Free Republic

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has invited Italian populist leader Matteo Salvini to Berlin in order to discuss Europe’s border crisis. The pair has already spoken on the phone and are in “full harmony” on migration and security policies, according to a statement from the Italian Interior Ministry. Mr Seehofer is the leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU) party of Bavaria, which has pushed for a cap on asylum seeker numbers and disagrees with ruling coalition partner Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on the issue. Mr Salvini serves as Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister...

Spain offered on Monday to take in a humanitarian ship stranded in international waters with 629 migrants aboard, prompting Italy’s new anti-establishment government to claim victory in its bid to get European partners to help more on immigration.

Following a major Spanish city’s vote to boycott Israel, the leader of Spain’s third-largest party called the Jewish state a “criminal country” during an interview aired by public television broadcaster. Pablo Iglesias Turrión, leader of the Podemos far-left party, said this in an interview earlier this week on RTVE. “We need to act more firmly on an illegal country like Israel,” said Iglesias Turrión, whose party in 2015 won 20 percent of the votes in the general election just one year after its creation. Last week, a motion promoted by a local fraction of Podemos on the city council of...

Credit: Mathieu Duval ========================================================================= First direct dating of an early human tooth confirms the antiquity of Homo antecessor, western Europe's oldest known human fossil species. A previous find from the unit TD6 of Atapuerca Gran Dolina archaeological site in northern Spain has yielded more information about our early human lineage. An international team of researchers from Australia, China, France and Spain has conducted the first direct dating study of a fossil tooth belonging to Homo antecessor (H. antecessor), the earliest known hominin species identified in Europe. The study shows that H. antecessor probably lived somewhere between 772 000 and 949...

... In Berlin, Macron’s proposals were met with a combination of skepticism and fear, especially among Merkel’s conservative base. Though no country has benefited more than Germany from the currency union, many Germans remain convinced that much of the rest of Europe — particularly the Mediterranean states — is trying to pick its pockets. The Greek bailouts, which cost Germany little in the grander scheme of things, only hardened that impression. In fact, for much of the German establishment, Macron’s ideas are nothing less than an open invitation to raid Berlin’s treasury.

A precious tool in my hand is the one I am able to wield to build and construct My Temple in each and every child I have given life to. So be the trowel of My hand laying the mortar of Unity my children for I AM building My Temple in others as I have built My temple in you . . . 1 Peter 2:1-10 2 Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. 2 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in...

MORE than 270 earthquakes have been recorded in just ten days near Spain’s Canary Islands raising fears of a volcanic eruption. The quakes have struck near Tenerife and Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands where there is a huge submarine fault between the two islands. Spain’s National Geographic Institute said the biggest recent quake reached a magnitude of 3.2 on the Richter scale at only about 35km from Puerto La Luz in Gran Canaria. A report said the fault line has not been active in recent times, but it added, “What if it started spewing magma again? And what if...

Some 2,000 Turkish Jews have applied for Portuguese citizenship after Portugal’s government decided to grant nationality through naturalization to the descendants of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Portugal and Spain in the 15th century, Portuguese Ambassador to Ankara Paula Leal da Silva has said.The ambassador said she believes some 17,000 Sephardic Jews currently live in Turkey. Some of the applicants among the 2,000 have received the citizenship since the law was adopted two years ago, while some others’ acceptance process is still ongoing, da Silva told the Hürriyet Daily News in an interview. “The story is very simple, but...

“We regard its age as quite likely between 865,000 and 810,000 years ago,” said Michael Walker of Spain’s Murcia University, a lead researcher on Cueva Negra. “[Arguably] Until now hand-axes in Europe have not been recorded from before 500,000 years ago,” said Walker. Moreover, he adds, “the evidence of combustion [use of fire] is also the oldest anywhere outside Africa.” The new dating results were acquired through biochronological analysis of small-mammal teeth remains found within the Cueva Negra rockshelter, indicating they accumulated during what is technically called the Matuyama magnetochron, or between 0.99 and 0.78 Ma. Researchers do not yet know...

The clean energy transition and other initiatives to decarbonise Europe’s economy will represent 25% of EU spending under a seven-year EU budget plan put forward by the European Commission on Wednesday (2 May). Another key aspect is whether the EU will commit to stop funding fossil fuel projects like gas pipelines, which environmentalists claim risk locking Europe into unnecessary infrastructure. “I’m not sure it’s reached the upper layers of the Commission yet,” Gaventa said. Other parts of the budget could prove controversial, like a proposal to allocate 20% of revenue from carbon trading to the EU budget, as well as...

The men, dubbed the Wolf Pack, were found guilty of a lesser charge -- sexual abuse -- which protesters considered too lenient. They are accused of gang raping an 18-year-old woman in 2016 at a bull-running festival. The sentencing also requires the men, who have been in custody since 2016, to pay the woman a total of $61,000 in compensation. One of the men, a police officer for the Spanish Civil Guard, was fined an extra $1,000 for stealing the woman's phone. According to a police report, the gang surrounded the woman in a small alcove, took off her clothes...

Barcelona-based YouTuber faces up to two years in prison over a video in which he fed Oreos filled with toothpaste to a homeless man and joked that it would help him with a long-overdue clean. Kanghua Ren - known as ReSet to his more than a million subscribers - filmed himself filling the biscuits with toothpaste and replacing them in their packaging before feeding five of them to the homeless man in January last year. As the 52-year-old man - named by authorities as Gheorge L. - ate the cookies, ReSet jibed: “Maybe I’ve gone a bit far, but look...

Few figures of the 20th Century have been as relentlessly maligned as Francisco Franco Bahamonde, who ruled as Spain’s Caudillo (supreme leader) from 1939 until his death in 1975. Franco’s death was celebrated with vulgar, vindictive glee in the obituary columns of Establishment publications that had treated the passing of Communist mass murderers with respectful solemnity.

You my children are my lightning bolts of boldness, and thunder of my presence as you declare my word for truly I watch over my word to perform it in the glory and majesty of who I AM. Therefore press forward for I have Already conquered the enemy for you by the The Cross. Dissolve the lies of the enemy with my word and declare grace to the mountains for my life is alive in you. • ACTS 17:28 For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your owr.cn poets have said, 'We are...

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain and Saudi Arabia have signed a framework agreement to sell the Gulf Arab state warships under a deal estimated to be worth around 1.8 billion euros ($2.2 billion). Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and Spain’s defence minister signed an “executive summary to facilitate the necessary procedures” for the Saudi Defence Ministry to sign a contract with Spanish state-owned shipbuilder Navantia for the supply of warships, a Saudi government statement said late on Thursday. It said another agreement was signed between state-owned Saudi Arabian Military Industries Company and Navantia, but did not provide further details. A Spanish Defence...

If Mark and Sheryl only speak up when caught and claim they did not inhale then who is really in charge

Archaeological excavations at the Aranbaltza site in the Basque Country coast (Northern Spain) have revealed several episodes of neandertal occupations with preserved wooden remains... In 2015, the excavation revealed two very well preserved wooden tools, one of which is a 15 cm-long digging stick... The detailed analysis of this tool and the luminescence dating of the sediment that bears the wooden remains indicate that the objects were deposited around 90,000 years ago, and thus were made by neandertals. The Micro-CT analysis and a close examination of the surface have shown that a yew trunk was cut longitudinally into two halves....

Last Wednesday, European Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans hosted a roundtable with imams from Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, and The Netherlands. He had a message for them that they doubtlessy welcomed: “The Commission is strongly committed to promoting diversity in Europe. Islam is part of our history, Islam is part of our present and Islam will be part of our future.” There is no doubt that Timmermans’ statement is true, but not quite in the way he meant. Timmermans did hint that he was aware Europe might not travel a smooth and placid path to the glorious multicultural future:...

Scientists say a patch of ancient seagrass in the Mediterranean is up to 200,000 years and could be the oldest known living thing on Earth. Australian researchers, who genetically sampled the seagrass covering 40 sites from Spain to Cyprus, say it is one of the world's most resilient organisms - but it has now begun to decline due to global warming. The analysis, published in the journal PLos ONE, found the seagrass was between 12,000 and 200,000 years old and was most likely to be at least 100,000 years old. This is far older than the current known oldest species,...

A team of scientists say that sprawling seagrass in the shallows of the Mediterranean may be the oldest living organisms on Earth, far older than humanity itself. Working off of DNA samples, a team of scientists say clumps of seagrass between Spain and Cyprus could be as old as hundred of thousands of years old. The study comes as scientists have sought to increase studies concerning how various organisms will face the changes from global warming. The team of scientists studying the seagrass say that the organism is facing threats from higher than normal sea temperatures and pollutants introduced by...