Free Republic

When Pia Wurtzbach brought back the Miss Universe crown in 2015 she received a hero’s welcome. Ayala Avenue, the main road of Manila’s central business district was closed off midday, during a weekday and people gathered in their thousands carrying signs, waving flags and tearing up as they greeted the newly crowned beauty queen. It was a day of national pride for Filipinos. For the first time in 42 years, a Filipina brought home the most coveted crown in the beauty pageant industry. And in a country where pageants are followed and cheered on as much as the Superbowl, the...

About 709,000 years ago, someone butchered a rhinoceros using stone tools on the Philippine island of Luzon. That may not seem remarkable -- except that humans weren't supposed to be in the Philippines so long ago. Before this discovery, the earliest indicator that early humans, or hominins, were even on those islands had been a single foot bone from 67,000 years ago, uncovered in the Callao Cave on Luzon. That's quite a time jump. Research says that the new findings push back the date for humans inhabiting the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years. A study published Wednesday in...

November will mark the sixth anniversary of China's first fixed-wing flight operations aboard the aircraft carrier Liaoning. Conducted with Shenyang J-15s – a clone of the Sukhoi Su-33 – the development was greeted with much pride in China. The start of flight operations followed the launch of the Liaoning in 2011, after its transformation from an old Soviet Kuznetsov-class hulk, the Varyag. Although the effort involved both an aircraft type and a vessel from the Cold War era, it marked a renaissance in regional aircraft carrier development. Beijing has gone on to develop a sister ship to the Liaoning. This...

Link only due to copyright issues: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/05/01/donald-trump-nobel-peace-prize-north-korea-column/566161002/

Some students at Fort Hays State University (FHSU) in Kansas say a school-sponsored operetta production is not only “racist,” but also rife with “cultural appropriation.” FHSU Music and Theatre describes its production of The Mikado as “a fun burlesque romp about the whimsy of love” on its Facebook page. According to the operetta’s description, the play takes place “in a mythical Japan,” where the main character “has been appointed Lord High Executioner and must find someone to execute before the arrival of the ruling Mikado.”

Asia needs more transport infrastructure. More than the state, which finances the lion's share, can fund. So what more can be done to bring in increased private capital, when investors have so far been mostly disappointed by the returns? Is there a way of breathing new life into the public private partnership (PPP), the most common vehicle for private infrastructure investment? We think so. Governments need to offer private sector investors more than they can hope to earn from ticket sales on railways or motorway tolls. They should consider sharing the extra tax revenues generated from the increased economic activity...

U.S. Pacific Command still calls itself PACOM, but it appears INDO-PACOM -- India-Pacific Command -- might be the acronym of the future. Pentagon and State Department studies now routinely refer to the "Indo-Pacific region," as do the defense and foreign policy papers authored by their counterparts in Japan and Australia. "INDO" obviously contracts Indian Ocean, equivalent to "PAC." However, Chinese admirals in Beijing detect another implication: the huge nation that dominates that body of water -- India. To paraphrase Shakespeare's Hamlet, aye, there's the rub. For China, India is a very large rub. The subcontinent dominates the Indian Ocean. China,...

In what Reuters has dubbed a massive “show of force”, dozens of Chinese warships have been observed on satellite imagery, exercising with an aircraft carrier and warplanes above the heavily-disputed South China Sea, as part of the previously noted massive military drills, which the PLA ominously said were “in preparation for war.” The four images, provided by Planet Labs for Reuters confirms the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning joined the annual naval war drill earlier this week. According to the Taiwan Defense & National Security ministry, late last week Taiwan sent two ships and military aircraft to shadow the Chinese aircraft...

HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam’s state oil firm PetroVietnam has ordered Spanish energy firm Repsol to suspend its “Red Emperor” project off the country’s southeastern coast following pressure from China, the BBC reported on Friday. {snip} The block lies near the U-shaped “nine-dash line” that marks the vast area that China claims in the sea and overlaps what it says are its own oil concessions. The field can produce 25,000-30,000 barrels of oil and 60 million cubic meters of gas a day, Vietnamese news provider Cafef.vn reported last month. Repsol spent around 33 million euros ($41 million) on exploration in Vietnam...

Now Hillary Clinton fractures her wrist after slipping in a palace bathtub during trip to India Hillary Clinton's wrist injury is worse than originally thought The former Secretary of State was forced to cancel her appearances in Jodhpur, India this week when she slipped in a palace bathtub and hurt her wrist Doctors advised the 70-year-old to rest, but the pain grew unbearable so she was taken to the hospital early Wednesday morning A CT Scan and X-ray confirmed she had a hairline fracture on her wrist This is the second time the former presidential candidate has injured herself on...

As winter's cold grip loosens on Hanoi, the city has been named one of the ideal travel destinations for March by American-based Business Insider. (please see the link, for the full article)

Well, well, well. So Mister Trump is going to meet with the leader of North Korea. Stunning. For someone who's universally castigated as being a clueless, all thumbs palooka of a leader, this fellow sure gets a lot of things done. Very significant things. One might even say world transforming. You can hate him, berate him, and try very hard to minimize any of his accomplishments, but President Trump is starting to tip the arguments his way. The previous President of the United States was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for…what again? Still no one knows. Where I live in...

When it was first announced last Thursday that President Trump was to personally meet with North Korea Dictator Kim Jong-un for negotiations, the media’s response varied from optimistic to seething anger. But with some time, it appears as though their consensus is now to denounce the idea as was blatantly obvious on Sunday’s Meet the Press. The entire panel up in arms and fretting that Trump was either going to hand North Korea a victory or blow a gasket at the meeting and start a war. Moderator Chuck Todd, still bitter because Trump called him a “sleeping son of a...

President Trump shocked the world Thursday night when it was announced that he planned to sit down with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in the coming months. The political world was so overwhelmed by the news that even the journalists at CNN were more or less optimistic. Yet over at MSNBC, host Rachel Maddow was anything but enthused by the idea as she spewed skepticism and threw shade at the commander-in-chief for excepting North Korea’s offer. Towards the beginning of her bitter rant, Maddow seemed to question the President’s intelligence and/or knowledge of history for taking the meeting: You might...

Japan's Coast Guard says 4 Chinese patrol ships temporarily entered Japanese territorial waters near the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea on Friday. Coast Guard officials said the ships breached the territorial waters off Uotsuri Island in Okinawa Prefecture shortly after 10 AM. Foreign Ministry officials lodged a protest with the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo. They said intrusions into Japan's waters are an infringement of its sovereignty, and demanded that the vessels leave the area at once. The 4 ships stayed in Japan's waters for about 90 minutes before moving away. Japan controls the Senkaku Islands. The Japanese government...

Many modern East Asian currencies have roots in Ming dynasty trade and Chinese traders’ faith in the Mexican silver dollar. Attempts to dislodge it, such as the Hong Kong-minted silver British dollar, were not always successfulAt the antiques market near the old Qingjing mosque in central Quanzhou, a city in China’s south-eastern Fujian province, it is sometimes possible to purchase unusual silver objects that reveal much about the currencies in circulation in East Asia today. On one stall, crammed with opium pipes, blue-and-white ceramics and jade trinkets, is a small, dome-shaped lump of metal in a rusty tin box. It...

When five Myanmar journalists were sentenced to decadelong prison terms for reporting the alleged existence of a military-run chemical weapons factory in Myanmar a few years ago, Aung San Suu Kyi — then an opposition lawmaker — condemned the harsh punishments as “very excessive.” The journalists, from the now-defunct Unity publication, had been convicted for violating the nation’s Official Secrets Act — the same colonial-era law now being leveled against a pair of Reuters reporters who are facing a staggering 14 years behind bars each. […] Three and a half years on, the thinking of Suu Kyi, who now heads...

US President Donald Trump today unveiled a US$ 4 trillion annual budget for the fiscal 2019 beginning October 1, proposing US$ 256 million in civilian assistance and US$ 80 million in military aid to Pakistan. The proposal of aid to Pakistan comes weeks after Trump administration suspended nearly US$ 2 billion in security assistance to Islamabad due to its inability to take action against terrorist groups operating from its soil. The White House has said it would consider lifting the freeze if it sees action by Pakistan against terrorist groups. The budgetary proposal says that the military aid depends on...

The 2018 Winter Olympics were in full swing and Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and head of their Propaganda and Agitation Department, had bizarrely become a liberal media darling. Despite the fact her job entailed censorship and glorifying public executions, numerous outlets had touted her for “stealing the show,” winning “diplomatic gold,” being the “Ivanka Trump of North Korea,” and hyping the extremely creepy North Korean cheerleading corp. CNN, who has a history of climbing into bed with murderous regimes (Iraq and Saddam Hussein) to stay relevant, was one of the more notable...

Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia. Former history teacher and scholar Tamaki Matsuoka holds Japan's education system responsible for a number of the country's foreign relations difficulties. "Our system has been creating young people who get annoyed by all the complaints that China and South Korea make about war atrocities because they are not...