Free Republic

🇺🇸 A judge ordered the Pentagon to restore press credentials and stop screening journalists. The Pentagon's response: comply with the ruling, close the entire correspondents' corridor, and relocate media to an external annex that's still under construction. The court said you can't control who covers the military. The military said fine, but you're covering it from across the parking lot now. This is happening during the biggest U.S. military operation in two decades, when press access to the Pentagon matters more than at any point since Iraq. Source: @SeanParnellASW @BreannaMorello

NEW YORK (AP) — In a strongly worded decision this week, a federal judge ordered that the Voice of America — its mission to provide news for countries around the world largely shut down for the past year by the Trump administration — come roaring back to life. Whether or not that actually happens is anybody’s guess. The government filed notice Thursday to appeal U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s order two days earlier to put hundreds of VOA employees who have been on paid leave the past year back to work. Lamberth had ruled on March 7 that...

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — In the two weeks since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump increasingly has been knocked on his political heels. He’s grown more agitated with news coverage and has failed to find a way to explain why he started the war — or how he will end it — that resonates with a public concerned by American deaths in the conflict, surging oil prices and dropping financial markets. Even some of his supporters are questioning his plan and his overall poll numbers are declining. Meanwhile, Moscow is getting a boost...

One year after Elon Musk began an unprecedented attempt to eliminate swaths of the federal government, newly released deposition videos are providing a never-before-seen look at two of the people responsible for the largest mass termination of federal grants in the National Endowment for the Humanities' history. In lengthy depositions, two DOGE employees -- Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh -- defended the effort to cut "useless agencies" as part of DOGE's attempt to reduce the federal deficit. "You don't regret that people might have lost important income ... to support their lives?" an attorney asked Cavanaugh about the grant cancellations....

A classified report by the US National Intelligence Council concluded that the Iranian regime was unlikely to be toppled even by a large-scale assault, the Washington Post reports. Three people familiar with the report tell the newspaper that the assessment, completed around a week before Israel and the US launched their assault on the Islamic Republic, outlined small- and large-scale assaults as scenarios for potential succession. The report concluded that protocols would be followed if supreme leader Ali Khamenei were to be killed to ensure the regime’s survival, with it “unlikely” that Iran’s opposition would take control. The Post says...

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine hold a press conference at 8 a.m. ET on March 2.

In a stretch of Louisiana with about 170 fossil fuel and petrochemical plants, premature death is a fact of life for people living nearby. The air is so polluted and the cancer rates so high it is known as Cancer Alley. “Most adults in the area are attending two to three funerals per month,” said Gary C. Watson Jr., who was born and raised in St. John the Baptist Parish, a majority Black community in Cancer Alley about 30 miles outside of New Orleans. His father survived cancer, but in recent years, at least five relatives have died from it....

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...

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...

Leaders of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private agency that has steered federal funding to PBS, NPR and hundreds of public television and radio stations across the country, voted Monday to dissolve the organization that was created in 1967. CPB had been winding down since Congress acted last summer to defund its operations at the encouragement of President Donald Trump. Its board of directors chose Monday to shutter CPB completely instead of keeping it in existence as a shell. “CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving,...

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...

For faith leaders supporting and ministering to anxious immigrants across the United States, 2025 was fraught with challenges and setbacks. For many in these religious circles, the coming year could be worse. The essence of their fears: President Donald Trump has become harsher with his contemptuous rhetoric and policy proposals, blaming immigrants for problems from crime to housing shortages and, in a social media post, demanding “REVERSE MIGRATION.” Haitians who fled gang violence in their homeland, as well as Afghans allowed entry after assisting the U.S. in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover, now fear that their refuge in America may...