Free Republic

02-24-2002Pastor's Message From the desk of Fr. Joseph McLafferty..... The lead article in this month's Maryknoll magazine is about Bishop Francis Xavier Ford, M.M., a Maryknoll missionary who served in China for almost 40 years.  This past Thursday, February 21st, marked the 50th anniversary of his death in a Chinese prison. Francis Xavier Ford was born in Brooklyn on January 11, 1892, the son of Austin and Elizabeth Rellihan Ford.  Ford attended St. Francis Preparatory School in Brooklyn and Cathedral College in Manhattan.  In 1912 he was the first student to apply to the seminary of the recently established...

“Housing in Vancouver is insane — it was insane when I left and it’s more insane now.”That’s from 33-year-old Kevin Oke, co-founder of LlamaZoo Interactive who left Vancouver for Victoria two years ago because he couldn’t afford to buy a home in his native city even while earning a generous salary as a lead designer at a video-game company whose clients included Atari and Ubisoft Entertainment SA.  Kevin isn't the only one leaving. Vancouver added only 884 net new people age 18-24 last year according to Statistics Canada, and many observers worry the soaring cost of housing will eventually strip the...

The Chinese government has clamped down on the country's entertainment industry, banning depictions of sex, homosexuality, witchcraft and one night stands from television programs. The South China Morning Post reported the crack down on online and television shows was part of the new General Principle of Television Drama Production Content, which was released in December. Also banned are programs showing extra-marital affairs, the use of drugs or alcohol, teenage relationships, fighting, smoking and programs that promote superstitions, like witchcraft. Among the popular programs pulled was an online series called Addiction (also known as Heroin), which depicts gay love, and Go Princess Go,...

Hey Loser Romney...hypocrite much??

More details about China’s human spaceflight missions are filtering through after the country announced its launch Tiangong-2 and Shenzhou-11 launch schedule for 2016. On Sunday it was announced that the Tiangong-2 space lab will launch in the third quarter of 2016, and be visited by the Shenzhou-11 spacecraft in Q4. Shenzhou-11 will carry two Chinese astronauts, popularly referred to as taikounauts derived from the Chinese ‘taikongren’ (太空人). It has now been stated that two taikonauts will stay in space for 30 days. While this pales into comparison with Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly’s Year in Space, it will be doubling China's...

CHICAGO--The Chicago Stock Exchange, Inc. (CHX) is pleased to announce that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an investor group led by Chongqing Casin Enterprise Group (the 'Casin Group'). The Board of Directors of CHX has unanimously approved the transaction, which is subject to regulatory approvals. The acquisition is expected to close in the second half of 2016. Terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.

The Sacramento Kings basketball team had to cancel giving away Lunar New Year shirts celebrating the Year of the Monkey on Monday after a player noted the shirts could be deemed offensive during Black History month. Bucks TV analyst Marques Johnson says he was called into a conversation player DeMarcus Cousins was having with the Kings operations team over the controversial shirt. 'I walk into the building and DeMarcus Cousins calls me over to an animated discussion he's having with Kings operations people. He [asks] me, "Olskool, what you think about this T-shirt? Told him a little insensitive on first...

BANGKOK — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has ordered the Pentagon to find out why so many generals and admirals have become embroiled in legal and ethical problems, a trend exacerbated by recent investigations of two of the military’s best-known commanders. The Pentagon disclosed Panetta’s directive on Thursday after he arrived in Thailand as part of a visit to Asia. But aides insisted that he had been considering the review for some time and that it was not prompted by revelations that the FBI has been investigating former CIA director David H. Petraeus, a retired Army general, and Marine Gen....

Back in 2007 and 2008, ironically the last time the Federal Reserve was hiking rates, the market began to form a bearish head and shoulders pattern. The pattern took a little less than a year to complete, and began breaking down heavily in early 2008. The initial reaction lower in 2008 brought the market down by close to 15% in a matter of weeks, leading to a strong rebound higher from late January until May. In May, more selling pressure commenced, and when it was all said and done, the market had collapsed by nearly 55% from its 2007 highs...

Founder of today’s China killed 45 million of his own people (TibetanReview.net, Sep05, 2010) Recently declassified Chinese Communist Party archives show that the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao Tsetung's regime cased the greatest "man-made famine" the world has ever seen, reported the ANI news service Sep 3, citing a new publication from Hong Kong. Mao's Great Famine, by Frank Dikotter, Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, is reported to show that 45 million Chinese people were killed between 1958 and 1961. Chinese propaganda posters of the late 1950s show smiling young workers marching jubilantly towards unity under the...

Chinese censors are scrubbing sites of mentions of North Korean girl band By Victoria Ho 19 minutes ago After the Moranbong Band's abrupt cancelation of their performances in Beijing over the weekend, it appears Chinese censors went to work deleting speculation and chatter about the North Korean girl band on mainland sites. The Moranbong Band, whose members were said to be handpicked by North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, were on a goodwill mission to Beijing and were set to perform three concerts starting Saturday night. But just hours before the first, they abruptly canceled the gig and headed home on...

Electric-car startup Faraday Future plans to open its $1 billion factory in North Las Vegas at the sparsely populated, 18,000-acre Apex Industrial Park, Chinese tech billionaire Jia Yueting said in a letter to Nevada legislators obtained by the Associated Press. The state has been in talks over the past few months to bring electric-car startup Faraday Future to North Las Vegas. Nevada was competing with California, Georgia and Louisiana.

Last month the Pentagon sent a tough signal to its fastest-growing rival in Asia when a U.S. Navy warship sailed close by an artificial Chinese island in the contested waters of the South China Sea. The message: The U.S. will stand by its allies as they confront China's increasingly muscular military. This month, the Defense Department picked Joint Base Lewis-McChord for a friendlier exchange between the two world powers. The Army is opening up the South Sound base for a weeklong exercise with its Chinese counterpart, the People's Liberation Army. It's fairly small compared with some of the standard engagements...

A forthcoming report by the congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission provides new details of China’s space-weapons programs, dubbed counterspace arms, that are aimed at destroying or jamming U.S. satellites and limiting American combat operations around the world. “China is pursuing a broad and robust array of counterspace capabilities, which includes direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles, co-orbital anti-satellite systems, computer network operations, ground-based satellite jammers and directed energy weapons,” a late draft of the commission’s annual report states. “China’s nuclear arsenal also provides an inherent anti-satellite capability.”

Mark Leadbeatter was jailed for four years after his bungled grab for cash left him doused in boiling oil, causing severe facial burnsA thief was left with severe facial burns from a hot wok when he tried to rob a Chinese takeaway. Mark Leadbeatter, 53, was doused in boiling oil while trying to raid an Oriental food van. The hapless robber, who suffered burns to his face and neck, has now been jailed for four years. In a report of the incident PCSO Julie Green said: “He demanded money from the three females working on the van. He was given...

Behind the rise of ISIS, the Libyan Civil War, the unrest in Egypt, Yemen and across the region may be a single classified document.That document is Presidential Study Directive 11.You can download Presidential Study Directive 10 on “Preventing Mass Atrocities” from the White House website, but as of yet no one has been able to properly pry number 11 out of Obama Inc.Presidential Study Directive 10, in which Obama asked for non-military options for stopping genocide, proved to be a miserable failure. The Atrocities Prevention Board’s only use was as a fig leaf for a policy that had caused the...

Chinese authorities have issued a ban on 22 Muslim names in Hoten prefecture in northwestern China’s troubled Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in an apparent bid to discourage extremism among the region's Uyghur residents, threatening to forbid children with such names from attending school unless their parents change them, according to local police and residents. A Uyghur woman named Turakhan who lives in a suburban village of Niya (in Chinese, Minfeng) county in Hoten (Hetian) prefecture told RFA’s Uyghur Service on Wednesday that the village chief and police had informed all residents about “the list of forbidden Muslim names.” “My daughter’s...

A rather strange tale comes across the transom to us today from the rough and tumble world of competitive poetry publishing. (Okay… I confess. I really just wanted to type that sentence.) But putting all snark aside, the Washington Post’s Sarah Kaplan did come up with a rather enlightening news item about the annual publication of the anthology, Best American Poetry. No! Wait! Come back! I promise, the story gets better.There is one beleaguered individual, Sherman Alexie, who is responsible for reading thousands of submissions each year and determining which bits of verse should make it into the august...

The five Chinese Navy ships spotted operating in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska steered within 12 nautical miles of the U.S. coast and passed through U.S. territorial waters, the Pentagon said. The Wall Street Journal reported: Pentagon officials said for the first time late Thursday that the five Chinese navy ships had passed through U.S. territorial waters as they transited the Aleutian Islands, but said they had complied with international law. Analysts saw the passage as significant as Beijing has long objected to U.S. Navy vessels transiting its territorial waters or operating in international waters just outside....

Five Chinese navy ships are currently operating in the Bering Sea, off the coast of Alaska, the first time the U.S. military has seen such activity in the area, Pentagon officials said Wednesday. The officials said they have been aware in recent days that three Chinese combat ships, a replenishment vessel and an amphibious ship were in the vicinity after observing them moving toward the Aleutian Islands, which are split between U.S....