Free Republic

Head of state-affiliated Saudi TV channel reveals Saudi Arabia will 'seriously try to get' nuclear weapons following Iran deal. While US President Barack Obama claimed he prevented a nuclear arms race in the Middle East when he presented the Iran deal last Tuesday, a key source in Saudi Arabia laid bare that claim by expressing the country's sense of urgency to acquire its own nuclear weapon. Jamal Khashoggi, head of the Saudi Al Arab news channel that is owned by a prince of the ruling Saudi royal family, and who previously was the media aide to Saudi Arabia's ambassador to...

The UN Security Council on Monday unanimously adopted a resolution endorsing the Iran nuclear deal and paving the way to lifting longstanding sanctions on the Islamic Republic. The 15-0 approval of the Iran nuclear deal clears one of the largest hurdles for the landmark pact, which will now go before the US Congress where it may face an uphill battle for confirmation. The UN vote came shortly after the European Union approved the nuclear deal, okaying the pact between the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany and Iran that lifts punishing economic sanctions on Tehran in exchange...

China has deported 20 foreigners from Britain, South Africa and India for watching video clips that advocated terrorism and religious extremism, the official state media reported. Xinhua News Agency said late Saturday that the foreigners watched an unspecified documentary in a hotel room and later some of them watched video clips that advocated terrorism. Police also found similar clips on a cellphone belonging to one of the South Africans, Xinhua said. …

A Japanese parliamentary committee approved legislation that would expand the role of Japan’s military Wednesday after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling bloc forced the vote in the face of vocal protests from opposition lawmakers and citizens. Opposition lawmakers tried to stop the committee vote as hundreds of citizens protested outside. The unpopular legislation was crafted after Abe’s Cabinet adopted a new security policy last year that reinterpreted a part of Japan’s post-World War II constitution that only permitted the nation’s military to use force for its self-defense. The bills in question would allow Japan to also defend aggression against its...

Katherine Archuleta, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, will resign effective Friday, according to a White House official, one day after it was revealed that sweeping cyberintrusions at the agency resulted in the theft of the personal information of more than 22 million people. Ms. Archuleta went to the White House on Friday morning to personally inform Mr. Obama of her decision, saying that she felt new leadership was needed at the federal personnel agency to enable it to “move beyond the current challenges,” the official said. The president accepted her resignation.

Bad ideas take a long time to die Since the start of the 21st Century, the leftward lurch in Latin America has been unmistakable. By early 2008, the nations of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and, to a certain extent, Mexico and Peru, have all embraced center-left political parties or movements. The reason for the tilt is a familiar one: the siren song of government-mandated wealth redistribution and increased levels of social spending have resonated with people with a long history of economic and development troubles. “I think it’s difficult for conservative candidates to...

Welcoming China’s leader to two summits in a Russian city, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia and China can overcome their countries’ difficulties by working together. Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping both arrived Wednesday in the Russian city of Ufa for summits of the BRICS trade group and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The BRICS group also includes Brazil, India and South Africa, while the SCO, which also focuses on regional security and political issues as well as economics, includes the former Soviet Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Iran, India and Pakistan are observer SCO...

More than two dozen companies in China are postponing initial public offerings and security companies are pledging more than $19 billion for a fund to stabilize the country’s free-falling stock market. The 28 companies, which had obtained permission from China’s securities watchdog for IPOs planned in Shanghai and Shenzhen, said they would postpone them due to recent market fluctuations and refund money already paid, the official Xinhua News agency announced late Saturday. That followed reports that regulators were asking companies to postpone the IPOs. […] The Chinese stock market has been in free-fall for three weeks, losing 28 percent of...

China’s Shanghai Composite index dropped 7.4% on Friday. That would be the equivalent of a more than 1,300-point drop in the Dow Jones industrial average. The Shenzhen Composite, which is dominated by tech stocks, ended trading down 7.9%. As always in market turns, it is unclear exactly what sparked the current sell-off. Some have pointed to the fact that regulators have recently been tightening rules on buying stocks with money borrowed from a broker, or “on margin.” Officials in China are particularly concerned about stock loans that have been coming from unregulated financial entities.

Chinese and Russian media have started suggesting the possibility of a China-U.S. war. While the national news agency in China calls it “inevitable,” a Russian news agency listed a number of indications that it said “proved’ the two nations were heading toward a military conflict.

During his opening remarks at the seventh U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, Vice President Joe Biden said that China “awakened” an America that got “a little too comfortable in the last part of the 20th century.” […] “It awakened the competitive spirit that’s stamped into the DNA of every American, naturalized as well as native born,” he said. “A lot of them are Chinese, I might add.” […] “We do not fear China’s rise. We want to see China rise,” said Biden. “To continue to rise in a responsible way that will benefit you most, China, because you have an...

The U.S. and China will have intense disagreements, but the world is depending on the two powers to work together, Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday, urging China to be a “responsible stakeholder” in international affairs. Biden was speaking at the start of the annual U.S.-China Security and Economic Dialogue, which takes place amid growing tensions over cybertheft and China’s island building in the South China Sea. Secretary of State John Kerry said he was looking forward to a “very frank” discussion on cybersecurity, Internet freedom, human rights and religious freedom. Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang said neither China nor...

When Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta testified in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week she said that the personnel records of about 4.2 million current and former federal employees had been “compromised” by a “cyber intrusion” into the OPM’s computer systems. […] When Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz asked Archuleta whether this included the files on military and CIA personnel, Archuleta gave him an identical answer to each question. “I would be glad to discuss that in a classified setting,” she said. …

A $50 billion canal to be built by a Chinese tycoon in Nicaragua would be deep enough to allow submarines to pass through undetected. Billionaire Wang Jing has spearheaded what is one of the biggest engineering projects in the world and is three times the size of any other canal, yet shipping forecasters don’t anticipate a need for such a route in terms of trading. Many believe that Wang, who has not disclosed who his investors are, may be backed by the Chinese Government who hope to get a foothold in the continent where business has traditionally been dominated by...

China has announced that fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan will not be permitted in the largely-Muslim province of Xinjiang. This is not the first time such a ban has been imposed, but this year tensions are extra high because of recent attacks in the area carried out by Muslim extremists. With China’s leading role in world power-politics gradually mounting, decisions by the leaders of the giant country are of increasing interest to the rest of the world. China is the most populous country in the world and the 3rd largest in size. …

The recent cyber theft of millions of personnel records from the federal government was sophisticated and potentially crippling, but hackers with just rudimentary skills could easily do even more damage by targeting voting machines, according to security experts. In many cases, even the electronic ballots could be manipulated remotely, according to a new report. The report found that the AVS WINVote machines Virginia has used since 2002 have such flimsy security that an amateur hacker could change votes from outside a polling location. “This means anyone could have broken into the machines from the parking lot,” said Cris Thomas, a...

China plans to drop the entry permit requirement for Taiwan residents visiting the mainland, the official Xinhua news agency cited a senior Chinese politician as saying on Sunday. Yu Zhengsheng, chairman of China’s National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, made the comments at an annual forum between the mainland and Taiwan, Xinhua said. The move is an inducement from China to Taiwan ahead of the island’s presidential election in January, offering to make life easier for the hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese who travel to the mainland for work or leisure every year. …

The Obama administration is looking favorably at the plan by a Chinese economist to collateralize China’s enormous US debt with a huge swath of America’s Heartland which is, coincidentally, populated by a Conservative voting bloc. Our valuable real estate, infrastructure and profitable corporations, all in RED STATE territories, are now under the evil gaze of liberal operatives whose hatred for any and all things American is exceeded only by their greed and globalist nature. “Yu Qiao, a professor of economics in the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsighua University in Beijing proposed in 2009 the plan for the...

China needs to better protect trade secrets and fairly enforce business rules to ensure European investment and hiring at a time when Chinese leaders are trying to foster a more innovative economy, the biggest European business group in China said Wednesday. Optimism about continued profitability is waning and nearly a quarter of European companies doing business in China plan to cut staff, according to an annual survey by the European Chamber of Commerce. […] To ensure continued European participation during China’s economic slowdown and its “paradigm shift” toward more value-added industries, the government must more uniformly enforce business rules without...

“Part of the problem is that we’ve got very old systems,” President Obama said on Monday, in a response to a question about the recent hack attack on U.S. government computers. He said making U.S. cyberspace more secure is “going to be a big project,” requiring “new systems and new infrastructure.” The intrusion involving the Office of Personnel Management apparently compromised the personal, identifying information of four million current and former federal employees. […] Speaking at the conclusion of the G-7 summit in Germany on Monday, President Obama refused to say that China is responsible for the massive intrusion into...