Free Republic

In public, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says his country’s growing friendship with China is unshakable — a strategic military and economic collaboration that has entered a golden era. But in the corridors of Lubyanka, the headquarters of Russia’s domestic security agency, known as the F.S.B., a secretive intelligence unit refers to the Chinese as “the enemy.” The threats are laid out in an eight-page internal F.S.B. planning document, obtained by The New York Times, that sets priorities for fending off Chinese espionage. The document is undated, raising the possibility that it is a draft, though it appears from...

The world’s richest man led the charge to kill a bipartisan spending deal, in part by promoting false and misleading claims about it.When President-elect Donald J. Trump picked “the Great Elon Musk,” the world’s richest man, to slash government spending and waste, he mused that the effort might be “the Manhattan Project of our time.” On Wednesday, that prediction looked spot on. Wielding the social media platform he purchased for $44 billion in 2022, Mr. Musk detonated a rhetorical nuclear bomb in the middle of government shutdown negotiations on Capitol Hill. In more than 150 separate posts on X, Mr....

The National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading public funder of biomedical research, has an enviable track record. Research supported by the agency has led more than 100 Nobel Prizes and has supported more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by federal regulators from 2010 to 2019.No surprise, then, that the agency has been called “the crown jewel of the federal government.” But come January, when President-elect Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans take charge, the N.I.H. may face a reckoning.Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the new administration’s selection for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which...

Former female sports greats, media figures, and even a conservative lawmaker tore into a recent New York Times article for referring to women as “non-transgender women.” Tennis legend Martina Navratilova and other prominent people blasted the piece online for the characterization, stating the outlet should just be referring to biological women as women. “NYT- you stink. We are women, NOT TRANSGENDER WOMEN. Just WOMEN will do in the future,” Navratilova wrote on the social media platform on Friday. The Times published an article Thursday which documented the inner turmoil of a women’s college volleyball team – the San Jose State...

On the night he won a second term, President-elect Donald J. Trump rejoiced in the moment. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he boasted. In the two weeks since, his campaign has repeatedly heralded his “landslide,” even to market Trump merchandise like the “Official Trump Victory Glass.”But by traditional numeric measures, Mr. Trump’s victory was neither unprecedented nor a landslide. In fact, he prevailed with one of the smallest margins of victory in the popular vote since the 19th century and generated little of the coattails of a true landslide.The disconnect goes beyond predictable Trumpian braggadocio. The...

Plenty of presidents have been called dictators by their political opponents, but none until now has been publicly accused of being a “fascist” by his own handpicked advisers.When former President Donald J. Trump’s longest serving chief of staff said the other day that his old boss “falls into the general definition of fascist,” Mr. Trump let loose with the insults, assailing his onetime right hand as a “total degenerate,” a “LOWLIFE” and a “bad General.”What Mr. Trump did not do, at least at first, was actually deny that he was or aspired to be a fascist.Any other politician might consider...

When the history of the 2024 election is written, one of the iconic images illustrating it will surely be the mug shot taken of Donald J. Trump after one of his four indictments, staring into the camera with his signature glare. It is an image not of shame but of defiance, the image of a man who would be a convicted felon before Election Day and yet possibly president of the United States again afterward. Sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high-octane campaign heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America for...

Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday spewed crude and vulgar remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania that included an off-color remark about a famous golfer’s penis size and a coarse insult about Vice President Kamala Harris. The performance, 17 days before the election in a critical battleground state, added to the impression of the Republican nominee as increasingly unfiltered and undisciplined. It comes as some of Mr. Trump’s allies and aides worry that Mr. Trump’s temperament and crass style are alienating undecided voters. It was unclear if the outbursts and insults were an expression of his frustration as the...

Throughout American history, business leaders have been able to assume that an American president of either party would uphold the rule of law, defend property rights and respect the independence of the courts. Implicit in that assumption is a fundamental belief that the country’s ethos meant their enterprises and the U.S. economy could thrive, no matter who won. They could keep their distance from the rough-and-tumble of campaign politics. No matter who won, they could pursue long-term plans and investments with confidence in America’s political stability. In this election, American business leaders cannot afford to stand passive and silent. Donald...

In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are staking their chances on two radically different theories of how to win: one tried-and-true, the other untested in modern presidential campaigns. Ms. Harris’s team is running an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades, deploying flotillas of paid staff members to organize and turn out every vote they can find. Mr. Trump’s campaign is going after a smaller universe of less frequent voters while relying on well-funded but inexperienced outside groups to reach a...

As Vice President Kamala Harris vows to crack down on illegal immigration at the nation’s southern border, she has played up her experience as California’s attorney general pursuing criminal groups that traffic drugs, guns and people across the United States and Mexico.“I was the top law enforcement officer of the biggest state of the country, California — that is also a border state,” she said on Thursday at a town hall in Nevada. “I took on transnational criminal organizations.”Ms. Harris’s surrogates and allies say her push on transnational crime sheds light on how she might address challenges at the border....

Fumbling blindly through cratered farms, the troops from Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade had no maps, medical kits or working walkie-talkies, they said. Just a few weeks earlier, they had been factory workers and truck drivers, watching an endless showcase of supposed Russian military victories at home on state television before being drafted in September. One medic was a former barista who had never had any medical training. Now, they were piled onto the tops of overcrowded armored vehicles, lumbering through fallow autumn fields with Kalashnikov rifles from half a century ago and virtually nothing to eat, they said. Russia...

Following a string of Ukrainian military successes in the south, the Kremlin sought on Monday to tamp down speculation that Russian forces would withdraw from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex, with President Vladimir V. Putin’s spokesman saying that Moscow has no plans to end its military occupation of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. “One should not look for signs where there are none and cannot be any,” said the spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov. Mr. Peskov’s comments came after some pro-Russian military bloggers wrote posts suggesting that Moscow’s forces would withdraw from the area, and after Ukrainian officials said there were indications...

The billions of dollars in military aid the United States has sent Ukraine includes some of the most advanced and lethal weapons systems in the world. But Ukraine has also scored big successes in the war by employing the weapons and equipment in unexpected ways, and jury-rigging some on the fly, according to military experts. From the sinking of the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea flagship, in April to the attack on a Russian air base in Crimea this month, Ukrainian troops have used American and other weapons in ways few expected, the experts and Defense Department officials say. By mounting...

Henry Kissinger, the 99-year old former secretary of state, suggested that Ukraine would likely have to give up some territory in a negotiated settlement, though he added that “ideally the dividing line should be a return to the status quo” before the invasion, which included the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the seizure of parts of the Donbas. “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself,’’ Mr. Kissinger concluded. Almost immediately, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine accused Mr. Kissinger of appeasement, retorting angrily that “I...