Free Republic

2018 was the year that the United Nations made it first attempt at the global governance of migration — a move rejected by patriotic countries like the United States, Hungary, Israel, and Australia. On December 19th, 152 countries at the UN General Assembly in New York City voted in favour of adopting the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration. A dozen countries abstained, including Australia and Italy, and five countries voted against it, three in the European Union — the United States, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Israel.The UN began drafting the document in response to Europe’s migrant...

Europe's far-right community is boycotting Toblerone chocolate after learning that the sweet is now halal. The certification that enables practicing Muslims to eat the well-known triangular chocolate actually came in April, but a social media post by a spokesman for the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known as AfD, brought it to the forefront last week. Then came the hashtag #BoycottToblerone, which has since spread to other countries, including England, France and the Netherlands... Deerfield, Illinois-based Mondelēz International, which owns Toblerone, told CNN that the production process for the chocolate made in a factory in Bern, Switzerland, didn't need to...

Controversial Muslim lobby group MEND, which has been accused of promoting extremism, has “exerted decisive intellectual influence” in Britain’s first Islamophobia report, according to a think tank research note. Sir John Jenkins, the former British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, made the conclusions in a research paper for Policy Exchange after analysing the All-Party Parliamentary Group’s (APPG) report Islamophobia Defined: The Inquiry into a Working Definition of Islamophobia, which calls for the Government to establish a working definition of Islamophobia as “rooted in racism” and “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” Sir John found that...

HAMBURG — Fake news wasn’t invented by the Russians. The New York Times had Jayson Blair, who faked dozens of articles and interviews over the years. U.S.A. Today had Jack Kelley, who made up sensational stories about events he had not witnessed and places he had not seen. In both cases, the editors were forced to resign. Now, it’s Der Spiegel’s turn. The fabled German news magazine’s award-winning reporter Claas Relotius, 33, a legend in his time, replaced facts with fantasy. He quoted people he had not interviewed. He described streets and buildings he had seen on Google Earth only....

US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell on Friday demanded an independent investigation into a German journalist who was caught making up key details in a series of reports for Der Spiegel news magazine. He said the revelations “are troubling to the US Embassy, particularly because several of these fake stories focused on US policies and certain segments of the American people.” He said he wrote to the editors of the respected news weekly calling for an “independent and transparent investigation.” He said it was clear the US had been the victim of institutional bias at the magazine, saying the outlet...

Why Angela Merkel is like the former Soviet leader There was a time when Angela Merkel, like many young East Germans, would don a special shirt (blue rather than brown; different dictatorship) and parade for the Party, sometimes (not everything had changed) by torchlight. On occasion, she and her Free German Youth comrades would have marched behind banners carrying the portrait of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader whose extended (1964–82) rule has more than longevity in common with her own. No, no, Merkel is not a Communist. Nor does she order the invasion of other countries; she merely bullies them....

The European Union announced on Thursday it would commit a further €20 million ($23 million) to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in 2019, i24news reports. This will bring the EU’s contribution to €153 million, which is in line with how much the US contributed to the UN agency for “Palestinian refugees” in 2017. The United States, the largest single contributor to UNRWA, announced in August that it would end its $350 million a year funding for the agency, describing the organization as an “irredeemably flawed operation”. That announcement followed a previous US announcement in January that it...

Knowing that Relotius' purpose was likely to focus on a few of our many conservative voters, I still had an ounce of faith in journalism. Maybe, just maybe, since he was a professional, award winning, international journalist and was spending not one day here but several weeks, he would craft an interesting, nuanced story about how we all somehow manage to coexist with each other in Trump's America without burning each other's houses down. But I also had a distinct gut feeling that his portrayal of this town could go very, very wrong. What happened is beyond what I could...

European Commissioners and other eurocrats are receiving substantial pay rises for Christmas, while the unelected executive’s controversial president Jean-Claude Juncker has been pictured having to be “supported by two employees” at a festive dinner in Vienna. ***** Top grade bureaucrats’ pay increases are being applied retroactively from July 2018, taking Juncker, as President of the European Commission, and fellow mandarin Donald Tusk, as President of the European Council, to salaries of around €32,700 a month.

The German news magazine Der Spiegel has been plunged into chaos after revealing that one of its top reporters had falsified stories over several years. The media world was stunned by the revelations that the award-winning journalist Claas Relotius had, according to the weekly, “made up stories and invented protagonists” in at least 14 out of 60 articles that appeared in its print and online editions, warning that other outlets could also be affected. Relotius, 33, resigned after admitting to the scam. He had written for the magazine for seven years and won numerous awards for his investigative journalism, including...

Eight European Union member states on Tuesday warned that US President Donald Trump’s so-called “Deal of the Century” would fail unless it is based on the internationally agreed parameters for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict. The statement by France, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany and Italy followed a UN Security Council meeting on the Middle East in which US Ambassador Nikki Haley discussed the peace plan being prepared by the Trump administration. “We, the European Union members of the Council, would like to reiterate once more and emphasize the EU’s strong continued commitment to...

The terrorist attack on a French Christmas market should serve as a wakeup call to America. The stakes are too high for Congress to keep playing political games with border security. We need to build the wall. Americans awoke Wednesday to yet another awful reminder that we still live in a world beset with radical Islamic terrorism. In the night, the crack of gunfire and the all-too-familiar cry of “Allahu Akbar” rang out in a French Christmas market. At least four people who came out to enjoy Strasbourg’s famous Advent traditions are dead. As President Trump so astutely noted in...

BRUSSELS (AFP-Jiji) — The European Union’s foreign policy chief on Saturday asked Turkey to forgo any unilateral military action in Syria, where Ankara has threatened a fresh offensive against a U.S.-backed Kurdish militia. “The statements of a possible Turkish military operation in northeast Syria are a source of concern,” Federica Mogherini said in a statement. “We share the goal of ending violence, defeating terrorism and promoting stability in Syria and the wider region. We expect the Turkish authorities therefore to refrain from any unilateral action likely to undermine the efforts of the Counter-Daesh Coalition or to risk further instability in...

<p>French police have pushed protesters off the Champs-Elysees in Paris with tear gas and water cannon, and re-opened the French capital’s famed avenue to traffic.</p> <p>Police were telling protesters to remove their yellow vests, symbols of a nationwide protest movement that began in November against economic injustice and France’s high cost of living.</p>

The 30,000 alarmists gathered in Katowice, Poland expected to slam-dunk their report proclaiming a planet-threatening climate crisis, finalize rules for implementing the Paris accords, redistribute infinite billions of dollars from industrialized nations to “climate victim” countries, and solidify their control over people’s energy, jobs, living standards and liberties. It didn’t work out quite that way.They got blindsided by millions of French citizens angrily denouncing their government’s plans to carbon-tax them into worse poverty and joblessness. They were furious that the US exhibit profiled the benefits of fossil fuels – and outraged that the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait...

Nearly 200 nations have agreed rules on implementing the 2015 Paris agreement. After marathon talks in Katowice, Poland, the rulebook was approved unanimously on Saturday evening. The agreement aims to deliver the Paris goals of limiting global temperature rises to well below 2C. The final session was delayed by more than 30 hours amid an ongoing stand-off over carbon markets to reduce emissions. Some accused the hosts of not shepherding the agreement through.

Ten generals signed the open letter written by General Antoine Martinez. The signatories include top level figures, such as an admiral, a colonel, as well as the former French Minister of Defense Charles Millon. They are from the network of the Volontaires pour la France (VPF) The generals warned Macron that the deal will mean less sovereignty for France, providing yet another reason for “an already battered people” to “revolt”. They accuse Macron of being “guilty of a denial of democracy or treason against the nation” for signing the Compact without allowing a public debate on the issue, or consulting...

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a 56-year-old career politician committed to the status quo, has been chosen to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel as leader of Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Kramp-Karrenbauer — often referred to as "Mini-Merkel" or "Merkel 2.0" because many view her as Merkel's clone — won by just 35 votes (517 to 482) in a second-round run-off against her main opponent, a conservative named Friedrich Merz, at a CDU conference in Hamburg on December 7. Kramp-Karrenbauer's extremely narrow victory (51.7% to 48.2%) revealed a party split down the middle. Merz had pledged to pull the CDU back to its conservative...

U.S. Defense contractors are looking at a potentially sharp downturn in arms sales to key Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for decades their best foreign customers, because of the Obama administration's effort to forge a new relationship with Iran and to punish the Egyptian military for usurping their country's first Islamist president. The Saudis are reported to be seeking to buy five German Type-209 submarines, similar to those acquired by Israel and capable of launching nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, for $3.4 billion, with a long-term program of up to 25 boats in a $16.03 billion deal. Germany's Bild newspaper,...

The Women-Hunt in Germany Muslim migrants openly follow, film and sexually harass teenaged girls in shopping mall. March 3, 2016 Stephen Brown    "If a woman gets raped walking in public alone, then she, herself, is at fault. She is only seducing men by her presence. She should have stayed home like a Muslim woman." - Dr. Abd Al-Aziz Fawzan Al-Fawzan, Professor of Islamic Law, Saudi Arabia.   Many Germans welcomed with open arms the million, mostly male and Muslim, migrants Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel invited into Germany last September. At train stations, they handed out water bottles to...