Free Republic

In the previously unseen footage, Kim Philby gives a seminar to East German spies A previously unseen video of one of Britain's most infamous spies describing his career as a Soviet agent has been uncovered by the BBC. The tape is of Kim Philby giving a secret lecture to the Stasi, the East German Intelligence Service, in 1981. It is the first time the ex-MI6 officer can be seen talking about his life as a spy from his recruitment to his escape. He describes his career rising up the ranks of MI6 whilst providing its secrets to the Soviet Union's...

Politics: Amid the ObamaCare fiasco, the latest is that physicians will be subject to streams of grubby government spies checking up on their Medicare patient intake. This isn't Eurosocialist care anymore. This is the Soviet Union. In a front-page news story, the New York Times reported Monday that Obama administration officials intend to recruit a team of workplace spies they call "mystery shoppers" whose task will be to call up U.S. private physicians under false pretenses, fraudulently pose as patients and pry information out of their medical office staff about what kind of payment arrangements these doctors are taking from...

In most parts of Berlin today, one has to look hard to find the double strand of bricks embedded in sidewalks, >snip< the Berlin Wall was one of the most visible, despised, politically and ideologically charged boundaries on earth. It was also the quintessence of an unnatural border, one drawn not by nature, language, ethnicity or colonial hubris, but an artificial, man-made and deliberate cleaving of a culturally and linguistically homogenous society.  >snip<  very simply, no major world city had been cleaved in half so abruptly and violently. >snip< What happened in East Germany, many Germans are  realizing, was not...

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German man has canned the noxious-smelling exhaust fumes of East Germany's cult Trabant car and is doing a brisk trade selling the scent to those nostalgic for the former Communist state. "The smell is something very special and scarce nowadays," said Thorsten Jahn, whose cans of "Trabi" exhaust sell online for 3.98 euros ($4.81). "I wanted to preserve the past in an original way." Fifteen years since reunification, nostalgia for East Germany has been running strong as rosy memories of the communist state's social safety nets, holiday camps and quaint consumer products like the tiny, box-like...

SLOBODAN LEKIC IN BAGHDAD IRAQ'S football (soccer) coach yesterday denounced the United States-led coalition for ignoring the needs of the national team and threatened to resign unless authorities help the squad prepare for the upcoming Asian championships. "In a country without any working cinemas or theatres, where people are afraid to go out at night, the successes of our team are a matter of huge national pride," he said. "That's important for the return of normalcy. Doesn't the coalition, doesn't Paul Bremer understand this?" Bernd Stange complained that Mr Bremer, Iraq's chief US administrator, had provided no support for the...