Free Republic

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) – Early vote counting in Australia’s general election Saturday suggested the government was likely to be returned for a second term. The Australian Electoral Commission’s early projections gave the ruling center-left Labor Party 70 seats and the conservative opposition coalition 24 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, the lower chamber where parties need a majority to form governments. Unaligned minor parties and independent candidates appeared likely to win 13 seats. Senior government minister Jim Chalmers said the early results pointed to volatility and different contests across the nation. Opposition Sen. James McGrath expected the result would...

President Trump has ordered himself a ritzy private plane after giving up hope that Boeing could hand over a revamped Air Force One. The commander in chief is getting an L3Harris jet decked out with suites, plush carpeting, leather couches and more that was once owned by the Qatari government, according to The Wall Street Journal. The interior of the opulent plane was done by famed French interior design firm Alberto Pinto Cabinet — and boasts gold-colored walls and gold furnishings, reminiscent of Trump’s opulent home in Trump Tower. L3Harris is working to transform the lavish plane into one with...

Firebrand Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene has issued a surprising statement critical of President Donald Trump. The Georgia congresswoman is known for her loyal support of the two-time president and her devout defense of his MAGA policy platform. Displaying her faithfulness, Greene likened Trump to Jesus Christ during the president's high-profile legal battles last year. *** On Friday, she issued a scathing statement putting distance in between her and the commander-in-chief. 'I represent the base and when I'm frustrated and upset over the direction of things, you better be clear, the base is not happy,' Greene, wrote on X alongside a...

A surprising shift is underway at the bottom of the world. After decades of contributing to rising sea levels, Antarctica’s massive ice sheet has started growing again — at least for now. A study published this week in Science China Earth Sciences finds that the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) experienced a record-breaking mass gain between 2021 and 2023, largely due to anomalous increases in precipitation. The rebound is especially significant in East Antarctica, where four major glacier basins had previously shown signs of destabilization.

Will the Roman Catholic Church continue its policy of ignoring jihad and appeasing Muslims? Will the next pope continue the last pope’s consistent record of appeasing Islam? The late Pope Francis had a long record of whitewashing Islamic jihad violence and making moral equivalence arguments in order to downplay jihad terror. Back in 2017, Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar, noticed the pope’s yeoman service for the Islamic cause and thanked him for his “defense of Islam against the accusation of violence and terrorism.” Francis was not just a defender of Islam but also a defender of the...

Authorities in Tennessee have released video of a 2022 traffic stop involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He's the Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador. Officers suspected human trafficking, but he was never charged and was allowed to drive on

Acting US Attorney Ed Martin clawed back $1 million from a consulting firm that overbilled USAID by inflating its employee salary costs. This is one of the reasons why the Democrats and RINOs are stonewalling his confirmation. Per the US Attorney’s Office of DC: Stax Inc., a private consulting based in Boston, Massachusetts, has agreed to pay $1 million to resolve allegations it overbilled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in claims for salary reimbursement in the implementation of the U.S. Government funded Sri Lanka@100 project. This matter came to the U.S. Attorney’s Office from the USAID Office of...

Argentina renewed a $5 billion activated swap line with China for another year, the South American nation's central bank said on Thursday, shoring up dwindling foreign reserves as even more funds from the International Monetary Fund could soon pour in. Argentina has long held the $18 billion swap line with China, though the activated portion for $5 billion was set to wind down by June. The activated line will be renewed in full through mid-2026. Without an extension, the Latin American nation would have faced billions of dollars in repayments in coming months, a headache for libertarian President Javier Milei....

Trump has started the White Bouse Wire - loosely patterned after Drudge where you can get news directly from the WH

The woman convicted of kidnapping Elizabeth Smart over two decades ago was arrested Thursday for violating her sex offender probation. Wanda Barzee, who abducted then-14-year-old Smart with her husband Brian David Mitchell in 2002, is accused of illegally ... In 2002, Barzee and Mitchell, who was a street preacher, went through an open window and abducted Smart from her Salt Lake City bedroom at knifepoint. The teen was raped on a near-daily basis, and lived with the couple in run-down homes and campsites in Utah and San Diego. Smart was found nine months later after a good Samaritan saw the...

President Trump unveiled his 2026 budget outline Friday, proposing cuts totaling $163 billion to education, housing, medical research, foreign aid funding, energy and environmental protection — while seeking to boost defense spending to more than $1 trillion. The $163 billion cut in non-defense discretionary spending is a 22.6% reduction from current levels, ... The proposed cuts to government funding are in line with Trump’s greater mission to cut bureaucracy via the Department of Government Efficiency — and DOGE ... The defense budget calls for the elimination of “woke” and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs; a down-payment on a “Golden...

The Spanish blackout made us all aware of how unstable the grid can get when renewables are in the driver’s seat, but one should also not forget that they don’t come cheaply. The idea of getting free energy from wind and solar is inaccurate. Man must build machines to extract energy from nature and those machines, windmills and solar panels, are expensive. ... renewables are unreliable and expensive

MSNBC host and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki insisted in a new interview that she never saw signs that former President Joe Biden had declined while she worked for him. "I never saw that person —not a single time, and I was in the Oval Office every day, that was on that debate stage," Psaki said on the "Mixed Signals" podcast about Biden's performance during the June 2024 presidential debate which raised alarms about his fitness to serve another term. He dropped out the following month and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him as the Democratic...

The number of assisted deaths could be more than 4,000 in the 10th year after the law comes into force in England and Wales if MPs vote for it, a review of the policy says. The estimate forms part of the official impact assessment, external, carried out by civil servants to inform MPs as they debate whether to allow assisted dying. It said initially the numbers coming forward would be low, but are expected to grow over time. The impact assessment says that the total number of assisted deaths is estimated to range from between 164 and 787 in the...

Ten years ago, in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, Islamic terrorists opened fire on a free speech event because Americans dared to draw Muhammad. That moment — May 3, 2015 — should have been a turning point in the West’s battle against Islamic supremacy. Instead, it was quickly buried by media silence, political cowardice, and a deepening national amnesia of Islamic terror in America. Just four months earlier, in January 2015, the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris were massacred by Islamic terrorists for publishing cartoons of Muhammad. Incredibly, within weeks of that slaughter, an Islamic group held a “Stand...

'I used to support you,' protester shouted at the New York Democrat. 'You're a war criminal! War criminal! War Criminal!'A hysterical protester yelling about the "genocide" in Gaza interrupted a district town hall event being held by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., shortly after it began on Friday night. As Ocasio-Cortez first began speaking, she pulled up a PowerPoint presentation for the night's event. She was then interrupted before even getting through her first slide discussing the Trump administration's budget cuts, including alleged cuts to local healthcare systems. "I am a healthcare worker and I want to know what you're doing...

Move over, Jean Valjean — Luigi Mangione will soon be immortalized on a San Francisco stage in a sickening musical comedy glorifying the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO gunman. “Luigi the Musical,” slated to debut at the Taylor Street Theater on June 13, promises a “bold, campy and unafraid” take on the life and times of the man accused of perpetrating an assassination that left two young children without a father. Opening night is already sold out on the official website, which uses the tagline “A story of love, murder and hash browns,” a reference to Mangione scarfing down the McDonald’s menu...

The mid-1990s feel like a different world. In the 30 years since, the global economy has shifted dramatically, across sectors and markets.But headline stats like GDP, GDP per capita, or growth rates don’t always reflect what’s happening at the individual level.So, has life actually improved over time?To help answer that, Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao visualizes figures from Our World in Data to show how daily median incomes have changed in 20 of the world’s largest economies from 1994 to 2024.All figures are in PPP-adjusted International dollars per person. They are also adjusted for inflation, taxes, and benefits.ℹ️ PPP-adjusted International dollars...

The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has referred 57 cases of potential voter fraud to the DOJ, an official told NBC News.“Voter Rights” activists, like the leftists at the Brennan Center Justice, and their pals in the accomplice media have spent a lot of time and credibility telling us that foreign nationals never vote in U.S. elections. If they do, it’s extremely rare. A myth. But we’ve seen a lot of “extremely rare” pop up in recent years on the battleground of election integrity. “It amounts to a vanishingly rare phenomenon that is not going to impact the outcome...

‘No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.’On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order defunding NPR and PBS — two taxpayer-subsidized “news” organizations that have consistently published propaganda.The order proclaims that “Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”“At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” the...