Free Republic

Susan Rice pushed back on critics of President Obama's foreign policy Friday as she unveiled the White House’s new national security strategy. Rice, the White House's national security adviser, said in a speech at the Brookings Institution that the nation is “stronger than we have been in a very long time” despite the bitter debates raging in Washington. “Too often, what's missing here in Washington is a sense of perspective. Yes, there is a lot going on. Still, while the dangers we face may be more numerous and varied, they are not of the existential nature we confronted during World...

A herdsman in China’s remote far west has struck gold after stumbling upon a huge nugget of the precious metal estimated to be worth at least $250,000, state media reported Thursday. The 7.85 kilo chunk was discovered “practically lying on bare ground”, the official Xinhua news agency said, quoting the herder, an ethnic Kazakh named Berek Sawut. He found the golden lump, described in the report as “random-shaped” and about 23 centimetres long, 18 centimetres at its widest and up to eight centimetres thick. It was estimated to be worth 1.6m yuan ($255,000), Xinhua said, assuming it was 80 percent...

Later this year along the banks of the James River outside Richmond, Virginia, a paper products maker based in northeastern China will begin construction on a new U.S. manufacturing plant. The factory will churn the region's straw and corn stalks into household products including napkins, tissue and organic fertilizer—all marked "Made in the USA." Shandong Tranlin Paper's new U.S. factory is forecast to generate about 2,000 new jobs by 2020, and is the latest Chinese company to invest in American manufacturing. Chinese foreign direct investment in the U.S. totaled $12 billion last year, topping $10 billion for the second year...

Well December data is out now. America has set YET ANOTHER trade deficit in 2014 with China. By far the worst yet... Last year 342,632,500. Up from 318,711,300 last year (which was also a new record).

The director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lieutenant General Vincent R. Stewart, warned during congressional testimony yesterday that the "security challenges" the US faces are "more diverse and complex than those we have experienced in our lifetimes." Stewart delivered his remarks to the House Armed Services Committee during a hearing devoted to assessing worldwide threats. While Stewart addressed diverse national security issues, much of his written testimony was focused on what was once called the global war on terror. Al Qaeda in Syria may "expand its territory," while threatening the West The Islamic State's advances in Iraq and Syria...

Visiting Beijing between Feb. 3-5, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina is set to sign an agreement with China to increase the military-to-military cooperation between two nations, according to the UK-based Jane's Defence Weekly. Under the agreement, China North Industries Corporation will help Argentina produce a version of the VN1 wheeled armored personnel carrier, while China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation will help develop various types of naval ship. China is understood to have introduced five of its P18 export corvettes to Argentina. A source from the Argentine government said the vessels are estimated to cost US$50 million each. Known as...

Chinese and Argentine leaders on Wednesday signed a batch of agreements, including collaboration on two new nuclear power plants, as Beijing is strengthening its relations with the South American country. On a state visit to China, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and the two countries signed 15 agreements covering travel visas, information technology, media, energy, space technology and financing. The financial amounts of the deals were not disclosed.

Could This Be the End of Global Superpowers? Recent events indicate that we will likely soon be living in a superpower-free world. The old bipolar order, in which the United States and Soviet Union competed to promote their ideologies, uphold their allies, and subvert their enemies across the globe, is long gone. For the last two decades, the United States acted as the sole global superpower, with Russia and China as possible rivals. But neither of them is really up to that challenge, and in recent years even the United States’ influence is fading. Russia, China, and the United States...

(Reuters) - China will ban from March 1 internet accounts that impersonate people or organizations, and enforce the requirement that people use real names when registering accounts online, its internet watchdog said on Wednesday.

PUNTA BRITO, Nicaragua — One of the largest engineering projects in history would start here, on this desolate and pristine crescent of dark-sand Pacific beach. From in front of the hammock-swinging shrimpers on the porches of their tin-and-wood shanties, the trench would run east in sinuous curves up through the mangroves and banana fields until it reaches the shores of Central America’s largest freshwater lake, then cut across the Caribbean highlands and through indigenous territory, ending its journey 172 miles away on the beaches of the Atlantic. They call it the Grand Inter-Oceanic Canal: an audacious $50 billion plan by an...

The head of Brazil's state-run oil giant Petrobras and five senior executives have resigned in the wake of a huge corruption scandal. Maria das Graças Foster's departure follows the arrest and testimony of some three dozen executives at Petrobras and many of its suppliers. The board of Petrobras is due to meet on Friday to elect new executives. The scandal involves alleged price-fixing, bribes and kickbacks, which implicates Brazil's ruling party. Prosecutors have uncovered around $800m in bribes and other illegal funds. More than 200 businesses are being investigated and more than 80 people, including three former executives from Petrobras,...

China's biggest internet retailer says it has begun testing drone-based deliveries to hundreds of customers. It says the trial will last three days and be limited to areas within a one-hour flight of its distribution centres in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The company's blog adds that it believes the technology has the potential to speed up deliveries. Amazon, Google and parcel service UPS are among other companies carrying out more private trials of such aircraft. Alibaba is using its drones to deliver orders for a specific type of ginger tea, helping limit the maximum weight of the packages to 340g...

Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is making fun of Chinese accents on Twitter while on official business in the country. In a tweet on Wednesday, first reported by Bloomberg, she wrote about her trip, replacing "r"s with "l"s in the words arroz (rice) and petróleo (petroleum). Twitter / @CFKArgentinaShe then tweeted a non-apology: Sorry. ¿Sabes qué? Es que es tanto el exceso del ridículo y el absurdo, que sólo se digiere con humor. Sino son muy, pero muy tóxicos. — Cristina Kirchner (@CFKArgentina) February 4, 2015 Translation: "Sorry. You know what? It's just that the ridiculousness and absurdity is...

Now is the time for the U.S. to renew its affiliation with Egypt. Good things have happened since the ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood. Due in part to the freeze in U.S. presence with regard to Egypt, relations between Al Sisi and Netanyahu are vigorous. Egypt plans on purchasing five billion cubic meters of natural gas from Israel’s Tamar reserves. For the past year, Israeli and Egyptian forces have been working side by side to counter agitation in the Sinai, especially near the border with Gaza. Al Sisi has made distinct overtures that he wants an end to militant Islam...

A Chinese drone maker which created the small quadcopter that recently crashed on White House grounds said Wednesday it is updating its drones to prohibit flight over the US capital.

A skull that's more than three and a half millennia old has revealed signs of an early form of brain surgery. The perforated skull belongs to a mummified woman found in the Xiaohe tomb in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Experts said that the hole, which measures around 2 inches (50mm) in diameter, was most likely an early form of craniotomy. A craniotomy involves temporarily removing a 'flap' of bone from the skull to give surgeons access to the brain. The amount of skull removed depends on the type of surgery being performed, and the flap is later replaced using...

China launched a secret 100-year modernization program that deceived successive U.S. administrations into unknowingly promoting Beijing’s strategy of replacing the U.S.-led world order with a Chinese communist-dominated economic and political system, according to a new book by a longtime Pentagon China specialist. For more than four decades, Chinese leaders lulled presidents, cabinet secretaries, and other government analysts and policymakers into falsely assessing China as a benign power deserving of U.S. support, says Michael Pillsbury, the Mandarin-speaking analyst who has worked on China policy and intelligence issues for every U.S. administration since Richard Nixon. The secret strategy, based on ancient Chinese...

News that China is building a second aircraft carrier was leaked by an overenthusiastic local government, but reports were subsequently deleted from Web sites and social media here, a development that will do little to calm nerves in neighboring countries about Beijing’s growing maritime power. The government in Changzhou, in eastern Jiangsu province, boasted Sunday on social media that a local firm had won a contract to supply electrical cabling for the carrier. It later deleted the post, but not before it had been widely circulated. A report in a local newspaper was also withdrawn.

On the part of the single Chinese men, Ukrainian women are a good choice because besides being available, many of their females are beauty pageant caliber with their blond hair and blue eyes. It can be recalled that Asian males developed a crush on Natalia Poklonskaya, the young and attractive attorney general of Crimea who rose to global fame in March 2014 when she held a press conference following the military crash between Ukraine and Russia. Beijing News supported the idea of exporting Ukrainian brides, reports Foreign Policy. Other than the buxom ladies of Ukraine, other nationalities being considered as...

Israel is working to create "free trade zones" with Communist China and the Eurasian Union, as the world is being divided into geographic "regions" for the eventual New World Order. Globalism Wins as Israel Plans "Free Trade" With Putin, Beijing The New American 30 January 2015 As the world is increasingly divided up into geographic “regions” under regional regimes cobbled together under the guise of pseudo-“free trade,” Israeli authorities are now quietly working to create what they call “free trade zones” with both the Communist Chinese regime and the Kremlin-dominated Eurasian Economic Union (member countries shown in green). The...