Free Republic

Reining in illegal Arab construction is simply "not a top priority" for the government, according to a statement the state conveyed to the Supreme Court. The state was responding to demands that it carry out demolition orders issued against an illegally built Arab school just outside of Jerusalem. The school's construction was funded by the European Union. The Supreme Court subsequently dismissed the case on Wednesday, rejecting claims by Regavim, an NGO which monitors illegal construction in the Arab sector, that the state is intentionally avoiding enforcement of building laws. ...

Groucho Marx once said that money frees you from doing things you dislike. “Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy,” said the Marx Brother. John MacDougall | AFP | Getty Images German Chancellor Angela Merkel -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Having spent billions of euros they didn’t have, governments across Europe are now finding out the hard way that without money they have to accept things that they would rather not be doing—namely, taking orders from Angela Merkel in Berlin and Mario Draghi in Frankfurt. Late on Thursday, in Dublin, a scandal rocked Enda Kenny’s government when reporters got hold of the...

Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man   In Greece and Italy two unelected prime ministers, with banking backgrounds similar to members of our own government, have sworn to rescue their countries for the Euro Liberty, Fraternity and Currency!And they will save their countries by bringing to bear the expertise of every “non elected pipe smoking and tweed wearing university don,” in the Daily Mail’s derisive phrase, to tackle the problem of the Great European...

"There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner," says hedge fund legend Mark Mobius, "because we haven't solved any of the things that caused the previous crisis." We're raising our alert status for the next financial crisis. We already raised it last week after spreads on U.S. credit default swaps started blowing out. We raised it again after seeing the remarks of Mr. Mobius...he pointed to derivatives, the financial hairball of futures, options, and swaps in which nearly all the world's major banks are tangled up. Estimates on the amount of derivatives out there worldwide vary....

United Future World Currency Program THE WORLD IN A COIN Our Aim The world in a coin. This is our vision, our hope. It is a necessity and a challenge. What seems an impossible dream becomes an inevitable historic, economic and social process. It is an event which is intertwined with the fate of human evolution. A single currency becomes the premise for an increasingly global planet. A virtual currency capable of speaking a single, comprehensible language to foster humankind's innate desire to go farther, to surpass boundaries, and move towards true principles of peace, freedom, brotherhood and understanding beyond...

Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man   In Greece and Italy two unelected prime ministers, with banking backgrounds similar to members of our own government, have sworn to rescue their countries for the Euro Liberty, Fraternity and Currency!And they will save their countries by bringing to bear the expertise of every “non elected pipe smoking and tweed wearing university don,” in the Daily Mail’s derisive phrase, to tackle the problem of the Great European...

A senior Foreign Office diplomat has been arrested for inciting racial hatred after an angry tirade at his gym. News reports today said that Rowan Laxton, 47, allegedly shouted "f***ing Israelis, f***ing Jews" while watching television reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza last month. He is also alleged to have said that Israeli soldiers should be "wiped off the face of the Earth" during the rant at the London Business School gym near Regents Park. The Daily Mail said that the tirade continued even after other gym users asked him to stop. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office declined to...

At his massive annual press conference on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed his earlier statements that if Kosovo were to be granted independence, he would support applying the same principle to separatist states in Georgia. Under the argument that "principles have to be universal" the president said independence for Kosovo could justly be used as a model for Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He had first commented on the "universality" of the Kosovo model a day before at a Russian governmental meeting and instructed his foreign minister to pursue this policy. On Tuesday, he made his point even clearer by...

LONDON -- Wednesday – Ministers of Foreign Affairs and members of the Contact Group, agreed that a solution for Kosovo should be reached through negotiations, after their meeting in London yesterday. The Contact Group members advised Belgrade and Pristina to co-operate with UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari in the search for a solution. Among the problems that plague Kosovo today, the Contact Group listed freedom of movement, links between local communities in Serbia and in Kosovo, the issue of missing persons and protection for religious communities and sites. The Minister’s agreed that decentralisation was of key importance for the future...

When the UK Presidency suggested to the EU that telecoms service providers and ISPs should be forced to retain information about the telephone calls you make and the sites you visit, they stated that it was an essential “balance” struck between liberty and security: a grave compromise necessitated by the threat of terrorism and serious crime. We don’t remember them mentioning “and might help the recording industry fish for file-sharing networks, DRM workarounds, and spurious patent infringers”. The newly-formed Creative and Media Business Alliance (CMBA), made up of companies such as Sony BMG, Disney, EMI, IFPI, MPA and Universal Music...

It is no longer cool, alas, to write articles bashing Brussels. My Nasty days are over. New Toryism is with us, in which scepticism is balanced by a strenuous moderation, a painful, tight-grinned reasonableness. Some of my most joyous hours have been spent in a state of semi-incoherence, composing foam-flecked hymns of hate to the latest Euro-infamy: the ban on the prawn cocktail flavour crisp; the billions spent to export unsmokable Greek tobacco to the Third World; the European Commission's plot to scrap our double-decker buses; the tense international row over the dimensions of the Euro-condom; the vicious and unprincipled...

KRAKOW, Poland - (KRT) - On a whim, Marta Satala, 21, walked in for an interview with a recruitment agency that was advertising jobs abroad. "I didn't even have my documents with me," said Satala, who does volunteer work at a local orphanage. Three days later, the agency offered her a one-year contract to work at a nursing home in Gloucester, England. Like many others facing bleak employment prospects in Poland, she took it. Since last May, when the European Union expanded to include Poland and nine other counties, mainly from the former communist bloc, cities like Krakow and Warsaw...

FRANKFURT — German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has reiterated his call for eurozone members' net contributions to the EU to be excluded from the calculation of their public finances under the terms of the European Stability and Growth Pact. Excluding Germany's net EU contribution from the equation would trim its debt ratio by "around half a percentage point", Schroeder said in an interview to be published in the weekly magazine Stern today, but released in advance. The German public deficit is currently far in excess of the EU's limit of 3.0% of gross domestic product (GDP) and German politicians have been...

"'There's a huge interest in it this year. You'd think it was a British election,' said Martin Fletcher, foreign editor of the Times of London, a newspaper that has been reporting extensively on the U.S. election. 'I cannot remember an issue that has ever aroused such intense interest. Everyone in Britain has an opinion about it. It's a talking point wherever you go'"..."The chatter is in different languages, but in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, one hears the same thing over and over: President Bush must go.

The war in Iraq has left neither Iraq nor the world a safer place, the Vatican said on Wednesday, disputing a key claim of President George W. Bush a little over a month before the Nov. 2 U.S. election. "Everyone can see that it did not lead to a safer world, either inside or outside Iraq," Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, secretary for the Holy See's Relations with States, told the U.N. General Assembly. "The Holy See believes it is now imperative to support the present government in its efforts to bring the country to normality and to a political system that...