Free Republic

The Holocaust - the systematic annihilation of six million Jews - is a history of enduring horror and sorrow. The charred skeletons, the diabolic experiments, the death camps, the mass graves, the smoke from the chimneys ... In 1933 nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed by the Nazis. 1.5 million children were murdered. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of handicapped children. Yet there...

Obama camp angry, embarrassed over 2009 Nobel Prize: official The Associated Press Posted: May 15, 2014 5:24 PM ET Last Updated: May 15, 2014 5:24 PM ET A senior Norwegian diplomat says his country's former ambassador to the United States was given a verbal lashing by Barack Obama's chief of staff when the president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. Morten Wetland said Thursday the ambassador, Wegger Stroemmen, was approached by Rahm Emanuel, now Chicago's mayor, who accused Norway of "fawning" to the newly elected U.S. leader. Wetland, the Norwegian ambassador to the United Nations at the time,...

(Ivar Giaever) Nobel Prize Winner to Obama: You Are Wrong on Climate Change Surprising and Shocking! At a speech in Lindau, Germany, before scientists from 90 countries, Giaever disagreed with the President when Obama stated that "no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change." The Nobel Laureate's response? "He is dead wrong!" Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever told President Obama, whom he had endorsed for President in 2008, that he has it all wrong about climate change. It's not mankind's fault at all, but a normal process with little negative impact. The scientist cited statistics which showed...

Secretary of state’s legacy increasingly linked to Iranian regime fortunes Growing speculation that John Kerry will receive a Nobel Peace Prize for finalizing the Iranian nuclear deal is generating renewed criticism of his close relationship with the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, a key public face for the theocratic regime who is rumored to be a probable co-recipient with Kerry. Rumors have been circulating for months that Kerry and Zarif will be co-selected for the prize. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a leading Swedish think-tank, recommended in July that the two be selected for the Nobel in 2016. Lawmakers...

"My name is Mark Steyn. I am not a scientist. I am an author. My main interest in climate science is that Michael E Mann, the inventor of one of its most notorious artifacts, is suing me for "defamation of a Nobel Prize winner" -- a crime that I was not aware existed, especially in his case, as according to the Nobel Institute he is not a Nobel Prize winner. So I recently edited a book about it called "A Disgrace to the Profession": The World's Scientists -- in Their Own Words-- On Michael E Mann, His Hockey Stick, and...

The prize committee for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel – known more commonly as the Nobel Prize in Economics – is set to discuss the nomination of bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. The move comes days after UCLA finance professor Bhagwan Chowdhry penned an op-ed in The Huffington Post stating his intention to nominate Nakamoto for the prize. In his widely-covered article, Chowdhry wrote that Nakamoto deserves the prize because his invention, bitcoin, is "nothing short of revolutionary". Following its publication, however, some observers raised the question of whether Chowdhry violated nomination rules by...

The 2015 Nobel Prize in physics has gone to two scientists for discovering the quirky, shape-shifting behavior of neutrinos — tiny ghostlike particles that fill the universe, traveling close to the speed of light. Takaaki Kajita of the Super-Kamiokande experiment at the University of Tokyo and Arthur B. McDonald of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory at Queen’s University in Canada were awarded the physics Nobel on Tuesday for their discovery that neutrinos oscillate — and thus, that they must have mass. Small as these particles are, the scientists' insight — that neutrinos are chameleon-like particles, switching identities in an instant —...

Three scientists whose discoveries have driven scourges of the developing world to the brink of eradication have been awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. The Nobel Committee announced Monday it had awarded the 2015 prize to 85-year old William C. Campbell, 80-year-old Satoshi Omura and 85-year-old Youyou Tu of China for their discoveries leading to the development of antimicrobial treatments for such tropical diseases as river blindness, lymphatic filariasis (also known as elephantiasis) and malaria. Campbell, an Irish biochemist and parasitologist at Drew University in New Jersey, and Omura, a bioorganic chemist at Kitasato University in Japan and...

The former director of the Nobel Institute regrets his decision to award Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. Recall this was prior to Obama accomplishing anything other than pulling the wool over the eyes of the Nobel committee and the majority of Americans. Geir Lundestad, who also awarded the prize to terrorist Yassir Arafat, stated in his memoir, “We thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn’t have this effect.” I beg to differ. The Nobel Prize no doubt bloated Obama’s already overinflated ego. Perhaps it also empowered him to ignore the wishes and values of the American...

“[We] thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn’t have this effect,” he told the Associated Press in an interview. The award so early in his term appeared to take the Obama White House by surprise, and Mr. Lundestad said U.S. officials privately asked if a Nobel Prize-winner had ever skipped the awards ceremony. Normally the Nobel committee’s decision regarding recipients remains private, and Mr. Lundestad’s frank and revealing remarks regarding internal decisions have caused a stir in Norway, detailing the politicking and compromises that have gone into determining the annual laureate. “Even many of Obama’s supporters thought that the...

US mathematician John Nash, whose life story was turned into the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, has died in a car crash, local media has reported. Nash, 86, and his wife Alicia were both killed when their taxi crashed in New Jersey, the reports said. The mathematician is renowned for his work in game theory, winning the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994. His breakthroughs in maths - and his struggles with schizophrenia - were the focus of the film.

Monday, April 13, 2015 Gunter Grass and the Left's Red Flags Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog A few days after September 11 I saw a quote from Gunter Grass on a Manhattan lamppost. In those dark days, the lampposts and walls that weren't covered in missing persons posters were decorated with the hysterical pamphleteering of the left urging us to blame ourselves for the attacks. The quote has long since been lost to memory, buried under smoke and ash, a green parrot perched on an empty staircase and crowds thronging on foot across the bridge. The...

Günter Grass, the German novelist, social critic and Nobel Prize winner whom many called his country’s moral conscience but who stunned Europe when he revealed in 2006 that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II, died on Monday in the northern German city of Lübeck, which had been his home for decades. He was 87. His longtime publisher, Gerhard Steidl, told reporters that he learned late Sunday that Mr. Grass had been hospitalized after falling seriously ill very quickly. The cause of death was not announced.

Or, "he could go down as Neville Chamberlain at Munich." Experts say we won't know true impact of any deal for years.April 2, 2015 John Kerry did not start the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. But nobody has thrown himself more into the talks and nobody's reputation has more riding on their outcome than the American secretary of State currently trying to hammer out a deal in Switzerland. The former Democratic senator from Massachusetts hoped when he took the helm at the State Department in 2013 that he would make his mark in history by finding the...

**SNIP** The Obama administration continued its attack on coal-fired power plants, which provide about 40 percent of US electricity. In June, the EPA proposed new restrictions on carbon emissions that would make it vitually impossible to build a new coal-fired plant in the US. At the same time, more than 1,200 new coal-fired plants are planned across the world, with two-thirds to be built in India and China. In his 2007 Noble Prize acceptance speech, former Vice President Al Gore warned that the arctic ice could be gone in “as little as seven years.” But arctic sea ice rebounded in...

Russia's richest man has revealed that he bought US scientist James Watson's Nobel Prize gold medal, and intends to return it to him. Steel and telecoms tycoon Alisher Usmanov said Mr Watson "deserved" the medal, and that he was "distressed" the scientist had felt forced to sell it. The medal, awarded in 1962 for the discovery of the structure of DNA, sold for $4.8m (£3m) at auction. The medal was the first Nobel Prize to be put on sale by a living recipient. The 1962 prize was awarded to Watson, along with Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick, with each receiving...

Russia's richest man has revealed that he bought US scientist James Watson's Nobel Prize gold medal, and intends to return it to him. Steel and telecoms tycoon Alisher Usmanov said Mr Watson "deserved" the medal, and that he was "distressed" the scientist had felt forced to sell it. The medal, awarded in 1962 for the discovery of the structure of DNA, sold for $4.8m (£3m) at auction. The medal was the first Nobel Prize to be put on sale by a living recipient....

Let’s suppose that James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA together with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, is wrong about race and intelligence. And let’s even suppose that it was immoral for him to say that this fact “makes me despair about Africa.” Does this abolish Dr. Watson’s free speech rights? No. Well, does James Watson merit the merry media witch hunt that has followed him, ever after making that Verboten remark, so that he is now known as “the disgraced scientist James Watson”? I do not think so. Media witch hunting is a fundamental wrong, no matter who...

This administration is fond of saying that its policy of opposing quarantining health care workers who may have come in contact with Ebola but embracing the internment of American soldiers in the same condition is based on “science.” Administration officials reportedly berated Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie for imposing a mandatory 21-day quarantine on potentially symptomatic care workers who were exposed to Ebola by saying that this policy “doesn’t comport with science.” White House Press Sec. Josh Earnest insisted that the president’s administration acquiesced to the quarantining of American soldiers who served in Ebola-affected regions only because they...