 3,000 employees working on a United States resettlement program, including hundreds based at home in the latest blow to an aid and development community reeling from the Trump administration’s foreign aid funding freeze.

President Donald Trump and his supporters were targeted by four consecutive FBI code-named counterintelligence investigations over the last decade that secretly subjected hundreds of innocent Americans to privacy-invading tactics and essentially treated the man twice elected president as a national security threat for most of the first nine years of his political career, according to interviews and documents reviewed by Just the News. FBI Director Kash Patel has personally led the effort to review the operations code-named Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, Plasmic Echo and Arctic Frost that stretched from summer 2016 to January 2025, uncovering evidence of a far-reaching dragnet...

...Judge James Boasberg, who confronted the Trump administration over its 2025 deportation flights, was a nine-time host for a Chinese law exchange funded by a Chinese Communist Party-linked spy front. Six of those annual host credits came while Boasberg served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. One came in 2020, when he was its presiding judge. The court reviews some of the government’s most sensitive applications for foreign-intelligence surveillance and searches.... ...CUSEF, is part of Beijing’s United Front system, which combines political influence with intelligence operations. ...

The Department of Justice is preparing to issue a series of grand jury subpoenas as part of a South Florida-based investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan and the probes by the CIA and FBI into Russian interference in the 2016 election, MSNBC has learned. The investigation is being supervised by the U.S. attorney in South Florida, Jason Reding Quiñones, in consultation with Justice Department senior staff in Washington, according to a source familiar with the matter and other information obtained by MSNBC. The Justice Department declined to comment.

Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown, who serves as the University’s chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and the director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, posted a shocking suggestion to the brutal Iranian regime over the weekend. Following the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday, Brown shared a post on X saying he hoped that Iran would strike a United States military base as a “symbolic” gesture.

A US Attorney for New York was allegedly chased by a knife-wielding illegal immigrant with a lengthy criminal record who threatened to slit his throat on the streets of Albany Tuesday night, prosecutors said. John Sarcone, the Trump-appointed US Attorney for the Northern District of New York, was allegedly chased and threatened outside the Hilton Hotel in Albany by Saul Morales-Garcia — an illegal migrant from El Salvador who was previously deported, WNYT reported, citing Albany County prosecutors. Morales-Garcia, 40, allegedly aggressively advanced toward Sarcone with his weapon in hand — gesturing that he would slit the attorney’s throat as...