Free Republic

All ideologies spawn psychopaths who kill innocents in its name. Yet only some are blamed for their violent adherents: by opportunists cravenly exploiting corpses while they still lie on the ground.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was precipitated by assurances from China, Germany, and the United States that each of Russia’s major trading partners either backed his position or had zero interest in getting in his way. President Joe Biden’s invitations to Putin to bite off more chunks of Ukraine made it clear that America was not interested in a fight with the Russian dictator in his own backyard. Surely, the mighty Putin would make quick work of the Ukrainians. After all, he helped put down the Syrian rebellion to preserve Iran’s stake in Syria, and thereby sealed Barack Obama’s nuclear...

One of the Russian companies indicted by Robert Mueller in the troll farm case has responded to the special counsel’s recently-filed motion prevent discovery of evidence with a blistering (and somewhat trolling) court filing. On Thursday, attorneys for Concord Management and Consulting LLC timely submitted their 13-page memorandum in opposition to Mueller’s requested order.

For 18 minutes in April, China’s state-controlled telecommunications company hijacked 15 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, including data from U.S. military, civilian organizations and those of other U.S. allies. This massive redirection of data has received scant attention in the mainstream media because the mechanics of how the hijacking was carried out and the implications of the incident are difficult for those outside the cybersecurity community to grasp, said a top security expert at McAfee, the world’s largest dedicated Internet security company. In short, the Chinese could have carried out eavesdropping on unprotected communications — including emails and instant...

SAN FRANCISCO, July 15 — On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog — or the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company. Or so thought John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, who used a fictional identity on the Yahoo message boards for nearly eight years to assail competition and promote his supermarket chain’s stock, according to documents released last week by the Federal Trade Commission. In one Internet posting sure to enter the annals of chief-executive vanity, Mr. Mackey wrote as Rahodeb, “I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!” ---- Successful executives like Mr....

ARCHBISHOP Lawrence Burke says his decision to ban Deacon Ronnie Thwaites from the pulpits of the Roman Catholic Church is grounded in his belief that politics and ministry do not mix if the church is to remain united. “It is for the unity of the church,” Archbishop Lawrence told The Sunday Gleaner yesterday. He also pointed to the association of politicians with criminal elements as a reason for keeping active politicians out of the pulpits Said Burke: “I think the perception is that many of these politicians are not in charge of what’s going on in their constituencies. Look at...

Avatar 'Lauranne' attends Bible study in Second Life where Christians try to keep it real - - - I sat on a plump blue sofa and looked around. Those in the ladies' Bible study seemed lovely, and the environment was welcoming But I joined the group with trepidation. I didn't know anyone. I felt a stranger in a strange land. Would this gathering be, well, freaky? Why would I think that? I was visiting a "room" in a cyber church. It wasn't exactly me sitting on a couch but my avatar, a computer-generated image I named Lauranne. The others in...

Three Burleson men who belong to a "radical Christian activist group" were in the Johnson County Jail on Friday night after a church deacon caught two of them attempting to ignite an explosive device on Independence Day at a church under construction in north Burleson, authorities said Friday. Dayton Lee Calaway, 19, and Michael Philip Plaisted Jr., 18, were arrested Wednesday night near the Victory Family Church after they got bogged down in mud as a fleet-footed deacon chased them from the church in the 400 block of Northwest John Jones Drive, police said. Two other people drove away, the...

OMAHA, Neb. — In addition to a lawsuit against a nun accused of stealing church money, the Omaha Archdiocese has filed more lawsuits against her and some family members. In April the archdiocese sued Sister Barbara Markey in an effort to recover $820,000 the archdiocese says she stole as director of the archdiocese's Catholic Family Life Office. Her criminal trial on a charge of theft by deception was tentatively set for Sept. 17. She was initially sued in April. This week the archdiocese filed a lawsuit against 11 of her relatives for a total of $73,800. They were not accused...

They have been called "The Magnificent Seven," a reflection of the size of the group and their significance to the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento. These men make up the largest number of new priests to be ordained here in more than four decades -- and among the most by any diocese in the country this year. This morning, they will don the vestments that symbolize their commitment to the church in an elaborate ordination ceremony and celebration at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament. They trained to be priests in the midst of the recent turmoils of the Catholic Church....

SHANGHAI, China: Chinese police have detained eight leaders in the country's unauthorized Protestant church movement on charges of violating rules on religious activity, an overseas monitoring group said Wednesday. The detentions, the latest reported in an ongoing campaign of harassment against underground church groups, came earlier this month in the northern provinces of Shaanxi and Shandong, the China Aid Association reported. Pastors Zhou Jieming and Niu Wenbin were picked up on June 9 while distributing religious literature in a market place in Shaanxi's Jiaocheng county, along with 10 other church activists, said the group, based in Midland, Texas. While the...

Robert Putnam’s sobering new diversity research scares its author. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties. Putnam’s study reveals that...

MILTON - When it came time for the Gospel reading and homily at the 9 a.m. Mass at St. Agatha Catholic Church, the Rev. Peter Casey didn’t take his usual place at the pulpit. Instead, he pulled a large puppet figure of a priest onto his hand and joined the assistant pastor, deacon and a trio of parishioners with other puppets. As dozens of grinning youngsters watched from the foot of the low, open altar, the ensemble acted out a good-humored sketch of the story of Jesus’ miraculous feeding with a few loaves and fishes. When one of the puppet...

Remember several years ago when God started advertising on billboards around the country? "We need to talk. -- God." "Need directions? -- God." "Keep using my name in vain, I'll make rush hour longer. -- God." A church in Decatur is now using the dark side to spread its message. A billboard that reads, "I Hate Victory Family Church -- Satan" went up near the intersection of U.S. 287 and U.S. 380 this week. On the bottom left of the sign is the church's Web site, www.victoryfamilychurch.net. Associate pastor Chris Bates said the Web site has had more than 1,100...

The case for despair these days in Christian/Muslim relations is depressingly easy to make. June isn't even over, but so far this month has seen the following anti-Christian incidents in majority Muslim areas: Hamas gunmen torched and looted a Catholic church in Gaza along with a nearby Rosary Sisters School. The parish priest, Fr. Manuel Musalam, said that every cross had been destroyed and every Bible burnt, in addition to the school's computers and other equipment being destroyed. A Hamas leader in Gaza has warned Christians to "get ready" for Islamic rule, stating that "missionary activity" will no longer be...

Lest any of the Democratic candidates forget, tangling with Hillary Clinton comes at a painful price. That, in short, was the message her campaign sent this week to Mrs. Clinton’s rivals after her rapid-response press operation rapidly humiliated Barack Obama, her closest competitor for the Democratic nomination, by turning his own campaign’s attacks against him. By obtaining and then leaking to The New York Times a not-for-attribution opposition-research memo that the Obama campaign had distributed to reporters, Mrs. Clinton’s press office forced several public apologies from Mr. Obama and his campaign, all without Mrs. Clinton so much as publicly mentioning...

Bishop Peter J. Elliot, new auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Melbourne, Australia, was appointed April 30 and consecrated on June 15. He has most recently served the diocese as episcopal vicar for religious education, and as director of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family. He is a consultor to the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and was appointed an auditor at the World Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist in 2005. Bishop Elliot, who entered the Catholic Church in the 1960s, served for ten years as an official of the Pontifical...

As a 14-year-old, Mary Ann Gregory marched in the parade at the first General Synod of the United Church of Christ in 1957. The denominations joining that year to form the United Church of Christ - the Reformed Evangelical and Christian Congregational churches - initially walked in separate lines, then merged to form the tail of a Y, she remembered, a symbolic representation of the new unity. "There was a lot of celebration because there was so much hope," said Gregory, a member of St. Paul's United Church of Christ in Westminster, of the synod gathering in Cleveland. "It was...

It’s Friday, June 15, a day after Hamas took over power in Gaza via a military coup, otherwise known as civil war, and I’m in Ramallah. The West Bank is as close to the action as an Israeli citizen can get these days, since all Israelis, even those holding dual citizenship, as I do, have been prohibited from entering Gaza for the past six months. The Israeli media is trying to overcome this limitation by commissioning reports from Hebrew-speaking Palestinians in Gaza, which is helping somewhat to give a wider picture of what’s going on beyond Erez Checkpoint. But it...

It's the nature of my job that I attend far too many conferences. Over the course of a decade reporting on "all things Catholic," I've sat through thousands of papers, lectures and keynote speeches, in various languages and on various continents. Even measured against that volume of material, however, the Daniel Finn's presidential address June 10 at the annual Catholic Theological Society of America convention ranks as one of the most impressive presentations I've ever heard. When I say "impressive," I mean not just intellectually provocative or rhetorically satisfying, though Finn's address was both, but also brave and potentially transformative...