Free Republic

Trump’s Riyadh Speech Heralds The End Of Failed Neocon Foreign PolicyTruly looking out for American interests means refraining from trying to remake foreign countries in our own image.In what was probably the most important presidential speech in decades, President Donald Trump repudiated decades of failed interventionist U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East during an official visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday.Not only did Trump lambast neocon “nation-building” in the region, he more or less vowed never to pursue the kinds of neocon misadventures that spilt American blood and treasure over the past 25 years in the insane pursuit...

Referral comes from U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency, complete with supporting evidence. The federal government's main housing loan agency has referred New York Attorney General Letitia James, a longtime nemesis of President Donald Trump, to the U.S. Justice Department for possible prosecution over alleged mortgage fraud, according to a letter obtained by Just the News. William J. Pulte, the director of the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), made the referral Monday to Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy Todd Blanche, and attached evidence he said corroborated earlier media reports alleging irregularities in a series of loans James obtained,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mary Glantz was in her room at a Hampton Inn in Columbia, South Carolina, last Friday night during a trip visiting friends when her phone began pinging furiously with messages at 9:30 p.m. They were from panicked colleagues at the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent, congressionally funded organization in Washington that had found itself in the crosshairs of billionaire Elon Musk's cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency. At 10:09 p.m., Glantz's own termination notice arrived in an email telling her she was being fired, effective immediately. Most of USIP's 300 staff were laid off that night. Glantz...

Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk was walking alone Tuesday night to meet friends at a dinner where they would break their 13-hour Ramadan fast when six plainclothes officers suddenly encircled her on the street near her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, surveillance video shows. The 30-year-old shrieked in fear when an officer in a hooded sweatshirt and hat grabbed her by the wrists as another pulled out a concealed badge on a lanyard and confiscated her cell phone. Soon afterward, the swarm of officers who had surrounded her on the sidewalk pulled cloth coverings over their mouths and noses, some...

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Russian forces are preparing to launch a fresh military offensive in the coming weeks to maximize the pressure on Ukraine and strengthen the Kremlin’s negotiating position in ceasefire talks, Ukrainian government and military analysts said. The move could give Russian President Vladimir Putin every reason to delay discussions about pausing the fighting in favor of seeking more land, the Ukrainian officials said, renewing their country’s repeated arguments that Russia has no intention of engaging in meaningful dialogue to end the war.

The State Department has officially notified Congress that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been dissolved, and the remaining operations of the agency will be run by the State Department itself. According to United Press International, the State Department officially told Congress that USAID was dissolving on Friday. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement, "Today, the Department of State and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have notified Congress on their intent to undertake a reorganization that would involve realigning certain USAID functions to the Department by July 1, 2025, and discontinuing the remaining...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Ukraine could be placed under a “temporary administration” as part of a peace process that could include help from North Korea and other Moscow allies, according to Russian state media. Speaking to a group of servicemen in Russia’s northern port of Murmansk, Putin laid out several provisions for a peace process to end the three-year war launched by Moscow in February 2022, according to Russia’s state news agency, TASS. Among Putin’s many suggestions was a call for new elections in Ukraine and the “signing of key accords” once the country is under international administration,...

KYIV, Ukraine—It was a scorching summer day in 2014 when Artem Kravchenko and hundreds of other Ukrainian soldiers put their trust in a Russian promise not to open fire and retreated in a column from the surrounded city of Ilovaisk. By the end of the day, Kravchenko found himself lying in a ditch surrounded by dead comrades after Russian forces shot up the column. With three Russian bullets in his body, he had to drink his own urine to survive. “They started shooting from the right, so we went to the left and met another ambush there,” said Kravchenko, who...

Russia's under-pressure economy and Vladimir Putin have been dealt a devastating blow after state-controlled gas giant Gazprom recorded a huge net loss of $12.89B (£9.9bn) in 2024. The company's financial woes were compounded by plummeting share prices in its subsidiary Gazpro Neft and an increased income tax rate of 25%. This greatly raised tax liabilities for the company, leading to billions of pounds lost and follows a historic 2023 where Gazprom revealed a net loss for the first time in 25 years, recording a historic deficit of 629 billion rubles ($7.6 billion). The huge financial blow has had a knock...

MANDAN, N.D. (AP) — A North Dakota jury on Wednesday found Greenpeace liable for defamation and other claims brought by a pipeline company in connection with protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline. The nine-person jury awarded Dallas-based Energy Transfer and its subsidiary Dakota Access hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The lawsuit had accused Netherlands-based Greenpeace International, Greenpeace USA and funding arm Greenpeace Fund Inc. of defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy and other acts. When asked if Greenpeace plans to appeal, Senior Legal Adviser Deepa Padmanabha said, “We know that this fight is not over.” Padmanabha added that...

After years of being held captive by Environmental Extremists, Lunatics, Radicals, and Thugs, allowing other Countries, in particular China, to gain tremendous Economic advantage over us by opening up hundreds of all Coal Fire Power Plants, I am authorizing my Administration to immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL.

Zelensky's version of the battle of the bulge....

"When Nate heard his cousin, U.S. Vice President JD Vance, attack Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House’s Oval Office, he flew into a rage. In his camper van, lost on the roads of the American West that he has been crisscrossing since he came back from Ukraine in January 2025, Nate was disappointed. He felt let down by his younger cousin — JD is a few years younger than Nate, who is 47 — whose integrity he had always defended. “JD is a good guy, intelligent,” Nate says. “When he criticized aid to Ukraine, I told myself that...

You can see the ridiculous political puppet show for what it really is. They are just actors reading a script.

Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., erupted over Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) while delivering remarks to colleagues on the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday. During a markup of bills related to providing the House with information on DOGE access to Treasury Department payment systems and the Social Security Administration, Larson turned red and shouted at Republican colleagues, "You will do whatever Elon Musk and Donald Trump tell you to do. "Where's the independence of the committee? Where's the legislature? We're an equal branch of government," an enraged Larson yelled, "Look at the empty seats here....

Putin CRUSHES Trump's Ceasefire Trap, Ukraine's Army COLLAPSES in Kursk!My prediction: By 2050 even Wikipedia won't know what the word "ukraine" might have ever meant....

A top political columnist for The Washington Post resigned today, accusing Post chief executive and publisher Will Lewis of killing her column that criticized owner Jeff Bezos's drive to overhaul the opinion pages to focus on his libertarian priorities. Post columnist and Associate Editor Ruth Marcus, who has worked at the paper for four decades, says she can no longer stay there. "Jeff's announcement that the opinion section will henceforth not publish views that deviate from the pillars of individual liberties and free markets threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what...

Former U.S. Senator Jon Tester, D-Mont., linked his 2024 Senate loss to ex-Vice President Kamala Harris’ poor performance in the state. Tester, who lost to former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy in that race, declared on HBO’s "Real Time with Bill Maher" that the woke politics embraced by the top of the ticket are what doomed his performance in Montana. "And the top of the ticket did not perform because I don’t think the top of the ticket embraced the issues that Americans were talking about," he said. "We got wrapped up in all the cancel culture crap." Tester had served...

Weapons manufacturers across Europe are rushing to secure contracts after EU countries announced plans to dramatically increase defence spending. Share prices of European arms companies had already risen sharply following the US decision to suspend military aid to Ukraine. ... Von der Leyen suggests the EU could raise "close to" €650 billion over four years, which would be added to a €150 billion loan to member states for defence investment, totalling €800 billion. European arms manufacturers view this as a golden opportunity to compete against their US rivals.

U.S. satellite mapping company Maxar Technologies has blocked Ukraine's access to its imagery, according to a report by Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi. The publication quotes unnamed users of Maxar's commercial service as saying that the company provided them with an official explanation that the restriction was made "in response to an administrative request." Maxar's reported move could be a consequence of U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent decision to stop supplying American military intelligence data to Ukraine. It could be seen as evidence that the ban affects not only state institutions, but also U.S. companies and commercial services providing satellite data...