Free Republic

While it is two full years before the 2016 US presidential race, the parade of possible candidates to Israel began Monday afternoon with a meeting by Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Warren, whose name has been mentioned as a possible challenger to Hillary Clinton for the democratic nomination, arrived Saturday in Tel Aviv, and will also visit Ramallah and Amman. This is the first trip abroad for the senator, elected in 2012 and who has so-far concentrated largely on US domestic issues.According to the Boston Globe, Warren has been among only a handful of senators...

AMMAN, Jordan — Jordan’s king and his people are bristling with anger over Israeli actions at a sacred site for Muslims in Jerusalem, threatening to turn a cold peace between Israel and Jordan into a deep freeze. The rising animosity between Jordan and Israel, whose governments are tethered by a peace treaty, could undermine U.S.-led efforts to fight Islamist extremists. It also threatens a multi-billion dollar natural gas deal that is important to both countries. Jordan took the extraordinary step this month of recalling its ambassador to Israel to protest police incursions, provocative visits by Israeli politicians and the treatment...

The New York Times reports that President Barack Obama is about to dismiss Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. The reason given? That the White House recognized that "the threat from the Islamic State would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel was brought on to employ." In other words: Hagel was brought on to downgrade the military radically, but now the military turns out to be necessary, after all. Yet that cannot be the only reason, absent any sign that Obama is committing to a sudden, steep increase in the defense budget, and reversing the non-sequester...

Russia is set to lose about $40 billion (32 billion euros) per year due to Western sanctions over the Ukraine conflict, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said Monday. "We are losing around $40 billion per year due to geopolitical sanctions and we are losing some $90 to $100 billion per year due to oil prices falling 30 percent," Siluanov said in a speech at an economic forum in Moscow, quoted by RIA Novosti news agency. Sanctions imposed by the European Union and the US on Russia's economy, which is largely dependent on exports of raw materials, block its access to international...

KIRKUK, Kurdistan Region—Kurdish Peshmerga forces entered the town of Jalawla in northern Diyala Sunday morning after they launched a major assault on the Islamic State (ISIS), said Rudaw correspondent in the area. The Peshmerga are now in control of several quarters of Jalawla and that ISIS militants are on the retreat, said our correspondent. A Peshmerga commander from Jalawla said that his forces have controlled five neighborhoods of the town and two nearby villages of Sayid Ahmed and Sayid Jabir.He said that the ISIS stronghold of Tawhid is also surrounded by Kurdish forces.The commander said that parts of the...

Earlier this month I reported here at PJ Media on the surrender and defections of U.S.-backed Syrian rebel troops to Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda’s official affiliate), most notably the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, which the DC foreign policy establishment was hailing as “the West’s best fighting chance against Syria’s Islamist armies,” and Harkat al-Hazm, the first group to receive heavy weaponry from the U.S. earlier this year.Now Mona Mahmood of the Guardian reports that elements of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are defecting to ISIS: US air strikes in Syria are encouraging anti-regime fighters to forge alliances with or even defect...

President Barack Obama claimed he has been "restrained" on immigration and that his position on executive actions has not changed after he unilaterally granted temporary amnesty and work permits to millions of illegal immigrants. On ABC's This Week, Obama said that he has "been very restrained with respect to immigration" and has "bent over backwards and will continue to do everything I can to get Congress" to pass a more permanent and comprehensive executive amnesty bill.

President Obama will announce the resignation of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Monday in the first high-profile personnel move since Democrats suffered significant losses in this month's midterm elections. "In October, Secretary Hagel began speaking with the President about departing the administration given the natural post-midterms transition time," a senior administration official said. Obama will make the announcement with Hagel at 11:00 a.m. According to the White House, a successor will be named "in short order," but Hagel will remain in the post until that person is confirmed by the Senate. A senior administration official praised Hagel as "a steady...

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is stepping down under pressure, the first cabinet-level casualty of the collapse of President Obama’s Democratic majority in the Senate and the struggles of his national security team amid an onslaught of global crises. The president, who is expected to announce Mr. Hagel’s resignation in a Rose Garden appearance on Monday, made the decision to ask his defense secretary — the sole Republican on his national security team — to step down last Friday after a series of meetings over the past two weeks, senior administration officials said.

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is stepping down under pressure, the first cabinet-level casualty of the collapse of President Obama’s Democratic majority in the Senate and a beleaguered national security team that has struggled to stay ahead of an onslaught of global crises. The president, who is expected to announce Mr. Hagel’s resignation in a Rose Garden appearance on Monday, made the decision to ask his defense secretary — the sole Republican on his national security team — to step down last Friday after a series of meetings over the past two weeks, senior administration officials said.

Academics have made a cottage industry of their concern over human rights but their consciousness gets raised pretty selectively. “In August, Yale University announced a new undergraduate program in human rights,” Eric A. Posner wrote in The Chronicle Review on November 21, 2014. “It joins other human-rights programs, institutes, and clinics that have spread like kudzu across campuses in the United States and around the world.” “By one count, the number has increased from one in 1968 to almost 150 in 2000, with most of the growth in the 1990s. The U. N. provides links to more than 300 academic...

Following the news of a bad buckwheat harvest, panic buying of the traditional foodstuff sent prices soaring in a sign that some analysts say is likely linked to economic anxieties, not harvest yields. The run on buckwheat "indicates people's expectations of an upcoming economic crisis, to which consumers are always keenly attuned," said Natalia Kolupaeva, a retail analyst at Raiffeisenbank. Prices for buckwheat started to grow at the end of October on reports of a bad harvest in the Altai region in Siberia, which produces about 40 percent of the buckwheat in Russia. News of the bad harvest spread like...

- A new deadline for a political framework agreement for Iran's Nuclear talks has been set for March 1, 2015, a Western diplomat tells CNN on Monday, with a deadline for final agreement including annexes on July 1. Negotiators had been scrambling to reach a deal on Iran's nuclear program before a Monday night deadline. The negotiators included representatives from Iran and the P5+1 countries -- the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain), plus Germany.

I wondered how our neutered, bootlicking, pro-Government media would manage to turn David Cameron's devastating personal and political defeat in Rochester into a disaster for Red Ed. Piles of money, tankers laden with snake-oil, five visits by the Prime Minister himself, even a frantic plea for Guardian readers' votes could not save the Tories from what I reckon was the worst defeat in their entire history, losing a seat to a party that really believes in what the Tories pretend to believe in..... Here's the supposedly big story: Emily Thornberry MP posted a tweet in which she wrote the words...

North Koreans working in Sarawak's coal mines legally Monday, November 24, 2014 - 10:26 The Star/Asia News Network SARAWAK, MALAYSIA - Deputy Home Minister Datuk Seri Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said the North Koreans were brought into Sarawak to work via a special arrangement between the Sarawak and North Korean governments. "Only Sarawak has North Korean workers (in Malaysia). This is not (allowed) in the peninsular,'' he said when commenting on the presence of dozens of North Koreans at a coal mine in the Sri Aman division. Besides the 46 North Koreans, the mine's 119 foreign workers were from Myanmar...

Last year saw the highest number of terrorist incidents since 2000, according to the latest Global Terrorism Index released by the Institute for Economics and Peace. Worldwide, the number of terrorist incidents increased from less than 1,500 in 2000 to nearly 10,000 in 2013. Sixty percent of attacks last year occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria. The report suggests that U.S. foreign policy has played a big role in making the problem worse: "The rise in terrorist activity coincided with the US invasion of Iraq," it concludes. "This created large power vacuums in the country allowing different factions...

By working together the team: our friend of the Ukrainian diaspora in Toronto, Dominique Hradowy; OSINT-expert team "InformNapalm" Irakli Komaxidze; as well as administrators of our resource has published a fascinating map of "invading forces of the Russian Federation" on the site InformNapalm. Accommodation units are clickable and can additionally tell of many instances of Russian aggression against Ukraine. I want to present this card upon Permalink: https://informnapalm.org/maps/syly-vtorzhenyya/. Ask the readers and friends to distribute this material, it may be for many will be interesting and useful.

Google has been the target of repeated anti-trust scrutiny in Europe over the last decade. Today’s Financial Times is reporting that the European parliament is on the verge of taking even more drastic steps, preparing a plan that would call for the breakup of the search giant, specifically the “unbundling [of] search engines from other commercial services.” […] When asked by Financial Times why a drastic measure like a breakup was necessary, Ramon Tremosa, a Spanish member of the EU parliment who sponsored the motion, said the commission could not “ask the secret of [Google’s] algorithm” and was seeking other...

NEW YORK – Sen. Ted Cruz is in a crowded ballroom full of Zionists this Sunday evening, headlining an annual Zionist Organization of America dinner. “Standing with Israel and strengthening the U.S.-Israel alliance is critical for our nation and has been a key priority from the very first day I arrived in the US Senate,” he said at a VIP reception beforehand. “The threats to Israel right now have never been greater, and now is a time when we do not need leaders who simply speak empty words of support for Israel,” he said in a well-received speech. “We need...

US Tells Iran to Consider Nuclear Talks Extension VIENNA — Nov 23, 2014 By GEORGE JAHN and MATTHEW LEE The U.S. told Iran Sunday that it's time to consider extending nuclear talks, in the first formal recognition by Washington that frenzied last-minute diplomacy may not be enough to seal a deal by a rapidly approaching deadline. A senior U.S. official said that with the Monday evening cutoff date a little more than a day away, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry proposed to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamad Java Zarf that the two sides start discussing post-deadline talks in their latest...