Free Republic

When the parliamentary elections last year ushered in a new government in Germany, there was a collective sigh of relief. Guido Westerwelle, foreign minister for four years, had never mastered his office and always seemed to lack the sort of gravitas that the office demands. In came Frank-Walter Steinmeier; Westerwelle’s predecessor would also be his successor. With his calm demeanour, Steinmeier was considered by many to be the ideal top diplomat. Less than a year into his term, however, the disillusion is palpable, even among some of his sympathisers. Germany’s role in the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia is...

The Russian media recently celebrated, rather modestly, an anniversary of great significance in the history of this country. Fifteen years ago, on Aug. 9, 1999, former President Boris Yeltsin made the decision to name Vladimir Putin as his successor. Putin, at the time chief of the Federal Security Service, was appointed acting head of the Russian government and then simply prime minister several weeks later. Meanwhile, Yeltsin completely stepped into the background, handing over the reins of government to Putin. Aug. 9 is therefore a very important date because it marks the day the KGB came to power in Russia....

Thousands of birds are flying into a new solar "mega-trap" in the middle of California's Mojave Desert, killing the avian lot at a rate of up to one bird every two minutes, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). The state-of-the-art Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS), which opened in February, is the world's largest solar plant to utilize "power towers," skyscraping structures that receive beams of focused solar rays to generate electricity. At Ivanpah, the sun's ray's are redirected from a sea of more than 300,000 mirrors on the desert surface below to hit water filled boilers...

A Yazidi refugee, trapped in the mountains near the Iraqi city of Sinjar, has told a Channel 4 reporter that she got a mountain goat to suckle her two-month-old baby to ensure her newborn's survival when her own breast milk ran out. The unnamed woman was trapped by militants on the mountain in northern Iraq with tens of thousands other Yazidi refugees for as long as ten days. Channel 4 foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Rugman, speaking from the city of Dahuk last night, said: "I met a woman who had just come into Iraq from Syria, and she was caring...

The head of the Human Rights Committee in the Kurdistan Parliament has warned the international community that the number of refugees in the Kurdistan Region has passed two million. He urged the international community to provide help to those refugees otherwise a humanitarian crisis may not be avoided. “The number of refugees in the Kurdistan Region exceeded two million and the Kurdistan Region needs the help of the international community or refugees might face a humanitarian disaster,” stated the head of the Human Rights Committee in the Kurdistan Parliament Soran Omar on his Facebook account. “There are 1,200,000 Arab refugees...

The way Baba Sheikh sees it, there are only two options left to save Iraqi’s persecuted Yazidi minority from certain death at the hands of the self-declared Islamic State: Either evacuate Iraq en masse or have international peacekeepers carve out protected territory. “The important thing is that our people are saved,” says Baba Sheikh, the spiritual leader of the Yazidi ethno-religious minority, whose desperate plight helped galvanized the Obama administration into action last week. US air strikes, and Kurdish peshmerga forces, have partially broken a siege on Mount Sinjar, where tens of thousands of Yazidis had fled. The United Nations'...

By J.R. Nyquist  “We have to strike Poland and the Baltic States, where there are NATO rockets and aircraft. Since we cannot allow one plane to take off and strike Russia – we will have to strike first – half an hour before takeoff. And to be sure, we will be carpet bombing.  America is not a threat, but the small midget states of Europe will cease to exist. They will be wiped out. Then NATO will have to beg us for negotiations. Otherwise we will give them again a May ’45.”                           – Vladimir Zhirinovsky, August 2014 (Television interview, 8.08.2014.)“In...

Both the Washington Post and Huffington Post have recently condemned the anti-Obama street art display near the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, which taunted Barack Obama on his birthday with racist references. Interestingly enough, the same media organs, notorious for their unwavering support of this president, had neglected to cover a series of recent better-executed and more tasteful anti-Obama displays by American street artists in Augusta, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley. Granted, the American anti-Obama artists didn't give the media an opportunity to cry "racism." Is that why the U.S.-based artists weren't deemed worthy of a story? In defense...

Confronted by a looming humanitarian catastrophe at Mt. Sinjar, Obama finally ordered airstrikes against ISIS/ISIL, and also mounted a campaign to provide desperately needed supplies to the Yazidis who fled to the mountain before the ISIS onslaught. This initial set of strikes seems to have a very limited objective: they can best be described as a limited tank plinking campaign intended to halt the ISIS attack on the Kurds around Erbil. The US is using F/A-18s from the George Bush (CVN77), deployed in ones-eys and twos-eys to take out an artillery piece here, and a vehicle there. It will give...

By now Ukrainian army liberated 3/4 of territory occupied by rebels early this year. No one has doubt that separatists will lose. They themselves fight against hope. Some rebels fight because they paid, large category fight because they are stupid or have nothing else to do or watch Russian TV. Whatever reason they fight for they know they have no chance to win.., they know it is as certain as a new day comes after long night. As soon as new city is liberated locals welcome Ukrainian army and first thing they crush Lenin monuments. When I was watching...

Most of the discussion of the controversy over Diana West’s book American Betrayal centers around content rather than process.That is, people discussing the extreme reactions against her work — whether they agree with her or her critics — revisit the historical events themselves, and the inferences that may be drawn from them. Was Normandy really a better option for the Second Front than the Balkans or Italy? Could Britain and the United States have acted differently so that the Soviets would not have been able to overrun Central Europe? Was Eisenhower an inept commander? How many actual agents did Stalin...

Islamic extremist group ISIS is continuing its systematic genocide of Christians, Kurds and non-Sunni Muslims in Iraq. Just this week, the group allegedly beheaded a group of Christian children and put their heads on stakes for display in a community park. In an interview with CNN, Mark Arabo, a Chaldean-American with intimate knowledge of the situation, stated, "There is a park in Mosul, where [ISIS] they actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick and have them in the park," he reported. "More children are getting beheaded, mothers are getting raped and killed, and fathers are being hung."...

In retaliation for US and EU sanctions, Russia is banning the importation of large categories of food products from each: food imports from the US are pretty much banned altogether. These sanctions are aimed at an industry that is politically powerful far beyond its numbers. Chicken farmers in the US will squawk at the loss of about 1 percent of their revenues, and European dairy producers will bellow in anger. But the economic impact on the affected countries will be trivial. The US exports about $300 million in chicken to Russia (down substantially from a few years ago), which is...

"The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul," he wrote. "The only difference between this and the use of gas (which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had barred as a first-use weapon in World War II) is the fear of retaliation." Those harsh words, written three days after the Hiroshima bombing in August, 1945, were not by a man of the American left, but rather by a very prominent conservative -- former President Herbert Hoover, a foe of the New Deal and Fair Deal. In 1959, Medford Evans, a conservative writing in...

Putin is effing with Edward Snowden. Snowden’s one year of asylum ended on July 31, and he applied in mid-July for another year. As yet, he has heard nothing, except that he will be permitted to stay while his fate is decided. Putin is most likely sending Snowden a message. What is the message? That he is in Russia at Putin’s whim and sufferance. That he had better do as he is told, and not get any ideas. That he is owned. Note that the Russians doubtlessly are deeply suspicious of Snowden, and likely despise him. To give an idea...

Especially when dealing with Russians, subtlety gets you nowhere; you must tell them, bluntly, what you want to happen.... [...] Last month’s shoot down of Malaysia Air Flight 17 over Ukraine has made clear to just about everyone ... what should have been obvious a long time ago: Russian President Vladimir Putin is a serious threat to world peace. [...] If there is any lesson to be learned from studying European history ... it’s that thugs like Putin don’t stop because they’ve been punished or because they see the error of their ways. Thugs have a high tolerance for pain,...

There's about a 21 day period between contracting ebola and the appearance of symptoms. Can the disease be passed to another before the symptoms appear?

It is 6am on a warm West African morning. Two men, Ahmed and Milton, are up early, getting ready for long journeys. Apart from that, they have little in common. Ahmed is a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Guinea. He is a successful doctor, drives a Mercedes and lives in an exclusive air-conditioned apartment block in the Kaloum district of Guinea's capital, Conakry. Milton has no steady job, no car and shares a crowded corrugated iron shed in East 3, the poorest part of Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown. Ahmed is travelling today on important...

This story from the Independent has gone viral, and for understandable reasons: it claims that Germany and Russia are negotiating a scurrilous deal behind Ukraine’s back. More controversially, if Ms Merkel’s deal were to be acceptable to the Russians, the international community would need to recognise Crimea’s independence and its annexation by Russia, a move that some members of the United Nations might find difficult to stomach. Sources close to the secret negotiations claim that the first part of the stabilisation plan requires Russia to withdraw its financial and military support for the various pro-separatist groups operating in eastern Ukraine....