Free Republic

Rare 3D Camera Found Containing Photos from WWI "One cold morning last year, we attended an estate in the Niagara Falls where we were fortunate enough to come across and purchase a rare World War I Richard Verascope stereo camera previously owned by the French Army. The camera is in pristine condition and included the original leather carrying case and glass slides. Each slide is a piece of history in photographic form and I get shivers every time I place a glass slide into the 3D stereo viewer. Only at A Nerd’s World 986 Bathurst street can you see the...

Obama’s war on the Christian religion, particularly the Catholic variety, has claimed another casualty in the Middle East. The Vatican confirmed that “Syrian priest François Murad was killed in Gassanieh, in northern Syria, in the convent of the Custody of the Holy Land where he had taken refuge.… According to local sources, the monastery where Fr. Murad was staying was attacked by militants linked to the jihadi group Jabhat al-Nusra.” A graphic video of unknown origin- linked below- shows a crowd of Islamic militants gathered in a circle around three men kneeling on the ground. Many of the onlookers were...

c. 1940s: Military donkey ride

"We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked," Secretary of State Dean Rusk famously said during the Cuban missile crisis. Barack Obama has been doing a lot of blinking lately. On Syria especially. "There would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movements on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons," he said back in August 2012. Chemical weapons were a "red line." Presumably the president hoped that his statement would deter Bashar Assad's embattled regime from using chemical weapons. And presumably he hoped that his demand in 2011 for Assad to relinquish...

Friends and allies of Baroness Thatcher expressed ‘surprise and disappointment’ last night as it emerged President Obama is not planning to send any serving member of his administration to her funeral. Whitehall sources have revealed that the U.S. delegation at tomorrow’s service in St Paul’s Cathedral will be led by two Reagan era secretaries of state: James Baker and George Shultz. Though President Obama himself had not been expected to attend, there had been speculation that he would be represented either by Vice President Joe Biden or wife Michelle. The Queen’s decision to attend

JERUSALEM – In a stunning setback, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-line bloc fared worse than expected in a parliamentary election Tuesday, exit polls showed, possibly forcing the incumbent Israeli leader to invite surprisingly strong moderate rivals into his government and soften his line toward the Palestinians. TV exit polls showed the hard-liners with about 61 seats in the 120-seat parliament, a bare majority, and the counts could change as actual votes are tallied. The unofficial TV results had Netanyahu winning only 31 seats, though he combined his Likud Party with the far-right Yisrael Beitenu for the voting. Running separately four...

A group of anti-Israel activists and journalists are engaged in a coordinated campaign to stifle criticism of controversial secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel by attacking the former Republican senator’s critics, according to emails obtained by the Free Beacon. Fenton communications chief executive officer David Fenton, the Atlantic’s national correspondent James Fallows, former diplomat Charles ‘Chas’ Freeman, Just Foreign Policy director Robert Naiman, and American Conservative founding editor Scott McConnell participated in a recent email exchange dedicated to silencing Hagel’s critics, the emails reveal. The emailers targeted recent comments made by Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration National Security Council...

<p>IT was the top-secret air base so covert even the locals were sworn to silence.</p> <p>The US Air Force base, outside Charleville in outback Queensland, was deserted after World War II and has sat forgotten in the desert for more than 60 years.</p> <p>Until now.</p>

Why US Air Corps servicemen were allowed to wear such badass bomber jackets in WWII In honor of Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, Lisa Hix of Collectors Weekly has put together a fascinating and sobering article that both commemorates and explains why members of the US Army Air Corp were allowed to customize their bomber jackets to such outlandish and extreme degrees. The Army, not known for its lax uniform standards, allowed their air-bound servicemen to decorate their jackets with pictures of scantily clad pin-up girls, favorite comic characters, lucky charms, and any other assortment of icons. The reason, says historian...

August, 2012. The Great Rediscovery is in the headlines: "Senate Candidate in Texas is Known as an Intellectual Force " -- The New York Times "Romney: Media trying to 'divert' from real issues with focus on foreign gaffes." "Romney praises Poland as model of economic liberty" To borrow from Bob Dylan: "The times, they are 'a changin'" There is no accident in all the headlines cited above, you know. America is in the midst of the next chapter in what Ronald Reagan called "the great rediscovery" of American values. And the Other Side knows it. Which is why the aroma...

Mitt Romney's recent triumphal tour of Britain, Israel, and Poland struck me as a much-needed and most welcome apology tour for Barack Obama's abject abandonment and humiliation of our most loyal and trusted allies. Finally, here is an apology tour that Americans can get behind. It was a triumph. The enemedia says otherwise, of course. Mitt Romney began the long overdue, overwhelming task of beginning to rebuild allied relationships with longtime friends who were abandoned and betrayed by a reckless, feckless, subversive president.

Robert Kelley has done a series of interesting posts on his own blog (cross-posted to Duck of Minerva) exploring options for U.S. retrenchment and offering a template for thinking about U.S. alliance commitments. Consider what follows a set of variations on the theme he began. Kelley asks: if U.S. leaders tried to pursue a policy of partial retrenchment, what alliances commitments might they choose to limit or terminate, and which allies would still be considered important? Framing the question this way acknowledges that there may be some reputational issues involved in downgrading a long-standing security partnership, even if its original...

Last week, President Barack Obama rejected the world's most powerful living symbol of anti-communism, anti-Sovietism, and victory in the Cold War. The White House declined to have Lech Walesa stand in for the late Jan Karski, who posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Our president spurned Walesa, first president of free Poland, who had once risked everything to courageously join Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in keeping Solidarity alive in Poland. Like Reagan and John Paul II, Walesa knew that Solidarity could be the wedge to split the Communist Bloc from top to bottom, as it indeed...

Just how phoney, disingenuous, condescending, insincere, and weasely IS Barack Obama? Watch this montage of the president speaking about foreign countries and see for yourself. Unbelievable.

From the Danish show Detektor, here's a telling showcase of President Obama's mannerisms when he's wheeling and dealing in the foreign-relations arena. This isn't to say that we don't have good relationships with each of these countries, but... the words "indiscriminate" and "disingenuous" do spring to mind (h/t Ace):

After 9/11, it became commonplace to ridicule the status of Saudi Arabia as an “ally.” For decades, American leaders cuddled up to the Saudi Royal Family as it spent billions of dollars to export radical Islam around the globe. Today, the U.S. is eager to have our “ally,” Qatar, take a leading role in the region while it does the exact same thing. Qatar is home to Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, the most influential Sunni theologian and top Muslim Brotherhood cleric. He uses his popular show on Al-Jazeera, also based in Qatar, to rally support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and...

With vote tallies in for Egypt’s first round of parliamentary elections in it is abundantly clear that Egypt is on the fast track to becoming a totalitarian Islamic state. The first round of voting took place in Egypt’s most liberal, cosmopolitan cities. And still the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists received more than 60 percent of the vote. Run-off elections for 52 seats will by all estimates increase their representation. And then in the months to come, Egyptian voters in the far more Islamist Nile Delta and Sinai will undoubtedly provide the forces of jihadist Islam with an even greater...

A source on the Rick Perry campaign tells Hot Air that the Texas governor conducted some Texas-size fundraising in the third quarter. Coming in just a little over halfway through, Perry raised $17.1 million. That number would put Perry somewhere between $4-6 million ahead of Mitt Romney’s rumored total for Q3, according to this report last week from the Boston Globe. It’s also likely to far outpace Herman Cain’s fundraising or that of the other Republicans currently in the race. The pace is even more impressive. Perry had 49 days in which to raise funds, rather than the full 92...

Rick Perry aligned himself with some of the most hawkish pro-Israel voices on the question of Israel and Palestine today, but offered a more moderate vision than some of his supporters'. And the Texas governor laid out a far more articulated and current stand on the issues of Israel and a Palestinian state in a short speech to largely Orthodox Jewish supporters of Israel in a ballroom at the W Hotel on New York's Union Square. Perry spoke surrounded by Jewish leaders, many of whom -- like Likud figure and settler tribune Danny Danon and National Council of Young Israel...

For many, photographs from the World War II have only been seen in grainy black and white. But now, new colour images have emerged that show the full horror of the destruction inflicted by Nazi bombings across London. The powerful images were released to mark the 70th anniversary of the launch of Winston Churchill's 'V for Victory' campaign on July 19, 1941.