Free Republic

As Russian forces advance on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, people all over the country are being urged by officials — and sometimes compelled by necessity — to fight back in whatever ways they can. The country’s former president is patrolling the city streets with a civilian defense force, armed with an AK-47. Civilians have been called to find their own weapons and make molotov cocktails — a type of crude, homemade explosive named, mockingly, after a former Soviet foreign minister. Roughly 18,000 weapons have already been distributed in the Kyiv region, according to the government. At the country’s borders, Ukrainian guards...

Officially, Sweden doesn't keep a record of the languages its inhabitants speak. That fact was infuriating to Mikael Parkvall, a linguist at Stockholm University, so he decided to find out for himself. What is the most popular non-Swedish language in Sweden? After poring over various statistics and studies, Parkvall came to a conclusion: Arabic was very likely to now be the second most popular language in the Scandinavian country. Parkvall's study focused on native languages rather than second languages, which he says are a better judge of what languages are actually spoken in a country (while English is widely spoken...

The real loser in Barack Obama’s worldview? David Cameron. By Adam Taylor March 11 at 11:54 AM After eight years of often-difficult foreign policy, does President Obama bear any grudges? A lengthy new article based on hours and hours of interviews with the president published by the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg offers a hard look at Obama's thoughts on America's allies and enemies. Some of those thoughts may seem strikingly unorthodox. For example, while Iran comes into the president's line of fire, Obama also complains bitterly about America's Sunni Arab allies, Saudi Arabia in particular. China, perhaps America's most serious competitor...

Leonardo DiCaprio is a world-famous and critically respected actor. And yet, rather infamously, he has never won an Academy Award. Now he may have his chance: A group of filmmakers from Russia's far east have hatched a plan to help the Hollywood star finally get his own Oscar. Unfortunately for Leo, the "Oscar" in question it is not an actual Academy Award. Instead, it will be a homemade effort created by the filmmakers themselves, dubbed the "Yakut Oscar" in honor of the region from which it originates (the organizers say they will eventually come up with a better name). The...

By Adam Taylor March 18, 2015 Follow @mradamtaylor (Statens historiska museum / Christer Ahlin) In the modern-era, Scandinavian countries have become known for their sometimes awkward embrace of migrants from the Arab and Muslim world. But the history behind that relationship goes back far further than you might expect.Consider the case of a ring discovered in a Viking grave in Birka, a historic trading center in what is now Sweden. The woman in the grave died in the 9th century and was discovered around a thousand years later by the famous Swedish archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe, who spent years excavating...

This week, Saudi Arabia announced that it was forming a new "Islamic military alliance" devoted to fighting global terrorism. The plan stemmed from the "keenness of the Muslim world to fight this disease, which affected the Islamic world first, before the international community as a whole," Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman told reporters during a rare news conference.In many ways, this alliance seems designed to calm Western critics who have frequently complained that the Muslim world isn't doing enough to combat terrorism and extremism. However, the details of the planned alliance are more than a little...

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, for a while it seemed like border fences and barriers were a thing of the past in Europe. Many on the continent hoped for a new era of integration and receptivity. It didn't happen. Instead, a variety of pressures have led Europe to adopt wall-building projects that would make Donald Trump proud. Right now, in Hungary, for example, the government is rushing to complete a 109-mile-long barbed wire border fence along its southern frontier with Serbia – a project made bitterly ironic by Hungary's 1989 decision to cut its border fence with Austria...

s David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, heads into a second term as British prime minister after a truly remarkable election, he keeps being compared to another world leader: Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu. To some ears, that's not an entirely positive comparison, and it's certainly not an obvious one. Cameron, just reelected leader of a European nation and uncontroversial U.S. ally with a majority in Parliament, thanks in part to Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system. It will be Cameron's second term and, thanks to term limits, almost certainly his last. Meanwhile, Netanyahu was elected to his fourth term as leader of...

On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama spoke on the phone. Given recent tensions over Ukraine and Crimea, dialogue seems like a good thing. However, were the two presidents really talking to each other? After reading the two official statements about the call, it sounds like they got some wires crossed or something.