Free Republic

Final results from Brazil’s Sunday general elections confirmed this week that right-wing parties will hold a majority in the Lower House that, together with the majority in the Senate, will grant them control of both chambers of Congress once they take office next year. Brazilian conservative and right-wing parties, spearheaded by the Liberal Party (PL) led by Senator and presidential front-running candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, secured their best electoral performance in four decades during Sunday’s general elections. The results also automatically triggered an upcoming October 25 presidential runoff between Bolsonaro of the PL party and current incumbent socialist President Luiz Inácio...

The French Education Ministry said classes were totally or partially suspended at 891 schools after widespread damage occurred to schools and mounting injuries among staff, students and police. French Education Ministry suspended classes at nearly 900 schools nationwide Tuesday amid an increase in rioting over the country's school system and a lack of air conditioning in classrooms. The demonstrations in Paris have devolved into confrontations with law enforcement, and video footage has shown rioters clashing with police, who have deployed tear gas. Protests in Strasbourg, Lyon and Rennes have also turned violent at times, with demonstrators lighting fires and hurling...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is accusing the Biden administration of “dereliction of duty” after a DHS Office of Inspector General report revealed that the administration took little to no action to deal with noncitizens who illegally overstayed their authorized periods in the United States, including those deemed threats to national security. The OIG report found that Biden’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received 3,145,375 nonimmigrant visa overstay leads during fiscal years 2021–2024, with 104,049 (3.3 percent) flagged as potential national security or public safety concerns. ICE opened only 496 investigations into those flagged leads and made only eight...

On the evening of Friday 2 October, Daria Shipilova, an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, died in a district hospital in the Russian city of Shelekhov. Her place of work, and the rumoured circumstances of her death, have triggered a public health emergency in the region and a slew of questions: did the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, kill Shipilova? Could this metastasise into a plague epidemic in Russia? Should we – abroad – be worried? The Russian authorities have done their best to play down the link between the plague and Shipilova’s death. According to Russia’s public health watchdog,...

For decades, Palestinians have commemorated the Israeli declaration of independence in 1948 as their "nakba," a word that means 'disaster' in Arabic. That disaster resulted from the refusal of Arabs to accept the UN partition plan that made Israel a Jewish state, and five Arab countries attempted to eradicate Israel instead. The Israelis prevailed in that war, triggering massive displacement as Israel expelled Arabs from their country in response to the invasion. In the years since, as Arabs plotted wars against Israel, the Israelis have prevailed and punished their enemies, who insist that the lands of Israel belong to the...

It’s been three years since the savage Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks, which killed 1,200 people, often in barbaric, inhuman ways.As we reported, Democratic Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated the occasion by firing off an incendiary statement accusing Israel of committing war crimes and genocide in Gaza. (See: Morally Bankrupt Mamdani Spits on October 7 Victims to Demonize Israel.)If he wanted to stoke a response, he succeeded, because anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protests broke out throughout the Big Apple Wednesday. Not surprisingly, Columbia University and NYU once again played their part in the twisted response to the anniversary...

It’s four weeks until Election Day and Donald Trump is doing his utmost to dig Republicans out of their polling hole. In theory, anyway. Trump has been rallying through red states – Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas – to try and secure existing Senate seats. But today’s Democratic pile-on concerns a throwaway comment he made last night in Nebraska. Mid-weave, of course. The President said: “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They could take out a city… ‘let ’em, let ’em take Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego, that’s…’ this is...

The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, has repeatedly said that the fall of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine is inevitable and will happen faster than Kyiv thinks. Recent trends on the battlefield paint a different picture. A monthslong Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northern part of the Donbas has thwarted Russian efforts to encircle the remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the region. Russia, Western analysts say, has lost dozens of square miles of territory during the Ukrainian campaign, which Kyiv is calling Operation Vivaldi. In the southern Donbas, Russia continues to mount furious assaults to break through Ukrainian lines. But Kyiv...

The U.S. trade deficit widened sharply in August amid an influx of goods related to the artificial intelligence build-out and the vagaries of import tariffs, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. Imports swelled 4.3% for the month, pushing the total imbalance to $105.6 billion. That marked a 13.7% jump from July and was ahead of the Dow Jones consensus estimate for $102 billion. It also was the steepest deficit since the all-time gap in March 2025, recorded just before President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” announcement of “reciprocal” tariffs against U.S. trading partners. Though the monthly total was up, the year-to-date deficit...

Novel medicines can’t be treated in the same zero-sum way as semiconductors or electric vehicles, where one competitor’s win comes at the expense of the other, says Juliana Liu for Bloomberg Opinion.As Washington and Beijing tussle for dominance in frontier technologies, there’s one area in which competition shouldn’t preclude collaboration: innovative medicines. Beijing’s latest five-year plan for the biotechnology sector details how the country wants to lead the field globally. Unusually for an industrial blueprint, it comes with numeric targets. By 2030, Chinese drugmakers are expected to have made a “major leap” in competitiveness with sales of new medications growing...

Standing before the Acropolis in Athens, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio swept through the history of ancient Greece to the rise of American industry in a speech on Wednesday that portrayed western civilisation at risk of decline. Rubio said the world was at an "inflection point". Nations, particularly in Europe, should return to ancient Greek values and "rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together". "We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was here millennia ago," he said. While he spoke of cooperation, Rubio also said "nations need...

Elon Musk has backed Quebec independence and said Alberta and Saskatchewan should leave Canada, too, coming days after the separatist Parti Québécois returned to power. “Good. Quebec should separate,” the billionaire owner of X wrote on Wednesday, responding to a post about incoming premier Paul St-Pierre Plamondon’s pledge that Quebec independence would one day be achieved. “They would be better off. Alberta and Saskatchewan should separate, too,” he added. The remarks from one of President Donald Trump’s most prominent allies come amid growing scrutiny of American interest in separatist movements in Canada, including contacts between U.S. officials and separatists in...

An 18-year-old man accused of telling an FBI informant he wanted to attack the Mall of America during the Hmong Arts Celebration on Oct. 24 was arrested at gunpoint Tuesday in Richfield, Minnesota, during an arranged meeting to buy an AK-47-style rifle for $600, according to a federal criminal complaint filed Wednesday. In the complaint, authorities say a "confidential human source" exchanged "hundreds of bi-directional messages through multiple social media and encrypted messaging applications" with Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud from December 2024 until Tuesday. In those exchanges, Mohamud allegedly "expressed his desire to travel to Somalia" to join al-Shabaab and "fight...

Venezuela’s Cardón refinery — the country’s second-largest plant — was fully halted on Tuesday after a gas-line fire and explosions at its diesel hydrotreater. The blaze was brought under control in under an hour with no reported injuries, but PDVSA has not issued a damage assessment or restart timeline. The outage hits an already fragile domestic fuel system far more than U.S. supply. Cardón (sometimes rendered Cardon; the query’s “Ardon” matches this plant, not neighboring Amuay) sits at Punto Fijo in Falcón state and is half of the Paraguaná Refining Center. A social-media video posted by OSINTtechnical showed a large...

A 15-year-old supporter of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party was arrested in Britain after he made jokes about a local Conservative Party politician online. The schoolboy, only referred to as Fraser, was arrested by four officers from the West Midlands Police at his home in the early hours of August 3rd. He was taken from his family home and searched in front of his neighbours, locked in a cell, fingerprinted, had a mugshot taken, and had a sample of his DNA taken. Meanwhile, two officers searched his bedroom, and he was pressured to hand over his phone for other officers...

Ila Belov, 22, hit the girl during a clash and attempted to play the victim. He was nailed three months ago for the terrifying assault in Dundee, when the girl was aged 12. But his sentencing was delayed again and blamed on issues with social workers. His victim’s mother, who can’t be named, said: “I’m absolutely raging. “This is just a joke. It’s just piling the stress and the pressure on my daughter. “He’s walking about with a smug grin on his face while she’s too scared to go anywhere. “This needs to be dealt with so we can move...

We’re in a war between savages and civilization. Everything else is a detail. (The following is the first article I wrote after the Islamic massacres of Oct 7.) Savages We’re in a war between savages and civilization. Everything else is a detail. Some of us woke up to that war when planes crashed into skyscrapers. Others when we saw beheading videos spread across social media. What we saw in Israel, Hamas terrorists raping, mutilating and defiling corpses, is another bloody wake-up call. There will be many others. Beyond the politics and the geopolitics, we still haven’t come to terms with...

France is on the precipice of a dangerous financial spiral. The global surge in interest rates has exposed the country, once considered an oasis of relative stability in Europe’s financial markets, as one of the continent’s weakest links. France now pays more to borrow than former crisis hot spots like Greece and Italy. Its government is running a budget deficit surpassed only by the United States among its peers. Last week, a slow-burning selloff in France’s government bond market took an alarming turn as it spread across the continent, reviving memories of the eurozone debt crisis last decade. France’s 10-year...

Video posted by government forces in Yemen showed them driving armoured cars over Houthi ⁠fighters ⁠as they recaptured areas around the vital Bab el-Mandeb Strait from ⁠the Iran-backed group on Monday in a deadly new phase of the fragmented country's war. The videos gave a glimpse into the brutal closing stages ​of a pitched battle for control of territory near the strait that the Houthis had captured last month. The Houthi advance sent shockwaves through the oil market and pushed up petrol and diesel prices worldwide. Fighting continued near Bab el-Mandeb ‌on Tuesday as Saudi-backed government forces battled to consolidate...

The situation in France appeared to be escalating Monday as viral video showed a burning school with staff, students, and journalists barricaded inside. The scene, ripped right from the medieval crusades or the Jacobins’ 18th-century Reign of Terror, occurred at Nicolas Louis Vauquelin vocational high school, located in the 13th Arrondissement in southeast Paris. The spot is roughly three miles from tourist-heavy spots like the Notre Dame Cathedral, which itself was reopened in December 2024 after six years of restoration following a devastating fire, reportedly caused by an electrical short-circuit or discarded cigarette. It was not immediately apparent whether the...