Free Republic

(CNN) -- A Chinese patrol ship looking for signs of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean discovered Saturday a pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5 kHz, state news agency Xinhua reported. "That is the standard beacon frequency" for both so-called black boxes -- the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, said Anish Patel, president of pinger manufacturer Dukane Seacom. "They're identical." But experts cautioned that no confirmation had been made that the signal was linked to the missing plane. "This could be a variety of things," said oceanographer Simon Boxall, who said the frequency...

China should not doubt the U.S. commitment to defend its Asian allies and the prospect of economic retaliation should also discourage Beijing from using force to pursue territorial claims in Asia in the way Russia has in Crimea, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday. Daniel Russel, President Barack Obama's diplomatic point man for East Asia, said it was difficult to determine what China's intentions might be, but Russia's annexation of Crimea had heightened concerns among U.S. allies in the region about the possibility of China using force to pursue its claims. "The net effect is to put more pressure...

Thousands of Chinese Christians have mounted an extraordinary, round-the-clock defence of a church in a city known as the 'Jerusalem of the East' after Communist Party officials threatened to bulldoze their place of worship. In an episode that underlines the fierce and long-standing friction between China's officially atheist Communist Party and its rapidly growing Christian congregation, Bible-carrying believers this week flocked to the Sanjiang church in Wenzhou hoping to protect it from the bulldozers. Their 24-hour guard began earlier this week when a demolition notice was plastered onto the newly-constructed church which worshippers say cost around 30 million yuan (£2.91...

Has the United States ever experienced a time when a foreign nation has attempted to buy up so much of our land all at once? As Michael Snyder details below, it appears the Chinese are on a real estate buying spree all over America as they are now the dominat 'buyers' of investment green cards. This is occurring as private equity buyers and hedge funds exit the buy-to-rent business en masse and are, as Mike Krieger explains, are desperate to pitch American property to anyone willing to keep Housing Bubble 2.0 inflated... it seems Zillow is more than happy...

Russia's Vladimir Putin has committed a grave strategic blunder by tearing up the international rule book without a green light from China. Any hope of recruiting Beijing as an ally to blunt Western sanctions looks doomed, and with it the Kremlin's chances of a painless victory, or any worthwhile victory at all. Mr Putin was careful to thank China's Politburo for its alleged support in his victory speech on Crimea. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has been claiming with his usual elasticity that “Russia and China have coinciding views on the situation in Ukraine.” This is of course a desperate lie....

LONDON — India and Israel have concluded an agreement to assemble a ballistic missile defense system. Indian sources said Jerusalem and New Dehli concluded more than two years of negotiations with an agreement in principle to build a BMD system for India. The sources said the system would be designed to protect against nuclear warheads fired from China or Pakistan. “This system would integrate Indian and Israeli assets into a layered defense network,” a source said. The sources said the Indian Defense Ministry agreed to the project. But the two sides were preparing for contract negotiations that could extend into...

FULL TITLE: Abandoned: Heartbreaking pictures of parents leaving their children in China’s notorious 'baby hatches' They are truly heartbreaking scenes. The moments of despair as parents cling to their children for one last time before abandoning them in China's so-called baby hatches. A father kisses his child, her face hidden in a blanket. A mother holds her hooded baby as their shadows are cast upon the last door they will pass through together. Another collapses to the ground, reaching out to touch her son for the last time. They are the final moments of lives torn apart, often by poverty...

An Obama administration plan to give up oversight of certain technical Internet functions could open the door to a takeover by authoritarian regimes, Republican lawmakers claimed Wednesday. If Russia or China gain new influence over the management of the Internet, they could begin censoring content or blocking websites, the Republicans warned.

On CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night, national security correspondent David Martin chronicled the seemingly never-ending list of problems with the Pentagon’s next-generation F-35 fight jet, from cost overruns of $160 billion to technical problems that have plagued the plane’s development. When asked if the F-35 program, which is expected to cost some $1.5 trillion over the four-decade life of the program, is now under control, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, Frank Kendall, said, "Yes, it is." But that commitment came with a warning. “Long gone is the time when we're going to pay for mistake after mistake after mistake," said...

Has the United States ever experienced a time when a foreign nation has attempted to buy up so much of our land all at once? As you will read about in this article, the Chinese are on a real estate buying spree all over America. In fact, in some cases large chunks of land are actually being given to them. Yes, you read that correctly. China is on the way to becoming the dominant land owner in the entire country, and that is starting to alarm a lot of people. Do we really want a foreign superpower to physically own...

A disgraced senior Chinese army officer is accused of selling hundreds of military positions, raking in millions of dollars, sources with ties to the leadership or military told Reuters, in what is likely China's biggest military scandal in two decades. In a renewed campaign on graft, Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed to go after both powerful "tigers" and lowly "flies", warning that the issue is so severe it threatens the ruling Communist Party's survival. Lieutenant General Gu Junshan, 57, who was sacked as deputy logistics chief of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in 2012, has been charged with corruption,...

Proving that China’s fight against pollution has moved decisively into the realm of parody, bags containing mountain air were shipped into one particularly smog-addled city over the weekend. No, it wasn’t a scene from Spaceballs. According to the organizer, a Henan-based travel company, 20 bright blue bags of air were shipped to Zhengzhou, capital of central China’s Henan province, as a special treat for residents. The air originated from Laojun Mountain, some 120 miles away from the city, and was brought as part of a promotional gimmick to show oxygen-deprived city residents what they’re missing.

Romans may have learned from Chinese Great Wall: archaeologists The construction of the Roman Limes was quite possibly influenced by the concept of the Great Wall in China, though the two great buildings of the world are far away from each other, said archaeologists and historians. Although there is no evidence that the two constructions had any direct connections, indirect influence from the Great Wall on the Roman Limes is certain, said Visy Zsolt, a professor with the Department of Ancient History and Archaeology of the University of Pecs in Hungary. Visy made the remarks in an interview with Xinhua...

OSLO (Reuters) - A 200-year period covering the heyday of both the Roman Empire and China's Han dynasty saw a big rise in greenhouse gases, according to a study that challenges the U.N. view that man-made climate change only began around 1800. A record of the atmosphere trapped in Greenland's ice found the level of heat-trapping methane rose about 2,000 years ago and stayed at that higher level for about two centuries. Methane was probably released during deforestation to clear land for farming and from the use of charcoal as fuel, for instance to smelt metal to make weapons, lead...

Ancient Romans, Chinese Helped Warm Planet ICE SAMPLES REVEAL GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS By Rob Quinn, Newser Staff Posted Oct 4, 2012 1:08 AM CDT (NEWSER) – Human activity contributed to climate change long before the Industrial Revolution, according to new research. Scientists analyzing ice core samples from Greenland found a spike in emissions of the greenhouse gas methane during a 200-year period around 2,000 years ago, when the ancient Roman and Chinese empires were at their peak, reports the Los Angeles Times. Researchers believe the rise was caused by the widespread use of charcoal as fuel and the burning of...

The Malaysian Association of China Students Alumni has urged their countrymen not to let their grief over the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 tragedy lead them to condemn Malaysia. Its president Adam Huang said it would not do any good to “attack” Malaysia with unnecessary criticisms as it would only strain relations between the two countries. “We would ask them to express their emotion and sorrow in a rational way, instead of going to the streets to demonstrate,” he said in Mandarin which was then translated into English by his assistant Zhang Miao. Huang addressed a press conference here yesterday saying...

The commissioning of China's first Type 052D destroyer is only the beginning of the nation's future fleet of advanced destroyers, reports the country's official newswire Xinhua, which called the vessel a state-of-the-art destroyer. The Type 052D has 64 launch silos capable of firing air defense, anti-ship, cruise and anti-submarine missiles. Compared to its predecessor, the Type 052C, the Type 052D has fewer anti-air and anti-submarine missiles because it needs more space to carry other types of missile against ground and surface targets. The Type 052D’s relatively small size means the PLA Navy will still need larger vessels against potential threats...

Financial stress related to Ponzi financing and other bad debts in China is readily visible in numerous places. One result is China’s Big Banks Double Bad-Loan Write-Offs. China’s biggest banks more than doubled the level of bad loans they wrote off last year, in a sign that financial strains are mounting as growth in the world’s second-largest economy slows. The five biggest Chinese banks, which account for more than half of all loans in the country, removed Rmb59bn ($9.5bn) from their books in debts that could not be collected, according to their 2013 results. That was up 127 per cent...

In one of the ads Americans for Prosperity (AFP) has put on the air this year, a thirtysomething actress stands against a white backdrop and looks into the camera. “People don’t like political ads,” she says plaintively. “I don’t like them either. But health care isn’t about politics, it’s about people, and millions of people have lost their health insurance, millions of people can’t see their own doctors, and millions are paying more and getting less.” At the close, a narrator urges viewers to “tell Mary Landrieu to stop thinking about politics and start thinking about people.” Such ads...

Chinese authorities have seized assets worth at least 90 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) from family members and associates of retired domestic security tsar Zhou Yongkang, who is at the centre of China's biggest corruption scandal in more than six decades, two sources said. More than 300 of Zhou's relatives, political allies, proteges and staff have also been taken into custody or questioned in the past four months, the sources, who have been briefed on the investigation, told Reuters. The sheer size of the asset seizures and the scale of the investigations into the people around Zhou - both unreported until...