Free Republic

... in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency is issuing more anti-hydrocarbon regulations and more statements detailing the coming horrors of “dangerous manmade climate change.” Two points must be kept uppermost: the global warming “disasters” exist only in computer models, Hollywood movies and alarmist assertions; and the “preventative measures” are worse than the disasters. The issue is not whether greenhouse gases “contribute to” climate change. Scientists acknowledge that. The only relevant issues are: How big a contribution? Do these gases now dominate planetary climate variation, supplanting the solar, atmospheric, oceanic and other forces that have warmed and cooled our...

The failure of the Russians to share information critical to the protection of U.S. civilians may have led to a U.S. attempt to recruit an FSB agent who was in a position to tell the U.S. more than was being obtained officially. There are now reports in the Russian press that the FSB agent in question had traveled together with U.S. investigators to the North Caucasus. In any case, Ryan Fogle, a CIA agent working under diplomatic cover, was arrested on May 13. A video of the arrest was shown on Russian television and Russian officials took the gratuitous and...

A newborn infant has been rescued from a toilet pipe in eastern China after being allegedly flushed down by his parents. Firefighters plucked the baby boy from a pipe section right under the toilet commode. The pipe was cut away piece by piece to reveal the screaming newborn, who was wedged in tight.

A new study shows the relaxation of marijuana laws in Colorado has caused a significant spike in the number of young children treated for accidentally eating marijuana-laced cookies, candies, brownies and beverages.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, instead of improving education by repealing No Child Left Behind’s testing and other mandates, the Obama administration is increasing national control over schools via the “Common Core” initiative. Common Core is a new curriculum developed by a panel of so-called education experts. The administration is trying to turn Common Core into a national curriculum by offering states increased federal education funding if they impose Common Core’s curriculum on their public schools. This is yet another example of the government using money stolen from the people to bribe states into obeying federal dictates

The IRS routinely obtains information about how we earn a living, what investments we make, what we spend on ourselves and our families, and even what charitable and religious organizations we support. Starting next year, the IRS will be collecting personally identifiable health insurance information in order to ensure we are complying with Obamacare’s mandates.

Now the Iranian constitution requires a new president to be elected, and Rafsanjani’s entry into the contest radically alters what was previously seen as a contest between rival conservative groups. Not that Rafsanjani currently is more than a relative moderate – currently, because in his time he has veered sharply from side to side across Iran’s political spectrum; and relatively moderate because, although he now favours a domestic free market, privatization of state-owned industries, and a moderate position internationally, he is still sought by the Argentinian government for ordering the 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in...

It comes as no surprise that, during a CBS interview in February, President Obama supported having the Boy Scouts of America open its membership to gays and, presumably, those who lead scout troops as well. “My attitude, the President said “is that gays and lesbians should have access and opportunity the same way everybody else does, in every institution and walk of life.” Spoken like a good Communist hiding the true intent of debasing the cultural and moral life of America.

In short, Obama has never addressed his duty to govern. He has instead maintained a non-stop process of campaigning and fund-raising. It did not work in 2010 when voters returned power to the Republicans in the House and now he is doing everything he can to regain Democrat control there in 2014.

The 2011 census puts the Muslim population of the UK at around 5 per cent, a total that has been boosted by around 600,000 Muslim immigrants who have arrived in the UK over the past decade. Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said to UK daily the Telegraph that the decline of Christianity is “inevitable.” “In another 20 years there are going to be more active Muslims than there are churchgoers,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security has plans to buy enough ammunition to fight the equivalent of a 24-year Iraq War – on US territory – and even US congressmen don’t understand why. Smack in the middle of the smoking gun-control debate, and despite deep spending cuts across the American heartland, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wants to buy 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition over the next five years.

Simensen claims that it is overwhelmingly likely that the two aircraft were trapped inside an insulating layer of building debris within the skyscrapers. This leads him to believe that it was the aircraft hulls rather than the buildings themselves that absorbed most of the heat from the burning aircraft fuel. The SINTEF scientist believes that the heat melted the aluminium of the aircraft hulls, and the core of his theory is that molten aluminium then found its way downwards within the buildings through staircases and gaps in the floor – and that the flowing aluminium underwent a chemical reaction with...

Libya, or the Great Socialist people’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, is a country with a unique governmental structure that, although functioning under the same leadership for almost four decades now, seems to have made drastic changes in its foreign policies and external relations. From an isolated country considered, not long ago, by many Western countries as a state sponsoring terrorism, it has once again become a country with which it is good to do business.

Central Asia faces a broad range of security challenges. Due to the region’s position at the crossroads between Russia, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the Caspian Sea it is confronted with a range of trans-national issues such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, organised crime and terrorism. Central Asia also encounters specific regional threats including scarcity of water resources for generating power and irrigation purposes, which is currently causing tension. On a national level the five Central Asian republics face the threat of instability due to bad governance and the harsh impact of the economic crisis.

Our ultimate goal of homeland security will be served through a better understanding of the threat confronting it in order to “disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat al Qaeda and its allies.” Let me describe this global threat through a comprehensive survey that I conducted of all the al Qaeda plots in the West, all the al Qaeda affiliate plots in the West and all the plots done “in the name of al Qaeda” in the West since the formation of al Qaeda in August 1988. It is necessary to expand our inquiry because al Qaeda is now only one of...