Free Republic

Washington — For the third time, the House voted Tuesday to block President Trump from taking further military action against Iran, with seven Republicans breaking with the president. The vote ended in a 220 to 204 tally, marking a symbolic rebuke of the president over the largely unpopular war. Tuesday's resolution drew more GOP support than the previous two efforts to limit Mr. Trump's war powers in June and July. Three new Republicans voted yes: Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn of Iowa. The four who supported the prior resolutions were Reps. Tom...

A Kosovo war crimes tribunal on Wednesday found former President Hashim Thaci guilty of war crimes committed during the 1998-1999 war for independence from Serbia. Thaci, a former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) commander, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for crimes including murder, torture and illegal detention. He was tried along with three other former KLA guerrilla leaders in The Hague.

A transgender policewoman has confessed to raping a 15-year-old girl in a McDonald's toilet in Germany. Maja S., 55, confessed before the Traunstein Regional Court wearing handcuffs and leg irons amid the ongoing trial. She will likely face three and a half years in prison, according to Judge Andreas Bartschmid, in exchange for the confession. After her arrest, Maja S. was initially held in the women's section of the Bamberg prison in Bavaria. For the past five months, however, she has been in the men's section of the Stadelheim prison. Her lawyer, Peter Dürr, told BILD: 'This is a serious...

New photos obtained exclusively by CBS News reveal for the first time the widespread damage and destruction of buildings and vehicles at multiple U.S. positions across the Middle East, as a result of Iranian missile and drone attacks. The Defense Department's inspector general this week released a fresh report on the war in Iran that revealed "equipment losses" worth up to $3.7 billion — including nearly 60 aircraft. In a first-of-its-kind mandatory report to Congress, the inspector general added that U.S. Central Command reported Iranian strikes at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan.

For Americans who follow the Russian-Ukrainian war, the past few months must look very strange. In the first half of summer, the story from Kyiv – and the many western media outlets that repeated it – was that Ukraine was winning. Then, not long after the NATO summit in July, Kyiv announced it lacked the interceptors to prevent a winter disaster. The country needed 300 missiles to survive, we were told. Even if these 300 missiles arrive, they are unlikely to protect a country as large as Ukraine from the sheer volume of Russian ballistic attacks and glide-bomb strikes. Now...

Using his social-media megaphone to roil the waters, the tech entrepreneur is promoting a new anti-immigration party; ‘civil war is inevitable’ LONDON—On the eve of becoming the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk was fixated on political turmoil an ocean away from SpaceX headquarters.In one X post, he called the mayor of Belfast a “betrayer of her people.” In another, he called a British political leader “a scumbag and a traitor.” And a post from a once-obscure politician named Rupert Lowe—whose nascent far-right party Musk had declared the only hope for salvaging Britain’s future—got more than three million views after Musk...

All of the support acts for Ed Sheeran's US tour have quit after a rapper was dropped from the setlist over his pro-Palestine views. Beoga, the Irish folk band that collaborated on Sheeran's hit Galway Girl, are among four acts that have refused to continue on the tour in solidarity with Macklemore, who was dropped after calling for a "free Palestine". In a statement, Beoga said that Macklemore had been silenced by "Zionist lobbies" and that the group believed in "dialogue as a means of progressing the plight of the Palestinian people". Macklemore, real name Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, was dropped...

Washington said that the competitiveness fund included in the budget would “impede” partnership with the US because of provisions favouring “made in Europe” products. In a document sent to EU legislators and seen by Euronews, the US has threatened the EU with retaliation if it does not scrap European preference provisions in its multiannual budget. EU member states are currently discussing the EU’s long-term budget (2028-2034), which includes a €402 billion fund dedicated to competitiveness that favours the production of key goods within the EU, including in defence. The measure would potentially exclude foreign firms from EU financing to protect...

These days one reads fewer stories proclaiming the turning of the tide in the Russia-Ukraine war. There are also fewer tweets from Donald Trump threatening Iran with imminent destruction. Now that the noise has receded, it is a good time to listen. I am not hearing of a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive. What I am hearing instead is the thud of Russian jackboots marching deeper into the parts of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine that Vladimir Putin does not yet control. Meanwhile, in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula, the Houthis have taken control of the strategic port city of...

For Americans who follow the Russian-Ukrainian war, the past few months must look very strange. In the first half of summer, the story from Kyiv – and the many western media outlets that repeated it – was that Ukraine was winning. Then, not long after the NATO summit in July, Kyiv announced it lacked the interceptors to prevent a winter disaster. The country needed 300 missiles to survive, we were told. Even if these 300 missiles arrive, they are unlikely to protect a country as large as Ukraine from the sheer volume of Russian ballistic attacks and glide-bomb strikes. Now...

Two distinct laws passed in Nazi Germany in September 1935 are known collectively as the Nuremberg Laws: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. These laws embodied many of the racial theories underpinning Nazi ideology. They would provide the legal framework for the systematic persecution of Jews in Germany. Adolf Hitler announced the Nuremberg Laws on September 15, 1935. Germany’s parliament (the Reichstag), then made up entirely of Nazi representatives, passed the laws. Antisemitism was of central importance to the Nazi Party, so Hitler had called parliament into a special session...

Hundreds of Jews stood on the Temple Mount before dawn on the second day of Rosh Hashanah this year, and by the time they left, something had happened there that Rabbi Josh Wander believes had not happened in thousands of years: the shofar sounded on the Mount together with the silver Temple trumpets. Wander was there for both days of the holiday, and described what he saw in an interview with Rabbi Aharon Sokol on the podcast Parsha Inspired, an account independently corroborated by police statements and other eyewitnesses. A Shabbat exception, revived Any year Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat...

Between December 2025 and August 2026, Anthropic's Threat Intelligence team identified and disrupted misuse of Claude across seven categories of harm: cyber operations, surveillance, influence operations, conventional weapons, biological misuse, scams/fraud, and illicit distillation. The report's central argument is that AI has collapsed the skill and resource gap that used to separate state-sponsored operations from individual actors — “sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated attackers.” Across every case, operations moved from Claude simply assisting a human conversationally toward more autonomous, multi-agent orchestration that ran reconnaissance, exploitation, and data theft with minimal supervision, sometimes for extended unattended stretches. Four cyber case...

India’s fertility rate has for the first time fallen below the level needed to stop the population from shrinking, raising concerns about future labour shortages and an ageing society. For decades, India has seen rapid population growth. According to government statistics, including the Sample Registration System (SRS) Statistical Report — the country’s largest demographic survey — India has had a falling fertility rate for some years, but the reproduction rate remained high enough to keep the population growing. The latest SRS report, released last month by India’s Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, said that India’s Total Fertility...

In California, gas stations are facing a unique challenge. The station signs are only configured to go up to $9.99 per gallon and at several stations the price of diesel has reached that maximum. Diesel prices are higher than they have ever been in history. Worse, according to some news reports the advertising of the maximum price of $9.99 per gallon is meant to signal to truck drivers that they have run out of diesel altogether. Expensive diesel is a hit to the economy, but running out of the fuel at any price is a whole different kind of crisis....

Volodymyr Zelensky has sanctioned his former press secretary, who claimed without evidence that he had a drug habit. Iuliia Mendel, who lives in the US and has become a critic of the Ukrainian president in recent months, worked as his aide from June 2019 to July 2021 The measures, which will last for a decade, will strip the former spokesman of her state awards, freeze her assets and forbid her from moving capital out of her home country. The decree also sanctioned nine other Russian and Ukrainian citizens. In response to the decree, she posted on social media: "Sanctions against...

Mark Carney’s anti-American crusade risks hurting Canada’s economy while strengthening China and exposing the contradictions behind his trade war with the United States. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement—he is the global one. Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Donald Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations. So, at the eleventh hour, Carney stormed out of an...

‘They haven’t gone away, you know.” Gerry Adams’s chilling words, uttered during the peace process, to remind everyone that the IRA still existed, would do as well for Al Qaeda, the architects of the 9/11 outrage, the 25th anniversary of which fell yesterday. Osama Bin Laden’s killing in May 2011 may have removed the titular head of Al Qaeda but, neither that well-deserved death, nor the subsequent splintering of Al Qaeda from Isis (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) in 2014, has diminished either the virulence or potential danger that Al Qaeda presents. Reliable reporting is that Al Qaeda is...

The decision in Trump v. Barbara, which reaffirmed, by virtue of the 14th Amendment, that nearly all children born on U.S. soil are citizens at birth, pretty much shot down President Trump's attempt to squelch the citizenship issue.In light of what SCOTUS handed down, which did still allow him some latitude for restriction by executive order, the President moved to avoid the constitutional issue and pivot to regulating the visa, travel, and beneficiary vectors.In two executive orders, he hit what he could before a pregnant woman entered the country and the eligible categories, without tripping on the birthright pressure plate....Rather...

In brief: Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko reportedly left the country overnight in an official vehicle, amid an escalating clash with anti-corruption agencies and now involving President Volodymyr Zelensky. His departure came hours after he accused NABU chief Semen Kryvonos of crimes, prompting the president to call for the chief prosecutor’s dismissal.