Free Republic

Somalia has officially rejected Israel's appointment of an ambassador to Somaliland and declared plans for an Israeli embassy there illegal. The Somali government condemned the move as a violation of its sovereignty and insists Somaliland remains part of Somalia.... Major global and regional powers, including China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt, have criticized Israel's recognition of Somaliland and its embassy plans... The counter-terrorism collaboration between Washington and Mogadishu remains active, as demonstrated when the U.S. military teamed up with the Federal Government of Somalia to execute targeted precision airstrikes against Al-Shabaab fighters near Bulo Bashiir. The joint operation aimed to...

Morocco, Africa’s largest manufacturer, and Israel are looking to step up their military cooperation, with defence technology, cybersecurity, and military training among the key areas of focus. Morocco and Israel are intensifying their military cooperation, focusing on defense technology, cybersecurity, and military training. High-level meetings in Rabat involved Morocco's Defence Administration Minister and the Director General of Israel's Defence Ministry, following directives from King Mohammed VI. The partnership has expanded since the Abraham Accords, with formal agreements on arms purchases, intelligence sharing, and joint projects. Israel's participation in Morocco's Marrakesh air show in 2023 was notable, especially amid international restrictions...

An American robotics company backed by Eric Trump is negotiating a potentially massive deal to send humanoid robots into Hamas’s underground tunnel network in Gaza, where the machines could eventually fight alongside Israeli soldiers. Foundation Future Industries is discussing the potential sale of up to 1,000 Phantom MK1 robots to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), according to the Financial Times.The proposed deployment could place American-made humanoid machines inside one of the world’s most dangerous underground battlefields, with missions ranging from detecting explosives to potentially engaging enemy combatants.The robots could patrol underground passageways, identify tripwires and neutralize booby traps, according to...

A 7-year-old American girl was fatally shot by Mexican police during an anti-cartel operation near the U.S.-Mexico border. The girl, identified as Aranza, was shot in the head while traveling with her family in Matamoros, Mexico, as police pursued suspected members of the Gulf Cartel on Oct. 29, .. Her family alleges officers opened fire despite her father’s attempts to identify them as civilians, while Mexican authorities maintain that police were responding to an attack during the operation ... The mother alleges that she was driving with her husband and five children near the border in the town of Matamoros...

Police data shows imported practices hitting girls and women at the highest level on record ... Police in England and Wales recorded 3,145 honour-based abuse offences in the year ending March 2026 — the highest figure since comparable records began. Female genital mutilation offences rose 52 percent to 166. The number track the arrival and growth of communities in which family “honour” and control over female behaviour routinely override individual rights. The Home Office published the statistics on 5 November. They mark a 7 percent increase on the previous year’s 2,949 offences. .... London’s Metropolitan Police alone recorded 625 cases,...

Massive data centers in Southeast Asia exploited a gap in U.S. sanctions, providing crucial computing power for Chinese companies and a cover for alleged chip smugglingSENAWANG, Malaysia—An hour outside of the Malaysian capital, Bangladeshi workers this past week were driving dump trucks and excavators at a site stretching across 117 football fields.It was a world away from the Silicon Valley boardroom where, hours later, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang would be ousted. Yet this site in Southeast Asia and others like it are at the heart of the Huang affair.Here, a Chinese company plans to use Nvidia’s advanced artificial-intelligence chips....

President Trump has reportedly told senior aides he may hold off on resuming military strikes on Iran, despite repeatedly threatening to attack the country if it endangers US interests. Trump told senior advisers in recent days that he would refrain from launching new strikes as long as Iran or its Houthi proxies in Yemen don’t provoke the US, Reuters reported. *** The president on Thursday told Salem News Channel he would hit Iran to prevent it from threatening US allies and American vessels “without hesitation.” That same day, he told sports journalist Stephen A. Smith in an interview that he...

Two months before Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, it issued a series of far-reaching demands, including that NATO pull its troops back to positions they held in 1997, before the Western alliance expanded toward Russia’s borders. Now, in closed-door negotiations with President Trump’s envoys this week about how to end the war in Ukraine, the Russians have revived that stance — in some cases word for word — in an effort to attain a larger victory after five years and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Moscow’s unyielding position was laid out in a paper that Russian officials circulated this...

Earlier this week, The (London) Times newspaper reported Jaguar Land Rover (a division of Tata Motors) had appointed bailiffs to raid the Dutch offices of BYD, on suspicion that the Chinese marque had copied the design of the Defender SUV. The raid, which reportedly occurred in August, centred around Jaguar Land Rover’s claims that the BYD Ti7 SUV had benefited from alleged reverse engineering of the technology in the Land Rover Defender. Despite BYD claiming it had attempted to cooperate with Jaguar Land Rover’s requests for information, the bailiffs were able to seize digital records from BYD’s Schiedam and Hoofddorp...

The president said earlier this week that he imagines the communist government will “fall fairly soon.” President Donald Trump signaled in a new interview that he could take military action to topple Cuba’s communist government before he leaves office. “I want to get Cuba done before I leave you,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday when asked if he would order the use of military force against Cuba to free the nation. Trump said his administration is “watching it very closely” and Cuba is “doing very poorly,” calling it a “failed” country. The president said he would...

Five people, including two children, have been rescued after spending nearly three months stranded aboard a small boat in the Pacific Ocean, ending an extraordinary ordeal that began with what was supposed to be a brief trip between islands. The survivors were among nine passengers who departed the Micronesian islands of Murilo and Ruo on July 30, according to Fox News. The group had planned to make the roughly one-hour crossing, but a sudden storm pushed their 20-foot skiff off course and left them drifting in open water, according to reports from the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and The Times of...

Bush recently registered as an agent of a Brussels-based foreign principal organizing anti-Israel tours in the Palestinian territorie Former "Squad" member Cori Bush, now a foreign agent hired to lead anti-Israel propaganda tours in the West Bank, has been blocked from entering the Jewish state, she announced in a Friday video filmed from the airport. "My visa is now revoked," Bush said. "I tried to go through the TSA checkpoint and they were having problems letting me through, and the person asked me for my visa, I pulled up my visa, my visa to Israel is revoked." Bush attributed the...

A new migrant caravan of approximately 2,000 to 3,000 people—mostly from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Haiti, has left southern Mexican and is heading for the U.S. border.Members of the caravan are hoping last week’s Democrat midterm victories will lead to reopening the border and make it easier to enter the United States.Here we go again. Hundreds of migrants are already forming a caravan heading north because they saw the midterm results and think the border is open. But the real question is, who is actually funding this? Who is coaching them on where to go and what to...

* Lutnick agreed on Thursday to testify voluntarily before the Senate Banking Committee, Lutnick spokesperson Kristen Eichamer told NBC after chair Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., sent letters to Lutnick and Huang requesting they appear on Dec. 3 and Dec. 10, respectively. * Scott’s letter asked Lutnick to testify publicly “regarding recent public reports about Nvidia and the Department of Commerce’s role that raises national security concerns.” * The request comes amid a multitude of reports that Lutnick resisted new regulations to prevent Nvidia’s chips from being used by Chinese companies and the Chinese government to get an edge over the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration says it has returned more than $12 billion, or almost 99%, of the revenue obtained from the sales of Venezuelan oil since it ousted then-President Nicolás Maduro in January. In a broad energy deal reached with the country’s interim authorities, according to the report. As of Sept. 30, the end of the 2026 budget year, $168.6 million remained in an escrow account managed by the U.S. Treasury Department, the report said. Under the terms of the deal, Venezuelan crude is sold on the open market, with proceeds going into the U.S.-managed account. Venezuelan officials...

The world’s fertility crisis is more severe than is commonly understood. Last year, humanity’s total fertility level dropped below what demographers call the replacement rate—that is, the average number of children that a woman must have to keep a population constant over the long run. This has never happened before. There have been periods when the human population declined because of wars or epidemics, such as the Black Death, in the fourteenth century, or the diseases brought by Europeans to the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But now, simply as a function of their choices, humans will see...

Israel’s political transition has triggered a confrontation over national security, with Prime Minister-designate Gadi Eisenkot warning outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against launching new military operations against Iran before a new government takes office. In a letter sent Wednesday, Eisenkot, leader of the Yashar party and a former Israeli military chief, urged Netanyahu to exercise restraint in security decisions that could expose Israel to further military escalation. “Deploying security forces in the absence of a direct and immediate threat that cannot be postponed could have devastating consequences for Israeli democracy and for citizens’ trust in the institutions of government,” Eisenkot...

Russia has effectively given up its effort to replace the dollar with the yuan in foreign trade because of U.S. secondary sanctions, Bloomberg reported. Russia began shifting aggressively to the yuan after the start of its full-scale war with Ukraine and the imposition of Western sanctions. By 2024, the currency accounted for nearly half of the country’s foreign trade settlements, became the most traded currency on the Moscow Exchange, and overtook the dollar in bank deposit volume. The situation began to shift after the U.S. tightened secondary sanctions against banks in June 2024. Fearing restrictions, Chinese financial institutions started cutting...

Beijing targets California’s tech, research and innovators in its quest for superiorityOver the last half a century, Chinese spies have taken aim at a wide swath of California targets.They have worked as a Boeing aerospace engineer and a naval engineer at defense contractor Power Paragon to obtain highly classified information on U.S. space shuttle and Navy projects. They have assumed the roles of electrical engineering professor at UCLA and software engineer at Google and even worked as a driver and aide to the late U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein when she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee.Intelligence experts say that China continues...

Ting-Wei "Willy" Sun stood before a federal judge in Manhattan on October 8. He admitted to four felony counts: conspiracy to violate US export controls, conspiracy to smuggle goods out of the country, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors call the 44-year-old contractor a "fixer," a label that undersells what he's accused of actually doing. That's the headline fact. Here's why it matters beyond one contractor's sentencing: Sun was charged alongside Supermicro co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw, who pleaded not guilty. Liaw's trial, originally set for November, was pushed back to March 2027 after his lawyer...