Free Republic

Lithuania's parliament has passed the toughest restrictions anywhere in the former Soviet Union on the public display of Soviet and Nazi symbols. It will now be an offence in the Baltic state to display the images of Soviet and Nazi leaders. This includes flags, emblems and badges carrying insignia, such as the hammer and sickle or swastika. Correspondents say equating Soviet and Nazi symbols in this way is certain to infuriate Russia. The new law also prohibits the Nazi and Soviet national anthems but does not specify if this extends to the modern-day Russian national anthem, which uses the Soviet...

Ideology matters again. The big development of recent years is the rise not only of great powers but also of the great-power autocracies of Russia and China. True realism about the international scene begins with understanding how this unanticipated shift will shape our world. Many believe that when Chinese and Russian leaders stopped believing in communism, they stopped believing in anything. They had become pragmatists, pursuing their own and their nation's interests. But Chinese and Russian rulers, like past rulers of autocracies, do have a set of beliefs that guide their domestic and foreign policies. They believe in the virtues...

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aides at the Kremlin say they feel surrounded, and they're not going to take it anymore. Russian corporations are being foiled abroad; the Russian state is being unfairly blamed for volatility in global energy markets; and suggestions that the state is eliminating its critics are just preposterous. Why all the bad press? Because of "Russophobia" — an unreasoning Western hostility toward Russia — according to the Kremlin. "I see a campaign here," Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said in a TV interview last week. Amid all the allegations that the Kremlin — in a...

Russia has suffered terribly at the hands of Islamic terrorism over the centuries and continues suffer today. Yet, Russia is the best friend of the terrorism-exporting Muslim countries. Russia is actively helping Iran towards its ambition to extiprate Israel. Will Russia learn a lesson?

One short phrase has been uttered like a mantra by some of the 12 new cabinet appointees whom President Hugo Chávez on Monday swore in to office: “21st century socialism”. Such ideological rigidity looks set to be the hallmark both of Mr Chávez’s third term, which begins on Wednesday, and of the future course of Venezuela’s so-called “Bolivarian Revolution”. Mr Chávez, who was re-elected in a landslide last month, has pledged to radicalise his administration during his new six-year term, which runs until 2013, and fully convert Venezuela into a socialist state. Exactly what such a transformation will mean for...

There are many reasons to expect Moscow's deteriorating ties with the West will continue their downward trend this autumn. But the key one may be growing differences over the breakaway regions of Transdniester, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia and their stated desire to proclaim independence from Moldova and Georgia. The issue pushing the frozen conflicts to the fore are two independence referendums -- one in Transdniester on September 17, the second in South Ossetia on November 12. Russia, which has acted as a long-term booster for the separatist regions, is looking at the plebescites in two ways: a chance to bring...

Fear of The West In Russia By Masha Lipman Tuesday, May 2, 2006; Page A21 MOSCOW -- Early in the perestroika years, Mikhail Gorbachev declared the preeminence of human values for Soviet Russia. It was a truly revolutionary pronouncement: During decades of Cold War the U.S.S.R. had staunchly rejected civil liberties and other pillars of liberal democracy as "bourgeois" and alien to the Soviet man and state. Gorbachev sought to convince the West that the Soviet Union was opening up for real. After the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union, Russia rid itself of its oppressive police state, and...

National PR-ity // Moscow drafts a plan to influence the United States The Kremlin has taken up the promotion of Russian interests in the United States head-on. The key role will be given to the Russian-U.S. Council for Business Cooperation (RUCBC) whose supervisory board will include high-ranking officials from the Russian president’s administration, ministers and prominent public figures. The Russian government asked the Finance Ministry to find sources to finance the NGO. However, it has already been suggested that big business contribute for the council’s activities. The first donation is expected to amount to $50 million. Work has in progress...

CARACAS, Venezuela - U.S. missionaries accused by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of espionage have been forced from their remote outposts among jungle tribes by a government order, the final pair leaving Thursday after years of evangelical work. The New Tribes Mission flew those two out of the rain forest to regroup with other missionaries in the eastern city of Puerto Ordaz. There they will decide what to do next: leave the country or continue with a legal battle seeking to overturn the government's order to expel them from indigenous areas by Sunday. Most of the group's missionaries are Americans. Since...

Welcome bear hug By Arnon Regular Russian President Vladimir Putin's announcement that he would be willing to meet with Hamas leaders did not come as a complete surprise to Hamas, which is currently on a drive to obtain international legitimacy for its future government. Within 24 hours after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, its leaders had identified the Russian-Chinese axis, as well as a few European countries, as the place to concentrate its efforts to soften the stringent conditions for acceptance by the international community that are currently being set by the United States, Israel, Egypt and Jordan. Nevertheless, even...

Franco Frattini has called for a wider debate on totalitarian symbols The European Commission has rejected calls for a proposed Europe-wide ban on Nazi symbols to be extended to cover Communist Party symbols as well.EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini said it would not be appropriate to include the red star and the hammer and sickle in a draft EU law on racism. But he called for a wider debate on the use of totalitarian symbols. A group of MEPs from the former communist bloc had urged a ban on Soviet symbols alongside Nazi ones. In a letter to the...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 — President Bush is expected to propose a health care initiative in his State of the Union address to help the uninsured and the underinsured, White House advisers said on Friday. It was unclear how much the initiative, to be announced in the address on Tuesday, would cost at a time when Mr. Bush is under pressure because of a growing budget deficit. But White House officials have made clear that they do not want to cede the politically potent issue of health care to the Democratic presidential candidates, all of whom have made health care a...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 — President Bush is expected to propose a health care initiative in his State of the Union address to help the uninsured and the underinsured, White House advisers said on Friday. It was unclear how much the initiative, to be announced in the address on Tuesday, would cost at a time when Mr. Bush is under pressure because of a growing budget deficit. But White House officials have made clear that they do not want to cede the politically potent issue of health care to the Democratic presidential candidates, all of whom have made health care a...

TALLINN, Estonia (Reuters) -- Residents of Vandra in rural Estonia got a blast from the past as they received voting cards for an upcoming EU referendum in Soviet-era envelopes complete with hammer and sickle, the post office said Thursday. National post office Eesti Post apologized for any upset caused by local officials using envelopes from a huge stockpile left from before the Baltic country regained independence in 1991, which also carried the acronym CCCP and other Soviet symbols. "It's not our practice to use envelopes from Soviet times," Eesti Post spokeswoman Inge Rumessen said. "We banned them long ago."

Iraqis snap up property Families, factions move into regime's buildings or boot out Palestinians 05/03/2003 By TOD ROBBERSON / The Dallas Morning News BAGHDAD, Iraq – Available now, rent-free: four-bedroom, four-bathroom apartment, Tigris riverfront with view of presidential palace, some minor door lock repairs necessary. Inquire within. Perhaps not since Americans settled public lands using the Homestead Act of 1862 has the world witnessed the transfer of so much real estate to so many people in such a short amount of time as in the three weeks since the fall of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's government. Across Baghdad and the...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - It would not be Washington's first choice, but the long-banned Iraq Communist Party on Sunday won the race to publish the first newspaper in Baghdad since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The eight-page "People's Path" was handed out for free, snapped up eagerly by passers-by hungry for any kind of news after the U.S. invasion eradicated state-run media. "Collapse of a Dictator" read the headline under the hammer and sickle on the front page, followed by an article railing against the abuses of Saddam's "bloody, terrorist reign." "With the dictatorship's collapse, all the wishes of the vast...