Free Republic

Beijing has rejected President Obama's criticism of its plan to make tech companies put backdoors in their software and share their encryption keys if they want to operate in China. On Monday, Mr Obama told the Reuters news agency he had "made it very clear" China had to change its policy if it wanted to do business with the US. But Beijing said it needed the powers to combat terrorism and tackle leaks. It also suggested the West was guilty of having double standards.

The U.S. is providing spy-satellite imagery to Ukraine to help in its fight against Russia-backed rebels, but with a catch: the images are significantly degraded to avoid provoking Russia or compromising U.S. secrets... But before delivering them, U.S. officials black out military staging areas on Russian territory and reduce the resolution so that enemy formations can’t be clearly made out, making them less useful to Ukrainian military commanders. Those steps, which delay the delivery of the images by at least 24 hours, are designed to keep the U.S. out of the so-called kill chain—military jargon for the stages of lethal...

**SNIP** U.S. officials initially had denied reports that the administration was withholding details from Israel of the closed-door talks with Iran. That changed Wednesday into a blunt rebuke of one of America's closest allies. "Not everything you are hearing from the Israeli government is an accurate reflection of the talks," Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters. She said the administration has begun "a selective sharing of information" with Israel as a result. White House press secretary Josh Earnest complained of "a continued practice of cherry-picking specific pieces of information and using them out of context to distort the...

Top U.S. counterterrorism officials say they worry a potential terrorist could be hiding among refugees who are looking to come to the United States after escaping the brutal war in Syria. "It's clearly a population of concern,” the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Nicholas Rasmussen, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, went further, saying it would be a “huge mistake” to bring refugees from the conflict to the U.S. – even as an estimated 4 million children, women and men have been forced to flee Syria and another 7 million have been...

"What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as...

Russia's top general said Friday that a strong nuclear arsenal will ensure military superiority over the West as Moscow forges ahead with a multi-billion dollar plan to modernize its forces by 2020. Russia, facing a likely recession because of a fall in oil prices and sanctions over Ukraine, must deal with new forms of Western aggression, including economic confrontation, said General Valery Gerasimov. But despite the deep economic woes, he said the Russian military would receive more than 50 new intercontinental nuclear missiles this year. "Support for our strategic nuclear forces to ensure their high military capability combined with ......

White House denies Channel 2 report claiming US has stopped updating Israel about developments in nuclear negotiations with Iran in response to Netanyahu's planned Congress speech, after Boehner admits he failed to tell administration he had invited PM. According to the report by Israel's Channel 2, US Undersecretary of State, Wendy Sherman, who is involved in the talks has announced she will no longer be updating Israelis about the talks. Susan Rice, US President Obama's National Security Advisor, has also reportedly announced she is cutting ties with her Israeli counterpart, Yossi Cohen, who serves as Netanyahu's National Security Adviso

Мазохи́зм: masochism Here at The St. Petersburg Times language desk, we've written a lot about gaffes in the translation and interpretation of official statements over the years. Once upon a time, those mistakes were just that — mistakes. And only translation nerds were interested in the nuances. Those days are gone. Now translation is just one more weapon in the propaganda wars.

Boris Johnson says he intends to renounce his American citizenship to prove his "commitment to Britain". He told the Sunday Times that his citizenship was "an accident of birth that has left me with this thing. I've got to find a way of sorting it out". The Mayor of London, who was born in New York, has in the past been forced to pay US tax because of his American citizenship. He has just completed a six-day tour of cities in the US. Mr Johnson said he would approach US ambassador Matthew Barzun to explore what steps he had to...

More Than 500,000 In U.S. Could Be At Risk Of Female Genital Excision Preliminary data shows that up to 507,000 women and girls in the United States were at risk of female genital excision in 2013. By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS A new study finds that nearly 507,000 women and girls in the U.S. could be at risk of female genital excision There is anecdotal evidence of U.S. girls being sent to their parents' home countries for 'vacation cutting' Nearly 507,000 women and girls in the United States could be at risk of female genital excision, including 57,000 in California, a new...

So here’s Obama’s opinion: Ukraine should not get military aid from the West because even with American help, Russia would still mop the floor with them. And this, according to the Times, is what Obama thinks will intimidate Putin into signing a peace treaty. I’ll offer the president some free advice: telling Putin the world is too weak to stop him isn’t very intimidating. Yet even if the West got Putin to sign on to a new agreement, nothing will have been accomplished. Putin has been violating the last ceasefire agreement, because there’s no one to enforce it. What Obama,...

,li>U.S. Seen in Middle East as Ally of Terrorists Many Egyptians and moderate Arabs and Muslims were shocked to hear that the U.S. State Department recently hosted a Muslim Brotherhood delegation. They were equally shocked when an EU court decided to remove Hamas from the bloc's list of terror groups. "Just two days after the controversial visit, the Brotherhood called for a war against their fellow Egyptians." — Linda S. Heard, Middle East Expert, Gulf News. "The Muslim Brotherhood is seeking to return to the political arena through the American door and terrorist attacks. The U.S. policy appears to be...

My new book, The Protestant's Dilemma, shows in a myriad of ways why Protestantism is implausible. We sifted through many arguments to boil the book down to the most essential. A few chapters didn't make the cut but are still good enough to share. Here's one of them. If Protestantism is true, There's no way to know whether you're assenting to divine revelation or to mere human opinion about divine revelation. Protestants and Catholics both believe that God has revealed himself to man over the course of human history, culminating in his ultimate self-revelation in Jesus Christ. But whereas Catholics...

Their neighbors thought they were a sales consultant and a real estate agent. He had a degree from Harvard. They had two children. They were a typical American family, except they were not. Documents released by the FBI paint a picture of the lives and the extensive training in spycraft given to a group of Russian spies sent to live in American society, including one couple found in Cambridge.

A Lubbock Texas judge made international headlines earlier this year for his prediction that if President Obama is reelected on Tuesday, it will open the door for a United Nations invasion. Judge Tom Head told a local radio station in September that the president will: “Try to give the sovereignty of the United States away. He’s going to call in the UN troops, personnel carriers, tanks and whatever.” The proclamation drew widespread scorn and ridicule both at home and abroad. Even the office of the Secretary General weighed in on Head’s prediction. “It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said a spokesperson for UN...

#Google hands data to US Government in #WikiLeaks espionage case https://t.co/ocBQGvL4yl pic.twitter.com/MIxGiOu9si — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 26, 2015 Google hands over WikiLeaks emails, but is the first to exploit Charlie Hebdo and Sony's "the Interview". Why? https://t.co/D2Ir2Yi3Kq — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 25, 2015 'Attack on journalism': WikiLeaks responds to Google's cooperation with US govt Google’s willingness to surrender the private emails of WikiLeaks staffers to the United States government amounts to an “attack on journalism,” a representative for the whistleblower group says. Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist who joined WikiLeaks as the group’s spokesman in 2010, said he’s “appalled” that...

Pope Francis greets pilgrims in St. Peter's Square before the Wed. general audience on April 16, 2014. Credit: Daniel Ibanez/CNA. Manila, Philippines, Jan 18, 2015 / 12:56 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Archbishop Bernardito Auza – a member of the organizing committee for Pope Francis’ upcoming visit to the U.S. – has revealed details of the proposed schedule, which includes visits to three cities. “He would arrive on the 22nd and he would leave the evening of the 27th. It’s really a full six days, plus the travel, so it’s really one week,” Archbishop Auza told CNA/EWTN News in Manila on Jan....

The U.S. military is planning to deploy more than 400 troops to help train Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State, along with hundreds of U.S. support personnel, a Pentagon spokesman told Reuters on Thursday.

The United States of America is NOT at war with Islam. And every Muslim better pray and kiss our asses hoping that the USA is never at war with Islam. Every Muslim should bend over backwards to appease the United Sttates. The US is not at war with Islam. If we were, there would be a radioactive crater 300 meters deep and 1000 meters across glowing at 10,000 degrees at the site of the Kaaba shrine and Grand Mosque in Mecca -- where Muslims doing the Haj pilgrimage gather from around the world to bow down to the black Kaaba...

Muslims in USA by County.