Free Republic

Violent riots led by communist group Black Lives Matter and Islamic supremacists break out in the city of Brussels after the death of Ibrahim, a migrant in Police custody. The migrant was filming police enforcing coronavirus lockdown measures at a train station. Ibrahim refused to comply with police and their requests to stop filming. Ibrahim fled the scene, but was captured by police and shortly after died, possibly of a heart attack at the station due to drugs he ingested. Ibrahima B. was arrested on Saturday, January 9th a little before 7 pm by inspectors from the Brussels North police...

The government of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte was set to collectively resign on Friday over years of mismanagement of childcare subsidies, lawmakers said. Rutte was to inform King Willem-Alexander of the decision and hold a press conference during which he was expected to outline how the government will manage the emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic while in caretaker status. A new cabinet will be formed after parliamentary elections that had already been set for March 17. The decision follows a parliamentary inquiry last month that found bureaucrats at the tax service, with government oversight, had driven thousands of...

D Delivering in his final days on one of his last unfulfilled promises, President Trump is declassifying a massive trove of FBI documents showing the Russia collusion story was leaked in the final weeks of the 2016 election in an effort to counteract Hillary Clinton's email scandal. The memos to be released as early as Friday include FBI interviews and human source evaluation reports for two of the main informants in the Russia case, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele and academic Stefan Halper. The president authorized the release of a foot-high stack of internal FBI and DOJ documents that detail...

BEIJING - President Xi Jinping is asking former CEO Howard Schultz of Starbucks to help repair U.S.-Chinese relations that have plunged to their lowest level in decades amid a tariff war and tension over technology and security. A letter from Xi to Schultz reported Friday by the official Xinhua News Agency was a rare direct communication from China’s paramount leader to a foreign business figure. Schultz opened Starbucks’ first China outlet in 1999 and is a frequent visitor. Xinhua gave no indication whether the letter reflected an initiative to ask American corporate leaders to help change policy after President-elect Joe...

LONDON - People across the world are generally likely to say yes to getting a COVID-19 vaccine, but would be more distrustful of shots made in China or Russia than those developed in Germany or the United States, an international poll showed on Friday. The survey, conducted by the polling company YouGov and shared exclusively with Reuters, found Britons and Danes were the most willing to take the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available to them, while the French and Poles were more likely to be hesitant. The poll was based on questions put to almost 19,000 people. Friday’s YouGov...

At least 34 people were killed after a 6.2-magnitude earthquake rocked Indonesia's Sulawesi Island early on Friday (Jan 15) morning, said authorities. Hundreds more were injured when the earthquake struck in the early hours, triggering panic among the terrified residents of the island. "The latest information we have is that 26 people are dead ... in Mamuju city," said Ali Rahman, head of the local disaster mitigation agency, adding "that number could grow".

The images of the storming of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 6 sent shock waves around the world. The theme of Thursday’s debate in the Bundestag — “In the Wake of the Storming of the Capitol: Strategies to Strengthen Democracy and the Rule of Law in Germany and the World” — shows that those extended to Berlin. Many of the speakers warned that democracy and the rule of law are under threat. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, of the Social Democrats (SPD), referred to the Capitol, the seat of the US House of Representatives and the Senate, as...

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the President of Mexico, plans to form a coalition with other national leaders to fight back against big tech censorship after the platform banned President Donald Trump and at least 70,000 of his supporters last week, comparing it to the Spanish Inquisition, a report from the Associated Press reveals.“I can tell you that at the first G20 meeting we have, I am going to make a proposal on this issue,” López Obrador told the AP. “Yes, social media should not be used to incite violence and all that, but this cannot be used as a...

A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has received nearly $20 million in grants from the Department of Energy was arrested Thursday on charges that he failed to disclose ties to the People’s Republic of China.According to prosecutors, Gang Chen, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT, has held various positions on behalf of the PRC aimed at promoting China’s technological and scientific capabilities.He allegedly shared his expertise directly with Chinese government officials, “often in exchange for financial compensation,” said prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston.The Chinese consulate in New York allegedly requested that Chen, a naturalized...

WARSAW, Poland, January 14, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — The prime minister of Poland has delivered a blistering denunciation of Big Tech censorship, following the recent ban of President Donald Trump and others by virtually all social media giants. On Tuesday afternoon, Mateusz Morawiecki, 52, published a post defending internet freedom in both Polish and English on Facebook. He said that Poles are “so attached to freedom because we know what it is like when someone tries to limit it.” “For close to 50 years we lived in a country in which censorship was practiced, in which Big Brother told us how...

The story that has been told and generally accepted about the origins of COVID-19 is not true. Where did it come from, and equally important, when did it arrive, are questions that need answering. I have obtained secret military documents distributed from the highest ranks of the Canadian Armed Forces in an attempt to cover up a scandal of global proportions. The document, titled “Potential exposure to 2019 Novel Coronavirus during 7th military world games in October 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei Province China,” was written by Canada’s Surgeon General, A.M.T. Downes, Major General. His position reports to and obeys Trudeau’s...

In the wake of the suspicious Christmas morning bombing of an AT&T network sites located about a block away from the telecom giant’s regional offices in downtown Nashville, both the perpetrators and their motives remain unknown. Regardless of what comes to pass, there is a link between AT&T, Dominion Voting Systems, and Chinese Communist Party that is worth taking a closer look at. This possible connection centers on AT&T Chairman William E. Kennard. Kennard, who also sits on the Board of Directors for Ford Motor Company, MetLife, Duke Energy, and Staple Street Capital, the private equity firm that is the...

Days before President Trump is set to leave office, the White House has declassified a strategy document outlining this administration's attempts to address China's increasing global power. Last week, the Trump White House ordered the declassification of documents that otherwise would not have been available to the public for decades. News reports on the information, for instance, would not have become available until 2043. National security adviser Robert O'Brien indicated that the decision to declassify the document emphasizes the importance of understanding the attitude of American foreign policy toward China. "The United States has a long history of fighting back...

A racing pigeon from Alabama has survived an 8,000-mile odyssey to Australia, where it was named Joe after the president-elect – but authorities plan to kill the bird because it’s a quarantine risk, according to a report. Melbourne resident Kevin Celli-Bird said he discovered the exhausted bird in his backyard on Dec. 26 after it had disappeared from a race in Oregon on Oct. 29, The Associated Press reported.

Influential backbench leader Sir Graham Brady has said that lockdown measures could be “removing hope” from Britons, criticising “pointless restrictions” that ban people from sitting on a park bench or taking more than one walk a day. Sir Graham, chairman of the 1922 Committee of all backbench Tory MPs, warned that the government and ministers need to recognise that “lockdown carries its own costs”

American workers filed 965,000 applications for unemployment benefits last week — an unexpected surge as the coronavirus kept the labor market under pressure, the feds said Thursday. The latest batch of initial jobless claims brought the total reported during the COVID-19 pandemic to nearly 74.8 million — a number larger than the populations of Canada and Saudi Arabia combined. New filings spiked from the prior week’s revised total of 784,000 amid the latest round of lockdown measures brought on by a rise in coronavirus cases and deaths. Economists were expecting 787,000 claims for last week, according to Wrightson ICAP. “Deterioration...

LONDON - Half of the world's climate change financing should go to helping poorer nations adapt to the effects of global warming, such as droughts, rising seas and floods, the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) said on Thursday. Extreme weather last year such as torrential rains in Africa, record heat waves and warmer temperatures on tropical oceans is consistent with climate change, scientists say. Last year was one of the warmest on record and as impacts intensify, governments around the world must adapt better or face serious costs, damages and losses, the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2020 said. The 2015 Paris...

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras -- About 200 migrants began walking up a highway toward the border with Guatemala late Wednesday, two days before a migrant caravan was scheduled to depart San Pedro Sula. Some 75 police officers dressed in riot gear waited at a point farther along the highway on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula. One officer said the intention was to stop the migrants for violating a pandemic-related curfew, check their documents and make sure they weren't traveling with children that were not their own. For weeks, a call for a new caravan departing Jan. 15 has circulated...

When a handful of new coronavirus cases materialized this month in a province surrounding Beijing — apparently spread at a village wedding party — the Chinese authorities bolted into action. They locked down two cities with more than 17 million people, Shijiazhuang and Xingtai. They ordered a crash testing regime of nearly every resident there, which was completed in a matter of days. They shut down transportation and canceled weddings, funerals and, most significantly, a provincial Communist Party conference. By this week the lockdowns expanded to include another city on the edge of Beijing, Langfang, as well as a county...

Hong Kong (AFP) - A Hong Kong internet provider said Thursday it had blocked access to a website following a police order, the first confirmed takedown using a new national security law imposed by Beijing last year. Unlike mainland China, Hong Kong has open internet access, but critics of Beijing fear powers given to the police under the new law could herald the end of that freedom. Internet users noticed the website HKChronicles was unreachable from some Hong Kong-based devices last week, and its owner put out a statement saying she believed authorities were blocking access. HKChronicles, which is still...