Free Republic

A federal judge on Wednesday barred the Trump administration from continuing to detain Mahmoud Khalil under a rarely cited law invoked by the secretary of state — and suggested that Mr. Khalil could be released as early as Friday. However, the judge, Michael E. Farbiarz, paused his own order to give the administration a chance to appeal, saying it would not go into effect until 9:30 a.m. on Friday. And he left a pathway for the government to continue to detain Mr. Khalil for other reasons, though he suggested he would be skeptical were authorities to do so. ***Though Judge...

European nations are increasingly optimistic that they can support Ukraine financially and militarily against Russia even if President Trump decides to wash his hands of the conflict, as he often threatens, and instead focuses on normalizing relations with Moscow. But even with their best efforts, the Europeans cannot replace all of what the United States provides Ukraine — most important, real-time intelligence about Russian forces, incoming missiles and how and where to target the enemy. Ukraine’s ability to fight effectively relies largely on that American intelligence. “The Ukrainians don’t want this to be cut off no matter what,” said Camille...

In May, an American investor tried to sell top German economic officials on an audacious plan to buy a Russian undersea pipeline. Despite years of international friction over the pipeline, he proposed to eventually activate it and deliver natural gas to Germany. The investor, Stephen P. Lynch, had already made the pitch to the Trump administration, which he was betting would want U.S. control over a pivotal piece of energy infrastructure. Now the Germans wanted to hear for themselves about Mr. Lynch’s proposal to lead a takeover of the much-criticized pipeline on the floor of the Baltic Sea, called Nord...

Three young sisters have been found dead in Washington state after a tense weekend of searching. The sisters – Paityn Decker, 9, Evelyn Decker, 8, and Olivia Decker, 5 – failed to return from a “planned visitation” with their father on Friday, sparking a police canvass involving local detectives, federal officers and a Homeland Security helicopter in Chelan County, Washington. Authorities found their bodies near their father’s car on Monday at 3:45 p.m. around the Rock Island State Park campground in western Washington. The girls’ father, 32-year-old Travis Decker, remains missing and is wanted on suspicion of first-degree murder and...

DAVID BROOKS, NEW YORK TIMES: Yes, I'm not sure it was wreckage. There was wreckage if you're at NIH. There are wreckage at certain agencies, but the guy only saved $65 billion out of a multitrillion-dollar budget. So, as a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven't gotten over. And so there's folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That's...

The Marubo Tribe of Brazil’s Amazon has filed a defamation lawsuit in Los Angeles against The New York Times, alleging its coverage of the tribe’s first internet access portrayed them as tech-addicted and obsessed with pornography, according to the New York Post. The suit, seeking hundreds of millions in damages, also names TMZ and Yahoo for amplifying and sensationalizing the story. The article “portrayed the Marubo people as a community unable to handle basic exposure to the internet, highlighting allegations that their youth had become consumed by pornography.”

The New York Times published a hard-hitting report, Sunday, laying out the ways in which President Donald Trump has monetized his office. But the Gray Lady didn’t exactly let Democrats off the hook Sunday — as they also ran a devastating feature on the party’s efforts to win back young male voters. In the piece — written by national political correspondent Shane Goldmacher — some brutal details were reported about the Democratic party’s efforts to bring young men back into the fold. “Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters,...

Top Democratic operatives and donors have been hobnobbing in “luxury hotels” while trying to figure out why the party is shedding men and the working class — moves that have liberals have slammed as out of touch. In one instance, liberal super PAC Future Forward hosted a gathering in the Ritz-Carlton resort in wealthy Half Moon Bay, California, to apprise donors on what went wrong in 2024. Prominent figures such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) were reported in attendance. Some of the elite gatherings featured appetizers like short-rib tostones, mini lobster rolls, beef...

A Manhattan prosecutor allegedly weaponized her powerful position by enlisting allies within the NYPD and the District Attorney's Office to have her estranged husband, a respected New York Times reporter, arrested.Assistant District Attorney Amanda Goun masterminded a scheme to have award-winning health care journalist Joseph Goldstein arrested in a bitter custody war over their two young children, according to a federal lawsuit that reads like the plot of a legal thriller.According to the searing 62-page federal complaint filed earlier this month, ADA Goun allegedly had Goldstein, her husband of seven years, falsely arrested on trumped-up felony assault and child endangerment...

An Indigenous tribe from the Brazilian Amazon has sued The New York Times, saying the newspaper’s reporting on the tribe’s first exposure to the internet led to its members being widely portrayed as technology-addled and addicted to pornography. The Marubo Tribe of the Javari Valley, a sovereign community of about 2,000 people in the rainforest, filed the defamation lawsuit seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages this week in a court in Los Angeles. It also names TMZ and Yahoo as defendants, alleging that their stories amplified and sensationalized the Times’ reporting and smeared the tribe in the process....

We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.” – Paul Krugman, November 2016“Joe Biden will eventually preside over a soaring, ‘morning in America’-type recovery.” – Paul Krugman, November 2020.“Slower growth is certain. For 2025, I see little or no GDP growth, rising unemployment, and persistent inflation.” – Paul Krugmann, May 2025If you want an accurate gauge of future economic conditions, look no further than Paul “Nobel-Prize-Winning-Economist” Krugman. He has a solid record of being exactly wrong, as the above quotations show. So, the fact that he is now predicting stagflation should give everyone a...

Even before President Trump was re-elected, the Heritage Foundation, best known for Project 2025, set out to destroy pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.In late April, the Heritage Foundation dispatched a team to Israel to meet with power players in Israeli politics, including the country’s foreign and defense secretaries and the U.S. ambassador, Mike Huckabee.The conservative Washington-based think tank is best known for spearheading Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for President Trump’s second term that called for reshaping the federal government and an extreme expansion of presidential power.Now the Heritage contingent was in Israel, in part, to discuss another contentious...

A raid on Abby’s Bakery in Los Fresnos heralded the crackdown to come. Ahead of the owners’ trial for “harboring” undocumented workers, the community is seeing the impact of the president’s policies.Most mornings, Leonardo Baez, a father of seven, wakes up hours before sunrise to mix bread dough in the border city of Los Fresnos, Texas. Punishing and laborious work, yes, but owning a beloved bakery has been a lifelong dream of his, he said.It is now in jeopardy.In February, federal agents swooped down on his shop, Abby’s Bakery, detained workers they said were in the country illegally and pressed...

The EU’s top court annulled the Commission’s decision to deny the newspaper New York Times access to messages exchanged between President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, finding that the EU executive failed to plausibly explain why it does not possess the texts. After a long tug-of-war between the European Commission and The New York Times over transparency surrounding the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine contracts, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) today ruled that the Commission “has not given a plausible explanation to justify the non-possession of the requested documents.” According to the Court, the Commission cannot simply...

India and Pakistan have seemingly pulled back from the brink again. But so much was new about the nuclear-armed enemies’ chaotic four-day clash, and so many of the underlying accelerants remain volatile, that there’s little to suggest that the truce represents any return to old patterns of restraint. A new generation of military technology fueled a dizzying aerial escalation. Waves of airstrikes and antiaircraft volleys with modern weapons set the stage. Soon they were joined by weaponized drones en masse for the first time along the old Line of Control in Kashmir — hundreds of them in the sky, probing...

At least 44 of the government contracts canceled on the orders of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting initiative have been resurrected by federal agencies, wiping out more than $220 million of his group’s purported savings, according to a New York Times analysis of federal spending data. But Mr. Musk’s group continues to list 43 of those contracts as “terminations” on its website, which it calls the “Wall of Receipts.” The group even added some of them days or weeks after they had been resurrected. The result was another in a series of data errors on the website that made the group seem...

Oil producing countries are bracing for a bumpy ride this year, with a precipitous drop in prices to the lowest levels in four years seen as the initial, alarming sign of looming turmoil. A price drop benefits any country seeking to cut its fuel bill. But in oil producing nations, lower prices can feed economic troubles, and sometimes political unrest, as governments slash spending. Analysts who had already been predicting lower oil prices because of softening demand amid increased global production said the possibility of a tariff trade war and the overall climate of uncertainty could well deepen producers’ woes....

The New York Times published a 400-word report last week about the rape of a corpse aboard a New York City subway train — but nowhere in the article did the paper mention that the suspect, Felix Rojas, is an illegal alien. Rojas, 44, was arrested for first-degree rape after police say he violated the body of a dead man on an R train in Manhattan on April 9. Surveillance footage reportedly captured Rojas entering the nearly empty train at the Whitehall Street–South Ferry station, rummaging through the pockets of a deceased man and then sexually assaulting the corpse before...

House Republicans are planning to include several of President Trump’s campaign promises in the first draft of the bill, which they hope to release soon.It was easy to miss, but last weekend President Trump floated a fundamental rewrite of the American tax code. In a social media post, and again in remarks to reporters, Mr. Trump suggested the United States could stop taxing income under $200,000 and instead rely on revenue from his extensive tariffs. “It’ll take a little while before we do that, but we’re going to be cutting taxes, and it’s possible we’ll do a complete tax cut,”...

Just over 100 days into the Trump administration, there is mounting anger over the government’s assault on immigrants, its sweeping attacks on workers and social programs and its efforts to establish a right-wing dictatorship in the United States. Trump’s poll numbers are falling sharply, and recent weeks have seen demonstrations involving millions of people in cities throughout the United States. The response of the Democratic Party is to smother this opposition and prevent it from challenging the domination of the corporate-financial oligarchy and the two-party system, through which the ruling class carries out its policies of imperialist war and social...