Free Republic

Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a high-profile meeting with his Hungarian counterpart, Viktor Orbán, in Budapest. Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, has called Orbán his “comrade in this fight for the ideas of freedom,” and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is Orbán’s “Christian sister.” Last year, Donald Trump hosted the Hungarian leader three times at Mar-a-Lago. How did this one country in Europe become a beacon for right-wing ideas—and leaders—around the world? Once upon a time, Hungary was the poster child of “regime change”—the peaceful transition from communism to democracy. The process was indeed peaceful. But was it...

The most vulnerable nations on Earth are facing a “tidal wave” of debt repayments as a Chinese lending boom starts to be called in, a new report has warned. The analysis, published on Tuesday by Australian foreign policy thinktank the Lowy Institute, said that in 2025 the poorest 75 countries were on the hook for record high debt repayments US$22bn to China. The 75 nations’ debt formed the bulk of the total $35bn calculated by Lowy for 2025. “Now, and for the rest of this decade, China will be more debt collector than banker to the developing world,” the report...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered some shocking data points about American foreign aid spending before the Trump administration reformed the system. During testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, the top diplomat revealed that the White House discovered a foreign aid regime that was distracted and inefficient. Only 12 cents of every dollar spent by USAID reached recipients. ... while a mere 12 cents went to recipients, the other 88 cents was pocketed by third parties. ... Rubio noted that the United States is still giving “more humanitarian support than the next 10 countries combined” even after...

Kyrgyzstan may be a landlocked country with a population of less than 5.5 million, but it still looms large in the regional calculations of China, Russia and the United States. The Kyrgyz Republic is the only country to host both a Russian and a US military base. The Russian base at Kant symbolises Moscow’s preeminent security role in the region, while the US base at Manas plays a vital role in sustaining NATO military operations in Afghanistan. And Kyrgyzstan also borders Xinjiang, prompting concerns among Chinese policymakers over infiltration by terrorists and narcotics smuggling into this sensitive province as well...

BISHKEK—A Chinese company has pulled out of a $280 million project to build a logistics center in Kyrgyzstan after protests by hundreds of locals in a fresh display of anti-Beijing sentiment in Central Asia. The deal signed during Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to the former Soviet republic last year envisaged construction of warehouses, transport terminals, hotels and other facilities in a free-trade zone near Kyrgyzstan’s border with China. However, hundreds of locals saw it as a land grab by Kyrgyzstan’s giant neighbor and held a series of protests demanding that the project be canceled. The joint venture set up...

It’s been obvious for years that China has a Potemkin economy, kept alive by slave labor, market bubbles, and government underwriting. it can’t last forever. The latest grim forecast about the economy comes from Peter St Onge, an economist with a much deeper fund of knowledge about and understanding of the Chinese economy than I could have in a thousand lifetimes.The biggest hint that the Chinese economy was in trouble was the demise of Evergrande, a massive property developer in China. The bankruptcy was huge, with the company’s assets valued at a probably inflated $245 billion and debts of $300...

In the tariff war between China and the United States, a lot of chatter in the Pravda Media is about Xi Jinping's defiance, his outreach to European countries and other less important but collectively significant developing countries, and his retaliatory moves against America. They make it sound like China has a lot of cards to play in the trade war with America. China has put civilian government officials on a "wartime footing” and ordered a diplomatic charm offensive aimed at encouraging other countries to push back against U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs. https://t.co/rZWU2zsARQ— The Japan Times (@japantimes) April 14, 2025Collectively,...

Pakistan is failing, in large part because of its close association with Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).Because coal mines tend to emit large quantities of poisonous carbon monoxide, miners in the old days would carry a caged canary into the mine with them. The bird’s more delicate constitution would succumb to rising gas levels long before the miners and signal that human life might be in jeopardy. The bird’s death cued the miners to get out. Pakistan, as an early and enthusiastic participant in the BRI, is suffering as a consequence and may well be issuing a signal for...

Even though the Communist Party of China is officially atheist, and the central government was once wary of religion, subtle signs and increasing activities show there is a changing attitude towards religion in order to unite China and its neighbors. In March last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping stood in the offices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, and extolled the profound impact Buddhism has had on China. "Buddhism originated in ancient India," said Xi, the leader of the officially atheist Communist Party of China. "After it was introduced into China, the religion went...

President Joe Biden on Wednesday bragged about his administration’s plans to build a solar farm in Africa that U.S. taxpayers are funding a $900 million loan for. Biden’s boast occurred during a speech hosted by the League of Conservation Voters, in which he promoted his administration’s energy and environmental policies, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a seemingly non-existent railroad from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean and “one of the largest solar plants in the world” in Angola. To fund this solar plant — which is a partnership between the Angolan government, and U.S.-based firms AfricaGlobal Schaffer and...

DARIEN GAP, Panama—The grind of heavy machinery breaks the silence of the Darién jungle, where the Pan American Highway ends at Yaviza in Panama. Construction workers have cleared towering trees to make way for a steel and concrete bridge mighty enough to withstand flooding from the Chucunaque River. An onsite worker for the construction company Cusa told The Epoch Times the construction project will cut 4 miles into the Darién jungle at a cost of $42 million and includes a second bridge crossing the Tuira River. That would leave some 55 miles to finish the Pan American Highway, also known...

The most deadly witness in the Biden impeachment inquiry is due to testify Tuesday in a closed-door interview on Capitol Hill. He will be able to lay out in forensic detail the times he knows that Joe met with Hunter’s business partners, both during and after his vice presidency. He will bring documents in which the Chinese talked of their delight about doing business with the “B family” and the encrypted messages and emails in which Joe was referred to either directly or in code as “the big guy” or by Hunter as “my chairman.”

It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution.” Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking...

Dr. Gal Luft, the Israeli whistleblower who has been on the run since April, detailed his bribery allegations against the Biden family in an extraordinary new video obtained by the New York Post. As American Greatness previously reported, Luft was arrested on weapon trafficking and other charges in Cyprus last February and disappeared after he was let out on bail. After his arrest, the former Israeli army officer tweeted that the Biden administration was out to “bury” him.The Biden Department of Justice had Luft, the founder and executive director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS),...

A widening investigation into allegations of high-level corruption on the island of Malta, first levelled by murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, stretches to China and a $400 million investment into Europe by a Chinese state power company, Reuters has found. Caruana Galizia was murdered in October 2017 as she investigated a web of companies that she believed were funneling bribes to Maltese politicians. Now, Reuters and a consortium of journalists have traced two firms involved in that web to relatives of a senior Chinese executive for Accenture, the global consultancy firm. The executive, 43-year-old Chen Cheng from Shanghai, negotiated investments...

Balochistan can be freed if US stops supporting Pakistan, feels Baloch activist Ahmer Musti Khan who earlier heckled Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif speech."I must assure you our Baloch people are so confident of victory that they believe that once US stops supporting Pakistan, we can force them out of Balochistan," Musti Khan said in an exclusive interview with ANI....Musti Khan demanded freedom of Balochistan provinces where Pakistani army has been engaged in torture and killings of Baloch people demanding freedom. The activist also called Sharif a 'friend of al-Qaida founder Osama Bin Laden.'

Lusaka, Zambia (CNN)The trail of blood outside the warehouse door was the only immediate sign that a murder had taken place. But CCTV footage seized by police, and seen by CNN, revealed a brutal afternoon of carnage. At midday on Sunday, May 24, three Zambian attackers with iron bars entered the grounds of a Chinese-owned textile warehouse in Lusaka. Police said they were pretending to be potential customers. But the trio did not want to do business. Over the next 17 minutes, the CCTV footage shows, they beat two men and one woman to death in the courtyard, before dragging...

The Italian government of Giorgia Meloni is reportedly preparing to leave Communist China’s Belt and Road global domination scheme within the coming months. In 2019, under the stewardship of then-technocratic Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Italy became the first, and so far only, G7 nation to sign up to Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, which Beijing uses to ensnare nations throughout the world under its boot through debt trap diplomacy tactics. Now the populist-minded government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni faces a decision on Italy’s continued participation in the Chinese scheme, with the country’s membership set to automatically renew itself...

The “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, Israeli professor Dr. Gal Luft, has laid out his bribery allegations against the president’s family in an extraordinary video filmed in an undisclosed location while on the run. In the 14-minute recording, obtained exclusively by The Post, the fugitive former Israeli army officer claims he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals with alleged ties to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with their benefactors from the China-controlled energy...

As headlines about the frosty relationship between China and the United States are dominated by spy balloons, Taiwan and botched attempts at diplomacy, commanders in the Pentagon are increasingly worried by a more insidious threat: Beijing's growing stronghold on Latin America. From tens of billions of dollars in funding for key infrastructure projects across the region to its own secretive, military-run space station in Argentina that could target American satellites, China's presence has grown. Some 21 countries in Latin America are signed up to Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative - a defining policy introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2013...