Free Republic

Nicaragua has asked the UN's highest court to halt German weapons sales to Israel at the start of a landmark case. Germany is accused of breaching the UN genocide convention by sending military hardware to Israel and ceasing funding of the UN's aid agency. Berlin rejects the claims and will present a defence to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Tuesday. In 2023 some 30% of Israel's military equipment purchases came from Germany, totalling €300m ($326m; £257m). The allegations build on a separate case taken by South Africa in January, where judges in the Hague ordered Israel to take...

German police arrested several Hamas terrorists in the country following Israeli intelligence tip; the interrogations led investigators to a warehouse in southern Bulgaria housing stocks of weapons and ammo. The Bulgarian police uncovered a hidden weapons cache Thursday that, according to suspicions, is linked to four terrorists who were arrested in Germany and the Netherlands before Christmas. The four Hamas members, all Lebanese nationals, are suspected of planning to carry out attacks against Israeli individuals and institutions in Europe under instructions from a terror group in Lebanon. Police believe one of the terrorists came to Europe in order to locate...

Since October, the German cultural sector has been in turmoil. The ongoing crises in Israel and Palestine have inflamed some of Germany’s most sensitive, and urgent, political debates, sparking cancelations, defundings, boycotts, and resignations. As if overnight, cultural institutions have leapt—or been forced into—the fray of answering to the nation’s most existential questions: antisemitism and Jewish life in Germany, racism, immigration, xenophobia, and the legacy of the Holocaust. Some of the more widely publicized cancelations of the last several months have gotten attention beyond Germany, like the fracas over Masha Gessen’s receipt of the Hannah Arendt prize, the resignation of...

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Sunday that he expects to move a package including aid for Ukraine with “some important innovations” when the House returns from recess. In an interview on “Sunday Night in America With Trey Gowdy,” Johnson stressed the difficult position he’s in, with a historically narrow House majority, but said he was working throughout the current work period to come up with a package and plans to put it on the floor when the House gavels back into session.

A home belonging to a family of Pakistani migrants was set ablaze in the German town of Wächtersbach on Christmas Day 2023. Phantasmal right-wingers were immediately blamed for the arson. The family members, meanwhile, were depicted as victims of so-called Islamophobia and xenophobia. This narrative, agreeable to European leftists and the liberal media, recently went up in smoke. A convenient spark The fire began around 1 a.m. on Christmas morning and did roughly $379,000 in damage. The fire brigade found anti-migrant slogans scrawled inside the smoldering ruins. Der Spiegel reported that the words "foreigners out" had been spray-painted on some...

Australians made $746 million in digital payments in 2018—that number soared to $93 billion in 2022.. A new all-in-one mobile app will offer what its developers claim is Australia’s first end-to-end digital banking platform for the country’s 2.4 million businesses with fewer than 10 employees. The announcement comes a day after Bankwest announced that it is closing 45 of its branches and transitioning the remaining 15 to Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) branches, going digital-only by October 2024. Bankwest is a subsidiary of the Commonwealth Bank, which trades on the Australian Stock Exchange. ... The new app, called Business+, was...

German police took a 16-year-old schoolgirl out of her class after she was denounced by her headteacher for expressing political sympathies with right-wing party AfD in a harmless Smurf video. The incident has caused a national scandal in Germany. Now Loretta and her mother, Annett B., speak out publicly for the first time in a interview with conservative weekly Junge Freiheit. The girl feels humiliated; her mother fears for political freedom and civil rights in Germany.

Germany's Bundesbank confronted its predecessor's Nazi past in new research published on Friday and vowed it would never allow antisemitism or discrimination. The bank has put out an abridged version of an upcoming series of volumes, at a time when the far right is on the rise in Germany, triggering nationwide protests in a country still scarred by its 20th century history. It detailed how the Reichsbank financed Adolf Hitler's war efforts, helped the exploitation of occupied territories and was involved in the confiscation, expropriation and sale of Jewish assets.

Well over 20 of these terrorist operatives who came to Germany to carry out attacks were identified and arrested. Another major challenge were Islamist lone perpetrators who radicalized themselves via the Internet and planned their own attacks. Identifying these lone wolf attackers, who were often completely under the radar, was a huge challenge. I worked very closely with my colleagues from Mossad and Shabak on this. I have visited Israel many times and look forward to going again soon to meet new friends. As the new German conservative party, the Values Union is fully committed to supporting Israel and its...

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Demand for transporting goods from Asia to Europe by rail via Russia has increased by an average of 30% since the start of the Red Sea crisis, the Financial Times newspaper reported, citing logistics companies and rail operators. German shipping company DHL said that requests to transport goods on Russian railways have increased by 40% since container ships began traveling along alternative routes following the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, the report said on Sunday. At the same time, Netherlands-based Rail Bridge Cargo said that rail freight traffic via Russia was 31% higher this year compared...

Portugal has gone to the polls, in a vote that will either keep the centre-left in power or shift the country to the right.

Frankfurt has become the first German city to hang Ramadan lights at a cost of over €50,000 euros to honor the fact that 15 per cent of its population is now Muslim. On Monday morning, trucks began arriving on behalf of the city government to unload the stars and crescents, connecting them to the city’s power grid to honor the festival, which runs from March 10th to April 9th. The lights are similar to those that were displayed in London’s Piccadilly Circus last year. ... The lights are a result of lobbying from the Greens, the SPD and the ‘Green...

The European Commission will propose on Tuesday ways for the European Union to boost its arms industry so it can shift to “war economy mode” in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Thierry Breton, the European industry commissioner, will lay out proposals to encourage EU countries to buy more weapons together from European companies, and to help such firms increase production capacity, according to EU officials. “We need to change the paradigm and move into war economy mode. This also means that the European defense industry must take more risks, with our support,” said Breton, previewing the package. Breton, a...

Large NATO drills in the frigid fjords of northern Norway may be just war games meant to hone the fighting skills of the newly expanded 32-nation military alliance. But for troops taking part, they are very real. This week, crew members aboard the French frigate Normandie, one of France’s most modern warships, were roused from sleep and scrambled to hunt down and kill a submarine that snuck into cold Norwegian waters. The submarine belongs to Germany, also a NATO member. But for the purpose of the war games dubbed Nordic Response 2024, it was acting as an enemy vessel. The...

German law enforcement authorities on Thursday carried out raids across Germany against people suspected of posting misogynistic hate speech on the internet as part of of a coordinated push to shine the spotlight on online violence against women. Police raided homes and interrogated 45 suspects in 11 states early Thursday. None of the suspects were detained, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office said in a statement. Another 37 suspects were already searched and interrogated in previous weeks and months.The raids were part of a “combating misogyny on the internet” day of action, which comes one day before International’s Women’s Day. “We...

Arsonists calling themselves the Volcano Group left Tesla’s German factory without electricity on Tuesday, leading to damages the company claims could approach $1 billion.

A 62-year-old man in Germany intentionally got 217 doses of COVID-19 vaccines within 29 months. The vaccinations occurred outside of a clinical study, and after hearing about the "hypervaccinated" man, medical researchers in Germany reached out to him to run tests. The researchers say the man appeared to suffer no significant side effects despite the extreme number of doses. "In summary, our case report shows that SARS-CoV-2 hypervaccination did not lead to adverse events and increased the quantity of spike-specific antibodies and T cells without having a strong positive or negative effect on the intrinsic quality of adaptive immune responses,"...

A 62-year-old man from Germany has, against medical advice, been vaccinated 217 times against Covid, doctors report. The bizarre case is documented in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal. The shots were bought and given privately within the space of 29 months. The man appears to have suffered no ill effects, researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg say. ...Evidence for 130 of the jabs was collected by the public prosecutor of the city of Magdeburg, who opened an investigation with the allegation of fraud, but no criminal charges were brought.

If NATO is so much against sending troops to Ukraine, why doesn’t NATO demand that the soldiers already there be sent home? On Monday, February 26, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that Germany would not provide its Taurus long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine because doing so would require German troops to be sent there to operate them, just as the British are operating the Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles. The British cried foul and accused Scholz of a “flagrant abuse of intelligence” – meaning that Scholz confirmed what everyone already knows, that NATO officers and trained personnel are in Ukraine...

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned on Thursday that NATO will be drawn into war if Ukraine is defeated by invading Russian forces. Speaking at a Republican-led House Armed Services Committee hearing to discuss his recent absence while hospitalized for complications from prostate cancer surgery, Austin predicted that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not "stop" if Moscow wins the war in Ukraine. Austin made the remarks after being asked about Congress failing to approve a $60 billion military aid package for Ukraine, as requested by President Joe Biden. Despite significant bipartisan support for Ukraine aid, the measure has stalled amid...