Free Republic

Two teenage girls from Germany were detained, arrested, and deported at an airport in Hawaii after immigration officials said it was suspicious they had not booked a hotel room. Backpackers Charlotte Pohl, 19, and Maria Lepere, 18, arrived in Honolulu from Auckland while undergoing a round-the-world trip. The duo planned to spend five weeks in Hawaii before moving onto California and Costa Rica for the next legs of their journey. But despite having ESTA travel authorization, immigration officials accused them of attempting to enter the U.S. to work illegally, and they were placed in handcuffs and taken to a nearby...

Anthropologist Richard Rudgley explores the history of the Celtic world and reveals the Celtic tradition to be a crucial part of what makes a Brit a True Brit. From Germany to the far west of Ireland, by way of Gaul, Pictish Scotland and England under Roman occupation, Rudgley takes a 5,000-mile journey of discovery that starts around 1,000 BC and ends in the present day. He uncovers remarkable archaeological evidence that puts a brand new light on the savagery and civilisation of an often misunderstood European culture. Where Did the Celts Really Come From? | 48:22 Our History | 883K...

Is Germany on the path to secularization? In 2024, for the first time, the country recorded more individuals without religious affiliation than Catholics and Protestants, according to the research group Weltanschauungen in Deutschland, which bases its findings on publications from the German Bishops' Conference and the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD). Indeed, Germany reported 47% atheists, compared to 45% Catholics and Protestants combined, and 4% Muslims. In 1990, only 22% of Germans identified as non-religious. By way of comparison, non-religious individuals have been in the majority in France for several years, with a National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies...

Aide: Clinton Unleashed bin Laden Chuck Noe Bill Clinton ignored repeated opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden and his terrorist allies and is responsible for the spread of terrorism, one of the ex-president’s own top aides charges. Mansoor Ijaz, who negotiated with Sudan on behalf of Clinton from 1996 to 1998, paints a portrait of a White House plagued by incompetence, focused on appearances rather than action, and heedless of profound threats to national security. Ijaz also claims Clinton passed on an opportunity to have Osama bin Laden arrested. Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, hoping to have terrorism sanctions ...

The U.S. government must launch a probe into the Chinese overseas law enforcement operation in New York City, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation, as other countries raise the alarm over reports of police stations on their soil. “How in God’s name could they openly have these communist police stations in our country?” Beau Dietl, retired NYPD detective, told the DCNF. “This shows the Chinese Communist Party is not afraid to exert its will outside of China, and we should do all that we can to counter this behavior,” Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Jim Risch of Idaho...

The spread of Chinese overseas police service stations around the world raises concerns among human rights campaigners. The Chinese government is opening illegal police posts all over the world. China claims that these posts are capable of cracking down on global and multinational crimes. These checkpoints have been opened in many countries around the world including developed countries like Canada and Ireland. According to local media reports, Fuzhou has established informal police service stations affiliated with the Public Security Bureau (PSB) across Canada. At least three of these stations are located in the Greater Toronto Area only. Chinese Police Station...

In a shocking verdict that speaks volumes about the state of justice in Western Europe, a young American woman living in Germany has been convicted of manslaughter, receiving a two-year suspended sentence, for fatally stabbing a 64-year-old Eritrean migrant who sexually assaulted her in broad daylight. The female sexual assault victim, identified as Fallyn B., was just 20 years old at the time of the attack. She was groped on an escalator by the migrant at Kaiserslautern Central Station, an area increasingly plagued by migrant-related crime, the German newspaper Die Zeit reported. According to surveillance footage and eyewitness reports, the...

The European Union on Friday threatened to target US steel and textile exports in retaliation for Washington's restrictions on steel imports, unless the Bush administration agree to its demands for compensation. In an aggressive riposte to last week's White House decision to levy duties of up to 30 per cent on steel imports, the European Commission confirmed it was drawing up a list of US goods worth about $2bn which could face increased EU tariffs. The $2bn relates to the value of EU steel exports affected by the US tariffs. "The overall amount we'll be looking for is close to...

One of the most famous German warships in history, SMS Emden had a surprisingly short combat life. Only a couple months. But she was so effective and such a menace during this, that the cruiser has never been forgotten. It's a toss up between her and Graf Spee on which is the more famous German raider. In today's video, we'll be looking at Emden's wreck. From when she was run aground, to how the ship fell apart over the years. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any decent images of the current wreck site.

A German military assessment exposes major issues with NATO weapons in Ukraine. The PzH 2000 howitzer, while advanced, is so technically fragile that its combat usefulness is in doubt. The Leopard 1A5 tank is used mostly as makeshift artillery due to weak armor. The Leopard 2A6 is too expensive and complex to maintain at the front. Air defense systems also face problems. The IRIS-T works well, but ammo is too costly and scarce. The Patriot system is called “unsuitable for combat” because its MAN carrier vehicles are outdated and lack spare parts. This information was revealed in a transcript of...

Ninety per cent bored stiff, nine per cent frozen stiff and one per cent scared stiff. That was - historian Andy Robertshaw insists - the experience of most soldiers in the First World War. It was not one of constant fighting, never-ending trench foot and heartless aggression from commanding officers, despite the impression to the contrary given by most film depictions. As for how I felt on a chilly but sunny day last week when I toured Andy's faithful reconstruction of a real British trench, I will let you decide from the pictures. The trench dug in woodland at Detling...

He had no doubts at first, but slowly they emerged. He was struck, he says, by the fact that the first coins bearing Muhammad’s name did not appear until the late 7th century — six decades after the religion did. He traded ideas with some scholars in Saarbrücken who in recent years have been pushing the idea of Muhammad’s nonexistence. They claim that “Muhammad” wasn’t the name of a person but a title, and that Islam began as a Christian heresy. Prof. Kalisch didn’t buy all of this. Contributing last year to a book on Islam, he weighed the odds...

NATO is a corpse. All that remains is the grotesque performance art of a diplomatic zombie stumbling from summit to summit, mouthing tired clichés about “shared values” and “burden sharing,” even as its core strategic logic lies rotting beneath the surface. The Atlantic Alliance, once the steel scaffolding of Western security, has become a hollow ritual. Its military readiness is an illusion. Its political cohesion is fraying. Its future, if it has one, lies not in revival—but in reinvention or replacement. This is not a triumphalist declaration from the Kremlin or Beijing. It is a sober diagnosis, grounded in realism...

The European veil of leftist intellectual and moral superiority is starting to crumble. In recent weeks, we’ve seen Europe begin to take responsibility for its defense, the climate crazies seeing many of their goals collapsing under the weight of the twin realities of science and economics, and the rise of conservative politicians who are seeking an end to the immigration invasion. ... Europe is now fully awake to the fact that the U.S. is not their on-call military ... Thanks to decades of cradle-to-grave benefits, in addition to their reliance on the U.S. for their defense, Europe essentially has no...

snip... ~This, for example, is an interesting development. From the Reinickendorf district of Berlin: Mann stürmt mit Machete in Bäckerei – und wird mit Baseballschlägern totgeprügelt Which means: Man storms into bakery with machete - and is beaten to death with baseball bats Who takes a baseball bat to a bakery? Well, as usual, the local media coverage is minimal and designed to obfuscate. The 38-year-old deceased had apparently been living in a homeless shelter and was a regular of the baker's who believed him to be Romanian. He entered the shop on the Residenzstraße bearing the increasingly popular Euro-accessory...

What a difference a couple of months of lies and betrayals make. Two days ago, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, led by Alice Weidel, was in a statistical tie with Chancellor-Elect Friedrich Merz's Christian Democrats (CDU). AfD was, however, still iced out of any government participation, even as Merz lied and finagled his way in efforts to form a coalition government with anyone but them. The German public, watching Merz's negotiations go down, their votes for change cast aside in the frenzied deal making, and their few remaining freedoms cast to the wind, had an almost instantaneous case of...

Newly uncovered photos and online accounts purportedly associated with the Wisconsin teen school shooter suggest a deeply disturbing obsession with other school shooters such as Columbine killer Eric Harris — and even show her wearing a t-shirt of his favorite band. A now-eerie snapshot of Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow, 15, was posted on her father’s Facebook page and shows her aiming a rifle at a shooting range wearing a shirt from the German industrial rock band KMFDM. Harris was seen in photos also wearing one of the band’s T-shirts before he and Dylan Klebold went on to murder 13 people in...

Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson 🚨BREAKING: President Trump announces MASSIVE tariffs are coming VERY shortly on pharmaceuticals. THIS is what I voted for: "We're gonna tariff our pharmaceuticals ... we're going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals." From Aaron Rupar 8:00 PM · Apr 8, 2025

AfD and CDU continue tied at 24.5

Ferdinand Porsche became widely known as the brilliant engineer behind the bestselling Volkswagen Beetle and some of Porsche’s first sports cars. But like his creations, the German industrialist had a dark side that is impossible to separate from his technical achievements. During the Second World War, Porsche’s manufacturing business, along with many others, became a key pillar of the Third Reich – helping to sustain Adolf Hitler’s war effort by churning out tens of thousands of militarized versions of what would later be renamed the Beetle. […] Yet amid a new era of European instability, the Porsche clan has revealed...