Free Republic

In the mountains of western Iran, the province of Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari is known for mile-high lagoons, flowing rivers and wetlands that attract thousands of species of migratory birds. But years of diminishing rainfall have shriveled water sources. Conditions worsened, residents say, after Iranian authorities began funneling water 60 miles away to the lowland city of Esfahan, sparking protests as far back as 2014. The uprising — in which at least 21 people died and thousands were arrested before authorities reimposed order — had many sparks: rising prices, persistent unemployment, bank collapses, a wide wealth gap, corruption in the theocracy. But an...

The World Economic Forum delivered a strong warning about Donald Trump’s go-it-alone approach to tackling climate change as it highlighted the growing threat of environmental collapse in its annual assessment of the risks facing the international community. In the run-up to the US president’s speech to its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, next week, the WEF avoided mentioning Trump by name but said “nation-state unilateralism” would make it harder to tackle global warming and ecological damage. The WEF’s global risks perception survey showed Trump’s arrival in the White House in 2017 had coincided with a marked increase in concern about...

There could be no starker illustration of the profound differences that exist between Washington and London -- despite alignment on many other issues -- than comments this week by our two leaders on climate change and the environment. For President Trump, the Paris Agreement is a bad deal that will close US businesses -- perhaps even has closed some already. Meanwhile, in London last week, Prime Minister Theresa May was launching the UK's 25-year Plan for Nature. Its flagship pledge is to "leave the environment in a better state than we found it". The evidence is entirely against the world...

The refugee crisis – particularly in the Mediterranean area – has received large amounts of new attention in the past few years, with people fleeing from Syria and entering the European Union emblematic of the problem. There has been some research connecting this refugee problem with changes to the climate. In particular, the years preceding the Syrian refugee crisis were characterized by a severe drought that reduced farm output and led to economic and social strife there. Separating out the influences of climate change from general social instability may be impossible, because they are intimately linked. But we do know...

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres has unveiled his plan to promote global mass migration in the left-liberal Guardian newspaper. Guterres, a former Socialist Party prime minister in his native Portugal, took over the top job at the UN on January 1st, having previously served as the institution’s High Commissioner for Refugees. His article, titled ‘Migration can benefit the world. This is how we at the UN plan to help’, makes the bold claim that mass migration “powers economic growth, reduces inequalities and connects diverse societies”, in order to promote the Global Compact for Migration. “This will be the first...

Stabbings in the news. First from Sweden: Gothenburg Man Suspected Of Killing Australian Appears In Court And Vermont: Burlington Man Charged With Motel Machete Attack And Ireland: Dundalk Stabbing Victim Was Japanese And one more, from Germany: The teenage girl died of her injuries after the 15-year-old boy stabbed her with a kitchen knife in Kandel. There's rather a lot of this nowadays, don't you find? Hard to keep up. I try to winnow it down by only following stabbings in towns I've been through in the last two years. In 2016 I spoke to some "Syrians" in Kandel, a...

America is not owned by Americans and their children but is instead held by people all over the globe, according to a statement from amnesty advocate Sen. Lindsey Graham. “I’ve always believed that America is an idea [which is] not defined by its people but by its ideals,” Graham said in a press statement January 12 which sought to criticise President Donald Trump for describing some foreign countries as less pleasant than America, or as “shitholes.” Graham continued: The American ideal is embraced by people all over the globe. It was best said a long time ago, E Pluribus Unum...

OSLO - Global warming is on track to breach the toughest limit set in the Paris climate agreement by the middle of this century unless governments make unprecedented economic shifts from fossil fuels, a draft U.N. report said. The draft, of a report due for publication in October, said governments will also have to start sucking carbon dioxide from the air to achieve the ambition of limiting temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. “There is very high risk that ... global warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” the U.N. panel of experts wrote,...

The precise extent of human-induced climate change is unclear, but the basic science is unequivocal, as is the danger it poses to the United States. This threat comes from the direct impact of climate change on agricultural production and sea levels but equally importantly from the huge waves of migration that climate change is likely to cause, on a scale that even the world’s richest states and societies will be unable either to prevent or accommodate. Yet for two out of the past four U.S. administrations, action on this issue has been frozen due to the refusal of a large...

RUSH: Have you seen the latest news? Trump is gonna go to Davos. Can I tell you what kind of an excrement storm that could end up being? This World Economic Forum in Davos. Who goes to Davos? Every left-wing powerbroker you can think of from Hollywood to Big Business to entertainment, you name it. It’s just an adjunct of the Socialist International, and they get together and they find and discuss ways to fleece the United States using issues like climate change. Trump is gonna go and park himself right in the middle of this bunch. It is going...

In November, as delegates from all over the world gathered in the former German capital of Bonn for the annual UN climate summit, their hosts were feeling a bit embarrassed. Germany likes to champion itself as a climate leader. But when delivering her headline speech to the summit, Chancellor Angela Merkel was unable to make any new climate commitments. That’s because she was locked in difficult coalition negotiations with the free-market liberals and the environmentalist Greens. Germany is still 40 percent reliant on coal, a reality Merkel acknowledged in her speech. Because of strong economic growth and Merkel’s decision to...

"We are moving from a world dominated by very exclusive trans-Atlantic relations towards a rebalancing," Le Maire said, during a two-day trip to Moscow in December. France wants to create a trade "backbone" stretching from Europe via Moscow to Beijing, the minister revealed. He also criticized the US threat of "extraterritorial sanctions," with which Washington tries to pressure foreign companies with operations in the US into forgoing business in Russia. Extraterritorial sanctions would make the US "the de facto gendarme of global trade," Mr Le Maire warned. "That is contrary to our vision of a multilateral global organization," he warned.

Last week, Susan Rice, former American Ambassador to the United Nations and former National Security Adviser to President Obama, wrote an article in the New York Times regarding President Trump’s newly unveiled national security strategy. Although she intended to derail President Trump’s foreign policy, what she really accomplished was outlining the reasons why globalists like Rice and Obama should never again inhabit the White House. From the start, Rice’s criticism of the President was thwarted by her utopic and naïve views as she suggested Trump was “dystopian” in calling the world “extraordinarily dangerous.” In fact, the only thing extraordinary is...

Tens of thousands of people have evacuated their land in Bali as the nearby volcano Mount Agung angrily spits ash and its magma rises. Many Balinese hold the mountain sacred and accept its occasional outbursts as moral admonishments whereas geologists consider this activity a routine part of Earth’s behavior. But scientists have found another force - climate change - affects the frequency of eruptions. Now a new study shows even relatively minor climate variations may have such an influence. If they are right, today’s global warming could mean more and bigger volcanic eruptions in the future. The new study is...

The Arctic continued in 2017 to warm at double the rate of the global temperature increase, resulting in the second warmest air temperatures, above average ocean temperatures, loss of sea ice, and a range of human, ocean and ecosystem effects, according to the United Nations weather agency. “While 2017 saw fewer records shattered than in 2016, the Arctic shows no sign of returning to the reliably frozen region it was decades ago,” said the Arctic Report Card, a peer-reviewed study that brings together the work of 85 scientists from 12 nations. The UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Tuesday...

Tax cuts are going to grow the economy by much more than expected. That’s the verdict of the Wall Street Journal‘s prestigious “Heard on the Street” column. Importantly, Heard on the Street is run by the news side of the WSJ, not its tax-cut loving editorial page. So there’s no particular pro-tax cut or pro-Republican bias at work here. Some of the pro-growth changes include eliminating any delay to the corporate tax cuts, lowering of the top individual rate, lowering rates for most taxpayers, and increasing the child tax credit. The latter is particularly important because middle-class households are “more...

The Trump administration will reverse course from previous Obama administration policy, eliminating climate change from a list of national security threats. The National Security Strategy to be released on Monday will emphasize the importance of balancing energy security with economic development and environmental protection, according to a source who has seen the document and shared excerpts of a late draft. “Climate policies will continue to shape the global energy system,” a draft of the National Security Strategy slated to be released on Monday said. “U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth, energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic...

Extreme weather left its mark across the planet in 2016, the hottest year in recorded history. Record heat baked Asia and the Arctic. Droughts gripped Brazil and southern Africa. The Great Barrier Reef suffered its worst bleaching event in memory, killing large swaths of coral. Now climate scientists are starting to tease out which of last year’s calamities can, and can’t, be linked to global warming. In a new collection of papers published Wednesday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, researchers around the world analyzed 27 extreme weather events from 2016 and found that human-caused climate change was...

Republicans are hesitant to switch from our winner-take-all state laws allocating electors to the electoral college to using the National Popular Vote. The National Popular Vote Plan would award all of a state’s electors to the candidate who wins the most popular votes in all fifty states. There is a fear that such a move will benefit Democrats, since Democrats won the popular vote even though they lost the elections in 2000 and 2016. But the truth is, Republicans are likely going to lose their ability to win the necessary swing state of Florida in the future, and they can...

A man planned to bomb Downing Street's gates before attacking Theresa May with a knife and suicide vest inside Number 10, a court has heard. Naa'imur Zakariyah Rahman, 20, has been charged with preparing acts of terrorism and was remanded in custody during a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court. The 20-year-old appeared alongside Mohammed Aqib Imran, 21, who is accused of trying to join Islamic State and preparing acts of terror.