Free Republic

Behind a wire fence lies a vast gaping wound of earth. Before Google’s arrival a few months ago, an estimated quarter of a million trees occupied the 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland. Now they are all gone. After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre – taking even the top soil with it – all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery, puddles and mounds of earth, roots and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off...

As arsonists, rioters and looters swarmed the streets of Paris Sunday night, French police were completely ineffective and President Emmanuel Macron and his wife were off attending a concert, which featured Céline Dion.Well-planned rioting and thievery are taking place throughout France and other European countries. Some say the actions are coordinated by the extreme far left and will continue unabated. France is still six months away from its next presidential election.Europe is on fire.Its victims are on their own.Extreme anti-gun laws throughout the continent have helped fuel the fires.France has some of the strictest anti-gun laws in the world.For a...

Gunmen attacked during funeral procession, state-owned TV says Witness says assailants fired for several minutes King says attack will be met with 'harshest retaliation' Authorities say extremists carried out terrorist attack UN chief condemns attack AL-MUSHAIRFEH, Jordan, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Seven people were killed on Friday when gunmen opened fire ​during a funeral at a church in Jordan, said the head of the country's Public Security Directorate, in a rare attack ‌on Jordan's Christian minority that authorities described as a terrorist act by extremists. Speaking at a press conference, Major General Abdallah al-Maaytah said most of those wounded in...

France is seeing its worst riots in decades — violence clearly aimed not simply at the ruling party, but at France itself — and the left-liberal establishment is still trying to blame a few bad apples. That’s true not just of President Emmanuel Macron, but of global media that claim it’s mainly about student grievances over budget cuts — at least one BBC article actually used the phrase “mostly peaceful protests.” This is nonsense: The street mobs haven’t been just (or even mostly) kids for weeks now, and the vandalism began in the first days; it was last month that...

An Irish public service announcement from a government-funded group that urged grandparents to get consent before hugging their grandkids was yanked after fierce backlash and pleas from politicians for “a bit of common sense.” The advert released by the group We-Consent — a project of the Dublin Rape Crisis Center — was axed after it was deemed “inappropriate and demeaning to grandparents,” Jim O’Callaghan, Minister for Justice of Ireland, announced on Thursday.“The video produced by the DRCC involving grandparents does not represent the views of the Government,” O’Callaghan, whose department was a source of funding for the campaign, wrote in...

US intelligence purportedly believes country may not survive the economic, political and social tensions dividing its societyThe green light had been given; the mission was ready to go.At an Israeli base deep inside Gaza, the soldiers of the Givati Infantry Brigade’s Rotem Battalion were preparing to embark on a combat patrol.Yet upon opening the door of their Namer armoured personnel carrier, they refused to enter.Despite the increasingly frustrated entreaties of their commander, the operation was ultimately scrapped.Why? Because, according to multiple reports on the August incident, there was a female paramedic inside the armoured vehicle, and for the troops...

Western governments have put themselves in mortal danger. They are actively doing things that are destroying their countries: (1) replacing their native citizens with unassimilable foreigners; (2) centralizing government power in unelected and unaccountable bureaucracies; (3) censoring and criminalizing public dissent; (4) offshoring industrial and manufacturing jobs; (5) exacerbating energy costs and general inflation by demonizing hydrocarbons and pushing “global warming” delusions; (6) increasing taxes, government spending, and public welfare in unsustainable ways; (7) demolishing their nations’ historical identities, traditions, beliefs, and common cultures; (8) providing foreigners with “free” homes, food, and educations, while accusing native citizens of being “racists,”...

Talks postponed to November — "30 nights of nightmare" for Kyiv 1:07 — 😱 The massive night strike on Kyiv begins 2:30 — 💀 Dozens of ballistic missiles — Ukraine can't intercept any 3:23 — 📊 Up to 22 missiles: 11 Iskander-M, 8 S-400 ballistic, 3 hypersonic 4:18 — 📈 210 drones, 181 intercepted — but silence on missile stats 4:49 — 🏭 Antonov plant, warehouses, storage facilities targeted 5:19 — 🌉 SOUTHERN BRIDGE hit — traffic jam, Dnipro crossing blocked 6:48 — 🏚️ Northwestern Kyiv warehouses and malls wiped out 7:19 — 🔄 First night since mid-October WITHOUT strikes...

U2 front man Bono is attacking Christians and Jews who have supported Elon Musk and President Donald Trump’s efforts to cut wasteful and fraudulent government spending with the efforts of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The “With or Without You” singer insisted that you can’t be a real Christian or Jew if you support the spending cuts to government programs such as USAID and other programs that lavished billions of U.S. tax dollars on foreign nations. He made his latest comments on the New York Times sponsored The Interview podcast. “What Christian household, what Catholic household, what Jewish, religious...

Zelensky just blinked. President Trump has been pressing Kyiv to make a deal. On Tuesday he said it plainly: "We want Zelenskyy to make a deal." Now Zelensky is moving. On Fox News Wednesday he was asked if he'd accept freezing the war where the lines are now. "Yes, right now, we have to freeze," he said. He called it a "real way to end this war." After meeting Steve Witkoff in Oslo, he also says Ukraine will back new three-way talks with the U.S. and Russia, likely in November. It's not a peace deal yet. Zelensky still wants security...

The Michigan Senate candidates faced off in their second and final debate before the Nov 3 general election Former Rep. Mike Rogers and his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, tore into each other at their second Michigan Senate debate Wednesday evening. Rogers, a former FBI special agent and the Republican U.S. Senate candidate, clashed with El-Sayed over the personal barbs, accusations and fierce divides that have defined one of the country's most anticipated Senate elections.

Oil flows out of the Persian Gulf in October nearly returned to levels seen before the start of the Iran war, but traders remain wary about a fragile recovery. Total crude exports in the region, or flows coming out of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, recently recovered to within 10% of their previous levels in January and February, according to data compiled by TankerTrackers.com, a maritime intelligence firm tracking crude oil shipments (see chart below).

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatens to strike American bases across the Middle East if the US military continues to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. “The US military must know that if this trend continues, the conflict will extend to its bases in the region,” the Guards say in a statement on their Sepah News website. “This is a serious warning,” they added. Iran claims control over Hormuz, a strategic shipping route through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supplies passed before war broke out in February. It regularly attacks ships that attempt to navigate...

A Polish soldier who accidentally shot a Syrian refugee who had entered Poland over the border from Belarus has been acquitted of negligent use of a weapon. The Syrian man had been seeking 50,000 zloty (€11,500) in compensation from the soldier. The verdict was welcomed by defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, whose ministry had supported the soldier’s legal defence. The incident in question took place in November 2023 in Poland’s northeastern Podlasie province. The soldier, named only as Adam Ł. under Polish privacy law and who holds the rank of second lieutenant, had only recently received his first posting to the...

Ben Roberts-Smith has revealed he contemplated suicide for months amid war crimes allegations, saying thoughts of his children helped him through his lowest point. The nation's most decorated living soldier said the relentless coverage took a psychological toll and left him believing his family might be better off without him. 'When that flood of media and allegations came, it was relentless,' Roberts-Smith told NewsCorp. 'From the perspective of someone sitting there going, 'What is going on? I don't understand where it's coming from. I don't know why that's being said.' 'Psychologically, that takes a toll. 'And there were many times...

Somaliland’s president has offered to put Donald Trump’s name on an airport.Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, commonly known by his nickname Irro, has floated renaming Berbera International Airport. The idea came after weeks of lobbying at Washington and New York to win what his government has sought for decades: formal recognition from the United States. Berbera, a port city on the Gulf of Aden, has a runway built by the Soviet Union in the 1970s that stretches more than 4,000 meters, among the longest in Africa. So far, no agreement has been reached on the airport, on military access, or on recognition...

Former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has questioned whether he can receive a fair trial, giving two major interviews on his dramatic arrest at Sydney Airport, the prospect of life behind bars if convicted on five counts of war crime murder and his defamation loss against the Nine newspapers. Breaking a years-long silence amid serious allegations he murdered unarmed Afghan civilians and prisoners between 2009 and 2012, the Victoria Cross Recipient said he was unsure a jury could be found that were impartial towards him — but he was “trusting again in the system”. It comes after his legal team pondered...

Marine Le Pen is set to officially launch her presidential campaign this weekend at the National Rally two-day party congress in Orléans. The latest Ifop poll, carried out in the wake of the mass protests and riots in France, suggests the far right leader would win the first round of the presidential election by a wide margin, and far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon emerged as her most likely opponent in the runoff. ...

When an Iranian dissident proclaims that “the greatest killer of Iranians has been Islam,” the statement is less an exercise in academic historiography than a cry of immediate political exhaustion. Across the diaspora and within the quiet corners of Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz, a powerful counternarrative has taken hold. Confronted with the gallows, morality police, and institutional dogmatism of the Islamic Republic, many Iranians have turned history into a weapon of resistance. In this narrative, the seventh-century Arab conquest is not a distant chapter in antiquity, but the original sin of Persian history – an ongoing catastrophe linking the fall...

Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano’s policy of leniency toward immigrants has caused his prosecutors to regularly decline to pursue cases involving drunken driving, felony drug possession, shoplifting and grand larceny against migrants, according to a new congressional audit. Investigators for the House Judiciary Committee said they found more than 100 previously unreported cases in which Mr. Descano’s office failed to prosecute or under-prosecuted cases against migrants. That included a Chinese migrant “serial fraudster” who had more than 50 charges dropped. The audit, released Tuesday, tied those cases to Mr. Descano’s stated desire to protect immigrants from having to face...