Free Republic

For two decades, Muhammad Abdulrahman, 58, lived with his wife and his beehives on a remote hillside in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. But in May, Israeli settlers set up camp about 200 yards away and took control of the road leading to Mr. Abdulrahman’s home, blocking him from returning, he said. Israeli soldiers then evicted him and his wife, Suha Abdulrahman, the couple said. The Israeli military said that Mr. Abdulrahman left voluntarily, but he said that he has still been unable to return home. Last month, a video shared by an Israeli lawmaker on social media showed his house...

After several bruising weeks for Speaker Mike Johnson, a soft-focus podcast interview alongside his wife, conducted by Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s top advisers, had all the ingredients for a flattering reset. What emerged from the interview instead was a portrait of a Republican leader barely keeping his head above water in a job to which he does not appear particularly well suited, a conversation full of tragically revealing details packaged as rueful humor but with the biting sting of truth. “We have this joke that I’m not really a speaker of the House,”...

Juan Orlando Hernández was accused of receiving millions in bribes and partnering with cocaine traffickers. He was convicted in Manhattan in 2024 and sentenced to 45 years in prison.President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built...

Scientists used tiny new sensors to follow the insects on journeys that take thousands of miles to their winter colonies in Mexico.A monarch butterfly carrying a tiny tag developed by Cellular Tracking Technologies at the Cape May Point Arts and Science Center in New Jersey, which helped fund a monarch tagging project.Credit...Video by Hannah BeierFor the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico.This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into...

Today’s Republican Party is big on manliness and masculine virtues. The MAGA right in particular is forever obsessing over who is the biggest, the strongest, the most fearless among them.This is why, watching President Trump’s fight to keep a lid on the Epstein files, I have been struck, delighted even, that among the vanishingly few Republican lawmakers with the courage to defy him have been three fire-breathing congresswomen: Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.Love ’em or hate ’em, these House troublemakers bucked their party leadership, stared down their president and made...

At least 12 people were killed and 27 others wounded on Tuesday in an attack on Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, according to officials. It was the first major attack to hit the city in more than a decade and comes as Pakistan is facing a resurgence of assaults by several insurgencies. An attacker detonated a bomb near the entrance of a courthouse around lunchtime, according to the Pakistani interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi. He said the attacker had tried but failed to enter the court complex, with hundreds of lawyers, defendants and judges inside. The attacker died at the scene, the authorities...

We have met the enemy of civilization, and it’s women. Not individual women, mind you. Because any given individual woman can possess masculine characteristics. And certainly not homemakers — those are the women who are doing the job they’ve done for millenniums, taking care of the family. No, the challenge to civilization is presented, in the view of Helen Andrews, a writer and editor who served as a senior editor at The American Conservative, by the women who are entering the workplace in such great numbers that they now make up large portions or majorities of their professions. In that...

Judge Mark L. Wolf, writing in The Atlantic, said he was stepping down to defend against the “assault on the rule of law” by President Trump, who he accused of “targeting his adversaries.”A federal judge warned of an “existential threat to democracy” in a searing first-person essay published on Sunday, saying he had stepped down from the bench to speak out against President Trump. He accused Mr. Trump of “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment.”The judge, Mark L. Wolf, wrote in The Atlantic magazine that...

Tuesday’s results are a reminder that nothing is forever in politics. Pronouncements that coalitions have changed and one party has captured the hearts of a demographic group are always susceptible to events. Groups like young voters, or Latino voters, did not become forever Republicans after the 2024 elections. In short: Parties have to deliver or voters will look to the alternative.

Comey expected to work for 'President-elect Clinton,' knew top aide was talking to media: emails Emails referenced in a bombshell court filing by acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan in which the government rejected Comey's argument that he was being maliciously prosecuted for providing false statements and obstructing Congress about actions he took as FBI director. Federal prosecutors revealed Monday they have unearthed a trove of personal emails showing then-FBI Director James Comey openly talked in the days before the 2016 election that he expected to be working soon for President-elect Hillary Clinton and was being kept apprised by a top...

The federal indictment of New York’s attorney general centers on a home she purchased for a relative. It is an act that rings deeply familiar to many.To some Black families, it was an intimately familiar arrangement.A woman whose parents fled a life of sharecropping in the South was among the first in her family to achieve a prestigious career. She extended her help to relatives who had less, even buying a home for a grandniece in need of stability.The house sits at the center of the indictment of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, by the Justice Department. She...

A growing number of Republicans on Capitol Hill have raised concerns about President Trump’s expanding war against drug cartels carried out without consultation or authorization by Congress, and are pressing for more information and involvement in a campaign whose legal basis remains murky. Most in the group have not expressed explicit opposition to the strikes that have been carried out so far against boats in the Caribbean Sea and, this week, expanded to the Pacific. The vast majority of Republicans have enthusiastically rallied behind them, and this month, all but two of them voted to block a measure that would...

A Republican measure that would pay essential government employees faltered in the Senate, and the G.O.P. blocked a pair of Democratic bills to pay a broader swath of workers.Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked legislation to pay federal employees who have been working without compensation during the government shutdown, thwarting Republicans’ latest effort to weaken their hand in the federal spending fight. The defeat was part of a series of failed partisan votes on the 23rd day of the government shutdown that underscored the depth of the prolonged impasse, with neither Republicans nor Democrats showing any indication that they planned to...

Was it only weeks ago in mid-September that I wrote a column about Democrats embracing the assassination culture that took the life of young Christian evangelist Charlie Kirk? And now in Virginia they’re doubling down. Virginia Democrats are endorsing the murderous candidacy of Jay Jones, who comes from a prominent black Virginia Democrat family. You see Jones in the photograph above, applauding the Democrat candidate for governor, former U.S. Rep Abigail Spanberger. You’ve heard of Jones and his dark fantasies over texts to a colleague, seeking the murders of his Republican opponents. And their children. Yes, their kids who he...

We’ve just received yet another dispatch from the Imaginarium of Dr. Faux-nassus — otherwise known as Paul Krugman — who had the chutzpah to accuse President Trump of lacking a grip on reality. Do you really want to go there? In one his most oblivious pieces of bloviating word salads to date, Krugman declared to his Substack subscribers October 21 that “Donald Trump Has Lost Touch With Reality.” In Krugman’s 20/200 vision, “it’s getting worse. When will we acknowledge the obvious?” We’re still waiting for him to acknowledge that the detached-from-reality Bidenomics snake-oil he sold to his former New York...

President Trump has repurposed money to fund military salaries during the government shutdown. He has pledged to find ways to make sure many in law enforcement get paid. He has used the fiscal impasse to halt funding to Democratic jurisdictions, and is trying to lay off thousands of federal workers.Government shutdowns are usually resolved only after the pain they inflict on everyday Americans forces elected officials in Washington to come to an agreement. But as the shutdown nears a fourth week, Mr. Trump’s actions have instead reduced the pressure for an immediate resolution and pushed his political opponents to further...

Ms. Machado’s efforts to reclaim a stolen election by any available means, including military intervention, has long galvanized her supporters. Her opponents say these hard-line policies have a political cost.Last year, María Corina Machado, the leader of Venezuela’s opposition, was forced into hiding by the country’s autocrat after he stole a presidential election Ms. Machado’s movement had won.Now, Ms. Machado is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, U.S. warships are floating near the Venezuelan coast and the United States is calling President Nicolás Maduro a “narco-terrorist” and a fugitive from American justice.The Nobel award has galvanized Ms. Machado’s movement....

The CIA’s operations abroad are usually shrouded in secrecy, but President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had authorized the spy agency to take unspecified action in Venezuela, an extraordinary and unprecedented acknowledgement from a commander in chief. “Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela?” a reporter asked Trump at the White House. “I authorized for two reasons, really,” Trump said. “Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America." The second reason, the president said, was narcotics trafficking. “And the other thing are drugs. We have a lot of drugs coming in...

If you’re old enough to have admired CBS in its heyday, watching its decline has been painful.Decades ago, it was dubbed the Tiffany Network – home of the great journalist Walter Cronkite (“the most trusted man in America”), and innovator of the top-flight magazine program, 60 Minutes.Even outside its news division, the network was a place where the variety-show host Ed Sullivan could break down racial exclusion by inviting outstanding Black entertainers to his Sunday night program; that was controversial in an era of intense racial turmoil. The CBS news department had some of the best journalists in the nation,...

Hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers may not automatically receive back pay once the government reopens, the White House indicated in a draft memo, prompting broad fears that the Trump administration might try to circumvent federal law to maximize the pain of the shutdown. The memo, which was shared by a White House official, could presage a radical break from a policy adopted during President Trump’s first term. It appeared to contradict some of the administration’s own guidance, which by Tuesday still indicated that furloughed employees would receive retroactive pay shortly after Congress strikes a funding deal. Following the...