Free Republic

Pakistan carried out airstrikes on Afghanistan’s two largest cities on Friday, including the capital, Kabul, according to officials from both nations, escalating months of tension and border skirmishes into an open conflict. Beyond Kabul, home to six million people, the strikes hit the southern city of Kandahar — where the Taliban’s supreme leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, lives — and the border province of Paktia, according to Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban government. Pakistan launched the strikes hours after Afghan troops had attacked Pakistani border positions, according to Afghan and Pakistani officials. The Afghan attacks were described as retaliation...

With the threat of a U.S. strike on Iran looming, the United States embassy in Jerusalem has told its workers that they may leave Israel and warned them that if they want to, it is vital that they do so immediately, according to an email from Ambassador Mike Huckabee sent to the U.S. mission Friday. The move followed meetings and phone calls through the night, Mr. Huckabee told embassy workers in the email, and resulted from “an abundance of caution” and conversations with the State Department in which officials agreed that the safety of embassy staff was a priority. Those...

Since its peak last fall, Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has lost almost half its value. Nearly $2 trillion of wealth has evaporated from the global crypto market since October. We have one question. What took so long? Outside of crimes and scams, the technology is useless, and its economics are even worse. ....At a time when investors have grown skittish about riskier assets, the value of Bitcoin has fallen nearly 50 percent since October, dropping to below $70,000, proving it was only a matter of time before crypto faced the critical lens it always needed but never truly received....

Drug lords have been killed or captured, and cartels have splintered or collapsed, only to see more violent ones replace them and the illicit trade expand. So, 60years of war on drugs, what has actually worked? ...The Sinaloa Cartel, after all, did not go away after its chief, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the notorious drug lord known as El Chapo, was captured and extradited to the United States. ...Rather than simply going after kingpins like Mr. Oseguera, the authorities need to take a holistic approach to dismantle these groups more completely, analysts say. The Mexican government has to use a combination...

The husband of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer has been barred from the department’s headquarters after at least two female staff members told officials that he had sexually assaulted them, according to people familiar with the decision and a police report obtained by The New York Times. The women said Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s husband, Dr. Shawn DeRemer, had touched them inappropriately at the Labor Department’s building on Constitution Avenue. One of the incidents, during working hours on the morning of Dec. 18, was recorded on office security cameras, the people said. The video showed Dr. DeRemer giving one of the women an...

Nickolay Mladenov, the head diplomat in charge of the Board of Peace's subcommittee on the Gaza ceasefire, stressed on Friday that all armed groups in the Gaza Strip must disarm. Mladenov was responding on social media to a post by Aaron Goren, an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who wondered why Mladenov refused to respond to a question on whether reports that Hamas will only be partially disarmed as part of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan are accurate. “I've made it very clear that all militants in Gaza need to be disarmed and there is...

The Times Guild Bargaining Committee sent staffers a newsletter on Tuesday detailing the latest labor negotiations. The Guild said it made a "big push to end the two-tier system The New York Times created and perpetuates by wrongly excluding jobs and workers from the Times Guild" and received a revised proposal from the company to end all hybrid work guarantees on March 1, 2027. "At that point, they would have the right to require us to work in the office five days a week and to eliminate our contractually guaranteed three weeks of remote work per year. As we saw...

Republican officials and candidates in Texas have shifted their rhetorical attack lines from the border fears that dominated recent elections to the state’s growing Muslim population, with language that echoes the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric has unnerved many in the state’s Islamic community while sending signals to Republicans outside Texas who might be searching for rhetorical targets now that the nation’s southwestern border has grown quiet. Ads for Senator John Cornyn of Texas have touted his fight against “radical Islam.” Texas Republican lawmakers created a “Sharia-Free America Caucus” in Congress....

In an age of rage, it is often difficult to stand out in the mob as so many pander to the perpetually irate. However, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has found a way to win the race to the bottom. In a posting on Bluesky, Bouie mocked the account of the addiction of the mother of Vice President J.D. Vance, saying that she should have sold her son for drugs. Bouie used Bluesky (the digital safe zone for the viewpoint intolerant on the left) to post one of the most reprehensible attacks on Vance. Bouie wrote that “this is...

On June 8, 1967, the Israeli military machine-gunned, bombed and torpedoed the U.S.S. Liberty, an American vessel floating off the Sinai Peninsula, killing 34 service members. Those facts are not in dispute. But almost everything else about the attack is driving a wedge through the MAGA movement. On one side are prominent voices like the podcaster Ben Shapiro, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Rich Lowry, editor in chief of The National Review. They insist the attack on the Liberty was a tragic case of mistaken identity amid the chaos of the Six-Day War, a conclusion shared by a U.S....

It’s known as “Don Colossus.” At 15 feet tall, the statue of President Trump, mounted on its 7,000-pound pedestal, is about the height of a two-story building — a giant effigy cast in bronze and finished with a thick layer of gold leaf. For more than a year, the golden statue has been at the center of one of the stranger moneymaking ventures of the Trump era. A group of cryptocurrency investors paid $300,000 to have a sculptor create it as a tribute to Mr. Trump, an outspoken crypto proponent. Then they used it to promote a memecoin called $PATRIOT....

Jeannine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, on Monday threatened jail time for anyone who enters the capital with a gun. In remarks on Fox News that could deepen a growing rift between gun owners and the Trump administration, Ms. Pirro declared that if anyone brings “a gun into the District, you mark my words, you’re going to jail. I don’t care if you have a license in another district and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.” Her remarks prompted swift pushback from the Republican Party’s pro-Second Amendment wing, which was thrown...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS What do Europeans want from the United States? As President Bush prepares for his first trip to Europe since his re-election - a five-day swing through Belgium, Germany and Slovakia - the Op-Ed page asked a variety of Europeans to name the single most important thing Mr. Bush could do to reinvigorate trans-Atlantic relations. "No New Wars" By ELFRIEDE JELINEK, Vienna President Bush ought to convince Europeans that he is not planning another war, while at the same time professing to think highly of the opinion of European nations and to value them. PRESIDENT BUSH needs Europe. He...

President Donald Trump declared that The New York Times must “pay a price” on Thursday after the Gray Lady and Siena University released a new poll suggesting that just 40% of registered voters approve of him. In a write-up about the survey, the Times’ chief political analyst Nate Cohn observed that “The major demographic shifts of the last election have snapped back. In today’s poll, Mr. Trump’s approval rating by demographic group looks almost exactly as it did in Times/Siena polling in the run-up to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. If anything, young and nonwhite voters are even...

Vocal Trump supporters are demonizing Renee Good, her partner and their allies, with some even using an acronym: AWFUL, or Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. In the days since a federal agent killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, Republican officials and conservative commentators have called the 37-year-old white woman “very violent,” a “deranged lunatic woman” and a “domestic terrorist.” Some right-wing influencers have latched onto a different word — or rather an acronym: Ms. Good, they have said, was AWFUL. “An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on...

For a year, Wall Street’s dominant theme has been the so-called K-shaped economy, in which the well-to-do have powered financial activity despite lower earners’ struggles. This week, the nation’s largest banks reported a broadly disappointing set of quarterly earnings, the first stumble after a yearlong spree of rising markets and softening regulations paid off handsomely for the finance set. Results at Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo all fell short of expectations, and their shares fell. Troubles ranged from delayed merger deals (JPMorgan) to stubborn expenses (Citi) to questions about the efficacy of artificial intelligence tools (Bank...

Black female professionals have seen a steep drop in employment over the last year. They are turning to each other for pep talks and résumé advice.When Nneka Obiekwe started a WhatsApp group chat in September, she was just trying to help her out-of-work friends. A consultant and skilled networker, Ms. Obiekwe, 37, is the kind of person friends turn to when they are looking for a referral or connection to a hiring manager. But since March, she had been receiving pleas every few weeks. By autumn, her network was tapped out. Most of the people reaching out were, like Ms....

The family-owned company that operates The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said on Wednesday that the newspaper will cease publication on Sunday, May 3, signaling the end of a publication whose origins date to 1786. The company, Block Communications, said it had lost more than $350 million over the past 20 years while publishing the newspaper. In a statement, it said the financial pressures facing local journalism had made “continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable.” The company cited recent court decisions that required The Post-Gazette to operate under the terms of a 2014-17 labor contract, which it described as imposing...

The Justice Department has backed off a dubious claim about President Nicolás Maduro that the Trump administration promoted last year in laying the groundwork to remove him from power in Venezuela: accusing him of leading a drug cartel called Cartel de los Soles. That claim traces back to a 2020 grand jury indictment of Mr. Maduro drafted by the Justice Department. In July 2025, copying language from it, the Treasury Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization. In November, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and President Trump’s national security adviser, ordered the State Department to do...

Many local New Yorkers and visiting tourists were rightly upset to see a massive billboard in Times Square proclaiming that, “Jesus is Palestinian. Merry Christmas.” Making matters even worse was another billboard containing a citation from the Quran (Surah Al-Imran 3:45), with Allah announcing the good news of the birth of Jesus the Messiah. The ads, which were sponsored by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), was said to be acts of “cultural resilience.” In reality, they promoted falsehood and stirred conflict at a time that is still sacred to hundreds of millions of Christians worldwide. As for allegedly demonstrating unity...