Free Republic

The US and russia are discussing the possibility of involving American investors in the Nord Stream gas pipelines and resuming russian gas supplies to Europe. Reuters reports this, citing five sources familiar with the situation. According to the agency, russian presidential advisor Kirill Dmitriev and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are participating in the talks. They have met in moscow and New York over the past few weeks. According to the sources, the Nord Stream issue remains on the agenda, although it is unclear how extensively the parties have discussed it. Kushner, as noted by Reuters, views business...

I write these words from Poland, where 90 percent of Poland’s Jews — 3 million out of 3.3 million — were slaughtered during World War II. That is what genocide looks like. In stark contrast, roughly 70,000 of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents were killed during Israel’s war with Hamas, amounting to approximately 3 percent of the population. And that figure includes enemy combatants. Yet the same word, genocide, used for the systematic, intentional murder of 90 percent of Poland’s Jews — and two-thirds of Europe’s Jews as a whole — is being used to describe Israel’s war with Hamas. How...

The story we have come to expect from immigrants is that their children and grandchildren will integrate into the dominant culture, retaining only superficial characteristics from their home country. With Muslim migrants in Denmark, one of the few places that measures such things, the story is the opposite: immigrants from North African and Middle Eastern countries, as well as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkey (MENAPT), become even more hostile to Western values and are more inclined to be criminals. Det handler om efterkommernes børn – de såkaldte tredjegenerationsindvandrere. I Danmarks Statistiks tabeller om for kriminalitet kan man ikke se dem. De...

Hamas is generating as much as $5 million a day from goods entering Gaza while rebuilding tunnels, accumulating weapons, and planning possible attacks on Israeli troops, including attempts to kidnap soldiers, according to separate Israeli television reports this week citing security officials. Neomi Neumann, a former head of research at Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, told the Kan public broadcaster on Thursday that Hamas continues to exercise effective control over Gaza’s population through a decentralized system of taxation, aid distribution, and covert enforcement. Neumann, now an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, estimated that Hamas earns...

The U.S. Labor Department announced it would suspend Microsoft and Adobe from its Permanent Labor Certification. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL were also suspended from the program. ... Vice President JD Vance criticized Microsoft specifically, pointing to the firm’s 6,000 layoffs in 2025. Vance claimed that the company “replaced” those workers with people on H-1B visas. “So we’re going to continue to support Microsoft and have a great relationship with Microsoft, but we’re also going to deny them the ability to apply for these permanent residencies until they show that they are going...

Ambassador Mike Huckabee @GovMikeHuckabee: Ambassador Mike Huckabee on X: "The NY Slimes w/ cowardly "anonymous sources" did a hit piece on David Milstein, Sr Policy Advisor @usembassyjlm & asked me for comment. They didn't use it, but here's my FULL statement they didn't have the guts or the integrity to use: The elements of the story the New York Times is trying to assemble are so lacking in fact that it ranks up with other Times farcical endeavors like the embarrassing ‘dog rape’ story, or the totally debunked story about a small boy being shot in the face by IDF...

President Trump claimed that his administration is “having productive discussions” and vowed to hold off on resuming attacks against the Islamic Republic before the midterm elections. “We are having productive discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the president wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “[W]hile Iran is in very bad condition, both Economically and Militarily and while the Blockade will remain in full force and effect, with Oil flowing in Record Numbers of Barrels through the Hormuz Strait,” he added, “we will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections.” The president has long been rumored...

"Half of Russia’s six largest diesel-producing refineries were forced to cut or halt output in September after strikes, according to a Reuters tally. ... Other forces have tightened diesel. Gulf refineries were damaged after the Iran war widened in February."

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...