Free Republic

More than 2,700 conversions and baptisms have been recorded across Germany’s Federation of Free Evangelical Churches.Congregational life in these churches has largely rebounded following the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic.The growth reflects a renewed hunger for the Gospel and traditional Christian community in Germany.Germany’s Federation of Free Evangelical Churches is reporting strong signs of spiritual renewal. Baptisms and conversions have risen significantly in recent months, pointing to a fresh openness to the Christian faith across the country.“We are seeing people come to Christ in numbers we haven’t experienced in years,”church leaders stated as they released the latest figures. The 2,700...

Ancient Greek papyri show that people used diagrams to solve and understand practical math problems nearly 2,000 years ago. A study led by Thomas Kelly finds that the drawings helped readers organize numbers, follow calculations, and check results. The research examines Greek mathematical papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt, mainly dating from the first four centuries A.D. The texts contain practical geometry problems involving land, buildings, and three-dimensional objects. Unlike formal proofs, these problems usually provide measurements followed by steps for calculating an answer. They offer another view of mathematics in ancient Greece, showing how geometry could be applied to practical calculations....

The Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, has repeatedly said that the fall of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine is inevitable and will happen faster than Kyiv thinks. Recent trends on the battlefield paint a different picture. A monthslong Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northern part of the Donbas has thwarted Russian efforts to encircle the remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the region. Russia, Western analysts say, has lost dozens of square miles of territory during the Ukrainian campaign, which Kyiv is calling Operation Vivaldi. In the southern Donbas, Russia continues to mount furious assaults to break through Ukrainian lines. But Kyiv...

The U.S. trade deficit widened sharply in August amid an influx of goods related to the artificial intelligence build-out and the vagaries of import tariffs, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. Imports swelled 4.3% for the month, pushing the total imbalance to $105.6 billion. That marked a 13.7% jump from July and was ahead of the Dow Jones consensus estimate for $102 billion. It also was the steepest deficit since the all-time gap in March 2025, recorded just before President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” announcement of “reciprocal” tariffs against U.S. trading partners. Though the monthly total was up, the year-to-date deficit...

AI firms say simulations are being used to identify which pharmaceutical programs are worth moving forward and to assess the value of acquisition targets. As AI tools get better at flagging clinical risks, they say unexpected trial failures may become less frequent. Novartis' experimental del-desiran for a rare type of muscular dystrophy was expected to be a winner, with the Swiss company's CEO predicting annual peak sales of $5 billion. When a late-stage trial missed its goal last month, shares fell 11%, erasing $30 billion in market value. AI start-up BioinvestGPT was not surprised. In July, it ran a simulated...

Republican Byron Donalds holds a 7-percentage-point advantage over Democrat David Jolly in the Florida governor’s race, according to a new NBC South Florida/Telemundo Station Group poll, while Republican Sen. Ashley Moody is up by 10 points in her matchup against Democratic challenger Angie Nixon. Donalds, a congressman from the southwest corner of the state, is at 48% in the poll, compared with Jolly’s 41%, in a race in which Donalds has had a commanding financial advantage. (That advantage is just inside the poll’s margin of error, but Donalds has the edge in most of the range of possibilities.) Moody is...

Novel medicines can’t be treated in the same zero-sum way as semiconductors or electric vehicles, where one competitor’s win comes at the expense of the other, says Juliana Liu for Bloomberg Opinion.As Washington and Beijing tussle for dominance in frontier technologies, there’s one area in which competition shouldn’t preclude collaboration: innovative medicines. Beijing’s latest five-year plan for the biotechnology sector details how the country wants to lead the field globally. Unusually for an industrial blueprint, it comes with numeric targets. By 2030, Chinese drugmakers are expected to have made a “major leap” in competitiveness with sales of new medications growing...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani was berated and booed at an Oct. 7 candlelight vigil in Union Square on Wednesday night by anti-Israel protesters who believe he turned his back on Palestinian causes. Hizzoner, with a candle in hand, was heckled by the angry mob, including some waving Hamas flags, who marched from City Hall to crash the event meant to honor Jewish victims killed by Hamas terrorists — and Palestinians in the subsequent war. “You coward!” some of the keffiyeh-clad agitators shouted at Hizzoner. “How do you let this happen?” “Zohran you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” the protesters...

Former Charles Manson follower Patricia Krenwinkel, who is serving a life prison term for her role in the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, has again been recommended for parole, state officials confirmed today. Krenwinkel, 78, was preliminarily granted parole Tuesday at her 18th subsequent suitability hearing, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “All grants of parole are proposed decisions and become final only after a thorough and comprehensive review by the Board of Parole Hearings and the Governor,'” CDCR officials said in a statement.

[Catholic Caucus] The Deceptive Tactics of the Silent Revolution Engulfing the Church - by Bishop Robert Mutsaerts The Deceptive Tactics of the Silent RevolutionBy Bishop Robert MutsaertsAux. Bishop of the Diocese of 's-Hertogenbosch, NetherlandsThe Catholic Church has experienced, over two thousand years, virtually everything that can befall an institution: bad popes, corrupt bishops, heresies, schisms, revolutions, persecutions, decadent monasteries, dissolute clergy, and theologians so determined to be original that ultimately only they themselves understood what they meant.And yet the Church endures. Not because Catholics have always been wise — that would be a rather audacious historical hypothesis. The Church survived...

This seems to be the current state of FR's home page. The link to "https://freerepublic.com/donate/" yields (for me, at least) the following: 404 Not Found nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)

A 71-year-old cyclist was killed after he collided with an off-leash dog in Central Park’s East Drive roadway Monday morning, according to the NYPD. Police said around 8 a.m. they received a call of a cyclist struck near East Drive and 84th Street just steps from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While riding his bike, the man collided with a dog that was unleashed and ran onto the roadway, police said. The cyclist, who was wearing a helmet, fell to the ground and suffered trauma on his head and body. The unidentified man was transported to NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical...

Hundreds of infuriated parents and staff members descended on Portland Public Schools’ headquarters Tuesday night to protest far-reaching proposals to close up to 14 schools, shift grade configurations and programs and redraw attendance boundaries. In numbers not seen since the Portland Association of Teachers strike, demonstrators chanted and cheered outside the district headquarters and scolded school board members during their meeting inside the building. about half of the district’s elementary schools have fewer than 300 students and a handful have only half that number — it gets harder to afford stable staffing.

HANOI, Vietnam — Police in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, arrested 12 men suspected of operating a citywide ring that stole and resold about 2,700 cats for meat, Vietnamese state media said. Police identified 39-year-old Luu Thanh Binh as the alleged leader of the network. He and 11 others are being investigated for theft. Investigators said Binh bought stolen cats, kept them at a facility in the city’s north and resold them for meat. He worked with suppliers who recruited others to ride motorcycles through residential neighborhoods between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., hunting for cats and trapping four to...

The White House releases a behind-the-scenes look of China’s President Xi Jinping’s during the recent state visit. Hosted by President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, President Xi was welcomed to the White House for events on September 23-25, 2026. Chinese President Xi looks at framed image of an autopen in place of a President Biden portrait.Trump and First Lady Melania Trump visit the National Archives with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan in Washington, D.C.Trump and First Lady Melania Trump visit the National Archives with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan in Washington, D.C.

As faithful P&E readers will recall, over the years your humble servant has made several “modest proposals” seeking to address unresolved issues then percolating in the Republic. Most, if not all of those proposals, have dealt with the “birthright citizenship” and “natural born Citizen” (“nbC”) matters under the 14th Amendment and “Eligibility Clause” provisions of the Constitution. Well, a recent decision of Florida federal District Court Judge David Leibowitz declaring a federal statute – 18 U.S.C. § 611 unconstitutional – presents an opportunity for one more proposal. This one, however, would be specifically directed to the clarification, if not outright...

An upmarket restaurant in Portland has faced a violent backlash after seating a group of white supremacists. Police were called twice to Clarklewis, an LGBTQ+-owned restaurant in the Central Eastside, on Sunday after protesters confronted the diners and restaurant staff. The restaurant said its staff had no idea about the group’s alleged political affiliations when they arrived for a private brunch.(snip) Rogers made clear that the restaurant does not support white nationalism and said staff would not knowingly host a group with those beliefs. Rogers said one female employee quit on the spot after the confrontation, while other staff members...

~ The FReeper Canteen Presents ~ ~ Remembering Our Troops!! ~ We Sing Too! Members of the U.S. Army Europe and Africa Band and Chorus perform to an audience of patients and medical professionals at the Aleris Rehab Station in Stockholm, Sweden. The Stronger Together Outreach Tour is an annual initiative preceding the DEFENDER-Europe 24 exercise, demonstrating U.S. Army Europe & Africa’s commitment to the NATO Alliance and our global Partners. As part of this effort, the USAREUR-AF Band serves as a bridge to increase cultural ties and enrich the alliance between the U.S. and Sweden through music. (U.S....

North Carolinians who have been inundated with TV campaign commercials may start noticing a gap in ads for Senate candidate Michael Whatley. The Whatley campaign has temporarily pulled ads on television, a campaign source told McClatchy. The source said this is a short-term adjustment of who the campaign is targeting. “We are confident we have the resources to target our late-breaking supporters and win on Election Day,” the source said. The campaign’s decision comes as national Republicans pull away from North Carolina’s Senate race to focus on other candidates nationwide. Whatley, 58, a Republican from Gastonia, is facing off against...

The lawsuit alleges Pfizer hid safety signals, misled millions about transmission, and used deceptive marketing to drive maximum COVID shot uptake. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has filed a sweeping lawsuit against Pfizer and its CEO, Albert Bourla, accusing them of deceiving the public about the safety and transmission-prevention capabilities of Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA injection. The 49-page complaint was filed on October 1, 2026, in St. Lucie County, Florida, and targets Pfizer and Bourla personally under Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. The complaint opens with a striking line: “Those people are criminals.” That is how Bourla described people...