Free Republic

Explanation: Does air glow? It does, but it is usually hard to see. When conditions are right, however, a faint glow about 90 kilometers up can be observed, most easily with a wide-angle long-duration camera exposure. The same airglow can also frequently be seen looking down -- in pictures taken from Earth orbit -- as a faint arc hovering above the surface. Pictured above between the beige clouds, above the curving Earth, behind the streaking airplane, and in front of the sparkling stars are some green bands of airglow. The glow is predominantly created by the excitation of atoms by...

Spain has issued a veiled warning that it will not accept a full bail-out from Europe if the terms are too harsh, a move that would paralyse the European Central Bank and call the euro’s survival into question. In an escalating game of brinkmanship, Spanish finance minister Luis de Guindos said his country is not yet willing to sign a Memorandum giving up fiscal sovereignty to EU inspectors. “First of all, one must clarify the conditions,” he told German newspaper Handelsblatt. Mr de Guindos said the crisis engulfing the region is larger than any one country and warned north Europe...

A report that Germany plans to sell two submarines to Egypt has triggered speculation about a deterioration in German relations with Israel. The German government stressed on Monday that it remained committed to Israel's security -- but officials declined to comment on the report. Class 209 submarine The German government on Monday reaffirmed its commitment to Israel after media reports said relations between the two countries had been damaged by an unconfirmed deal to supply Egypt with two German-made submarines. A German government spokesman declined to comment on an article which appeared in the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram last Friday and...

Berlin's Egyptian Museum has said that it will celebrate the centenary of the discovery of the 3,400-year-old fabled bust of Egypt's Queen Nefertiti amid an ongoing feud with Cairo over its ownership. The museum said it would open an exhibition on Dec. 6 honoring the famous sculpture and other jewels of the Amarna period in its collection on the German capital's Museum Island. On the same day in 1912, the bust was unearthed by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt. "The exhibition focuses on never-before-seen discoveries from the collections of the Berlin museum, supplemented by loans from other museums abroad," it said,...

Berlin - The head of an umbrella organisation for Muslims in Germany on Monday rebuffed a call by a Jewish leader to do more to combat anti-Semitism after a rabbi was brutally attacked in Berlin. "Muslims do not need lessons on that. Anti-Semitism is not compatible with Islam," Ali Kizilkaya, chairperson of the Co-ordination Committee of Muslims, told the Berliner Zeitung. The beating last Tuesday of 53-year-old rabbi Daniel Alter in front of his young daughter, allegedly by a group of Arab youths, has been roundly condemned. The president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dieter Graumann, urged...

Even as Greece desperately tries to avoid defaulting on its debt, American companies are preparing for what was once unthinkable: that Greece could soon be forced to leave the euro zone. Bank of America Merrill Lynch has looked into filling trucks with cash and sending them over the Greek border so clients can continue to pay local employees and suppliers in the event money is unavailable. Ford has configured its computer systems so they will be able to immediately handle a new Greek currency. No one knows just how broad the shock waves from a Greek exit would be, but...

Gangs are one of the most basic, and most potent, building blocks of stateless Fourth Generation war. We commonly think of gangs in connection with crime. But through most of history, the line between crime and war was blurred, often to the point of vanishing. (See Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century.) It was the state that drew the line clearly, but today in much of the Middle East and elsewhere states and the state system are collapsing. What is succeeding the state looks much like the 14th century Europe Tuchman describes: people and regions are at...

BEiRUT – Syrian fighters said they destroyed five helicopters in a raid on a military airport between the northern cities of Aleppo and Idlib Wednesday, while state television said the attack was repelled. Abu Mossab, a rebel who said he took part in the attack, said via Skype that rebels shelled Taftanaz military airport with two tanks captured from the army and destroyed five helicopters. “We destroyed five helicopters as well as buildings in the airport,” Abu Mossab said, although the facility remained in army hands after the raid in which the rebels lost two men before pulling back. “The...

Raw video: Explosive experts detonate remains of 550-pound bomb causing fires, damage to buildings.

The Supreme Military Council of the Syrian rebels released on a statement on Tuesday which said that the rebel forces took control of an army missile base in Damascus, in which ten ready-to-launch missiles were found. Some of the missiles, according to the statement, were converted to carry non-conventional warheads. “During the successful operation, the operatives of the Free Syrian Army found a large number of rockets ready for launching, with enormous destructive capability, and they were very surprised to find missiles that were converted to carry non-conventional warheads and which can be equipped with chemical or biological warheads,” said...

When Greece makes a $3.98 billion loan payment this month to the European Central Bank, one of its international lenders in bailouts, Germany -- which is putting up much of the rescue monies -- will reap the biggest profit, eFXnews reported. FT Deutschland noted that by 2026, when Greece is expected to finish paying off $325 billion in two bailout packages, that Germany could realize $15.8 in gains. In the meantime, Germany has already made significant gains from the very low interest rate it paid to finance its debt as shown in the calculations of economist Jens Boysen-Hogrefe of Germany's...

The president of France formally asked the Syrian opposition to form a provisional government on Monday. "France asks the Syrian opposition to form a provisional government – inclusive and representative – that can become the legitimate representative of the new Syria, “ President Francois Hollande announced in an address at the presidential palace to a group of new French ambassadors. “We are including our Arab partners to accelerate this step. France will recognize the provisional government of Syria once it is formed.” .....

--snip-- n 1941, the Nazis also devised the Hunger Plan, a scheme to feed German soldiers and civilians by starving Polish and Soviet citizens. Once again, the Nazis decided, the produce of Ukraine’s collective farms would be confiscated and redistributed: “Socialism in one country would be supplanted by socialism for the German race.” Not accidentally, the fourteen million victims of these ethnic and political schemes were mostly not Russians or Germans, but the peoples who inhabited the lands in between. Stalin and Hitler shared a contempt for the very notions of Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic independence, and jointly strove to...

One simply has to watch the words of the leaders in the Middle East to understand why there won’t be peace anytime soon. “Jerusalem is a Muslim and Christian city, and there will be neither peace nor security until the Israeli occupation, settlements, and settlers leave the city,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday. “Jerusalem’s identity is Arab, and the city’s and Christian holy sites must be protected from Israeli threats.” He added that Israeli excavation work in Jerusalem and in the Western Wall tunnels beneath the mosque “will not undermine the fact that the city will forever be...

BERLIN - In the debate in Germany over circumcision, you often hear people say jokingly that if cutting the foreskin off a baby boy’s penis for religious reasons is outlawed then piercing little girls’ earlobes shouldn’t be allowed either. But that’s just the scenario that may be shaping up. After a Cologne court ruled in June that circumcision was illegal, a Berlin judge is examining whether or not ear-piercing should be as well. The issue has come up in conjunction with a suit against a tattoo studio by the parents of a three-year-old girl whose ears were pierced at the...

Female students in Iran have been barred from more than 70 university degree courses in an officially-approved act of sex-discrimination which critics say is aimed at defeating the fight for equal women's rights. In a move that has prompted a demand for a UN investigation byIran's most celebrated human rights campaigner, the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, 36 universities have announced that 77 BA and BSc courses in the coming academic year will be "single gender" and effectively exclusive to men. ... Mrs Ebadi, a human rights lawyer exiled in the UK, said the real agenda was to reduce the proportion...

Iran's Supreme Leader has ordered the country's Revolutionary Guards to intensify its campaign of terror attacks against the West and its allies in retaliation for supporting the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. According to Western intelligence officials, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave the order to the elite Quds Force unit following a recent emergency meeting of Iran's National Security Council in Tehran held to discuss a specially-commissioned report into the implications for Iran of the Assad regime's overthrow. Damascus is Iran's most important regional ally, and the survival of the Assad regime is regarded as vital to sustaining the...

I read on Drudge and other places (certainly not the MSM) that Israel is going to attack Iran before the election. I couldn’t figure out why they would do that until I listened to Mark Taylor sitting in for Dennis Prager yesterday. He says the reason they want to do it is to force Obama to back them which they figure he would do because of the election. If they wait until after the election they are afraid he will not…will probably condemn them. And they can’t take the chance that Obama will lose because their country is at stake....

A German rabbi has been criminally charged for performing a circumcision, committing what the indictment calls "bodily harm," media outlets reported on Tuesday. The charges against David Goldberg, who is a mohel and the Rabbi of the city of Hof Saale in Bavaria, is the first known case following the anti-circumcision ruling issued by a German court in May.According to media reports, the charges were filed by a physician from the city of Hessen, and was based on the court ruling which stated that performing a religious circumcision ritual can be considered a crime. A Bavarian radio station reported that...

PARIS/LONDON (Reuters) - The City of London financial district, though diminished by scandals and job cuts, is proving irresistible to fed-up Parisian bankers fleeing France's rising taxes and the feeling that they're not best loved at home. French financial groups big and small, from advisory firms and private equity houses to big banks like Societe Generale, are looking at London as a possible shelter from a new 75 percent tax rate on top French earners, bankers say. Take Bertrand Meunier, who recently agreed to move to London to take a job at private equity firm CVC Capital Partners, leaving a...