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After weeks of spreading riots and demonstrations in Paris, socialist French President Emmanuel Macron has had an epiphany or sorts. Not only is he not going to put a new global warming tax on fuel, he's going to let financially-strapped French families keep more of their money from the taxman. At least this year. "No mercy"? Sounds like total surrender for someone who, just days earlier, arrested 1, 939 people across the country, more than a thousand of those in Paris. The truth is, Macron has lost control both of the people and of the narrative. His 18% approval rating...

BRUSSELS - Belgian police detained more than 400 people on Saturday after “yellow vest” protesters inspired by riots in France threw rocks and firecrackers and damaged shops and cars as they tried to reach official buildings in Brussels. In the second violence of its kind in the capital in eight days, a crowd which police estimated at around 1,000 faced riot squads who used water cannon and tear gas to keep people away from the European Union headquarters and the nearby Belgian government quarter. Calm was restored after about five hours. The movement in Belgium, inspired by the “gilets jaunes”,...

More than 1,700 people were arrested across France during the latest "yellow vest" protests, which left 135 people injured and caused widespread damage. Of the 1,723 detained on Saturday, 1,220 were ordered to be held in custody, according to the interior ministry. Despite the security clampdown clashes broke out in several cities across the country, including Marseille, Bordeaux and Lyon and Toulouse, during a fourth weekend of protests against rising living costs and the embattled French President Emmanuel Macron. Paris again saw the worst of the of the violence as protesters, wearing their distinctive yellow safety jackets, set fire to...

Paris was in lockdown early on Saturday with 'thousands' of French security forces braced to meet renewed rioting by "yellow vest" protesters in the capital and other cities in a fourth weekend of confrontation..... The Eiffel Tower and other tourist landmarks were shut, shops were boarded up to avoid looting and street furniture removed to avoid metal bars from being used as projectiles. About 89,000 police were deployed across the country.

PARIS - France hunkered down for another wave of potentially violent protests on Saturday as embattled President Emmanuel Macron planned to address the nation next week over public fury at the high cost of living, senior allies said. Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said the three-week-old “yellow vest” revolt had “created a monster” and vowed police would have no tolerance for violence, with much of Paris in lockdown and tens of thousands of police deployed nationwide. Castaner warned that radicals would likely again infiltrate the protest movement - a backlash against high living costs but also, increasingly, a revolt against Macron...

While world leaders gather in Katowice, Poland, for the COP24 climate summit, protesters in the streets of Paris have successfully forced French President Emmanuel Macron's hand, undercutting his efforts to impose a carbon tax on French energy sales. Macron has made climate change and lowering greenhouse gases a central component of both his domestic and foreign policies, only to face dramatic failure at the hands of his "yellow vest" countrymen. Macron's popularity has been low in France for months, and has now fallen to just a 23% approval rating. But the rioting across his country sends a frightening signal to...

PARIS - Vincent Picard describes himself as a “militant ecologist.” But when protesters took to the streets to express their rage over a planned increase in France’s fuel tax, Mr. Picard joined their ranks. He acknowledges that the tax might encourage the conservation considered critical for a healthy planet. But with the nearest train station 35 minutes away, he has to drive to work every day. “I am conscious that we have reached the end of fossil fuels and that we have to modify our habits,” said Mr. Picard, a 32-year-old pastry maker from northern France. But, he added, “You...

The French police forces including the special CRS riot police will be as fully mobilized as possible in Paris and other locations tomorrow as the "yellow vests" protests move into their next phase of mobilization swelled by new supporters. 125-thousand plus were estimated to have protested last Saturday and its quite possible that the protests may be even larger tomorrow. The Prime Minister of France's increasingly unpopular President Emmanuel Macron, Edouard Philippe, appeared on the evening television news Thursday to say 89-thousand police are mobilized for tomorrow's protests....

PARIS - French authorities will close dozens of museums, tourism sites and shops on Saturday, including the Eiffel Tower and Louvre, fearing a recurrence of last week’s violence in Paris, officials said on Thursday. “We cannot take the risk when we know the threat,” Culture Minister Franck Riester told RTL radio, adding that far-right and far-left agitators were planning to hijack rallies by “yellow vest” protesters in Paris. He said the Louvre museum, Orsay museum, the two operas, and the Grand Palais were among the sites that would be closed a week after rioters looted and defaced the Arc de...

The government in France put out the word Wednesday night that the fuel tax would be suspended not just for six months, but for all of next year (2019). The leader of the opposition National Rally (former National Front) Marine Le Pen tweeted late Wednesday night that President Emmanuel Macron should pledge on his honor not to reintroduce the tax wit the amended budget in the spring. Whether this apparent concession will help stamp out protests is uncertain. Four have died and hundreds have been injured in the weeks of protests by the "yellow vests" but now high school and...

The Gulag forced-labor camps in the USSR were “a good thing” as prisoners worked there to the benefit of the state, a 23-year-old local MP in Yekaterinburg said, and was slammed online as a “monster” in need of a history lesson. “Gulag is, actually, a good thing. Previously, the people were sent to work under supervision – at least, there was some benefit from them. But now, the inmates – rapists and murderers – just drink builder’s tea and do nothing, while we waste our money on them,” Andrey Pirozhkov, a recently-elected Communist Party MP in the Yekaterinburg’s local parliament,...

France’s violent Yellow Vest protests are now about many domestic concerns, but it’s no accident that the trigger was a fuel-tax hike. Nothing reveals the disconnect between ordinary voters and an aloof political class more than carbon taxation. The fault line runs between anti-carbon policies and economic growth, and France is a test for the political future of emissions restrictions. France already is a relatively low-carbon economy, with per-capita emissions half Germany’s as of 2014. French governments have nonetheless pursued an “ecological transition” to further squeeze carbon emissions from every corner of the French economy. The results are visible in...

"In Havana, some of the same architectural gems that draw tens of thousands of American tourists crash to the ground every year. Causes range from weather and neglect to faulty renovations and theft of structural beams."

I recently received a message from my father-in-law, containing a link to a Spanish language Facebook post by a man named Habitante, which translates to “Inhabitant.” I was unable to confirm the identity of Habitante, but his words and insights are so compelling and authentic — and what my family personally knows to be true — that it must be shared. What follows is my translation of the post written by Habitante (In trying to stick to his message, I have, to the best of my abilities, not disturbed his grammar and paragraph structure. So there is a little awkwardness....

By April 1992, with its Soviet ally freshly dissolved, Yugoslavia as the world had known it was gone in a bloody and violent breakup, leaving some 100,000 dead, 2.4 million refugees, 2 million internally displaced, and seven independent nations in its place. While those ethnic tensions still simmer in much of the former Yugoslavia, so too is a growing sentimental recollection of life in a country much of the younger generations can only learn about in history books and museums like Milakovic’s Yugodom. A Gallup poll from last year showed that many people in the former Yugoslavia look back fondly...

I triggered someone on Facebook, and as a result got put in Facebook jail for three days. I guess people don't like the truth being told about the rapefugee invasion in Germany.

Two Democrats in the U.S. Senate – both said to be eyeing the party’s 2020 presidential nomination -- recently announced so-called “basic income” plans for America’s lower-income families. A liberal publication, meanwhile, says neither plan goes far enough to aid families, and the government should instead just start “writing them checks.” But the Heritage Foundation argues that such plans tend to fail, in part because they tend to remove the incentive for work.

The Chinese are making doubly sure public displays of displeasure with their totalitarian regime such as occurred in Tiananmen Square in 1989 will never be repeated. They are instituting a technological surveillance program so pervasive that when completed -- quite soon, it seems -- it will enforce conformity throughout their giant country on a scale that would stupefy Orwell and Huxley. China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each...

Many homosexuals were drawn to the promise of Marxism. There was a certain tolerance and even gay liberation in the early years of the Soviet Union, before homosexuality was re-criminalized in 1933 and the community went back underground. "Gay Soviet history almost doesn’t exist," said Fiks, sitting at a desk in New York’s Winkleman Gallery on a windy Sunday in February. "The older generation didn’t do a lot of talking." Fiks plucked the title for his exhibit, "Homosexuality Is Stalin’s Atom Bomb to Destroy America," from a 1953 article by Cold War pundit Arthur Guy Matthews. "In the U.S., I...

No better time than Thanksgiving break to empower yourself against your leftist relatives... If the rest of us don't matter to them, at least the left should know how communism crushed gays, native Americans, unions, etc., See the reference site "Communism at 'Peace'" ( http://communiststats.com/ ). In 2 minutes, anyone will understand the insanity of unchecked liberalism.