Free Republic

When you have a President of the United States who has a close friend named Vince McMahon, you can expect a good fight show....... A top North Korean official carrying a note from that country's ruler Kim Jong-un has arrived in Washington for a meeting with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo..... Twenty were killed and dozens injured in a car bomb attack in Colombia's capital Bogota Thursday........ Act 50 of the European UnUUnion treaty invoked for Brexit explicitly states that if there is no deal to withdrawal a member nation can leave without one..... "Back to Paris" is the...

"A catastrophic failure of leadership @Theresa May. If she has any sense of honor she will resign" That is the tweet of "Mr. Brexit" Nigel Farage in face of Prime Minister Theresa May's huge defeat in the House of Commons..... Al-Shabab Islamic terrorists based in Somalia say they are behind the attack on a luxury hotel complex in Nairobi, Kenya that killed at least 24 people including one US citizen.... In the African nation of Zimbabwe opposition Pastor Evan Mwarire is under arrest following three days of protest against rising fuel prices..... The Russian Interfax News Agency quotes its sources...

BRUSSELS are likely to buckle to Britain’s key Brexit demands, due to uproar among EU countries over fears of an economic decline in the case of a no deal departure. The EU27 will give in to Prime Minister Theresa May’s demands to make the Irish border backstop a legally temporary measure. The key British demand is the only obstacle holding up Mrs May’s deal from passing in Parliament. The DUP and dozens of Brexiteers have vowed to vote down the deal this month unless changes are made to the backstop.

I’ve told this one before. Back in 2005, Mona Sahlin, who from 2002 to 2004 had served as Sweden’s minister of integration, told an audience at a Swedish mosque that many native Swedes envied them, because, she said, immigrants have real cultures and histories while Swedes have only “silliness” such as the commemoration of Midsummer Night. Later that year, at a debate on integration policy, the Norwegian activist Hege Storhaug asked Lise Bergh, who had succeeded to the post of Swedish minister of integration, whether Swedish culture was worth preserving. Blithely, Bergh replied: “Well, what is Swedish culture? And...

Good Morning. The third attempt to form a new Swedish government since last September's General Election is underway this week..... The British Prime Minister Theresa May making her final pitch for her controversial Brexit plan considered a sellout to the European Union by those who campaigned for a total separation from the EU when Brexit was approved in the June 2016 referendum..... The leading political party in the polls in France right now, the National Rally led by Marine Le Pen, held a national convention over the weekend to roll out its list of candidates for the European Parliament elections...

Swedish journalist Joakim Lamotte has spent time lecturing in schools across Sweden and claims that violence is on the rise because many teachers have simply given up on attempting to deal with the problem. “Threats, beatings, and stabbings now occur every day in Swedish schools and it increases dramatically. At the same time, teachers are getting less power while authorities and politicians are completely paralysed,” he noted. In a recent article on school violence, SVT revealed that within the last five years Sweden had seen 224 incidents involving various kinds of weapons including knives. In the last year alone, there...

The U.S. economy may be in the middle of one of the longest recoveries ever, but Alan Greenspan tells Barron’s that the economy doesn’t look so great—and could well get worse. The challenges that Greenspan sees are familiar ones, such as the ballooning deficit and the rising costs of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. But the former Federal Reserve chairman says there’s an urgency in tackling these problems as inflation looms, populism spreads, and China’s economic might increases. Greenspan, now 92, presided over a period of economic prosperity from 1987 to 2006 that earned him rock-star-like devotion by...

Last year brought twin milestones for the Royal Thai Air Force’s fleet of Saab Gripen C/Ds, with the service having marked a decade since ordering the Swedish-built fighter, and completed its first 10,000 flying hours with the single-engined type. In late November, FlightGlobal was among a select group of media invited to make a first-of-its-kind visit to Thailand’s Surat Thani air base since the nation introduced its latest combat additions over seven years earlier. Located a flying distance of approximately 530km (980nm) south of Bangkok, the city of Surat Thani is usually a stopping point on the tourist trail heading...

The patient has been isolated at Uppsala hospital being suspected of carrying the Ebola virus, Swedish media outlet SVT Nyheter reports. The Enkoping hospital has been promptly closed for fear of staff potentially being exposed. As Voice of Europe reported last week, there is concern about inadequate preparedness for when a new epidemic erupts. The national health authorities in Sweden have chosen to keep a low profile on discussions on the virus to avoid causing concern among citizens, having not coordinated government initiatives leaving it to county councils whether they increase their preparedness. The deadly Ebola virus is transmitted to...

A person in Sweden is being treated for suspected Ebola contamination at Uppsala University Hospital, the regional authority said on Friday. The patient, who is currently in isolation, was first admitted at a hospital in Enköping -- about 50 miles (80km) from Stockholm -- before being transferred to Uppsala. It is not clear if the individual traveled to an area where Ebola is being transmitted prior to developing symptoms. Authorities said the emergency room at Enköping has since closed and staff who were in contact with the patient are being looked after. Test results are expected to come back tonight,...

Ebola hits EUROPE as patient enters hospital(Sweden) vomiting blood, although other diseases have not yet been ruled out. There have been 298 dead in the Democratic Republic of Congo from Ebola, although malaria continues to be a health issue there as well. Ebola is feared to have hit Europe after an isolation unit was set up in Sweden following a patient vomiting blood. The patient entered into hospital at Enkoping before being transferred to Uppsala, to their infection clinic.

For years, I've heard American leftists say Sweden is proof that socialism works, that it doesn't have to turn out as badly as the Soviet Union or Cuba or Venezuela did.But that's not what Swedish historian Johan Norberg says in a new documentary and Stossel TV video."Sweden is not socialist -- because the government doesn't own the means of production. To see that, you have to go to Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea," says Norberg."We did have a period in the 1970s and 1980s when we had something that resembled socialism: a big government that taxed and spent heavily....

On 1 January, a so-called “extended judicial protection of transgender persons” is introduced, which means that the grounds of “transgender identity or expression” is added to the crime of hate speech, Fria Tider reports. At the end of last year, the Swedish Government submit a bill to Parliament with proposals to “strengthen the protection of transgender persons in criminal law”. “The legislative changes proposed by the government mean that transgender persons will be fully protected by hate crime legislation. Today, the regulations include, for example, skin colour, creed and sexual orientation”, the government wrote back then. The bill proposes that...

On its face, Trump’s announcement that he is pulling US forces out of Syria seems like an unfriendly act toward Israel. But it isn’t. On its face, President Donald Trump’s announcement that he is pulling US forces out of Syria seems like an unfriendly act towards Israel. But it isn’t. Trump’s decision to pull US forces out of Syria is of a piece with outgoing US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley’s address on Tuesday to the UN Security Council regarding the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Both statements reflect the depths of the administration’s friendship and support for the State...

The African who raped a Swedish child says he was looking for someone to rape that day, and he didn’t care if it was a child, news outlet Fria Tider reports. The 30-year-old Libyan who was charged with a brutal rape of a 9-year-old girl in Malmö earlier this year was sentenced by the District Court for aggravated rape of a child on Friday. The penalty will be six years imprisonment and expulsion, but not for life – after 15 years, the pedophile rapist is welcome back. This is what the prosecutor wrote in the document instituting proceedings: “He lured...

Four Swedish citizens, one a Tunisian with Swedish residence, sentenced for preparing a terrorist act in 2010, will be released Saturday. They planned to “kill as many as possible” in a planned bloodbath against the headquarters of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten over Muhammad cartoons. The convicts have only served two-thirds of their punishment, common for the Scandinavian penitentiary system. Since their sentencing they’ve been moved to different institutions throughout Sweden. The Swedish Prison and Probation Service report that all of the terrorists had been reported for threats of violence to staff and other prisoners during their prison sentence, with one...

I don’t go to those places without security,” a Swedish journalist tells me when I ask whether she would accompany me to some of her country’s “especially vulnerable” areas. The label is given by police to neighborhoods where crime is rampant and parallel social structures compete for authority with the state. To the politically incorrect, these are also known as “immigrant ghettos.” While much attention was focused on Germany during the 2015 refugee crisis, in which more than a million migrants from the Middle East and Africa entered the continent at the behest of Angela Merkel, the country that admitted...

The state broadcaster SVT’s coverage of the double murder of 24-year-old Louisa Vesterager Jespersen and 28-year-old Maren Ueland by Islamists in Morocco has sparked a fury of criticism. Besides running an article that the savage murder of the two Scandinavian girls “had nothing to do with Islam”, they also pushed the narrative that sharing the graphic video of the murder is illegal, warning Swedes not to share the video as that is punishable with up to four years imprisonment. Scores of viewers complained that SVT was more concerned by people sharing the video of the killing, than they were with...

Back in our early days in the U.S., my parents made a few things clear.  First, and most important, you learn English.  Two, you stay out of trouble, because we don't want to give Cubans a bad name.  Third, we learn about U.S. history, because we want to be respectful to this nation. My parents understood that integration or assimilation is essential to a successful life in a new country.  They understood it because they were the children and grandchildren of Spanish immigrants who flooded Cuba in the first half of the 20th century.  In other words, they all kept Spanish traditions, specially Christmas...

Theologist Ann Heberlein warns in Swedish newspaper Nyheter Idag for the dangers of Islamism. “Evil,” wrote Hannah Arendt in “Responsibility and Judgement”, are things that make us think “this should not have happened”. In the midst of Christmas preparations, evil is making itself known – first an act of terror at a Christmas market in Strasbourg. A man shoots irrationally straight into a group of people who drink Glühwein and buy Christmas gifts. Five people die and ten are injured. This should not have happened. Barely a week after the massacre in Strasbourg, two young women, Norwegian Maren, 28, and...