Free Republic

OPINION China’s recent outcry over the alleged breach of ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ with the Philippines reveals a profound irony, given the history of its coercion and deceit There is a huge amount of insincerity and gall involved in the Chinese complaint that the Philippines had torn up the bilateral ‘Gentleman’s Agreement,’ between Beijing and Manila. While the term ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ has an implicit assumption of ‘trust’ as a fundamental tenet besting a relationship, which may otherwise not be legally binding -- to even imagine that there has been any element of ‘trust’ between these two sparing countries, is to put oneself...

A Lesson in Markets and Bureaucracies: The Very Instructive History of Rat FarmsIn effect, authorities created two rat farms, both unintended: the sewers, and the private-sector rat-farms.The history of Rat Farms offers a valuable lesson in how markets and bureaucracies work. The story of how the colonial authorities in Hanoi came to establish two kinds of rat farms is highly instructive. The first rat farm was unintentional. French colonial authorities decided to modernize the French Quarter of Hanoi (where Westerners lived) by constructing a modern sewer system, the overall goal being to establish "a little Paris in the East." Their...

The 1,035-kilometer (642-mile) line opens this week to cargo but no regular passengers due to anti-pandemic travel curbs. Poor countries welcome China’s initiative. But the projects are financed by loans from Chinese state-owned banks that must be repaid. Some borrowers complain Chinese-built projects are too expensive and leave too much debt. Laotian leaders hope the railway will energize their isolated economy by linking it to China and markets as far away as Europe. But foreign experts say the potential benefits to Laos beyond serving as a channel for Chinese trade are unclear and the cost appears dangerously high.

Many Americans’ moral vanity is expressed nowadays in their rage to disparage. They are incapable of measured judgments about past politics — about flawed historical figures who were forced by cascading circumstances to make difficult decisions on the basis of imperfect information. So, the nation now needs an example of how to calmly assess episodes fraught with passion and sorrow. An example arrives Sunday night. For ten nights on PBS, Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War, ten years in the making and 18 hours in length, tells the story of a war “begun in good faith by decent...

Adolf Hitler started World War II by attacking Poland on September 1, 1939. Nazi Germany moved only after it had already remilitarized the Rhineland, absorbed Austria and dismantled Czechoslovakia. Before the outbreak of the war, Hitler's new Third Reich had created the largest German-speaking nation in European history. Well before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese government had redrawn the map of Asia and the Pacific. Japan had occupied or annexed Indochina, Korea, Manchuria and Taiwan, in addition to swaths of coastal China. Attacking Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia was merely the logical 1941 follow-up...

The most striking proof that the Arab anti-Israel cause is a common meeting ground for both Nazis and Communists --and that the Arabs welcomed supporters of both ilks-- lies in the friendship of Carlos, the notorious master terrorist who served the PLO, with Fran*ois Genoud, an old Nazi, one of the leading Nazis in pre-War Switzerland, later a financier who provided funds for Habash's faction of the PLO. "Carlos" (his nom de guerre) was what is called a "red diaper baby." His fabulously rich father, a Venezuelan lawyer and owner of estates, gave "Carlos" the name Ilich, Lenin's patronymic, as...

Does being on the left mean never having to say that you are sorry?—If you are talking about the Vietnam War and who won it 35 years later, that very well may be the case. Regarding the real truth of the Vietnam War after the fall of Saigon, Laos and Cambodia, Senator Fulbright, D-AK, who was also the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee summed up the sentiment of the 94th Congress, “I am no more distressed than if Arkansas had lost the football game to Texas.” “That started the Southeast Asian genocide. You’re talking about one quarter of the...

This week deadly armed clashes near Burma’s border with China ended a nearly two-decade-old ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and Burma’s government. About 10,000 people have fled to refugee camps along the Chinese border and 215 Chinese workers from the Datang United Hydropower Developing Co. returned home after the KIA captured a Chinese-built and operated hydropower plant last week. A KIA spokesperson told the Thailand-based Irrawaddy that the uprising began when the government reneged on an agreement to share electricity generated from the region’s Chinese-built hydropower plants with local people. “This electricity is now going to China, not...

The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write. No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007. Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former...

Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party that ruled Cambodia from 1976-1979. "Khmer Rouge" (or Khmer Reds) was the French rendering of the organization’s official name: the "Communist Party of Cambodia," later the "Party of Democratic Kampuchea" and also the "Communist Party of Kampuchea," or CPK. (Kampuchea is the local name for Cambodia.) Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in what is now the province of Kompong Thong, Cambodia in 1925. He came from a prosperous farming family that in 1931 moved to the capital, Phnom Penh, where the young Pol Pot learned some of...

American Friends? HardlyBy Gordon LambFrontPageMagazine.com | June 5, 2003 When the first Quakers arrived in America in the late 17th century, they were thought of as heretics, sometimes witches and routinely bizarre. Theirs was a religion based on the ideas the individual is supreme, that the relationship between God and man is a very private affair not to be regulated by government or society, that temperance ("all things in moderation") is a noble way to live one's life. Above all, it prized peace and stated that violence should be avoided if at all possible.The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has mastered...

Last Saturday night brought His Imperial Highness Prince Nguyen Phuc Buu Chanh of Vietnam, Regent of the Imperial Dynasty and President of the Vietnamese Constitutional Monarchist League, to Cornell. The Prince, a member of the Vietnamese imperial family gave a lecture, entitled "Revival of Vietnamese Culture: The Nguyen Dynasty," before a crowd of about 50 people. Maria Nguyen '05, vice president of the Cornell Vietnamese Association sang the American national anthem and then played the national anthem of South Vietnam. Aided by PowerPoint slides, Prince Buu Chanh then began his lecture speaking from a podium draped with the American flag...

The Imperial Nguyen Dynasty of Vietnam is politically pressuring the government of Vietnam to protect the liberty, religious rights of the Vietnamese people as well as the culture, traditions, languages of the Montagnards and Khmer Krom in Vietnam. (PRWEB) October 23, 2004 -- Today, Vietnam is experiencing a minor period of outward growth. Even the most dedicated Communists are abandoning old communist economic policies, which have proven to be ineffective and sometimes harmful. Capitalism is being introduced, with the Communist Party maintained only as a vehicle to exercise absolute control of the elite Party leaders over the common people. The...

WRITTEN BY LT.COLONEL CHARLES WADE Wednesday, October 13, 2004 Even before the primary elections, President Bush’s military service was a political issue as was Senator Kerry’s military service which he touted and others questioned. Reporters continue to seek comment from candidates, political operatives, and pundits. It seems that everyone is an expert, and everyone has an answer. Some of the more interesting responses have come from Republican senators who typically begin by asserting that they honor Senator Kerry’s Viet Nam service, but… Honor: What is that all about? What virtues are honorable? More important, what virtues are both militarily and...

Chinese President Hu Jintao yesterday reiterated his commitment to six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program in a call from President Bush about the stalled negotiations involving the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, China and Japan, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

Aurora,IL (PRWEB) September 8, 2004 -- OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENTS - From the Office of the Leadership of the The Imperial Nguyen Dynasty of Vietnam & Vietnamese Constitutional Monarchist League: His Imperial Highness Prince Nguyen Phuc Buu Chanh of Vietnam, Regent of the Imperial Nguyen Dynasty and President of The Vietnamese Constitutional Monarchist League denounces the Communist Government on the return of United States Servicemen MIA or possible POWs’ and Human Rights Record. It has been stated by American Marines and Army Soldiers who are in Vietnam searching for MIA's, that there is corruption within the government of Vietnam. They stated that...

Most of us old enough to have been reading newspapers and watching television in the mid-1980s remember when the Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninist junta “Sandinistas” were battling the anti-communist guerrilla army of “Contras” in Nicaragua. And who could forget the overblown Iran-Contra affair, the attempt to arm the Contras through a deal to swap arms for hostages with the mullahs in Iran. What might be hazy in the memory after 20 years, however, is the Keystone Kops, I-want-to-play-president role of the freshman senator from Massachusetts, John Forbes Kerry. Still humming his “Give peace a chance” mantra from Vietnam days, Kerry jumped into...