Free Republic

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is urging consumers to boycott Burger King over reports that the fast food chain is eyeing a tax-cutting move to Canada. Brown, an outspoken corporate critic, said people hankering for a burger should head to Wendy’s or White Castle, two Ohio-based chains that aren’t looking to shrink their tax bill via a so-called “corporate inversion.” “Burger King’s decision to abandon the United States means consumers should turn to Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers or White Castle sliders,” he said in a statement. “Burger King has always said ‘Have it Your Way’; well my way is to support...

Comrades, there are wreckers in our midst. The industrialist reactionaries at Burger King have declared their intention to abandon the struggle and join the ranks of the enemy in rightist Canada. That’s right. The traitorous corporation Burger King plans to take advantage of the fact that America’s English-speaking neighbor to the north maintains the second-lowest corporate tax rate of any G-7 nation. How dare they? “The iconic American fast-food brand is in talks to buy coffee-and-donuts chain Tim Hortons and move its headquarters to Canada,” Forbes reported. If concluded, this deal would create the world’s third-largest restaurant company and allow...

After recently ending its arms embargo against Pakistan, Moscow seems set to go through with a deal to sell MI-35 attack helicopters to the South Asian nation, ostensibly to assist it in its war against Islamist militants. This sale has little precedent; Pakistan and India’s Cold War alliances, with the U.S. and Russia respectively, have largely endured to this day. After 9/11 especially, Pakistan was a major recipient of American aid and military equipment, while India maintained its strategic relationship with Russia by continuing to be its biggest weapons buyer.

The impetus underlying China’s manifold interests in the Middle East remains a topic of close scrutiny. The dramatic social and political changes that are taking root in the region portend a vastly different geopolitical cartography in contrast with previous arrangements. These circumstances yield important implications for the people of the Middle East and foreign powers, such as the United States with longstanding strategic interests in the region. Owing to its notable inroads into the Middle East in recent years, China also is watching regional events unfold with great interest. Due to its increasing demand for Middle Eastern oil and natural...

The Perfect Revival? By Julio Severo Brazil has experienced an explosive growth of Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal (neo-charismatic) churches. Large crowds of poor people have been attending these churches looking for answers for their physical, material and spiritual needs. The Brazilian Catholic Church, plagued by the Liberation Theology, has been worried about this growth. And even mainline Brazilian Protestant churches, similarly plagued by Protestant versions of the Liberation Theology, have been worried. International onlookers see such growth as a phenomenon or even evidence of “revival.” Yet, Brazilian Calvinist critics question that if it were genuine, Brazil would not have now...

The black box recovered from the wreckage of the plane crash that killed Brazilian presidential candidate Eduardo Campos did not record his flight, Brazilian Air Force (FAB) says. It said the audio recording FAB experts had analysed was not related to the flight that crashed on Wednesday. A spokesman said they were trying to determine what the recording was. Mr Campos and six others died when his private jet crashed in bad weather in the port city of Santos near Sao Paulo. Experts from the Centre of Investigation and Prevention of Aeronautical Accidents in the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, have been...

SANTOS, Brazil, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Brazilian presidential candidate Eduardo Campos was killed in a plane crash on Wednesday, throwing the October election into disarray and causing big swings in local financial markets. Campos' private jet crashed in bad weather as it prepared to land in the coastal city of Santos, just south of Sao Paulo, killing all seven people on board, the Sao Paulo state fire department said. Television images showed smoke billowing from the crash site in a residential area. Campos, 49, was in third place in recent polls with the support of about 10 percent of voters....

People for the American Way’s Leftist Diatribe Against a Brazilian Conservative By Julio Severo The American Way should be to expose and destroy tyrannies, especially socialism. But do not tell that to the People for the American Way (PFAW), which, according to WorldNetDaily, is “an atheist socialist organization which, through publications like its ‘Right Wing Watch,’ dedicates itself to the destruction of conservatives in general.” Former leftist U.S. Presidente Bill Clinton in People for the American Way The latest attack from “Right Wing Watch” was against me, Julio Severo, in a piece entitled “BarbWire Pundit Defends Brazil’s Past Violent...

American audiences recently got their first taste of a new - and contagious - Brazilian street dancing style that has evolved from music born in the slums of Rio de Janeiro decades ago. For the creators of Passinho, dancing at New York's famed Lincoln Center on July 24th went beyond performing on a world-renowned stage. It was a vindication that a dance style associated in Brazil with criminals and gang activity is now seen as an art form that just happened to start in the favelas, or slums. “Eleven passinho dancers came here to do something that when we started...

Paul Mawhinney, a former music-store owner in Pittsburgh, spent more than 40 years amassing a collection of some three million LPs and 45s, many of them bargain-bin rejects that had been thoroughly forgotten. The world’s indifference, he believed, made even the most neglected records precious: music that hadn’t been transferred to digital files would vanish forever unless someone bought his collection and preserved it. Mawhinney spent about two decades trying to find someone who agreed. He struck a deal for $28.5 million in the late 1990s with the Internet retailer CDNow, he says, but the sale of his collection fell...

A Brazilian billionaire preacher inaugurated a massive church building in Sao Paulo, Brazil last week, designed to be a $300 million replica of the original Temple of Solomon, as noted in the Bible's Old Testament. The temple, which takes over an entire city block, is an 11-story building twice the size of the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro, and is complete with stone from Israel and a helipad for its founder's, Edir Macedo, convenience. "This temple is not about a denominational project, but something so glorious and spiritual that transcends reason itself," said Macedo, according to...

Russia’s ban on many western food products presents a massive opportunity for meat and grain exports from Brazil and a smaller one for its Latin American neighbors. Around 90 new meat plants in Brazil were immediately approved to export beef, chicken and pork to Russia and the South American nation is already working to increase its exports of corn and soybeans sales to Russian buyers, Brazil’s secretary of agricultural policy, Seneri Paludo, said on Thursday. Brazil’s enthusiasm for Russia comes after President Vladimir Putin ordered retaliation for sanctions against Moscow over the Ukraine crisis. “Russia has huge potential as a...

Featured Term (selected at random:NOSSA SENHORA APARECIDA Shrine of Our Lady, patroness of Brazil, at the Basilica of Aparecida, near the city of São Paulo. The statue venerated here was drawn out of the water by a group of fishermen in 1717. At first housed in a small chapel, the image became the source of so many favors that eventually it was placed in the present church, declared a basilica in 1929. More than a half million pilgrims come to the shrine annually. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used...

U.S. Betrays Military Men Who Protected Brazil from Communist Threat By Julio Severo Henry Kissinger once said, “In this world it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but to be a friend is fatal.” Brazilian military officials, who made significant sacrifices to protect Brazil from the massive Soviet, Chinese and Cuban communist threat in the 1960s and 1970s, will know what Kissinger meant. According to the Brazilian paper O Globo, by a resolution of President Barack Obama, the U.S. government has created a task force to identify documents produced between 1964 and 1984 regarding...

A remarkable video shows a group of indigenous people seen for the first time by the outside world as they emerged from a Brazilian jungle while fleeing illegal loggers and drug traffickers, according a Brazilian group that tracks such jungle tribes. The group of men are believed to be natives of Peru but they were filmed in northern Brazil on the banks of the Envira River which runs near the Peruvian border. The encounter took place within the last two weeks, but the video was released Thursday by the Brazilian indigenous authority FUNAI. The tribal men are naked except for...

A remarkable video shows a group of indigenous people seen for the first time by the outside world as they emerged from a Brazilian jungle while fleeing illegal loggers and drug traffickers, according a Brazilian group that tracks such jungle tribes. The group of men are believed to be natives of Peru but they were filmed in northern Brazil on the banks of the Envira River which runs near the Peruvian border. The encounter took place within the last two weeks, but the video was released today by the Brazilian indigenous authority FUNAI. The tribal men are naked except for...

I shall rend the heavens soon in a new way for all the Earth is about to witness and taste of My glory as I (( ( Roar ) )) out salvation over the children of My creation and Now in this Valley of Decisions I shall rise up the mountains that choose Me and have chosen Me . So watch and see for The Latter Rain is about to flourish My Lilies of The Valley I AM about to dress in My Glory Isaiah 64:1-4 64 Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains...

The head of the independent U.N. commission on Syrian war crimes said Friday that commanders of the Islamic State extremist group are “good candidates" to be put on a confidential list of alleged perpetrators. Brazilian diplomat and scholar Paulo Sergio Pinheiro said the al-Qaida breakaway group, which now controls a swath of north and eastern Syria, has carried out public executions, crucifixions and other “gross human rights violations.” […] He said the list includes people who are “criminally responsible for hostage-taking, torture and executions;” heads of Syrian intelligence branches and detention facilities where detainees are tortured; military commanders who target...

A set of proteins found in our intestines can recognize and kill bacteria that have human blood type molecules on their surfaces, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have discovered. The results were published online Feb. 14 and are scheduled to appear in the journal Nature Medicine. Many immune cells have receptors that respond to molecules on the surfaces of bacteria, but these proteins are different because they recognize structures found on our own cells, says senior author Richard D. Cummings, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Biochemistry. "It's like having a platoon in an army whose...

Was Hebrew DNA recently found in American Indian populations in South America? According to Scott R. Woodward, executive director of Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, a DNA marker, called the "Cohen modal haplotype," sometimes associated with Hebrew people, has been found in Colombia, Brazil and Bolivia. But it probably has nothing to do with the Book of Mormon -- at least not directly. For years several critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and of the Book of Mormon have claimed that the lack of Hebrew DNA markers in living Native American populations is evidence the book can't...