Free Republic

President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday announced his choice of Gabriel Attal, 34, to serve as France's youngest-ever prime minister in a bid to give new momentum to his presidency following a year of protests and criticism from both the left and the right. "The president of the republic appointed Mr. Gabriel Attal prime minister and tasked him with forming a government," read a presidential statement issued on Tuesday. Gabriel Attal rose to prominence as the government spokesman and education minister. He is France’s first openly gay prime minister. Attal's predecessor Élisabeth Borne resigned on Monday following recent political turmoil over...

Gabriel Attal is the new Prime Minister of France, who at 34 years old is the youngest and the first openly gay Prime Minister in the Republic, as President Macron attempts to breathe fresh life into his trouble-stricken government. President Emmanuel Macron has appointed an up-and-coming party loyalist to the key position of Prime Minister in his government after forcing the previous incumbent Élisabeth Borne out of the post yesterday afternoon. Gabriel Attal, who is in a civil union with the leader of Emmanuel Macron’s governing Renaissance party, the MEP Stéphane Séjourné, had been education minister for just six months...

A friend of mine has posted a penetrating analysis of the clerisy and the political class of America on Facebook. In it, he coins the portmanteau “Brahmandarin” to describe these cretins, and their sort of hybrid Mandarin and Brahmin nature. They have the permanent bureaucratic nature of the Mandarins, with a large infusion of Brahmin nepotism and in-class favoritism. Observe: Consider America’s “New Class”: academia, journalism, “helping” professions, nonprofits, community organizers, trustafarian artists,… Talent for something immediately verifiable (be it playing the piano, designing an airplane, or buying-and-selling,… ) or a track record of tangible achievements are much less important...

In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount. News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin -- as Greece is squeezed to make interest payments to the supposedly euro-pinching German banks. Such accounts may be exaggerations, but they should warn us that yearly progress is never assured. Instead, history offers plenty of examples of life becoming far worse than it had been centuries earlier. The biographer Plutarch, writing 500 years after the glories of...

<p>Civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.</p> <p>'snip'</p> <p>'snip'</p>

A trio of cruel Halloween hooligans are behind bars Tuesday after police say they targeted trick-or-treating children with paintball guns in North Miami. Marc Dolcine, 18, Rodson Travine, 19, and Darrel Labranche, 21, are all facing aggravated battery charges, according to North Miami Police. Police say the three drove up in a car and opened fire on a group of children in the area of Northeast 7th Avenue and 132nd Street. A Holiday Safety Enforcement Detail was in the area and witnessed the shooting, police said. The suspects tried to flee the area but were stopped by police and taken...

Dear Mr. President: I write with a growing sense of urgency about recent actions taken by your Administration that both escalate the threat to marriage and imperil the religious freedom of those who promote and defend marriage. This past spring the Justice Department announced that it would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court, a decision strongly opposed by the Catholic Bishops of the United States and many others. Now the Justice Department has shifted from not defending DOMA-which is problem enough, given the duty of the executive branch to enforce even laws it disfavors-to actively...

It begins with self-doubt; it ends with self-destruction. Historian Arnold Toynbee, who developed the theory of challenge-and-response to account for the survivability of civilizations, has said that great civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide — by not meeting their challenges. A variation of this historical insight may be phrased thus: When a civilization or an empire feels inwardly that it is dying, or as Oswald Spengler put it in The Decline of the West, that it wants to die and “wishes itself into the darkness,” it begins to go mad. Collective madness is a sure portent that an end...

Next year’s Academy Awards program ought to have a new category: Best Portrayal of a Sperm Donor. At least, that’s the role that’s being cast with increasing — and alarming — frequency. First came the cinematic summer hit "The Kids Are All Right," the story of a lesbian couple that each have given birth to a child using sperm from the same donor. Reaching their teen years, the children want to meet their biological father (whom the moms only call “sperm donor”). The kids track him down and some predictable family drama ensues, including a romantic tryst between donor-dad and...

Folks, a pretty busy weekend for “gay rights” activists. Currently, the so-called “National Equality Rally” is under way in Washington, D.C.; yesterday, President Obama, fresh from his Nobel Peace Prize win, addressed a meeting of the Human Rights Campaign, promising, among other things, the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that forces active homosexual persons to keep their sexual preference a private matter while serving in the military. The ban has been a favorite of presidents and politicians who have never served in the military and are clueless as to its inner social workings, yet are bent to...

Thousands of polygamous marriages like Hadi's have sprung up throughout Italy as a byproduct of a fast-paced and voluminous immigration by Muslims to this Roman Catholic country. Despite the obvious culture clash, Italian authorities largely turn a blind eye, leaving women in a murky semi-clandestine world with few rights and no recourse when things go especially badly, as they did in Hadi's case.

Senior medical figures in Italy are campaigning to scrap the Hippocratic Oath for doctors on the ground that the passages forbidding abortion and euthanasia are outdated. Giorgio Iannetti, a professor of surgery at Rome University, said that the oath, which is read out by medical students when they graduate, must either be abolished or “radically modified”. “There are passages which are no longer relevant to our times and which newly qualified doctors know in advance they will not be able to respect,” Professor Iannetti told a medical conference in Rome. The oath, written by Hippocrates, the Greek father of medicine,...

A TOP male lecturer at Sandhurst who taught Princes William and Harry has won his own war — to be a woman. Officer Cadets returned to the elite military academy for a new term yesterday to find pipe-smoking Dr Aryeh Nusbacher is now Lynette. Dr Nusbacher, 40 — already tagged “Mrs Gunfire” — is believed to have had the sex change op in the past few weeks. On top of giving her the title of Ma’am, cadets have been ordered to treat her with full respect. Sandhurst’s Commandant, Major General Peter Pearson, has warned that any jokes or snide remarks...

Khomeini figured: Why import the false ideologies of a failing civilization? Doesn't it make more sense to export Islamism to the dying West? And, for a guy dismissed by most of us as crazy, Khomeini made a lot of sense. The Rushdie fatwa established the ground rules: The side that means it gets away with it. Mobs marched through Britain calling for the murder of a British subject – and, as a matter of policy on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity, the British police shrugged and looked the other way. One reader in England recalled one demonstration at which he...

MONTERREY, Mexico, May 11 (Reuters) - Hit men from Mexico's Gulf Cartel drug gang handcuffed three men and shot them dead at a death cult altar on Friday, leaving lit candles, flowers and a taunting message for rivals in a worsening drug war. Police near the northern city of Nuevo Laredo found the corpses at a shrine to Santa Muerte, a religious figure worshiped by criminals and many of Mexico's poor. "This is for everyone who messes with the Gulf Cartel. Welcome to Nuevo Laredo, bunch of assholes," read the message, written on orange paper and taped to a wall...

This is the final in a series on geopolitics, considering the fate of the West (primarily the United States and Europe), and possible successor powers. In the piece (Vanity) As the World Turns, or The Wild, Wild, East , the issue was introduced; in (Vanity) As the World Turns, Part II, or Back to the Future , I considered the threat posed by resurgent Islam; in (Vanity) As the World Turns, Part III, or, The Year of Lipstick on a Pig the strengths of mainland China were considered, and in (Vanity) As the World Turns, Part IV, or The New...

In America Alone, Mark Steyn presents us with a doomsday scenario backed by impeccable science and research, and he does it in such a clever manner that we are actually amused as we read of the impending demise of Europe-as-we-knew-it, Japan, and Canada. Why are they failing? Procreation, or more pointedly, the lack thereof. Populations in Russia, Italy, and the Low Countries may have already passed the point of no return. Canada is on the borderline. America, on the other hand, appears to have a sustainable reproductive level, a fact that ought to make some Canucks wish that General Hull...

It's the end of the world!! Head for the hills!!! No, wait. Don't head for the hills—they're full of Islamist terrorist camps. Let me put it in a slightly bigger nutshell: much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands—probably—just as in Istanbul there's still a building known as Hagia Sophia, or St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's...

HOBART, - According to an apparently unembarrassed official of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Australian state of Tasmania, guidelines have been established that allow care givers to organise visits for disabled clients to Hobart’s local brothels. The terms “hooker or “street walker” have long been taboo as being insensitive. Now “prostitute,” is no longer acceptable either and the properly affirming phrase “sex trade worker,” is used to describe the world’s oldest profession. This new nomenclature is especially important now that publicly funded social workers can – and do – arrange for their intellectually disabled charges to...

The Netherlands and Belgium were the first countries to give full marriage rights to homosexuals. In the United States some politicians propose “civil unions” that give homosexual couples the full benefits and responsibilities of marriage. These civil unions differ from marriage only in name. Meanwhile in the Netherlands polygamy has been legalised in all but name. Last Friday the first civil union of three partners was registered. Victor de Bruijn (46) from Roosendaal “married” both Bianca (31) and Mirjam (35) in a ceremony before a notary who duly registered their civil union. “I love both Bianca and Mirjam, so I...