Free Republic

Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham won elections in areas with large Muslim populations. Both engaged with us as citizens The local and mayoral elections sawmany traditional Labour-voting Muslim voters abandon the party they’ve loyally supported for decades. One incident from one interview, and one sentiment in particular that I heard in my local area, sits front and centre: “I was disgusted when Keir Starmer supported Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza – how can I vote for someone who won’t even apologise for this?” said one man, referring to Starmer’s performance in an interview on LBC last October and...

Gov. Kristi Noem has “no shot” at being Donald Trump’s running mate after revealing in a forthcoming book that she shot and killed her puppy, sources close to the 45th president tell The Post. *** “She was already unlikely to be picked as VP, but had a shot,” the person said of Noem, who has been widely projected to be on Trump’s shortlist. “After this, it’s just impossible.” Noem writes, according to the Guardian, that she executed Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, after determining that the pooch’s “aggressive personality” made her “untrainable” as a hunting dog. “It was not a...

....In 2024 Kristi Noem, a strong contender to be named running mate to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has managed to go one further – by admitting killing a dog of her own. “Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant....By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave....

When Hemil Mangukiya left his small village in the Indian state of Gujarat last December, he told his family he was off to Russia to make a better living than was possible at home in India. Lured by a recruitment video he had seen on YouTube, the 23-year-old had thought he was going for a secure security job far from the war in Ukraine. But in strained phone calls home from Russia, he told his family he was instead sent to a month-long military training camp and then taken to the frontlines, where he was made to dig trenches, carry...

The Conservative party’s biggest donor told colleagues that looking at Diane Abbott makes you “want to hate all black women” and said the MP “should be shot”, the Guardian can reveal. Frank Hester, who has given £10m to the Tories in the past year, said in the meeting that he did not hate all black women. But he said that seeing Abbott, who is Britain’s longest-serving black MP, on TV meant “you just want to hate all black women because she’s there”. He also called all his “foreign” workers together to defend himself against online claims that he had made...

A fleet of Ukrainian drones has targeted Russia, causing explosions and fires at fuel refineries, cutting electricity supplies and reaching Moscow and beyond, according to reports from Russian authorities. -snip- Russian fuel facilities in Oryol and Nizhny Novgorod regions were on fire on Tuesday after drone attacks, local governors and media said. Air defence systems reacted to 25 drones launched by Ukraine over several Russian regions, RIA state news reported, citing Russia’s defence ministry. It was not immediately clear whether all the drones were destroyed. “In the morning, the Kstovo industrial zone, a fuel and energy complex facility, was attacked...

Donald Trump has said the US air force was “cocked and loaded” to attack three Iranian targets on Friday morning, but he called off the strike with 10 minutes to spare after being told that the airstrike might kill as many as 150 people. Trump said in a series of morning tweets that he decided late on Thursday that the death toll was not a proportionate response to the Iranian shooting down of a US spy drone off the Iranian coast 24 hours earlier. The tweets revealed how close the world may have come to a Middle East conflagration, and...

… Five important natural thresholds already risk being crossed, according to the Global Tipping Points report (https://global-tipping-points.org/), and three more may be reached in the 2030s if the world heats 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures. … The tipping points at risk include the collapse of big ice sheets in Greenland and the West Antarctic, the widespread thawing of permafrost, the death of coral reefs in warm waters, and the collapse of one oceanic current in the North Atlantic. Unlike other changes to the climate such as hotter heatwaves and heavier rainfall, these systems do not slowly shift in line with...

The former president’s support base holds firm as each negative in a court of law translates to a positive in the court of public opinion.

Joe Biden, the US vice-president, condemned a plan by Israel to build 1,600 homes on occupied Palestinian land in an East Jerusalem settlement. The Israeli interior ministry's approval of the plan cast a cloud over a visit to the country by Biden just hours after he pledged strong support for the Israeli government. In an unusually strong statement issued after he arrived 90 minutes late for a dinner with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden said: "I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units." He said the blueprint for Ramat Shlomo,...

At least six Russian regions have scrapped 9 May Victory Day parades that mark the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany amid fears over Ukrainian strikes, with a region 400 miles from the border being the latest to cancel. The governor of Saratov announced the parade there would not go ahead because of “safety concerns”, adding to a string of cancellations that are a glaring admission of the country’s military vulnerability more than 14 months into the war. Earlier, heads of Belgorod, Kursk, Voronezh, Oryol, and Pskov region, as well as the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, similarly cancelled their annual military parades....

A good first line is not always necessary because who stops reading after one sentence? But it can be extremely useful in building expectations for the style and characterisation that will follow. While book jackets can indicate a broad genre, that line can define the subgenre. The opening may establish the tone, character, location, era or season but it can also pull a reader into the realm of the story that follows, and often into the head of the protagonist or into an alternate reality. When we open a book, we are ready to embark on a journey. The starter...

The indictment of Donald J Trump has not driven a wooden stake through his heart. He has risen, omnipresent and ominous again, overwhelming his rivals, their voices joined into his choir, like the singing January 6 prisoners, proclaiming the wickedness of his prosecution. As he enters the criminal courthouse to pose for his mugshot and to give his fingerprints, evangelicals venerate him as the adulterous King David or the martyred Christ. Trump does not have to raise his hand to signal to the House Republicans to echo his cry of “WITCH-HUNT”. He owns the House like he owns a hotel....

<p>A mammoth meatball has been created by a cultivated meat company, resurrecting the flesh of the long-extinct animals.</p><p>The project aims to demonstrate the potential of meat grown from cells, without the slaughter of animals, and to highlight the link between large-scale livestock production and the destruction of wildlife and the climate crisis.</p>

One of the authors of a Senate bill that would enable the US commerce department to ban technologies with links to foreign governments has said the Biden White House is “very in favor” of the measure, but stopped short of saying whether the administration has discussed possibly prohibiting the Chinese-owned platform TikTok in particular.

A Florida bill that would require bloggers who write about the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, to register with the state proved a step too far even for the godfather of far-right Republicanism, the former US House speaker Newt Gingrich. “The idea that bloggers criticising a politician should register with the government is insane,” Gingrich wrote on Twitter. “It is an embarrassment that it is a Republican state legislator in Florida who introduced a bill to that effect. He should withdraw it immediately.” The bill was introduced by Jason Brodeur. It states: “If a blogger posts to a blog about an...

<p>The fall of crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has been painted as a big blow to the Democratic party, whose candidates were major beneficiaries of his largesse. But in a new interview, Bankman-Fried has claimed he gave equally large amounts of money to Republicans.</p>

As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless trauma a man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder...

Doctors hail new era for cancer screening as major research shows effectiveness of Galleri test Doctors have told health services to prepare for a new era of cancer screening after a study found a simple blood test could spot multiple cancer types in patients before they develop clear symptoms. The Pathfinder study offered the blood test to more than 6,600 adults aged 50 and over, and detected dozens of new cases of disease. Many cancers were at an early stage and nearly three-quarters were forms not routinely screened for. It is the first time results from the Galleri test, which...

Uncertainty hangs over the planned visit to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant by a team from the UN nuclear watchdog, as inspectors arrived in Ukrainian-controlled Zaporizhzhia city on Wednesday, where they are likely to spend the night before crossing the frontline. The International Atomic Energy Agency mission into Russian-controlled territory, which comprises representatives from countries deemed neutral by both sides, was reportedly intended to last four days. But on Wednesday, the Russian-occupying authorities said the IAEA would be given access for one day. They also said the mission would be expected to join the queue of civilians who cross back and...