Free Republic

IntroductionVaccination campaigns are widely considered to be a public health success story. Since Edward Jenner pioneered the smallpox vaccine in the 1700s, they’ve significantly reduced disease rates around the world and are credited with saving millions of lives—primarily in low- and middle-income countries. In the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been a rise in vaccine naysayers and a consequential uptick in disease outbreaks; misinformation about side effects is a root cause, experts say. Even in countries with low communicable disease rates, illnesses are getting harder to protect against as people opt out of vaccinations. Another major challenge is...

What a difference twenty-four hours makes. Yesterday, President Donald Trump was walking back his recent criticisms of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, going as far as to say he could not believe that he had called Zelenskyy a “dictator.” Today, Trump held an acrimonious meeting with Zelenskyy that culminated in Ukrainian president being asked to leave the White House and a joint press conference being canceled. The Trump-Zelenskyy meeting before the press pool spray, which Vice President JD Vance joined, has no precedent. Heads of government generally do not bicker in front of the cameras. But in today’s meeting, Trump accused...

European leaders are grappling with how to handle icier relations with the U.S. since President Donald Trump regained control of the White House this year."The Europeans have a serious problem of readiness … that they’re trying to fix, but it takes time," Camille Grand, a former NATO official who is now with the European Council on Foreign Relations, said in a Washington Post report Sunday. "If Trump decides ‘I’m going to pull out U.S. troops from Germany because I’m upset with the trade imbalance,’ that’s much more complicated to manage than to say we have a plan to do this...

President Trump is looking forward to a fundamentally productive negotiation with Russia’s Putin and Ukraine’s Zelensky, Vice President JD Vance has said, in comments mischaracterised by the Wall Street Journal as a threat of war.U.S. Vice President JD Vance is speaking at the Munich Security Conference — taking place just one day after what is said to have been a terror attack in the city — and meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky today. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal before these engagements, Vance communicated President Donald Trump’s determination to make a peace deal in Ukraine and the incentives on...

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has led U.S. development and humanitarian efforts around the world since 1961. It has taken the lead in coordinating effective responses to a number of humanitarian emergencies and strengthened development efforts abroad that proponents say have underpinned U.S. national security and cultivated goodwill toward the United States. More From Our Experts James M. Lindsay The Costs of Trump’s Foreign Policy Disruption Manjari Chatterjee Miller This Weekend’s Leaders Summit Brings Prospects for a More Sustainable and Useful Quad Ann Norris Women This Week: Texas Sues for Ability to Seek Records of Women who Obtain...

While the influence USAID funding exerts on foreign populations to induce and influence regime change may sometimes be subtle at best, other times it is much more apparent. Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine as Vice President in March 2016 may be one of the more well-known examples. After the 2020 Election and the exposé of the Hunter Biden Laptop From Hell, quite a bit of attention was given to an outburst that Joe Biden made during a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations in January 2018. During his remarks, Biden infamously bragged about pressuring Ukraine officials to fire Viktor...

For the past 20 years, the best minds in Washington and Jerusalem treated Hamas as a pragmatic political operator whose leaders were satisfied living in the same world as the rest of us. Their charter, first adopted in 1988, endorsed a set of bloodcurdling millenarian goals. But despite the open madness and world-making ambitions of their public pronouncements, Hamas remained a semi-legitimate player, treated as just one unremarkable thread in the Middle East’s rich tapestry of mildly threatening, gun-toting political dreamers. Even to the most hardened Israeli security officials they were a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose extreme rhetoric and regrettably...

Former North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) commander James Stavridis predicted on CNN's Smerconish on Saturday that the Russia-Ukraine war will end with Russian President Vladimir Putin taking 20 percent of Ukraine. President-elect Donald Trump has previously said that if he were at the negotiating table with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the war between the two Eastern European nations would end "within 24 hours." Now that Trump won this year's presidential election against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, the world will be looking to see how he handles the war. Stavridis, a retired admiral who frequents TV...

Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt advised pushing a "militant democracy" to ensure an "authoritarian figure" like former President Trump never rises to power again. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Levitsky and Ziblatt describe how they spent the last year "researching how democracies can protect themselves from authoritarian threats from within," lamenting how close Trump remains to getting a second term. "How could such an openly authoritarian figure have a coin flip’s chance of returning to the presidency? Why have so many of our democracy’s defenses seemingly broken down, and which, if any, remain?" they wrote....

Journalists and political commentators responded on social media to an article from The Atlantic comparing former President Trump to multiple fascist dictators, including Adolf Hitler. The Atlantic article, headlined, “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini” was published Friday. “The former president has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics,” Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum argued. “When you spend 8 years calling a person every bad name you can think of — including Hitler — only to see that it’s not working, so you desperately decide the only thing left for you to do is call him all the bad...

The advanced U.S. fighter aircraft will mark a significant upgrade to Ukraine’s air force, but their impact on the war with Russia will hinge on several factors.Ukraine is set to receive U.S.-made F-16 fighter aircraft within months, an upgrade that Kyiv and its Western allies hope will help level the playing field with Russia’s formidable air force. But the F-16s will only have a meaningful impact on the war in Ukraine if Kyiv and its partners can build and maintain the extensive support and logistics infrastructure necessary to keep these world-class warplanes in the air. What is the F-16 and...

Federal authorities have indicted the wife of Max Boot, a deranged leftist who works for the Washington Post, for operating as an unregistered foreign agent for South Korea. Which is honestly kind of hilarious given how Boot is one of those TDS morons who accused Trump of being a foreign agent without any evidence. He’s also one of those Zelensky simps who begs the American government to send even more countless billions to Ukraine, which isn’t a surprise given how his unregistered foreign agent wife used to work for the CIA.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A former CIA employee and senior official at the National Security Council has been charged with serving as a secret agent for South Korea's intelligence service, the Justice Department said. Sue Mi Terry accepted luxury goods, including fancy handbags, and expensive dinners at sushi restaurants in exchange for advocating South Korean government positions during media appearances, sharing nonpublic information with intelligence officers and facilitating meetings between U.S. and South Korean government officials, according to an indictment filed in federal court in Manhattan. She also admitted to the FBI that she served as a source of information for...

Russian Spy Hunter, Max Boot, was married to a real life foreign spy while he pushed the debunked Russian collusion hoax in the page of the Washington Post. Evidently he never noticed all of the expensive luxury goods his wife, Sue Mi Terry, was bringing home.

Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is accused by federal prosecutors of acting as a secret agent for South Korea. Terry, whose husband Max Boot regularly falsely accused former President Trump of being a Russian asset, reportedly used her position and access to U.S. officials to provide sensitive information to South Korea in exchange for luxury items and other lavish benefits, according to the indictment, New York Post reported. The allegations state that from Oct. 2013, Terry engaged in activities that compromised her role as an independent foreign policy...

Top Democrats are so alarmed about Joe Biden's ailing health some fear a shadowy cabal is keeping him in power so they can pull levers behind the scenes, it is claimed. The astonishing theory was detailed in the liberal New York magazine. Its reporter Olivia Nuzzi revealed that even Democrat elites are stumped as to how and why the fast-declining 81 year-old is being allowed to continue his re-election bid. Nuzzi said she had heard questions being posed by high-ranking Democrats on the east and west coasts about whether Biden is a puppet whose strings are being pulled by another...

HOUSTON – The city of Houston kicked off the President George H. W. Bush’s 100th birthday week celebration at the Bush Monument in downtown Houston. The program featured Houston Mayor John Whitmire, the Bush family, Jim “Mattress Mac” McIngvale, emcee Linda Lorelle, Houston First CEO Michael Heckman, and a tribute from the Houston Police Department. The event started at 10 a.m. and a pre-event performance by the Bushes’ favorite local music organization, the Theater Under the Stars Musical Theatre Academy Ensemble began at 9:50 a.m. The event was sponsored by the George & Barbara Bush Foundation and the Houston First...

Jeff Zients, the incoming White House chief of staff, met multiple times in 2016 with President Biden's son Hunter Biden who is facing criminal and congressional probes into his past business dealings. According to emails obtained from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and verified by Fox News Digital, Zients met with Hunter Biden twice in February 2016 and on another occasion in May 2016, just months before President Biden, the vice president at the time, was set to leave the White House. President Biden also attended the first two meetings which both took place at the U.S. Naval Observatory, where the...

China has increased its reliance on food imports over the past two decades, prompting concerns among officials who worry that disruptions to food supply chains could trigger domestic unrest. In particular, this reliance has heightened China’s sensitivity to food supply disruptions caused by geopolitical tensions, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine. What is China’s current food security situation? With less than 10 percent of the planet’s arable land, China produces one-fourth of the world’s grain and feeds one-fifth of the world’s population. Data from the country’s National Bureau of Statistics showed that in 2022, China’s grain output reached a record...

Water insecurity. China is home to about 20 percent of the world’s population but only 7 percent of its freshwater sources. Overuse has led to severe shortages, and industry along China’s major water sources has polluted supplies. Construction of hydropower dams along major rivers has also damaged ecosystems. The government released a plan in 2015 for preventing water pollution that included placing controls on polluting industries. The quality of surface waters—bodies such as lakes, rivers, and streams—has since improved. However, groundwater continues to fall short of targets, with more than 80 percent categorized as “bad to very bad.” Desertification. More...