Free Republic

At the Main Event Bar and Grill in Yuma, Colorado, on Tuesday morning, locals took their usual tables to eat breakfast and talk, as country music played over the speakers. The crowd was a mix of farmers, ranchers and retirees, many of whom have spent their whole lives in the tiny town (population 3,500) on the plains in the eastern part of the state. While some of the bar's televisions showed sport highlights, several were tuned to Fox News, with talking heads analysing the previous night's air strikes against Islamic State (IS) forces in Syria. "Either just let them wipe...

Is it ISIL, ISIS or Islamic State? Whatever you call the jihadist group known for killing dozens of people at a time, carrying out public executions, beheadings, crucifixions and other brutal acts, there is no denying they have captured the world's attention. On the eve of President Barack Obama's speech outlining Washington's strategy against the group, in which he will likely refer to it as ISIL, we ask: What's in a name?

Islamic State's stunning success this summer as it swept across northern Iraq and Syria flows from a highly organized structure controlled by a tightknit cadre led by an Islamist zealot who learned from the mistakes of his al Qaeda predecessors. Blending familiar terrorist acts such as car bombings with conventional military tactics, the group bolsters its strength with local tribal connections and the skills of former generals in Saddam Hussein's army, said Western and Middle Eastern officials tracking the extremist movement. Thrown into the mix is an effective recruitment strategy—join us or die, some young men in captured areas are...

Iraqi Shia militias and Kurdish forces are continuing their advance against Islamic State militants after breaking the siege of Amerli in northern Iraq. A BBC team entered the town on Monday, finding residents who had endured more than two months under siege. The joint forces have also seized the militant stronghold of Suleiman Beg. Meanwhile Amnesty International says that it has uncovered new evidence that Islamic State have launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the north.

Russia posted this map in response to Canada's Twitter That's the message the Canadian Nato delegation tweeted, in map form, to Russian soldiers "who keep getting lost and 'accidentally' entering Ukraine". "Geography can be tough," it notes snarkily. On Tuesday Ukraine released video of Russian paratroopers it says it captured within its eastern border. In response, Russian military sources said the men had crossed an unmarked portion of the border "by accident". Canadian officials, it seems, aren't buying the story. Since the tweet went live, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has alleged that Russian troops have been "deployed" in eastern Ukraine...

Baghdad, Iraq (CNN) -- As violence CONTINUES to wrack Iraq, the United Nations warned Saturday of another ethnic slaughter in the making by Sunni extremists from ISIS. ISIS fighters have besieged the ethnic Turkmen Shiite town of Amerli in the north for two months, and its fewer than 20,000 residents are without power and running out of food, water and medical supplies. "The situation of the PEOPLE in Amerli is desperate and demands immediate action to prevent the possible massacre of its citizens," said Nickolay Mladenov, the U.N. secretary-general's special representative for Iraq. He said the suffering was "unspeakable" and...

Supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have launched a viral propaganda campaign on Twitter threatening to attack the United States and its interests if America acts militarily against the group in Iraq.

What a difference a year makes. Around this time last year, the West was gearing up for military action against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was accused of carrying out chemical weapons attacks on his own people. That intervention never came to pass, not least because domestic public opinion in countries such as Britain and the United States was opposed to further entanglements in the Middle East. Now, the U.S. is contemplating extending airstrikes on Islamic State militants operating in Iraq in Syria — fighters belonging to a terrorist organization that is leading the war against Assad....

The Islamic State, which metastasized from a group of militants seeking to overthrow the Syrian government into a marauding army gobbling up chunks of the Middle East, gained momentum early on from a calculated decision by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to go easy on it, according to people close to the regime. Earlier in the three-year-old Syrian uprising, Mr. Assad decided to mostly avoid fighting the Islamic State to enable it to cannibalize the more secular rebel group supported by the West, the Free Syrian Army, said Izzat Shahbandar, an Assad ally and former Iraqi lawmaker who was Baghdad's liaison...

In the long term any country’s demographic trajectory is ultimately reliant on its Total Fertility Rate (TFR) the number of children born to the average woman. Mortality matters, but if a country has a super low TFR it can have the best healthcare in the entire world and nothing will prevent its population from collapsing. Anyone who doubts this should consider the example of Japan, which boasts extremely high life expectancy but which is nonetheless caught in a demographic “death spiral.” Despite it’s excellent healthcare and the outstanding health of its people, Japan’s TFR has been so low for so...

A quarter of a century ago, Washington DC had a fearsome reputation for crack abuse and rampant gun violence - it was the "murder capital" of the US. But now, once-blighted neighbourhoods close to the centre of the capital are thriving. When Ruben Castaneda moved to the US capital in 1989 to take up a job with the Washington Post, he was struck by how easy it was to score crack. Days after arriving in the city, he was taken to S Street Northwest by a "strawberry" - a streetwalker who offered sex in return for drugs. "The moment she...

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Sulaimaniyah (Iraq) (AFP) - Jihadists raised their black flag in Iraq's northern town of Sinjar Sunday in a second straight day of advances against Kurdish forces, sparking mass displacement the UN called a humanitarian tragedy. The Islamic State's capture of Sinjar raised fears for minority groups that had found refuge there and further blurs the border between the Syrian and Iraqi parts of the "caliphate" which the IS declared in June. "The (Kurdish) peshmerga have withdrawn from Sinjar, Daash has entered the city," Kurdish official Kheiri Sinjari told AFP, using the former Arabic acronym for the IS. "They have raised...

If it's true that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, then maybe we're in luck. Many people in this unhappy year are reading histories of World War I, such as Margaret MacMillan's "The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914." That long-ago catastrophe began 100 years ago this week. The revisiting of this dark history may be why so many people today are asking if our own world—tense or aflame in so many places—resembles 1914, or 1938. Whatever the answer, it is the remembering of past mistakes that matters, if the point is to...

(Reuters) - Islamic State, the al Qaeda spin-off that seized wide swathes of Iraq almost unopposed last month, has released a video warning Iraqi soldiers who may still have some fight in them that they risk being rounded up en masse and executed.

BEIRUT (Reuters) - A Hezbollah commander has died during a mission in Iraq, sources familiar with the incident said on Wednesday, indicating the Lebanese group that is already fighting in Syria's civil war may be involved in a second conflict in the region. Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shi'ite Islamist group, has not previously announced any role in the conflict in Iraq, which escalated last month when radical Sunni militants seized large areas of territory from the Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad.

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq to topple dictator Saddam Hussein. During the subsequent eight years, the U.S. spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of American lives fighting an insurgency waged against the new government. Today, two years after the last American combat forces left Iraq, the country is teetering on the edge of total chaos and threatening to pull the U.S. back into war. The Islamic State (ISIS), with the help of disenfranchised Sunnis, is gaining ground.

A spreadsheet that a man emailed his wife detailing her reasons for turning him down for sex has been shared by thousands of people online. For a whole month, the 26-year-old sexually-frustrated husband jotted down every response from his other half when he asked her for intimacy. He then collated the information and put it into an Excel document before cruelly emailing her as she arrived at an airport ahead of a ten-day business trip.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- Kobe Bryant says he's "scared" about his future after basketball, although he's embracing the challenge of finding something that he can be as passionate about as sports. Bryant turns 36 next month and is under contract with the Los Angeles Lakers for two more years. He was limited to just six games last season because of two major leg injuries, leaving him with the kind of idle time he never had before in his career. Bryant gives a peek into his life in a Showtime documentary airing in November. "Kobe Bryant's Muse" covers much of last...

Fierce fighting raged on the outskirts of Tripoli on Sunday as militias continued to battle for control of the airport in what's being called the worst fighting in Libya since the 2011 revolution. Clashes were concentrated around the airport, the airport road and a number of residential areas where militias have fought over the past week, residents said. At least five people have been killed, one local official said. The latest assaults were launched by militias from the city of Misrata and an Islamist militia umbrella group in the capital known as the "Libyan Revolutionaries Operations Room."