Free Republic

Hanoi/Manila Reuters: Thousands of Vietnamese set fire to factories and rampaged in industrial zones in the south of the country after protests against Chinese oil drilling in a part of the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam, officials said on Wednesday. The brunt appears to have been borne by Taiwanese companies in the zones in Binh Duong and Dong Nai provinces as rioters mistook the firms to be Chinese-owned. Vietnamese officials gave few details, but said gates to factories were smashed and windows were broken. Police said they were investigating. A Singapore foreign ministry spokesman said the premises of a...

David Tran fled communist Vietnam in December 1978 on the Huey Fong, a Panamanian freighter that carried Tran and more than 3,000 other refugees to freedom. According to a 2013 profile in the LA TImes, Tran and his family settled in Los Angeles, where he soon realized he couldn’t find work or a hot sauce that he liked. Tran began to make his own hot sauce and sold it in Chinatown. He named it after its place of origin (Si Racha, Thailand) and started a company in 1980, Huy Fong, which he named after the freighter that brought him to the United...

The State Department and a House panel are working on an alternative date for Secretary of State John Kerry to testify about information related to the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya. "The State Department has told the Committee that they are committed to finding an alternative date in the near future for Secretary Kerry to testify before the Oversight Committee," Frederick Hill, a spokesman for the panel, said Monday. "As such, Chairman Issa agreed to lift the subpoena obligation for May 21."

Vietnam said on Wednesday a Chinese vessel intentionally rammed two of its ships in a part of the disputed South China Sea where Beijing has deployed a giant oil rig, sending tensions spiraling in the region. The foreign ministry in Hanoi said the collisions took place on Sunday and caused considerable damage to the Vietnamese ships. Six people sustained minor injuries, it said. "On May 4, Chinese ships intentionally rammed two Vietnamese Sea Guard vessels," said Tran Duy Hai, a foreign ministry official and deputy head of Vietnam's national border committee. "Chinese ships, with air support, sought to intimidate Vietnamese...

Eleanor Holmes Norton is the Democrats’ non-voting congressional observer from the District of Columbia. You may remember her as the genius who claimed that people didn’t know they had to sign up for ObamaCare because evil Republicans had convinced everyone it had been repealed. Well, Democrats, congratulations. Your brain trust is at it again. This is a woman you actually elected and she’s dropped another nugget of wisdom in your laps. An incensed Ms. Eleanor Norton wants everyone to know that the Iraq war was “perhaps the most catastrophic war of the 20th century.” Here’s the clip:

Commentary by Paul Winters, Dignitas News Service In comments made Thursday in Japan, US President Obama pledged his support for Japanese rights in its dispute with China over islands in the East China Sea. The disputed land, known to the Japanese as Senkaku and referred to as Diaoyu are at the center of the Sino-Japanese tensions. The comments come as part of Mr. Obama's week-long trip through Asia in which he has been vocal in support for Japan and Korea in the region, but has been embarrassingly silent on support for the Philippines amid increased Chinese aggression in the South...

US Secretary of State John Kerry has accused Russia of "distraction, deception and destabilisation" in eastern Ukraine. In a strongly worded statement, he called on Moscow to help defuse the crisis there or face further sanctions.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry provided Russia with a stern warning Thursday evening — start complying with the de-escalation agreement brokered last week in Geneva, or face the wrath of new U.S. sanctions. Kerry delivered a terse statement from the State Department's briefing room late Thursday, during which he blasted Russia for not taking a "single step in the right direction" toward de-escalation. He criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin for what he called outlandish claims that the Internet is a "CIA plot."

Remains from an indigenous Southeast Asian were buried with those of an Army Reserve pilot from the Vietnam War at Arlington National Cemetery, America’s shrine for its fallen heroes. According to internal POW/MIA documents, when the remains of Chief Warrant Officer 3 William Smith Jr. were turned over to investigators in Vietnam in 1999, a portion belonged to someone else.(snip) Laboratory anthropologist Gwen Guinan wrote in the internal memo that “subsequent to the shipment and the burial’’ it was discovered that a fragment of a leg bone that should have been separated from Smith’s remains “had been inadvertently included.’’ The...

San Lorenzo man serves in military, works a lifetime -- "illegally."It took Lee Smith quite some time to find out that he wasn't a U.S. citizen. During which time he served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and lived and worked in the Bay Area for nearly 44 years. Smith, 65, a retired sheet metal fabricator, discovered he wasn't a citizen upon turning 65 and trying -- and failing -- to collect his Social Security benefits, according to The Daily Review. He joined the Army in 1969 and took the oath of citizenship -- a requirement for him to be...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com - Kerry: Our Goal is Not Eliminating Iranian Nuclear CapabilityPosted By Daniel Greenfield On April 15, 2014 @ 7:30 pm In The Point | No Comments Sometimes a choice of words can be extremely revealing. That was the case with Kerry’s contentious testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.Under pressure, Kerry tends to slip and say revealing things. That was how the infamous, “for it and against it” clip was born. Kerry dismissed breakout as “just having one bomb’s worth, conceivably, of material, but without any necessary capacity to put it in anything,...

Jesse Winchester, an American singer-songwriter who moved to Montreal in the 1960s to dodge the Vietnam War draft, died in his sleep Friday morning at the age of 69 after a lengthy illness. Born in Louisiana and raised in Tennessee, Winchester developed his musical talent while living in Montreal. He often played at a hotel in Morin Heights, Que., run by several Tennessee transplants during the 1970s.

It was a warmer than usual summer day in Clark, South Dakota when a rather large and ungainly young man, a recent high school graduate, set about finding his way in the world. The salivating Navy recruiter asked the youngster what it would take to have him sign up: “why, I’d like to go to Australia.” It was as good as done. After all, in 1966, if you were lucky enough to ship out on the USS Canberra, more likely than not, during the course of your hitch, there will be a port call to the ship’s namesake— Canberra, Australia.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 flew around Indonesian airspace apparently to avoid detection after vanishing from radar screens on March 8, a media report said today, suggesting the possibility of a more sinister reason behind the jet's disappearance..... After reviewing radar data provided by neighbouring countries, investigators have now found that the jetliner curved north of Indonesia before turning south toward the southern Indian Ocean, CNN quoted a Malaysian official as saying. The official also suggested the possibility of a more sinister reason behind MH370's disappearance a month ago. The plane's flight path clearly showed that someone on the plane was...

Several families driven from their homes, houses razed to the ground and land seized: Vietnamese authorities continue to subject Catholics to raids against in Cồn Dầu, Cẩm Lệ district, Da Nang province (south-central Vietnam), at the center of a land ownership controversy. For six years, Hanoi has tried in every possible way to justify its actions with claims that they are motivated by "ecological" needs, although in reality the real goal is the construction of a luxury tourist resort. The faithful try to resist and keep the historical community alive, even if their number is dwindling with the passage of...

Admiral Jeremiah Denton died yesterday at the age of 89. Admiral Denton served seven-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Denton’s name should be known by every American. In captivity he gave something beyond the last full measure of devotion, if that is possible. His is a story of almost unbelievable endurance, courage and patriotism. Here is a short course courtesy of the Denton Foundation that I saved a while back: In June 1965, he began a combat tour in Vietnam as prospective Commanding Officer of Attack Squadron Seventy-Five. On July 18, 1965, Denton...

Fishermen from this village believe they may have seen the missing Malaysia Airlines flight on the night it disappeared flying low over the Gulf of Thailand. It's not clear whether what they saw was flight MH370 or whether it is the latest in a string of false leads in the search for the missing plane, but if true it would suggest that the plane may have flown low to avoid radar, what is known as "terrain masking." On March 8 flight MH370 disappeared from radar as it flew north over the Gulf of Thailand towards Vietnam en route to Beijing....

KUALA LUMPUR—A Vietnamese search aircraft located fragments Sunday floating in waters off southern Vietnam that are suspected of coming from a Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU 0.00% jetliner that went missing a day earlier with 239 people on board. The fragments were believed to be a composite inner door and a piece of the tail, Vietnam's ministry of information and communication said in a posting on its website. They were located about 50 miles south-southwest of Tho Chu island. Officials released photograph of one fragment floating in the water. Malaysia Airlines said it had received no confirmation regarding the suspected debris. Flight...

The Civil Aviation Department of Hong Kong has received a pilot’s report that a large amount of debris was spotted in Vietnamese waters. The pilot, flying a Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur plane, says the debris is located about 60 kilometres southeast of Vietnamese city Vung Tau, some 500 kilometers from where the Malaysian jetliner lost contact with air traffic controllers. The department has submitted the message to the relevant authorities.

The former U.S. Senator from Alabama, Navy admiral and Vietnam prisoner of war who blinked “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse Code to alert the world of abuse by his North Vietnamese captors, died on Friday.