Free Republic

How does the U.S. economy do it? Europe is floundering. China faces slower growth. Japan is struggling to sustain tentative gains. Yet the U.S. job market is humming, and the pace of economic growth is steadily rising. Five full years after a devastating recession officially ended, the economy is finally showing the vigor that Americans have long awaited. Last month, employers added 288,000 jobs and helped reduce the unemployment rate to 6.1 percent, the lowest since September 2008. June capped a five-month stretch of 200,000-plus job gains - the first in nearly 15 years. After having shrunk at a 2.9...

A 60-year-old Boca Raton man is facing federal charges of helping to pack, mark and ship Florida spiny lobster illegally to Hong Kong, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. Eric Burman pleaded not guilty last week to the charges. If convicted, he faces a sentence of up to five years in prison followed by three years of supervised release, as well as a criminal fine of up to $250,000. Through a Pompano Beach business he owns, Burman “was engaged in the wholesale commercial seafood industry, including the export of live Florida spiny lobster to the seafood market in China,” the U.S....

German Chancellor Angela Merkel heads to China this weekend for her seventh visit, eager to deepen trade and investment ties between the export powerhouses of Europe and Asia. For the EU’s biggest economy, China is a crucial mass market, where companies want its technology and millions of newly prosperous crave German goods from Audi sedans to luxury home appliances. […] China is Germany’s number-two export market outside Europe after the United States. It sold goods worth €67 billion to China last year, while imports from the Asian giant topped €73 billion. …

On Independence Day, celebrations across the United States depend on China. The sparklers, bottle rockets and Roman candles you're using this Fourth of July almost certainly came from there. So did the professional-grade pyrotechnics that was launched above the Washington Monument on Friday night. It’s a quirky exception to “Buy American” sentiments that are otherwise going strong and picking up steam in Washington and corporate America, especially around patriotic events. After all, Congress passed a law this year requiring flags flown by the U.S. military to be made in America. Ralph Lauren, meanwhile, scrambled ahead of this year’s Winter Olympics...

A Chinese man with no arms clocked up 160,000 kilometres of driving with his feet - but no licence - before he was stopped by police on a motorway, media reported on Thursday. "During an investigation, (police) discovered a man wearing a short sleeve T-shirt with empty sleeves, with his left leg controlling the steering wheel," news website Jingchuwang said. The 45-year-old, surnamed Guo, was apprehended on a motorway in the central province of Hubei, the report said. "Police immediately requested him to get out of the car, and saw the driver use his big toe and second toe on...

JUNEAU -- A proposal for another big construction project is gathering headlines across the world. No, we're not talking about a $30 billion pipeline to send natural gas to the Lower 48. This is bigger: A $10 billion to $12 billion tunnel under the Bering Strait linking Alaska and Russia. And another $50 billion to lay railways to make the tunnel usable.

Russia introduced a plan Wednesday to build a tunnel between Siberia and Alaska under the Bering Strait, saying the $65 billion project could be used to export Russian oil, natural gas and electricity to the United States. While two officials at the Ministry of Economy endorsed the idea, they made clear that the Russian government had not signed off on it, other than to agree to a study on how to bridge the 93 kilometers, or 58 miles, of icy water that divides the Eastern and Western Hemispheres at their closest point. Plans for a land link over the strait...

Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed the joint suffering of China and South Korea under Japanese militarism during a speech in Seoul Friday that came days after Tokyo announced a landmark shift in military policy. “In the first half of the 20th century, Japanese militarists carried out barbarous wars of aggression against China and Korea, swallowing up Korea and occupying half of the Chinese mainland,” Xi said in an address at Seoul National University. “When the war against Japan was at its highest pitch, the Chinese and Korean people shared their suffering and helped each other with sweat and blood,” he...

Three years ago, a security guard working for seed company Pioneer Hi-Bred came across something unusual on a road in Iowa: Just off the pavement, a man was on his knees, digging in a field. Challenged by the guard, Mo Hailong claimed to be an employee of the University of Iowa who was traveling to a nearby conference. He jumped back in his car and sped away. U.S. authorities would later accuse Hailong, and five other Chinese nationals, of stealing corn seeds and attempting to smuggle them back to China. A seventh defendant, Mo Yun, was arrested and charged Wednesday...

Buried on page 40 of the Pentagon’s latest annual report on China’s military power is a brief mention of the YJ-12, a recent addition to China’s portfolio of anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM). The report notes that, “The new missile provides an increased threat to naval assets, due to its long range and supersonic speeds.” True, but in an understated way. In fact, the YJ-12 is the most dangerous anti-ship missile China has produced thus far, posing an even greater risk to the U.S. Navy’s surface forces in the Western Pacific than the much-discussed DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile. The arrival of...

A victory beyond the wildest dreams of Osama bin Laden is within reach of fighters from ISIL, a group of which he would likely approve regardless of what current Al Qaeda leadership says about the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. And it's all Obama's fault. “Iraqi troops battled to dislodge an al Qaeda splinter group from the city of Tikrit on Monday,” reports the Hindustan Times, “after its leader was declared caliph of a new Islamic state in lands seized this month across a swathe of Iraq and Syria.” The caliphate claims worldwide authority over all Muslims, and...

Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region working as civil servants, students and teachers have been banned from fasting during the holy month of Ramadan on Wednesday. The move has sparked condemnation from an exile group. Xinjiang is a mainly Muslim region, home to the Uighur minority. For years China's ruling Communist party has restricted fasting in the region, which has seen sees regular and often deadly clashes between Uighurs and state security forces. Beijing has blamed recent deadly attacks elsewhere in China on militants seeking independence for the resource-rich region. According to Agence France-Presse, the state-run Bozhou Radio and TV university...

The Chinese government has banned Muslims in the Xinjiang region from celebrating Ramadan, a traditional monthlong period of fasting and spiritual reflection. A spokesman for the exiled World Uyghur Congress, which promotes democracy, human rights and freedom for the indigenous Uyghur (Uighur) people, said authorities encouraged Uighurs to eat free meals, and inspected homes to check whether families were observing the fast.

BEIJING (AP) — Students and civil servants in China's Muslim northwest, where Beijing is enforcing a security crackdown following deadly unrest, have been ordered to avoid taking part in traditional fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Two Chinese government ships sailed into disputed waters off Japan-administered islands in the East China Sea Monday, the Japanese coastguard said, as Tokyo prepared to strengthen its military posture. The two vessels were sailing in territorial waters extending 12 nautical miles around one of the Senkaku islands, which China also claims and calls the Diaoyus, as of 10:30 am (0130 GMT). Since Tokyo nationalised some of the islands in September 2012, Chinese vessels and aircraft have regularly approached them, playing cat and mouse with the Japanese coastguard.

July 1 marks 17 years since the former British colony became a Chinese Special Administrative Region. Calls for popular representation are growing ever fiercer in the freewheeling metropolisWhen typhoons begin to lash along Asia’s coastlines each midsummer, Hong Kong usually manages to escape serious damage, since storms in the South China Sea tend to lose their muster over the Philippines and Taiwan by the time they make landfall. Some locals will cheekily boast that the city, constructed across an archipelago and on a peninsula extending south of the Chinese mainland, is protected by an invisible dome that blocks out these...

Tyler Durden 06/30/2014 Copper has rallied almost 6% in the last few weeks with a 1.25% surge today sending the 'economic' metal back to near 4-month highs. This must means demand is picking up, right? This must mean the world is ok, right? Chatter is that this morning's home sales 'noise' surprise spike was the catalyst but it appears much more likely that a combination of a continued squeeze of a very-extended spec short position and the ongoing unwind of China's commodity-finance-deals is the real catalyst. As the market comes to terms with synthetic demand (CCFD unwinds buying back hedges)...

“Hey, girls, college won’t just make you smarter… it will also make you prettier, richer and even whiter!” Chinese Internet users have been saying, making fun of a university in Beijing that published "before" and "after" photos of one of its students. In what appears to be a bid to attract prospective students, Tsinghua University reposted photos of a student taken before and after her university years on its Weibo (a site similar to Twitter) page. In the “after” photos, the student is dressed more fashionably and seems to have lighter skin. After her years of study, her appearance fits...

Most people hate cockroaches and would do just about anything to keep them out of their homes. But that is not the case for one woman. The South China Morning Post is reporting that Yuan Meixia in China shares her home with 100,000 cockroaches, which she considers her children. She breeds them and raises them so she can sell them to a pharmaceutical company, which uses them for medicine. She lives in separate home, but visits the breeding home everyday. She was inspired to start breeding them after she saw a program on television which talked about their potential healing...

China has ambitious plans to touch down on Mars by 2020, likely with a rover, and to collect its own samples from the red planet 10 years after that, a top aerospace scientist has revealed. China already sent a probe, the Jade Rabbit (or Yutu) to the moon last year. It is expanding its horizons this time. Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of the country’s lunar project, said the new Mars programme aimed to create space probes – an orbiter and rover – for Mars, according to the Beijing Times. They will help answer questions including if there is extraterrestrial activity...