Free Republic

ROME – Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega expelled the Missionaries of Charity, the religious order founded by Mother Teresa of Kolkata, and closed two Catholic TV stations as he continued his campaign to end any form of real or perceived opposition to his regime. The announcement confirming the closure of all their activities came June 28, as the government of Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, announced they were closing another 101 NGOs “urgently.” Since a civil uprising of April 2018, the government has cracked down on voices of opposition. To date, there are 150 opposition leaders in prison,...

Satellite imagery revealed that the United States is constructing a new military facility in the Pacific, possibly preparing an alternative landing site for its airforce should the military bases on Guam become inoperable. Land-clearing activity has been spotted at Tinian International Airport in the Northern Mariana Islands, based on satellite images obtained by The War Zone on June 15. An annotated satellite image showing the full scope of planned construction as part of the Tinian Divert Airfield project. USAF Past satellite imagery from the Planet Lab suggests that construction work at the site started in May. This appears to correspond...

Colombia, which is America's strongest ally, has always had the most level-headed voters in the region. They've had two conservative parties, sometimes at once, and voters there have always rejected the crazy left, which in their case, is a Castro-grade revolutionary crazy grade of left, with Bill Ayers-types on steroids. They did, after all, fight a 60-year war against Marxist narcoterrorists, with only a few university wokesters defending them. So it was shocking news that on Sunday, Colombians went and elected just about the worst leftist of this stripe, a former M-19 narcoguerrilla named Gustavo Petro, president, turning one of...

REHOBOTH BEACH, Delaware, June 18 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden said on Saturday he was in the process of making up his mind on easing U.S. tariffs on China and planned to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping soon.

The euphoria that accompanied Ukraine’s unforeseen early victories against bumbling Russian troops is fading as Moscow adapts its tactics, recovers its stride and asserts its overwhelming firepower against heavily outgunned Ukrainian forces. Around 200 Ukrainian soldiers are now being killed every day, up from 100 late last month, an aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky told the BBC on Friday — meaning that as many as 1,000 Ukrainians are being taken out of the fight every day, including those who are injured. But the odds against the Ukrainians are starting to look overwhelming, said Danylyuk, the government adviser. “The Russians are...

President Biden on Friday declined to rule out Ukraine having to cede part of its territory to Russia in order to end Moscow’s more than three-month-old invasion.“Does Ukraine have to cede territory to achieve peace?” a reporter asked Biden after his remarks on the May jobs report.“But it appears to me that at some point along the line, there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement

Earlier, we reported on the deranged, confused, false ramblings of a senile old man who is so out of his depth in running the world’s biggest economy, the catastrophic results will soon be obvious to even his most die-hard fans. Now, it’s time for his nemesis on the world scene, Russia’s Vladimir Putin to respond.Speaking in a TV interview on Friday evening, following a meeting with African leaders in Sochi, Putin accused Western leaders of trying “to shift the responsibility for what is happening in the world food market” and said that “restrictions imposed by the US and its allies...

Wary Pacific nations are resisting ‘good brother’ China’s offer to expand its scope Round one does not go to China. It failed to convince a group of Pacific island nations to sign an agreement to keep receiving security and economic cooperation from itself. They could not shed their suspicions that China was attempting to show off its ‘partners’ in the South Pacific to square off with the QUAD’s growing presence in the Indo-Pacific. Some nations were opposed to the Chinese offer, titled ‘China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision’. What raised eyebrows were the Chinese proposals to train local police, help...

“Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow”- that is a topic of debate in Taiwan. As US officials visit Taiwan, China issues warnings and sends war planes. While Japan and South Korea raise military spending. vid at link China-US rivalry continues to dominate global headlines, and it’s become ever more urgent in the context of Ukraine. China-Europe relations are now at its worst in the past 4 decades. Across Asia- India, Japan and South Korea are increasing military spending. In Southeast Asia, countries eye the South China Sea nervously, as war ships continue to sail here from all the major powers. As all...

Moscow appreciates Beijing’s support in its efforts to uphold Russia’s principal approaches to the formation of Europe’s security architecture and values China’s stance regarding the situation in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday. "We highly appreciate the balanced and unbiased stance of our Chinese friends regarding the situation in and around Ukraine," Lavrov said in a video address to participants of the ‘Russia and China: Cooperation in a New Era’ conference. "We are supported by Beijing in efforts to defend Russia’s principal approaches to the security architecture formation in Europe," he continued.

"1984" had its Ministry of Truth, the Soviets had their Gulag. Today’s Russians, like their kindred spirits among the American left, may be less overt in policing speech but don’t let a less visible barbarity fool anyone into believing that the goal is any less of an assault on free speech. Current Russian law punishes speech or public engagement that questions Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or even protests that call it a war. As University of Massachusetts Amherst Associate Professor Lauren McCarthy puts it, "public activities aimed at discrediting the use of Russia’s military," become "a criminal offense if committed...

[Caption] It’s a tightrope walk for the grouping at a time when US-China trade war has reached a peak. After having a bitter experience with Putin, Biden may need to maintain more restraint, simply to avoid another catastrophe in the Indo-Pacific The May 24 face-to-face meeting of the Quad leaders is considered very crucial against the backdrop of the ongoing Ukraine war. All the four heads of the Governments -- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, US president Joe Biden, Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese -- came together on a platform to display strength and...

Chinese President Xi Jinping is reportedly suffering from cerebral aneurysm and had to be hospitalised at the end of 2021, say media reports. Xi Jinping, however, wants to be treated with traditional Chinese medicines rather than going for surgery. According to ANI, earlier in March 2019, during Xi's visit to Italy, his gait was observed to be unusual with a noticeable limp and later in France during the same tour, he was seen taking support while trying to sit down. The ANI report added that during an address to the public in Shenzhen in October 2020, Xi's delay in appearance,...

A statement issued by the Russian Ministry of Defense (MOD) on Wednesday accused a slew of prominent politicians, pharmaceutical companies and government entities of participating in a global conspiracy in Ukraine.Specifically, the Russian MOD claims the U.S. and other NATO nations have been engaged in illegal military-biological projects within Ukraine.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former press secretary Iuliia Mendel wrote on Twitter that Russia is spreading “baseless accusations that the U.S. military was developing secret biological weapons in Ukraine, but this time they were helped by the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna.”The Russian Defense Ministry again spread baseless accusations that the...

One of the Senior Pentagon advisors to the POTUS during the Trump Administration.

The Kremlin on Wednesday dismissed speculation that President Vladimir Putin planned to declare war against Ukraine and declare a national mobilisation on May 9 when Russia commemorates the Soviet Union's victory in World War Two. -snip- Asked about speculation that Putin will declare war against Ukraine on May 9, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "There is no chance of that. It's nonsense." Peskov also said that people should not listen to speculation that there could be a decision on a national mobilisation. "It is not true. It is nonsense," Peskov told reporters.

May 1st is International Workers’ Day, also known as Labor Day in some countries, is a celebration of laborers and working classes promoted by the international labor movement, socialists, and communists. It occurs every year on the first of May. The day was chosen to honor rioters who killed seven policemen during the Haymarket affair and was promoted by the international communist or socialist movements, which during the 20th century killed at least 94 million people.That’s right, during the 20th-century, communism, and socialism murdered at least 94 million people. The reason for using both communism and socialism is they are...

Russia threatened a dramatic escalation of its war in Ukraine Thursday when Russia’s Channel One featured a video depicting Russian missiles reaching Berlin, Paris, and London. According to the UK’s Express, Channel One’s 60 Minutes program, one of the most popular TV shows in Russia, featured “the chairman of the nationalist Rodina party, Aleksey Zhuravlyov,” who “suggested Russia could launch a Sarmat missile attack on the UK.” This was not, however, Zhuravlyov’s eccentric view: “Producers then cut to a map of Kaliningrad and seemed to suggest that missiles could be launched from the Russian enclave between Poland, Lithuania and the...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accepted an invitation to take part in a G20 summit later this year in Indonesia, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, the current G20 chair, said on Friday.

Rephrase: In one sense, the Shanghai Lockdown is President Xi's way of saying to the internal, Chinese Communist Party, Shanghai opposition to Xi's quest for lifetime dictatorship, "see, I can paralyze your city with just one word". Steven Mosher was the first American social scientist to visit mainland China, in 1979. He was invited there by the Chinese government, where he had access to government documents and actually witnessed women being forced to have abortions under the new “one-child policy.” Mr. Mosher was a pro-choice atheist at the time, but witnessing these traumatic abortions led him to reconsider his convictions...