Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — A division of the U.S. Agency for International Development eliminated by Trump administration cuts last year was reborn Thursday as an independent nonprofit, allowing its international work to continue in a new form. This reincarnation of USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures as the nonprofit DIV Fund is thanks to $48 million raised from two private donors. It is a rare instance of continuation after the Trump administration froze all foreign funding last year and unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to tear down the agency that delivered U.S. foreign aid for 60 years. Out of that destruction,...

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — In some ways, 10-year-old Giancarlo is one of the lucky ones. He still goes to school. Each morning, he and his family bundle up and leave their Minneapolis apartment to wait for his bus. His little brother hefts on his backpack, even though he stopped going to day care weeks ago because his mom is too afraid to take him. As they wait behind a wrought-iron fence, Giancarlo’s mother pulls the boys into the shadow of a tree to pray. It’s the only time she stops scanning the street for immigration agents. “God, please protect my son...

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flooded Minneapolis, Shane Mantz dug his Choctaw Nation citizenship card out of a box on his dresser and slid it into his wallet. Some strangers mistake the pest-control company manager for Latino, he said, and he fears getting caught up in ICE raids. Like Mantz, many Native Americans are carrying tribal documents proving their U.S. citizenship in case they are stopped or questioned by federal immigration agents. This is why dozens of the 575 federally recognized Native nations are making it easier to get tribal IDs. They’re waiving fees, lowering the...

Tin SoldierAn American Vigilante In Afghanistan, Using the Press for Profit and Glory By Mariah Blake In April 2004, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxicabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack. Shortly thereafter, he headed to Afghanistan, where he spent the next two months conducting a series of raids with his team, which he called Task Force Saber 7. By late June, he claimed to have captured the...

The ‘nothing ever happens’ people seem to be, sadly, correct about Iran thus far, although one hopes that the brutal Islamic Republic might still be overthrown. It’s hard to know what to think, and at times like this we all turn to the experts to give their analysis of what might happen and what might follow. Foreign policy expertise is hard work, because it requires both a specific knowledge of the national culture and the relative strength of personalities. Because there are so many factors involved, analysts frequently get things completely wrong, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles being the notorious...

President Donald Trump marked his first year back in office by presiding over a meandering, nearly two-hour-long press briefing to recount his accomplishments, repeating many false claims he made throughout 2025. Among the topics about which he continued to spread falsehoods were the 2020 election, foreign policy, the economy and energy. Here’s a closer look at the facts. 2020 election TRUMP, referencing former President Joe Biden: “... a man that didn’t win the election, by the way, it’s a rigged election. Everybody knows that now. THE FACTS: This is a blatant falsehood that has been disproven many times over… International...

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — There was the pregnant woman who missed her medical checkup, afraid to visit a clinic during the Trump administration’s sweeping Minnesotaimmigration crackdown. A nurse found her at home, already in labor and just about to give birth. There was the patient with kidney cancer who vanished without his medicine in immigration detention facilities. It took legal intervention for his medicine to be sent to him, though doctors are unsure if he’s been able to take it. There was the diabetic afraid to pick up insulin, the patient with a treatable wound that festered and required a trip...

As 79-year-old US President Donald Trump enters the second year of his second term, questions about his physical and cognitive health are a recurring topic amid viral images, defiant responses from the White House and a lack of medical disclosure. The debate echoes earlier controversies around the health of US leaders – and raises uncomfortable questions about transparency and power. Let’s be clear: we have no idea what his health condition is. All we can really assess is what we see,” presidential historian Barbara Perry says. “And what we witness is an almost octogenarian man who keeps nodding off at...

As its immigration crackdown in Minneapolis intensifies, the Trump administration is leaning into messaging that borrows from phrases, images and music about national identity that have become popular among right-wing groups. ...The administration says it’s tired of criticism that its messaging is framed around white supremacy or Nazi slogans. “It seems that the mainstream media has become a meme of their own: The deranged leftist who claims everything they dislike must be Nazi propaganda,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “This line of attack is boring and tired. Get a grip." César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio...

Federal immigration officers have shot 11 people since September as the Department of Homeland Security has ramped up deportation operations around the country. In the majority of the shootings, officers have fired into cars — a tactic that law enforcement authorities and policing experts have been trying for decades to curtail. The vehicle shootings raise serious concerns among policing experts about the rapidly expanding deployment of DHS personnel into American communities, where officers are regularly captured on video clashing with immigrants who are in the country illegally as well as citizens who protest the arrests. The shootings “are not one-offs,”...

DETROIT (AP) — At the North American International Auto Show, tires squeal as gearheads put shiny new vehicles through their paces on a pair of indoor tracks that sprawl across the event space. One of those tracks used to be set aside exclusively for electric vehicles as U.S. automakers sought to quickly build out the cars of the future. But no longer. This year, both strips are open to hybrids and gas-powered vehicles as Detroit continues a pivot away from EVs since President Donald Trump returned to the White House with a pro-fossil fuels agenda. “The show will always reflect...

Crowds gathered again in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Jan. 7, marching through the same streets where some of them were protesting five and a half years ago after George Floyd’s murder. The full force and fury of the federal government landed on Minnesota this week. “You will be held accountable for your crimes,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Jan. 6, as the largest immigration enforcement action in agency history surged into the state. It felt like she was addressing all Minnesotans, not just the handcuffed man she paraded before the cameras. Minnesotans reeled as masked ICE agents descended on the...

Journalist Michael Patrick Leahy is facing jail at a hearing tomorrow because he published information from long-hidden journal of Covenant Killer Audrey Hale.. The lawfully obtained information comes from records that should already be public. Information that we have a right to know. Nashville Police confirm authenticity of Covenant Killer Audrey Hale journal pages obtained by The Tennessee Star.

NEW YORK (AP) — By nearly any measure, 2025 has been a rough year for anyone concerned about freedom of the press. It’s likely to be the deadliest year on record for journalists and media workers. The number of assaults on reporters in the U.S. nearly equals the last three years combined. The president of the United States berates many who ask him questions, calling one woman “piggy.” And the ranks of those doing the job continues to thin. It’s hard to think of a darker time for journalists. So say many, including Tim Richardson, a former Washington Post reporter...

One week ago, 23-year-old Nick Shirley was relatively unknown in the public sphere. But in recent days, he has gained hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views, amplified by Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance and FBI Director Kash Patel. The MAGA leaders promoted Shirley’s video of himself and a Minnesota activist investigating federally funded facilities in the state that allegedly posed as daycares without any children present. It’s part of what many on the right say is widespread government assistance fraud perpetuated by the Somali community there. Shirley’s experience could only happen in today’s media and political...

As Washington state residents take stock of widespread damage, officials say the recent succession of storms highlights why proactive work to protect communities from flooding is so essential. But the Trump administration has delayed or attempted to cut federal funding for some of those projects, leaving a slate of the state’s major initiatives in limbo. Washington had secured tens of millions of dollars in federal grants for projects to elevate houses, move people away from flood-prone areas and protect homes with new levees, among other measures. But earlier this year, the Trump administration attempted to cancel roughly $182 million in...

The other day R. Bruce Dold, the great Pulitzer Prize winning editor of the Chicago Tribune, died. And our friend Cory Franklin wrote a beautiful column about Bruce. At the church there were many people there, people I knew, former colleagues at the Tribune who loved and respected Bruce. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were not there for Bruce alone, but that we also were mourning journalism itself. At least Chicago journalism, the Chicago newspapers. I’m not trying to redo Dr. Franklin’s great work about Bruce, but I did add an editor’s note explaining that while he...

UKHIYA, Bangladesh (AP) — In moments when she is alone, when there is a break in the beatings from her husband, the girl cries for the school that was once her place of peace in a world that has otherwise offered her none. Ever since the military in her homeland of Myanmar killed her father in 2017, forcing her to flee to neighboring Bangladesh with her mother and little sisters, the school had protected Hasina from the predators who prowl her refugee camp, home to 1.2 million members of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority. One day in June, when Hasina was...

CHICAGO, Dec 13 (Reuters) - The windowless newsroom of The Phoenix, the Loyola University Chicago newspaper, hums like an old refrigerator. A coffee pot burbles in the corner as juniors Julia Pentasuglio and Ella Daugherty lean over a glowing laptop, updating a Google map. Each red pin marks a sighting of federal immigration agents near campus and the surrounding neighborhoods. Nearby, editor-in-chief Lilli Malone scrolls through reports from Rogers Park, a neighborhood along Chicago's lakefront where 80 languages mix. There were new pins from seven sightings that day alone - reports of vans barreling down side streets, masked immigration officers...

WASHINGTON (AP) — After the arrest of a man charged with placing two pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national parties on Jan. 5, 2021, the warning from the Trump administration was clear: If you come to the nation’s capital to attack citizens and institutions of democracy, you will be held accountable. Yet Justice Department leaders who announced the arrest were silent about the violence that had taken place when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol and clashed with police one day after those bombs were discovered. It was the latest example of the...