Free Republic

During an interview with House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) that was aired on Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” host Erin Burnett said she was trying to understand why Johnson is “choosing to get involved in” the issues at Columbia University, a school that receives indirect money from the federal government. Burnett introduced the interview by saying, “There are pro-Palestinian protests across the United States spreading, violent clashes today between police and students at USC and UT-Austin, where more than 20 people were arrested. This follows protests at NYU, Brown University, and Columbia University where an encampment has taken over...

A band of migrants brawled outside of a Midtown hotel in New York City where they were seen fighting with sticks, belts, bats, and even traffic cones. “At least a dozen asylum seekers squared off Sunday afternoon outside The Row hotel on Eighth Avenue, with one out-of-control migrant seen swinging a bat menacingly at the mob before one of the combatants is taken to the ground and pummeled by four others,” reported the New York Post.

Greece’s Supreme Court has published the final list of parties that will compete in June’s European elections with the roster excluding the far-right party Spartiates (the Spartans). The ruling party New Democracy, along with opposition parties PASOK and New Left, filed a memorandum challenging the Spartans’ participation. The far-right group has been under scrutiny as a result of their associations with convicted members of the now-defunct neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, notably Ilias Kasidiaris. The prosecution process has been started against eleven Spartan parliamentary members for potential parliamentary and electoral fraud linked to their leadership roles. The electoral court has not...

A group of Republican and Democrat senators, along with the United Steelworkers (USW), are calling on President Joe Biden to hike United States tariffs on imported aluminum to save American jobs. In a letter to Biden’s Commerce Department Secretary Gina Raimondo, the senators warn that aluminum extrusion plants in the U.S. are at risk of being eliminated as a result of imported aluminum extrusions.

An Oklahoma man is facing up to 12 years in prison for having ammunition in his carry-on bag at a Turks and Caicos airport, according to a GoFundMe page for his family. Ryan and Valerie Watson, the parents of two young children, were flying home from their island vacation, where they were celebrating a friend's 40th birthday, on April 12 when they were arrested at the airport. "They had their lives turned upside down when they tried to return home, as local airport security found four rounds of ammunition unknowingly left in a duff[le]bag from a deer hunting trip," a...

<p>At least nine protesters were handcuffed and loaded into police cruisers at a peaceful, pro-Palestinian protest Wednesday at the University of Texas hosted by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, a registered student group and a chapter of the national Students for Justice in Palestine. And several more were arrested at the university's South Lawn.</p>

Two-hundred days and counting. No mention of American hostages held by HAMAS, which we are no resupplying and defending from Israel. Hamas published a propaganda video showing Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin on Wednesday on their Telegram channel. ... n the video, Goldberg-Polin notes that he was hanging out with friends at the Nova Music Festival when Hamas attacked the festival and kidnapped him and his friends, countering claims that Hamas leaders have made in the past that they did not target civilians. Goldberg-Polin was seriously injured by a grenade during the Hamas assault on the Nova Music Festival and lost...

YIV, Apr 24 (AFP): Last month Pavlo Petrychenko, a junior sergeant in the Ukrainian army, issued a stark warning to President Volodymyr Zelensky about a dangerous vice sweeping the military. A surge in online gambling among serving soldiers has seen many lose their entire salaries, he said, pushing them and their families into debt. Some were even selling off army drones and thermal imaging cameras to feed addictions, compromising their own safety for a long-shot chance to strike it rich. Exhausted by more than two years of war, campaigners say online gambling is rife in the Ukrainian armed forces, a...

Ukraine faces challenges that are "almost insurmountable" in the face of a growing military initiative from Russia, according to a retired British Army officer. And, amid uncertainties created by the potential election as president of the US in around months time of Donald Trump, who is against providing further military support to Kyiv, as well as war fatigue developed in the West, Ukraine doesn't have much time left to resist to Vladimir Putin's troops, he suggested.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday he called White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and threatened to “intervene” if President Biden slapped sanctions on an Israeli military battalion over its alleged conduct in the West Bank. “We heard a rumor of this before our [aid] bill was actually brought for a vote in the House [Saturday], I mean, hours before,” Johnson (R-La.) told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “And I’ll tell you what I did, Hugh, and I don’t, I guess I’m breaking news here,” Johnson went on. “No one knows this. But I called the White House immediately...

George Will, a conservative columnist for The Washington Post, went after House Republicans who recently voted against more aid to Ukraine in a Wednesday opinion piece in the Post. In the opinion, highlighted by Mediaite, Will said the 112 Republicans House Republicans who voted against Ukraine aid “voted last Saturday to endanger civilization,” calling them “ignoble.” “Hoping to enhance their political security in their mostly safe seats, and for the infantile satisfaction of populist naughtiness (insulting a mostly fictitious ‘establishment’), they voted to assure [Russian President Vladimir Putin’s] attempt to erase a European nation,” Will wrote in his column. Opponents...

The population of Providence, R.I., has barely held even since 2020. Had it not been for some 8,300 immigrants who settled in Providence County, it would have shrunk by 1.3 percent by last year. Same in South Bend, Ind., where some 1,700 immigrants into Saint Joseph County barely filled a gap left by locals ditching town. Immigrants slowed demographic decline in more than 1,100 counties from 2020 to 2023, according to census estimates. Their numbers made up more than the entire growth of the population in 131 of them. The demographic reality casts immigration in a different light, not as...

President Joe Biden suggested war is peace on Wednesday after he signed legislation to provide Ukraine the funds to conduct a war against Russia. “It’s a good day for world peace,” Biden claimed about the war funds in the State Dining Room of the White House, echoing George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” “It’s going to make America safer, it’s going to make the world safer, and it continues America’s leadership in the world, and everyone knows it,” Biden said of the funds. The Senate passed the foreign aid package on Wednesday. Just minutes after the vote, Biden signed the legislation...

Ukraine for the first time has begun using long-range ballistic missiles provided secretly by the United States, bombing a Russian military airfield in Crimea last week and Russian forces in another occupied area overnight, American officials said Wednesday.

The former leader of Northern Ireland’s biggest unionist party was jeered as he left court Wednesday following his appearance on sexual abuse charges dating back nearly four decades. Some members of the public shouted at Jeffrey Donaldson and lunged toward him, and he had to be surrounded by police as he left Newry Magistrates’ Court following his first appearance since his arrest last month. Donaldson, 61, faces one charge of rape, a single charge of gross indecency and nine indecent assault charges dating from 1985 to 2006. His wife, Eleanor Mary Elizabeth Donaldson, 58, faces four counts of aiding and...

The United Nations has decided to exclude the terrorist organization, Hamas, from its blacklist containing states and non-state actors which committed acts of sexual violence in 2023. The UN claimed it excluded Hamas due to lack of credible evidence. The UN report also excluded Russia from the list, despite evidence of sexual violence committed by Russian soldiers against women in Ukraine. Israeli Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, said he was “disgusted” by the report. The UN blacklist and wider annual report, authored by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was debated Tuesday, the first day of Passover. ...

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday the U.S. Senate's approval of a multi-billion aid package for Ukraine reinforces America's role as a "beacon of democracy." "I am grateful to the U.S. Senate for approval of vital aid to Ukraine," Zelenskyy said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app. "This vote reinforces America's role as a beacon of democracy and leader of the free world."

Opponents of the amendment question the wisdom of allowing medically unqualified groups access to women considering an abortion but the government counters the move is designed so prospective patients can be better informed. Italy’s Senate has passed legislation which allows regions to permit groups “with a qualified experience supporting motherhood” to have access to women considering abortions at public clinics. For the right-wing government, the amendment fulfils the original intent of the 1978 law legalising abortion, known as Law 194, which includes provisions to prevent the procedure and support motherhood. But some in the medical profession have questioned the wisdom...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is spreading a hoax about a “mass grave” supposedly discovered at a Gaza hospital where Israeli soldiers had recently been fighting terrorists. AOC cited a post on Twitter / X by Nick Kristof, a radical left-wing columnist for the New York Times, who has spread doubts about Hamas’s documented use of hospitals, but treats Hamas claims about Israeli atrocities as proven facts. How are news outlets dedicating wall-to-wall coverage to campus protests, but not the discovery of mass graves in Gaza of people with their hands tied & clothing stripped? Why do we not know more?...

A Jewish NYU professor tore into anti-Israel student protesters, calling out the “double standard” that allows them to spread antisemitism when hate spread about other groups would never be tolerated. “I can tell you, if I went into the NYU square with a white hood on and said, ‘Lynch the blacks’ or ‘Burn the gays,’ my ID would be shut off by that night,” Scott Galloway, an NYU Stern School of Business professor, told MSNBC on Tuesday. “I would never work in academia again,” he added. “There would be no need for the words ‘context’ or ‘nuance,’ I wouldn’t be...