Free Republic

Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's top court on Sunday struck down a landmark deal regulating exploitation of Mediterranean gas reserves, in a major defeat for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who called the ruling "mystifying". A panel of Supreme Court justices said in their ruling that a clause in the plan that prevented it from being changed for a decade was unacceptable. "We have decided to cancel the gas deal because of the stability clause" that would have barred future governments from altering the deal, they said. The court however suspended the ruling for a year to enable the parliament to amend...

EU Finance Ministers Debate New-Look Euro Coins; Weigh Mixed-Bad Economic Outlook LUXEMBOURG (AP) -- EU finance ministers, opening a two-day meeting Friday, sought to make sense of a mixed bag of economic data from the euro zone, with Germany posting its strongest growth in four years but Italy sliding into recession. "This is a very serious problem," Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean Claude Juncker said upon arriving at the meeting he was leading. EU Finance Commissioner Joaquin Solbes said "growth in Germany was good news [1% 1Q GDP], but Italy is bad news." And Gerrit Zalm, the Dutch finance minister whose...

The Shipping of Michigan Copper across the Atlantic in the Bronze Age (Isle Royale and Keweenaw Peninsula, c. 2400BC-1200 BC) Summary Recent scientific literature has come to the conclusion that the major source of the copper that swept through the European Bronze Age after 2500 BC is unknown. However, these studies claim that the 10 tons of copper oxhide ingots recovered from the late Bronze Age (1300 BC) Uluburun shipwreck off the coast of Turkey was “extraordinarily pure” (more than 99.5% pure), and that it was not the product of smelting from ore. The oxhides are all brittle “blister copper”,...

Merkel is battling for a deal that will see refugees more evenly spread around the European Union after Germany welcomed 1.1 million asylum seekers last year. But instead, eastern European countries are planning new razor wire fences, and even Paris -- traditionally Berlin's closest EU ally -- has shown little enthusiasm for Merkel's welcome policy. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Saturday that the mood in France was "not favourable" to Merkel's call for a permanent quota system. "Europe cannot take in all the migrants from Syria, Iraq or Africa," Valls told German media. "It has to regain control over...

Greece aims to play the role of an economic force to strengthen ties between the European Union and Iran, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Sunday after he arrived in Tehran for an official visit. "Greece will become an energy, economic and trade bridge between Iran and European Union," Tsipras said, according to a translation by the Mega television channel. He further called Iran "a key player for stability and peace in the Middle East, and a significant economic partner." Tsipras's comments come after Iran's nuclear deal with world powers came into force, allowing the United States and the European...

Russia seemingly has ignored Secretary of State John Kerry’s appeals to stop bombing civilians and allow critical humanitarian aid to starving Syrians – and is instead escalating its military involvement, deploying four of its most capable fighter jets to Syria, two defense officials confirmed to Fox News. The decision to send the Su-35S jets poses yet another hurdle for Kerry’s efforts to proceed with peace talks. The Su-35S is Russia’s most advanced warplane, capable of air-to-air and air-to-ground missions, one official familiar with the jet said. Already, continued Russian airstrikes against Syrian opposition fighters, some backed by the CIA, were...

Belgium has called for vast refugee camps holding up to 300,000 refugees to be built in Greece in a desperate attempt to stem the flow of migrants from Syria and other nations outside Europe. At an emergency summit of European leaders yesterday, Belgian migration minister Theo Francken raised the spectre of setting up 'closed facilities' in Greece to be operated by the EU. He said that the Greeks 'now need to bear the consequences' of being too weak to guard their own borders and called for Athens to face an EU 'sanction mechanism' under which the rising number of refugees...

In an article published on National Public Radio's (NPR) website Monday, a map of the Middle East failed to include Israel, labeling Palestine in its place. The map was an illustration accompanying the article "What Are You Afraid Of In 2016? Globetrotters Share Their Fears." The article referenced travelers' fears of Islamic radicalization and extremism in the region. Immediately following the publication, the website's comment section was flooded with criticism from readers and journalists who questioned the online publication's decision to use an illustration of this nature. As a result of the abundance of complaints, NPR removed the photo and...

Officials in Israel expressed outrage on Monday evening after the European Union (EU) passed a resolution stipulating that agreements with Israel will no longer apply to any areas over the 1949 Armistice borders. Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely responded to the decision and said, "The Europeans continue to act unilaterally with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict". "This resolution achieves the opposite from what they sought to achieve. These types of declarations only push actual dialogue further away and give a boost to the Palestinians to continue their efforts to condemn Israel in the international arena and to continue the relentless...

Cyprus no longer sees Israel as an aggressive country imposing its will by force on the Palestinians, but rather as a small nation fighting for survival in the face of much greater odds, Averof Neophytou, head of the country's center-right ruling party said on Monday. [...] For years, he said, Cyprus had the "wrong perception of Israel," partly because it was for so long an active member of the Non-Aligned Movement, before joining the EU in 2004. "For decades Israel was blamed for creating the instability in the region, but can anyone credibly blame Israel for the instability in Syria,...

Experts in Cyprus are trying to unravel the identity of one of the island's older inhabitants, after a skeleton was discovered protruding from a cliff in one of the island's richest archaeological sites. The intact skeleton was found at Curium in the southwest of the Mediterranean island renowned for its links to the ancient world. The earliest settlements here can be dated as far back as the Neolithic age, about 4,500 BC. Experts believe the skeleton came to the surface due to years of erosion from the sea. The discovery is reminiscent of three skeletons found embracing in the same...

We are witnessing the decline and fall of the European Union as we know it: the beginning of the end for the last of the twentieth century's grand political experiments. The speed of the decline and the extent of the fall are not certain; Brussels still has plenty of options. But it is clear that the EU, having ceased its geographical and institutional expansion, is entering a period of contraction, and quite possibly disintegration. The lines of fracture are clear, and so are the indicators that the stresses will only intensify. Divisions between the rich north and the poorer south,...

Since this disk was found in Crete, and the people of Crete today speak Greek, that's a good language to assume was spoken by the maker of the disk. Still, that's a guess, or a hypothesis, not a fact. Besides that, we know that not everybody on Crete spoke Greek in the Bronze Age. The classical Greeks mentioned people they called Eteocretans who did not speak Greek. Further, we know that Linear A, written by the Minoans on Crete before the Mycenean Greeks came, did not represent Greek. Professor Hubert LaMarle considers it to be an early Indo-Iranian language, related...

The goddess of love, the Minoan Astarte, is the key figure that unlocks the mystery of the Phaistos Disk, according to linguist, archaeologist and coordinator of the program Erasmus of Crete Technological Institute; Gareth Owens. Speaking to the ANA -- MPA news agency, Owens said that after new data found in his research, his theory has changed slightly compared to the position he had expressed about a year ago. The focus is no longer the "pregnant mother", as originally estimated, but a "pregnant goddess" that takes shape in the face of Astarte, the goddess of love. "There is no doubt...

While "Syrian" refugees are flooding Europe -- in large part due to Turkey's policy aimed at letting them pass freely through the country and into Europe -- and Turkey is embroiled in an escalating crisis with Russia, the European Union seems to be willing to take Turkish accession talks further than ever before. According to Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, there are now "strong signals" that Greek Cyprus is willing to remove its veto on five negotiation chapters Ankara wants opened in order accelerate Turkey’s formal entry into the European Union; Turkey has been an associate member since 1963. "There...

Greece and Turkey fought a brief dogfight on Twitter over Turkey's downing of a Russian warplane due to an error by an aide in Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' office, a Greek official said on Monday. It began in the middle of a summit between Turkey and the European Union on Sunday, when a message appeared on Tsipras' Twitter account saying: "To Prime Minister Davutoglu: Fortunately our pilots are not as mercurial as yours against the Russians." A second tweet issued in Tsipras' name referred to near-miss aerial incidents between Greek and Turkish planes over the Aegean Sea, saying: "What...

Cyprus deports six Frenchmen detained at airport on suspicion of extremist links amid fears they were heading for Syria Cyprus today deported six French citizens who had been detained at the island's main airport on suspicion of extremist links - but were later said not to be a danger. But police in France said all six were known to the authorities there and that three of them were subject to an 'S File', meaning they were suspected of links to a terrorist group. The six - five men of Turkish descent and one of Algerian origin - were detained on...

German physicist disputes Atlantis discovery claim by American Tue Nov 16, 3:00 PM ET Science - AFP BERLIN (AFP) - The remains of the lost city of Atlantis which a United States researcher claims to have found off the Mediterranean island of Cyprus are in fact submarine volcanoes, according to a German physicist. US researcher Robert Sarmast claimed Sunday to have found proof that the mythical lost city of Atlantis actually existed and is located under the Mediterranean seabed between Cyprus and Syria. But German physicist Christian Huebscher said he had identified the phenomenon as 100,000 year-old volcanoes that spewed...

More than 3,200 years ago, life was abuzz in and around what is now this modern-day Israeli metropolis on the shimmering Mediterranean shore. To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all. Yet...

Moscow places S-400 'Growlers' in Syria's Latakia base, in an escalation that places Ben-Gurion Airport within range. Russia has revealed in photographs that it has deployed a highly advanced anti-missile system in western Syria, that is capable of downing planes taking off in Tel Aviv. The S-400 anti-missile system, known to NATO as the SA-21 "Growler," was shown to be stationed in the Latakia Airbase on the Syrian coast of the Mediterranean Sea in photographs released by the Russian military, reports the Daily Mail on Thursday. In the past there have been Arab media reports of Israeli airstrikes in Latakia...