Free Republic

There has been a complete dismissal by some that the dubious management of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp, created by Gov. Scott Walker has led to a new investigation. Characterized a " partisan witch hunt" by his defenders, the reality is that GOP legislators have serious concerns about how unsecured loans were made and never repaid. In addition, GOP prosecutors, as well as the bypartisan audit team, soundly refute that dismissal. GOP legislators removed Walker as Chairman of the WEDC earlier this week. Here is a link to an article outlining GOP concerns on one of those loans, which is...

Senseless head-butting needs to give way to sensible brain-storming Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has called on America to end its attempt to remove Syria’s President Assad from power in return for Russia’s co-operation to militarily confront Islamic State. Lavrov reportedly told Bloomberg on 2 June 2015 : “The U.S.’s “obsession” with [Syria’s President] Assad isn’t helping in the common fight against the threat from Islamic State… “People put the fate of one person whom they hate above the fight against terrorism. Islamic State can go “very far” unless stopped, and air strikes alone “are not going to do the...

While most Americans like the idea of drug testing for welfare recipients, they LOVE the idea of drug testing for members of Congress. According to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, 64 percent of Americans favor requiring welfare recipients to submit to random drug testing -- a measure pushed by Republican lawmakers in recent years -- while 18 percent oppose it. But an even stronger majority said they're in favor of random drug testing for members of Congress, by a 78 percent to 7 percent margin. Sixty-two percent said they "strongly" favor drug testing for congressional lawmakers, compared to only 51 percent...

Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.” St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even...

Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.” St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even...

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to punish the editor of a newspaper which published video footage it said showed the MIT state intelligence agency helping send weapons to Syria. The Cumhuriyet newspaper published footage on its website on Friday which it said showed gendarmerie and police officers opening crates of what it described as weapons and ammunition on the back of three trucks belonging to MIT. "The individual who has reported this as an exclusive story will pay a high price for this," Erdogan said in a television interview with state broadcaster TRT late on Sunday. "I will not...

Syrian insurgents rushed reinforcements into combat on Tuesday against rival Islamic State militants who have seized crucial territory near the northern city of Aleppo in recent days, building on the momentum the group has achieved in other battlefield successes in Syria and Iraq. Amid increased fears that Aleppo could be the next big prize to fall to the Islamic State in the latest twist to the four-year-old Syrian civil war, Syrian opposition leaders accused the government of essentially collaborating with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, by bombing other rival insurgent groups, even though the government and...

PF: In ‘Superpower’ you outline three possible courses for American foreign policy: 1) keeping faith with the old “Indispensable” America that underwrites global stability 2) adopting a “moneyball” approach where the US pursues its narrow economic and security interests, or 3) an “Independent” America where the US gives up trying to solve the world’s problems, but seeks instead to lead by example by investing in America’s security and prosperity at home. While you invite readers to choose for themselves, you personally plumped for the “Independent” strategy – why? IB: “I went for ‘Independent’ because America needs a strategy that doesn't...

Natural scientists agree that the climate is changing and that humans bear some of the blame. Social scientists are now attempting to assess the economic and political price societies are likely to pay for turning up our planet’s thermostat. The security policy community is especially eager for an answer. In the academy, the debate over climate change and its security implications gained momentum after researchers from Stanford, the University of California Berkeley, New York University, and Harvard observed that civil wars were more prevalent during years that experience hotter temperatures. The chief explanation for this relationship is that higher temperatures...

Hungarian Jewish leaders are criticizing a new Holocaust museum under construction in Budapest for omitting the culpability of Hungarians in the attempted genocide of the Jews. The museum in Budapest, called House of Fates, is nearly complete, but the planned exhibition focuses only on the last period of the Holocaust in Hungary, starting in 1944, when the ghettoization and deportation of over 500,000 Hungarian Jews was already complete. It fails to deal with the earlier persecution against Hungarian Jews, starting with the passage of anti-Jewish laws in the 1920s, local Jewish community leaders and historians complained. Community leaders said they...

More than a quarter of young people of sub-Saharan origin in France feel discriminated against at work, according to a study published on Friday. The Center for Employment Studies found 27 percent of 18- to 35-year-olds from this group felt they were treated unjustly at work. The figure was 18 percent for those of North African descent and 12 percent for those with a Turkish family background. Among women, the ‘native’ French population, namely those with no discernable migrant background, felt most discriminated against with 19 percent reporting unfair treatment. According to the study, women feel discriminated against on the...

Droits Humains launches petition calling for ‘human rights for everyone’, but critics say capitalised ‘Homme’ means mankind A group of French feminists are saying non to the declaration of the rights of man, which they say is sexist and an outdated example of the French exception culturelle. The Droits Humains collective is calling on France to stop leaving women out of the idea of universal liberties. The declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen was approved by the national assembly in 1789 at the time of the French revolution. The collective wants the French government to immediately...

The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals. The surveillance project was launched by a joint electronic eavesdropping unit called the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, which includes spies from each of the countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance — the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. The top-secret document, obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was published Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept. The document outlines a series of tactics that the NSA...

About 1,000 Israeli Ethiopian Jews have held a rally in Tel Aviv to protest against institutional racism in Israeli society. Monday night's march passed without incident under the watch of dozens of security officers, a police spokesman said. Demonstrators chanted slogans demanding "social justice" and "the arrest of racist police". Ethiopian Jews in Israel have staged several rallies against alleged police brutality and racism in recent weeks, and some gatherings have turned violent as they clashed with security forces. Earlier this month, a video of two police officers beating a black Israeli soldier sparked a massive protest by Ethiopian Jews,...

It took just a few days after the stunning defeat of Obama's attempt to fast-track the Trans Pacific Partnership bill in the Senate at the hands of his own Democratic party, before everything returned back to normal and the TPP fast-track was promptly passed. Why? The simple answer: money. Or rather, even more money. Because while the actual contents of the TPP may be highly confidential, and their public dissemination may lead to prison time for the "perpetrator" of such illegal transparency .... fast-tracking the TPP, meaning its passage through Congress without having its contents available for debate or amendments,...

THE facility spread out below him, row after row of neatly aligned white tin roofs, looking like candies set against the endless beige of the desert floor. It was called Camp Bucca. To coalition forces in Iraq, it was the primary detention facility for enemy prisoners of war. To Mitchell Gray, then 48 and serving his country for the third time, it was simply the place where the US Army had decided his skills, which included a law degree and a fluency in Arabic, were needed most. He and the rest of his unit, the 45th Infantry Brigade of the...

The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday released a much-delayed proposal for the amount of biofuel that must be blended into conventional vehicle fuel. The proposal, which would become final by the end of November, would set levels for last year at what producers actually made but increase the total volume of renewable fuel required by 1.5 billion gallons, roughly 9 percent, by the end of 2016. That would bring the volume to 17.4 billion gallons[.]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration's latest plan on ethanol, the corn-based renewable fuel, probably will not have a major effect on pump prices, but could have political reverberations in Iowa and other farm states in the 2016 presidential campaign. Under the proposed rule announced Friday, the amount of ethanol in the gasoline supply would increase in coming years, just not as much as set out under federal law. That approach drew criticism from ethanol and farm groups that have pushed to keep high volumes of ethanol in gasoline. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has called for a robust...

The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Yet this is precisely what NATO did in Libya, while blaming the damage on Gaddafi himself. Since then, the country's water infrastructure - and the suffering of its people - has only deteriorated further. Numerous reports comment on the water crisis that is escalating across Libya as consumption outpaces production. Some have noted the environmental context in regional water scarcity due to climate change. But what they ignore is the fact that the complex national irrigation system that had been carefully built...

Meet Gulmurod Khalimov, the US-trained and funded former commander of Tajikistan's special forces, who, as Reuters reports, has now gone to Syria to fight with ISIS. He has a message: "Listen, you American pigs, I’ve been three times to America, and I saw how you train fighters to kill Muslims...God willing, I will come with this weapon to your cities, your homes, and we will kill you." As Reuters reports: Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov commanded the Central Asian nation’s special-purpose police known as OMON, used against criminals and militants. He disappeared in late April, prompting a search by Tajik police. He...