Free Republic

SINGAPORE: There are enough jobs in Singapore and the Government is helping industries to transform their business models to create better jobs - an assurance that came from Manpower Minister Lim Swee Say on Friday (Sep 16), following the release of employment data on Thursday that showed there were more jobseekers than vacancies. Mr Lim said: "I want to assure Singaporeans that if you look at it from totality, there are enough jobs. Don't just look at the 49,000 job openings; in fact there are 3.3 million jobs out there in Singapore. And in fact what we are doing is,...

Charles Ortel bio, B.A. from Yale, MBA from Harvard Business School. He previously worked as a Managing Director at investment bank Dillon Read and later as a Managing Director at the financial research firm, Newport Value Partners. In a 9-page letter dated yesterday and posted to his blog, Ortel calls the Clintons’ charity the “largest unprosecuted charity fraud ever attempted,” adding for good measure that the Clinton Foundation is part of an “international charity fraud network whose entire cumulative scale (counting inflows and outflows) approaches and may even exceed $100 billion, measured from 1997 forward.” Ortel lists 40 potential areas...

HOLIDAY, Fla. — Donald Trump’s prospects for winning the White House will probably rise or fall among the strip malls and 1,000-square-foot ranch homes of southwest Pasco County. In this working-class suburb of Tampa Bay, finding people enthusiastically supporting Hillary Clinton is tough. Finding people enthusiastically supporting Trump is less difficult. Finding people fed up with the status quo is a piece of cake. “It’s not that I like Trump that much, it’s that I dislike Hillary so much. I don’t think [Barack] Obama did anything for us, and I see it continuing with Hillary. At least with Trump, there’s...

Apache’s recent oil find highlights what could be a new phase in fracking. To date, fracking in the U.S. had really been all about taking explored basins and drilling new wells to get at previously untapped resources. That strategy worked well when oil prices were more than $80 a barrel. At today’s prices though, drilling the old style rigs in mostly depleted fields to get at residual layers of black gold is a money losing strategy. Apache’s find shows that money can be made by taking risks and looking for major new finds in areas that had been passed over...

For the environmental lobby and politicians of the progressive stripe, Donald Trump is their worst nightmare come to life. In defiance of liberal orthodoxy, the fire-breathing Republican presidential candidate slams climate change as a hoax, vows to approve the Keystone XL pipeline if elected and ditch any U.S. commitments to curb carbon emissions. Love him or hate him, Trump’s verbal eruptions have provided endless fodder for TV talk show hosts and headline writers, and made this the most unlikely presidential election campaign in recent U.S. history. Until recently, however, the billionaire developer wasn’t taken seriously. The intelligentsia dismissed his bid...

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses. First, a little background. If you want to take a network off the Internet, the easiest way to do it is with a distributed...

I often open carry, especially in the summer when the temperatures make concealed carry a bit more cumbersome.  I was open carrying at this Yuma, Arizona gas station when a man approached me. He asked if Arizona were an open carry state.  I said that it was, and went on to explain that most states were.  He said he was from Colorado, where open carry was forbidden in some cities.  Yes, I said, the Colorado Supreme Court had made a weird decision that Denver could ignore state law.  He said the city of Aurora also prohibited open carry in...

The White House race could be decided in the Rust Belt – a vast, decaying former industrial powerhouse in the US Midwest and Northeast where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are battling for the support of working class white voters. The region, also typified by a declining population and urban decay, forms an arc around the Great Lakes, running mainly through Pennsylvania and Ohio. If those two states – each won twice by Democrat Barack Obama – swing to Trump in November, the Republican stands a good chance of becoming president. Major cities such as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Cleveland are...

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says a Donald Trump presidency would be a "nightmare", but that it is unlikely to happen. He also speaks about the reasons Trump has so much support: "If you look at the numbers, roughly the bottom 90% have had stagnant income over the past quarter of a century. and we've been trying to understand why has that been. And it is, I think partly because we haven't paid attention to the issue." "Fortunately, I'm not having too many sleepless nights, because I think the probability of [a Trump presidency] happening is not very large," he...

Logic dictates Trump may have a point about the Fed making decisions based on political imperatives The current stock market downturn appears timed to help the Democrat Party by scaring investors into rejecting Donald Trump on the grounds he’d trigger a crash if the Republicans win the White House in November. The Dow Jones fell again Tuesday this time over 250 points due in part, to fears of a rate hike at the Fed policy meeting next week. These market jitters may well have been calculated for effect, and engineered by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen in a bid to...

They call him Dr. Doom and for good reason. Dr. Marc Faber, author, investment adviser, and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom report, usually emphasizes the risks in the financial system and never minces his words. However, his views are more nuanced than most people think, and his advice for investors is more pragmatic than idealistic. Epoch Times spoke to Faber about central bank manipulation of financial markets, the reasons for income inequality, and how to invest in this environment.

The Obama administration shocked the oil industry last week, pulling the plug on a major oil pipeline from the Bakken that had become a flashpoint between a pipeline company on the one hand, and a growing coalition of Native American tribes and environmentalists on the other. Everyone was anxiously waiting a Friday ruling from a U.S. federal judge, who was weighing a request from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to stop construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.8 billion 1,168-mile oil pipeline that would run from North Dakota to Iowa and Illinois. The pipeline would threaten sacred lands and...

As I write this on September 12, the latest CNN poll has Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in a “near-even race” for the presidency of the United States. At PlasticsToday, we did our own online survey but asked our audience to rank the candidates on a single issue: Who would be best for U.S. manufacturing. Setting aside missing emails, the bromance with Vladimir Putin, trustworthiness and temperament, and sundry other issues, we asked the PlasticsToday audience to respond to a specific question: Disregarding all other qualities and flaws of the presidential candidates, who do you think would best represent...

In Medieval times, Kings and Queens interested in maintaining control over small, outlying geographical areas arranged a complex system of fiefdoms, vesting feudal lords with their imprimatur to tell the local serfs and vassals what to do, and granting them the “power” to extract taxes – a portion of which would be given to the royals. Despite Constitutional strictures created to insure the contrary, the United States federal government has followed pretty much the same template, albeit on a bureaucratic, rather than monarchical, level. Case in point, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is showing once more that it is...

A former senior EPA official known for coordinating with environmentalists slammed the White House for pushing back on agency plans to regulate hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas, text messages show. Michael Goo, EPA’s policy chief at the time, texted Sierra Club lobbyist John Coequyt that if environmentalists “want any hope of regulation of fracking then give us more time to try and remove the gun from our head and talk sense into OMB dickheads.” “If you want the oil and gas nsps to give fracking a free pass, as OMB would like then don’t give us the extension,”...

By completely overhauling the old rules of the business. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on an energy bonanza. A company discovered a new field with “the equivalent of at least two billion barrels of oil” that “has the promise to become one of the biggest energy finds of the past decade.” But the discovery wasn’t made by a foreign company in the Amazon, or deep in the waters off the coast off Africa, or in Kazakhstan—or any of the other politically treacherous, high-risk, low-infrastructure places where Big Oil has been prospecting for gigantic new gushers. Instead, the lucky...

NEW YORK – The refugee crisis in Europe was already pushing the European Union toward disintegration when, on June 23, it helped drive the British to vote to Brexit the EU. The refugee crisis and the Brexit calamity that it spawned have reinforced xenophobic, nationalist movements that will seek to win a series of upcoming votes– including national elections in France, the Netherlands, and Germany in 2017, a referendum in Hungary on the EU refugee policy on October 2, and a rerun of the Austrian presidential election on the same day. Rather than uniting to resist this threat, EU member...

Back in May I was invited to Singapore to tour schools, IT hubs, hospitals and startups. The size of the country, as well as their government structure, allows them move towards their objectives more quickly than other countries. What I witnessed during my visit was a nation determined to be seen as a leader in the technology sector and to be recognized as a nucleus for some of the top innovators in the world. One aspect of the trip that really resonated with me was the country's use of vertical farming and other cutting edge agricultural techniques. Population Pressures The...

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's daughter went on ABC's The View talk show to express her dismay at polls showing that a huge majority of Americans consider her mother untrustworthy. "I realize that some of the things coming out from the emails she tried to conceal are raising questions, but I know my mother and I'm certain that if anything thing she did was wrong in some technical sense that she did it for a good reason," Chelsea explained. "What a lot of people don't understand is that her job as the nation's top diplomat often required her to deliberately...

Aging infrastructure could render the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) increasingly ineffective, according to a new report from the Department of Energy. The U.S. has stored roughly 700 million barrels of crude oil in salt caverns in Texas and Louisiana for decades. The SPR was established in the aftermath of the Arab oil embargo in 1973, which painfully revealed U.S. oil dependence as high prices drove up inflation, created fuel shortages and lines at gas stations, and rocked the American economy. The SPR was setup to stash 90 days’ worth of supply into storage for safekeeping, meant to be used...