Free Republic

THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY of Roe v. Wade is a good time for us to pause and reflect...The consequences of this judicial decision are now obvious: since 1973, more than 15 million unborn children have had their lives snuffed out by legalized abortions. That is over ten times the number of Americans lost in all our nation’s wars. Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution... Nowhere do the plain words of the Constitution even hint at a “right” so sweeping as to permit abortion up to the time the child is ready to be born. Yet...

State-sponsored Russian hackers appear to have a greater interest in the U.S. power grid than meddling in the fall midterm elections since reports indicate that so far only two Senate Democrats up for re-election had online accounts tampered with, The New York Times reported Friday. There's little evidence of Russian military hackers in U.S. elections or state election systems, U.S. intelligence officials and representatives from technology companies maintain, but report there has been quite a lot of evidence pointing to foreign agents implanting malware on electric grids across the country. The Department of Homeland Security revealed this week Russia's military...

SEOUL, South Korea — He was one of North Korea’s deadliest secret agents. On Oct. 9, 1983, Kang Min-chul and two other North Korean agents bombed the Martyrs’ Museum in Rangoon, Burma, in a plot to kill the South Korean president, who was to have laid a wreath there. The bomb missed its mark — the president’s car had been delayed — but 17 South Koreans, including four cabinet ministers, were killed. For his deed, Mr. Kang was consigned to oblivion. North Korea denied any connection with the attack. In South Korea, where the bombing was declared a North Korean...

All or nothing at all -- three-quarters of a country never appealed to him, nor did the idea of a political entity called Northern Ireland that was created in 1920, comprising the six northeastern counties of Ireland in the province of Ulster. Gerry Adams is still adamant about the need for a united Ireland. As a political entity, the Republic of Ireland, first called the Irish Free State, was created in 1922. On November 18, 2017 the 69-year-old Adams, president since 1983 of Sinn Fein, the left-wing political party, announced that it was time for a change and that he...

Numerous international groups are trying to influence Ireland into legalising abortionThe great and the good internationally have a big interest in the outcome of Ireland’s looming abortion referendum, planned for next year. They want Irish voters to erase from their constitution the so-called Eighth Amendment, which gives the unborn child the same right to life as every other human being. Abortion is only permitted in Ireland when the life of the mother is at real and substantial risk. This amendment was inserted into the constitution following a referendum in 1983 which passed by a two-to-one margin. Ever since then secular...

[I begin] with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985. And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. [T]hese Socialist...

Early on the morning of Sept. 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov helped prevent the outbreak of nuclear war. A 44-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, he was a few hours into his shift as the duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret command center outside Moscow where the Soviet military monitored its early-warning satellites over the United States, when alarms went off. Computers warned that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched from an American base. “For 15 seconds, we were in a state of shock,” he later recalled. “We needed to understand, ‘What’s next?’ ” The alarm...

1. Ahmad Abu Adass In 2005, the last year of his life, Ahmad Abu Adass was 22 and still living with his parents in Beirut, Lebanon. He was kind and liked people, his friends later told investigators, but none of them thought he was very sophisticated. The best way to describe him was simple, one said. He was generous and a little naïve. He was very weak, physically. A Sunni Muslim of Palestinian descent, Adass had become interested in religion and now spent many hours at the Arab University Mosque near his home. It was there, after a prayer session,...

Walking alongside rice paddies and water buffalo on the outskirts of Dhaka with Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus was like walking down the red carpet with a Hollywood movie star. Women in saris grabbed at the handsome man with thick gray hair, flirting and addressing him with ease. I was surprised, given we were in a conservative Muslim country where rural women typically take a backseat to men. But this man, who won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, had taught them to stand up to their husbands by giving them small loans that now put them in the driver's seat....

Saddam's Ambassador to al-QaedaBy Jonathan SchanzerWeekly Standard | February 23, 2004 A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al-Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan's Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam/al-Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in...

“This was the heyday of [Ayatollah] Khomeini’s theocratic vision, when Iran thought it really could export its revolution across the Middle East, providing money and arms to anyone who claimed he could upend the old order.” He may yet turn out to be the avatar of Iranian democracy, but three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut. Mousavi, prime minister for most of the 1980s, personally selected his point man for the Beirut terror campaign, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, and dispatched...

Khizr Khan wrote that any writings on judicial matters “must always be subordinated to the Shari’ah and open to reconsideration by all Muslims.” From The Daily Caller: Khizr Khan, the Muslim father of a slain American soldier, is an attorney who has previously written in a law journal about Islamic law. He specifically wrote about the purity of the Quran and the Sunnah over all other texts and interpretations. Khan rose to fame after speaking at the Democratic National Convention Thursday and pulling out a pocket U.S. Constitution imploring if Donald Trump had even read it. Khan wrote “Juristic Classification...

In an unusually strong protectionist action, President Reagan today ordered a tenfold increase in tariffs for imported heavyweight motorycles. The impact of Mr. Reagan's action, which followed the unanimous recommendation of his trade advisers, is effectively limited to Japanese manufacturers, which dominate every sector of the American motorycycle market. The action was exceptional for protecting a single American company, the Harley-Davidson Motor Company of Milwaukee, the sole surviving American maker of motorcycles.

Stop by your local post office and you might just see a poster of Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londono hanging next to the Most Wanted posters of bank robbers and fugitives. The State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information about the Communist terrorist leader. But all the State Department had to do was ask Secretary of State Kerry. Obama did the wave with the Cuban dictator and Kerry met with Timochenko , the leader of FARC, a Marxist terrorist organization that appears on his own department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations a little above Al Qaeda. Timochenko is a...

Obama's call for disarmament in the threat of facing the Soviet Union.

Most students at Columbia do not have first hand knowledge of war. Military violence has been a vicarious experience, channeled into our minds through television, film, and print. The more sensitive among us struggle to extrapolate experiences of war from our everyday experience, discussing the latest mortality statistics from Guatemala, sensitizing ourselves to our parents' wartime memories, or incorporating into our framework of reality as depicted by a Maller[?] or a Coppola. But the taste of war -- the sounds and chill, the dead bodies -- are remote and far removed. We know that wars have occurred, will occur, are...

A nuclear weapons command exercise by NATO in November 1983 prompted fear in the leadership of the Soviet Union that the maneuvers were a cover for a nuclear surprise attack by the United States, triggering a series of unparalleled Soviet military re­sponses, according to a top-secret U.S. intelligence review that has just been declassified. “In 1983, we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger,” the review concluded.

The Obama administration is declining to inform Congress about the number of American citizens and troops killed by Iran and its terror proxies, according to a document provided to Congress and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The administration was repeatedly asked by Congress to release figures describing how many Americans and Israelis have been killed by Iran’s military and terror activities since the country’s 1979 revolution. In a series of on-the-record responses obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon, and provided in written form to Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), Kerry sidestepped the questions on all of the three separate...

On arrival in La Paz, Pope Francis was presented by Bolivian President Evo Morales with a wooden crucifix carved in the form of a hammer and sickle, the symbol of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Fidel. Had Pope John Paul II been handed that crucifix, he might have cracked it over Evo’s head. For John Paul II had seen up close what communism did — to his country, his church and his people in 45 years of Bolshevik rule. On his arrival in the Nicaragua of Daniel Ortega in 1983, Pope John Paul castigated a priest-collaborator who dared to serve that...

If Christian broadcaster Stendal goes on trial in Colombia, missions work nationwide may be at risk. Is Russ Stendal, the famed missionary to FARC terrorists in South America, actually El Gringo, a terrorist leader seeking the overthrow of Colombia’s government? That question is before a three-judge panel, based on allegations from Carlos Manuel Silva, chief sectional prosecutor for the Colombian department of Cundinamarca, which includes the capital, Bogota. Stendal denies any allegation of leadership in FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). He said in a recent Facebook video, “Somebody set a trap for me, and I walked into it. They...