Free Republic

The buck stops with them. North America’s second-largest supermarket chain is warning its suppliers that it won’t allow price hikes due to President Trump’s tariff spree. Albertsons, which operates over 2,200 grocery stores — including Balducci’s, Kings and Acme in the New York area, blasted out a missive to its suppliers late last month, explaining that suppliers must get authorization for significant price hikes. “With few exceptions, we are not accepting cost increases due to tariffs,” stated the letter, first uncovered by American Economic Liberties Project researcher Matt Stoller.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Monday warned President Trump’s tariffs will destroy New York City’s economy and likely plunge it right into a recession — as he urged the commander in chief to “back off.” The New York Democrat claimed Trump’s “pinball tariff strategy” could result in a nearly $20 billion direct hit to the Big Apple and threaten hundreds of thousands of jobs. “President Trump’s pinball tariff strategy will wreak total havoc on New York City and is likely to drive us right into a recession. We’ve crunched the numbers, and what doesn’t look good for the nation,...

France’s trade minister said the European Union’s response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs could be “extremely aggressive” amid increasingly heated rhetoric from Paris. Speaking ahead of crunch talks in Luxembourg, French Minister of Foreign Trade Laurent Saint-Martin said that Brussels must consider all options in the trade dispute with the United States. “We must not exclude any option, on goods, on (American) services and open the European toolbox, which is very complete, which can also be extremely aggressive in return,” the minister said per Le Figaro.

Billionaire fund manager Bill Ackman, a staunch President Trump ally, has warned the world is on the brink of a “self-induced economic nuclear winter” – as he begged the commander in chief to pause his sweeping tariffs. “The President has an opportunity on Monday to call a time out and have the time to execute on fixing an unfair tariff system. Alternatively, we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down,” Ackman wrote in a lengthy X post Sunday night. “May cooler heads prevail.” Ackman, who endorsed Trump’s run for President, issued the stark...

Students participating in Pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses who are non-immigrant visa holders have been put on notice that they will face deportation by the Trump administration. Firming up a similar message from President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose department issues the visas required to study in the United States, made clear that foreign students who support terrorist organizations will face severe consequences. In a Truth Social post by President Trump on Tuesday, the Commander in Chief issued a warning to students protesting on behalf of Hamas, saying, “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the...

China warned it is ready for any “type of war” with the US in an alarming escalation as President Trump’s tariffs went into effect. “If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said late Tuesday. Tensions grew stiff between the two nations on Tuesday as Trump bumped up a 10% tariff on Chinese imports to 20%, claiming the trade measure would halt the flow of fentanyl into America. Jian’s statement, reiterated on X by...

A US official warned Hamas would face “total annihilation” if all hostages — living and dead — were not returned to Israel as the terror group failed to return the body of slain mother Shiri Bibas on Thursday. Adam Boehler, President Trump’s special envoy for hostages, issued the stark threat hours after the Israel Defense Forces positively identified the bodies of Bibas’ children, Ariel and Kfir, and hostage Oded Lifshitz — but also received an “anonymous, unidentified body.” “It’s horrific. It’s a clear violation and if I have one piece of advice for Hamas now, it’s ‘You need to release...

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned parties involved in the ongoing Gaza conflict to “avoid any form of ethnic cleansing” on Wednesday, a barb his spokesman appeared to indicate was intended for President Donald Trump. Trump shocked the Middle East by declaring on Tuesday evening that America would “take over the Gaza Strip,” a small slice of land in between Egypt and Israel currently controlled by the genocidal terrorist organization Hamas. Hamas has been in a formal state of war with Israel since October 7, 2023, when it invaded the country and massacred 1,200 random people, abducted dozens of others,...

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday that excluding his country from talks between the U.S. and Russia about the war in Ukraine would be “very dangerous” and asked for more discussions between Kyiv and Washington to develop a plan for a ceasefire. Speaking in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Zelenskyy said Russia does not want to engage in ceasefire talks or to discuss any kind of concessions, which the Kremlin interprets as losing at a time when its troops have the upper hand on the battlefield.

BRUSSELS (AP) – NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte warned on Thursday that a Russian victory over Ukraine would undermine the dissuasive force of the world´s biggest military alliance and that its credibility could cost trillions to restore. NATO has been ramping up its forces along its eastern flank with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, deploying thousands of troops and equipment to deter Moscow from expanding its war into the territory of any of the organization´s 32 member countries. “If Ukraine loses then to restore the deterrence of the rest of NATO again, it will be a much, much higher price than what...

Far-left London Mayor Sadiq Khan has warned that the “spectre of a resurgent fascism” threatens the West with the rise of populists in Europe, tech giants rolling back censorship, and the return of Donald Trump to the White House. The leftist Labour Party politician, writing for the Observer, the sister paper of the Guardian, likened the growing rejection of neo-liberal globalist policies in Europe and America to the rise of fascism in the “1920s and 1930s”. “The far right is on the march,” Mayor Khan exclaimed. “From Switzerland and Sweden to Hungary, Austria and Italy, European nations are coming under...

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy warned Thursday that the staggering influx of drone sightings over the Garden State the past few weeks — though harmless — is a “wake-up call” to the country’s vulnerability to potential foreign drone attacks. “Now we can say this based on the most sophisticated drone detection systems on the planet that started to arrive in New Jersey last Friday and Saturday, there is no public threat here, period. I could say that unequivocally,” Murphy said on News 12 New Jersey’s “Ask Gov. Murphy” program. But that doesn’t mean Jersey or the country as a whole...

The United States may face a “dire threat” from burgeoning cooperation between adversaries such as China, Iran, and North Korea if it strikes a peace deal for Russia in Ukraine, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned incoming President Donald Trump. Former Dutch Prime Minister Rutte, who was installed in the top NATO job in October after his longstanding globalist government in The Hague fell apart last year amid growing resentment towards his open borders agenda, has laid out the opening gambit for the international security state’s attempt to influence President Elect Trump’s peace negotiations with Kyiv and Moscow to end...

Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) warned Senate Democrats on Thursday not to “become obstacles” toward President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees. The warning indicates Thune is inclined to facilitate Senate confirmations of individuals nominated by Trump, who won a landslide victory and moved 48 states to the right. Thune’s statement came one day after Senate Republicans elected him majority leader. Trump did not endorse anyone in the race, although many America First Republicans preferred Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) for the position. Thune is perceived to be close to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), a politician often opposed to the America...

Chuck Schumer warns Republicans they must work with Democrats: "To my Republican colleagues: I offer a word of caution in good faith. Take care not to misread the will of the people and do not abandon the need for bipartisanship. After winning an election, the temptation may be to go to the extreme...it's consistently backfired on the party in power."

ROME — The Church is much more “alive” outside of the Western world, and pastors need to become less “Eurocentric” in their vision of Christianity, Pope Francis said Wednesday. Reflecting upon his recently completed apostolic visit to Asia and Oceania, the pope expressed his concern that “in thinking of the Church, we are still too Eurocentric, or as they say, ‘Western.’” In reality, “the Church is much bigger, much bigger than Rome and Europe, much bigger!” he said, addressing the crowds gathered in Saint Peter’s Square for his weekly general audience.

ROME — Pope Francis warned Sunday democracy is in “crisis” around the world, likely with an eye to a rise in right-wing parties across Italy, Austria, Argentina, Netherlands, and Germany. It is evident that in today’s world, democracy “is not in good health,” the pontiff told a group of 900 participants in the 50th annual Social Week, celebrated in the northern Italian city of Trieste. The pope went on to compare the modern “crisis of democracy” to a wounded heart that has suffered a heart attack, manifested by “various forms of social exclusion” that “limit participation.”

The global security system will be destroyed if Russia is allowed to prevail in Ukraine, leading to “many” new conflicts and a Third World War, that country warns while calling the U.S. to pass a major aid package. Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal visited Washington D.C. to drum up support for the forthcoming votes on the “$100 billion foreign aid package” , and brought a message of looming disaster if it isn’t passed. Speaking to British state broadcaster the BBC in Washington, Shmyhal cautioned that allowing Russia to win would signal the multilateral international rules based order had collapsed which...

When it comes to mailing letters, many people do it by dropping their envelopes in the United States Postal Service's blue collection bins placed in neighborhoods across America. However, the USPS is now warning would-be mailers that those blue boxes might not be the safest option. In a press release, the Postal Service explained that unfortunately, the collection bins have become very attractive to thieves looking to steal identities or checks, especially at specific times and on specific days. The agency stated, "The biggest variable enticing these criminals to steal are customers depositing mail into blue collection boxes after the...

Hillary Clinton is warning about the legality of birth control in the wake of a decision by the Alabama Supreme Court that found frozen embryos created through fertility treatments are children under state law. “They came for abortion first. Now it’s [in vitro fertilization], and next it’ll be birth control,” the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee and secretary of State said in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “The extreme right won’t stop trying to exert government control over our most sacred personal decisions until we codify reproductive freedom as a human right,” Clinton added.