Free Republic

"Seismic", "a socio-political earthquake", "a watershed moment for Germany". This was how political analysts and many media outlets described the stunning victory of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in local elections in Germany on Sunday. Is that an exaggeration? Saxony-Anhalt is one of the smallest of massive Germany's 16 regions. It boasts a mere 1.7m out of 59m eligible voters nationwide. How significant can its political sentiments be, especially since the AfD narrowly failed to win an outright majority? The answer: very significant. The vote may have been regional but it impacts at national level. The AfD landslide...

The far-right Alternative for Germany party surged to a major victory in a regional election on Sunday, but fell a little short of winning a majority in its quest to form the country’s first far-right state government since World War II. The German far-right party AfD has taken a commanding lead in Sunday's Saxony-Anhalt vote, but could not secure enough seats to form a majority. Final results showed AfD receiving 43.8% of the vote, more than double its showing five years ago in the region of 2.1 million people west of Berlin. However, falling three seats short, with 39 lawmakers...

US special forces spent four months conducting a secret mine-clearing mission in the Strait of Hormuz in an attempt to open up the waterway, the Financial Times reported Sunday. Iran has said it placed mines in international and Omani waters following the outbreak of the war. The International Maritime Organization estimated in June that roughly 80 mines had been deployed along important shipping routes. The covert operation was carried out amid ongoing exchanges of strikes between the US and Iran in and around the Strait, according to people familiar with the mission. Navy SEAL divers worked with unmanned vessels, robots,...

Saudi Arabia and seven other Arab and Muslim countries on Sunday issued a joint statement rejecting any attempt to displace Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and reaffirming their support for the establishment of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state. The statement was signed by the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia. The countries strongly condemned statements made in Israel calling for the encouragement of Palestinian emigration from the Gaza Strip and warned against turning such ideas into government policy or practical measures on the ground. According to the statement, displacing Palestinians...

US special envoy Jared Kushner says next month’s Knesset election has made Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government act “a little irrational” when it comes to Gaza. “I think we agree with the Israelis on the end state for Gaza,” Kushner says at a press appearance during a visit to Kyiv, where he was taking part in negotiations over the war. “They just have crazy elections, and that makes them a little irrational in certain regards,” he adds.The US has been trying to advance the Board of Peace’s plan to decommission the weapons of Hamas and all other armed groups in...

Why did British police patrol the streets unarmed while officers in New York considered carrying a gun essential to doing their job? In this 1966 report, ITN’s Peter Woods explores the stark differences between British and American policing. NYPD officers react with disbelief to Britain’s largely unarmed police force, with one lieutenant describing the idea as “sort of ridiculous” and predicting chaos if New York officers were expected to work without guns. The report also follows firearms training at the New York Police Academy and shows unarmed British police searching for Harry Roberts, wanted in connection with the murder of...

Illicit Iranian funds are flowing through U.S.-dollar clearing accounts, creating an enforcement dilemma for Washington As the Trump administration tightens its economic squeeze on Iran, it faces a surprising weak link in its campaign to cut off the regime from the global financial system: America’s own banks. Billions of dollars of Iranian funds are flowing through clearing accounts at American banks each year, Western officials and researchers say, despite sanctions that prohibit anyone subject to U.S. law from taking part in almost all financial activity linked to Tehran. Iran accesses the accounts through foreign partners that maintain relationships with U.S....

... A Ukrainian arms factory had supplied the military with thousands of defective mortar rounds. But even as the officials noticed that weapons were arriving faulty, Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency continued to award Mr. Shyman’s factory new contracts. Seven of Ukraine’s top 10 military contractors won new business despite open criminal investigations for fraud, failures to deliver on earlier deals or the arrest of chief executives for corruption. Companies won contracts without demonstrating that they could supply the weapons, or without licenses to deliver them. Auditors identified 18 companies that signed deals despite defaulting on previous agreements. Six of those...

Exit poll shows Alternative für Deutschland on 44.4% of vote in Saxony-Anhalt after huge turnout, with votes still being counted

BERLIN, Sept 6 (Reuters) - The Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged into first place in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, exit ​polls showed, putting a far-right party on the cusp of power at state level for the ‌first time since World War Two. The AfD won 44.5% of the vote, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives trailing well behind on 18.5%, and the centre-left Social Democrats and environmental Greens both clearing the minimum threshold to enter parliament, according to an exit poll from the ​ARD broadcaster.

The Alternative for Germany party has a strong lead in a regional election, but it is unclear whether it will be able to form the country’s first far-right state government since World War II, exit polls indicated Sunday. Alternative for Germany, or AfD, went into the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt seeking an absolute majority in the state legislature to govern on its own. That would overcome the so-called “firewall” of mainstream parties’ refusal to work with AfD. A first state government would be the biggest prize in the party’s 13-year history, at a time of widespread discontent...

Krakatau, the infamous volcano, just produced its largest explosive eruption since 1883. And this caused the cancellation of hundreds of flights, generated a massive eruption plume, and caused ash to fall across a wide area. Yet, how large is this eruption, and why might it have occurred? Today's video will attempt to answer these questions through the knowledge & analysis of a geologist.

Strategic patience for the win? Iran's regime leaders thought they could force the US to buckle by strangling the global economy at the Strait of Hormuz. The US, however, has an actual blue-water navy, and that tends to matter in blockades involving a country entirely reliant on sea trade for its only valuable export economy. As the Wall Street Journal concedes, Donald Trump's Hormuz blockade is a lot less "leaky" than the IRGC's. And as Trump himself pointed out yesterday, the Strait may not matter for very much longer anyway:By squeezing the Strait of Hormuz, both the U.S. and Iran...

US President Donald Trump's top negotiators have met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, as efforts to end the war in Ukraine gather pace. Footage released by the Kremlin showed Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner being greeted by Putin, who said the current situation "is not so easy". Witkoff thanked Putin for agreeing with Ukraine to halt strikes on each other's capitals for three days. On Sunday the envoys will travel to Kyiv for more talks - their first such visit to Ukraine's capital. On Friday, Trump said Witkoff and Kushner were "bringing with them a proposal to end the...

An MS-13 gang member convicted in a savage execution-style murder is out of federal custody in California after a federal judge ordered his immediate release, igniting fury from the Trump administration. U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta ordered the release of David Antonio Aviles Perez, 35, aka "the witch," after finding that immigration officials held him for five months without giving him a bond hearing or determining whether he posed a danger to the public or a flight risk. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin accused the Biden-appointed judge of putting the public in danger by ordering Aviles Perez’s...

Oneel Bou Saab keeps a photo of her father in his army uniform. Lieutenant George Bou Saab was killed serving in the Lebanese Armed Forces in 2013 during clashes with an extremist group in the southern city of Sidon, and for years his death sat inside a familiar civic story: a soldier who died defending "all of Lebanon," as his daughter puts it, not any one sect or faction. That story cracked open again this August, when parliament passed a sweeping new law that automatically reduces the sentences of people convicted in cases like the one connected to her father's...

I thought this was important given the leftist judge setting free Kahilid Sheik Mohammed. The video damns us and our future here and now Do not miss

Nicaragua approved a constitutional reform that bars the opposition from participating in elections and extends Daniel Ortega’s term in office, a measure aimed at securing a presidential succession within the family of the octogenarian former guerrilla leader. Ortega and his wife and co-president, Rosario Murillo, tightened their grip further by pushing through the amendment, which closes the door to a political transition after two decades of rule marked by the concentration of power and harsh repression. What was approved? The National Assembly, controlled by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), voted Tuesday to prohibit “traitors to the homeland,” people linked...

“We need your voice,” Abdul El-Sayed told a sex offender who had been sentenced to prison for sexually soliciting what he thought was a 14-year-old girl online and then for “distributing child sexually abusive material and multiple counts of accosting children for immoral purposes.” The sex offender had reinvented himself as an activist against incarceration and claimed that he had suffered, “I was only allowed to have the type of phone without a browser, and several times had my phone confiscated” and argued that the answer “is to address the root causes of crime… address the real problems… like education,...

In one of his Truth Social bombs, President Donald Trump insisted we should rename Lake Ontario to Lake America after Canada refused to accept his trade negotiation terms. It obviously echoes his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. It's easy to find these whole geographic kerfuffles unnecessary. But the media hated the first one so much that the Associated Press found itself restricted from the White House press pool for refusing to accept the new Gulf terminology. What they hate is anything Trump does to add a patriotic pro-America tinge to something that they associate...