Free Republic

Traditionally, the Uighur separatists aren’t the sort to seek attention. Dwelling primarily in the mountains of Xinjiang Province in northwest China, they don’t maintain an active social media presence like the Taliban or al-Qaeda. They almost never post videos boasting of exploits. But over the last two weeks, amid so-far unsubstantiated speculation the Uighurs had some involvement in the disappearance of MH370, the Turkic-speaking Muslim group has gained greater international notoriety than perhaps ever before. :snip: The Uighur emergence began on March 1 when a group of them wielding knives stormed a train station in southern China and stabbed to...

I just returned from Australia, where I was speaking at a conference sponsored by AustraliaÂ’s superlative human rights group, the Q Society, along with Stop Islamisation of Nations (of which I am a board member). Also on the trip were Pamela Geller (SIONÂ’s president), Ashraf Ramelah of Voice of the Copts, Nonie Darwish of Former Muslims United, the Israeli scholar Mordechai Kedar, and numerous Australian human rights activists.Australia is a beautiful country full of marvelously friendly people, as I saw both on this trip and on my speaking tour of six Australian cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra, and Cairns)...

Fellow pilots in Malaysia Airlines have come out in defence of Capt Zaharie Ahmad Shah as the probe into the disappearance of MH370 refocuses on the crew and passengers. The pilots who had worked with the veteran colleague over the years said they did not believe that he was capable of sabotaging his own flight. “He is such a kind-hearted person and would not have been able to think of anything like this,” said a close friend of Zaharie. “Zaharie is always smiling and ready with a joke,” said another pilot who has flown alongside Zaharie previously. “He won’t do...

The head of the investigation into the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has denied any evidence of hijacking, The Telegraph has reported. Rather, hijacking is just one of a number of possible lines that they are looking at. His comments came after a Malaysian government official told Associated Press that investigators had concluded that one of the pilots, or someone else with flying experience, hijacked the missing Boeing 777-200ER jet carrying 239 people. The official said that hijacking was no longer a theory. "It is conclusive." Refuting this claim, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, who is leading the MH370 investigation, told the Telegraph:...

New evidence has suggested that communication from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have been deliberately cut off. ABC news said US investigators now believe the aircraft's data reporting system and its transponder - which reports its position in flight to ground-based radar - shut down separately. The fact that the devices appear to have been shut off at a 14-minute interval from one another suggests that they may have been deliberately disabled or at any rate did not fail as a result of a catastrophic airframe incident, the US network said.

AUSTRALIA is headed for coast-to-coast Liberal governments, with expected Labor defeats in South Australia and Tasmania tomorrow and Tony Abbott welcoming the prospect of working with “like-minded” leaders to “reshape our country to provide more jobs and prosperity”. Newspoll surveys point to a Labor-Greens rout in Tasmania, with the likelihood of the Liberals governing in their own right, and a Liberal victory in a much tighter contest in South Australia - the biggest spread of Coalition governments since John Howard’s win in 1996. The Prime Minister and Joe Hockey yesterday used the prospect of Liberal state victories and an 80,500...

Malaysian authorities have denied their efforts to find a missing passenger jet are mired in chaos, as they again doubled the search area to include areas hundreds of kilometres from the plane's flight path. At a combative news conference on the fifth day of the vast hunt, transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said officials would "never give up hope" of finding Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and its 239 passengers and crew. The hunt, involving 42 ships and 39 aircraft from several nations, had focused on Vietnam's South China Sea coast where the plane last made contact on Saturday. But the search...

ABC's Bob Woodruff has shared an email from an oil rig worker stationed near the coast of Vietnam that alleges to have witnessed the missing jet go down in flames. "The timing is right," writes Mike McKay. "While I observed the burning (plane) it appeared to be in ONE piece." McKay's employer has confirmed that the letter is not a hoax. "From when I first saw the burning (plane) until the flames went out (still at high altitude) was 10-15 seconds," he writes. "There was no lateral movement, so it was either coming toward our location, stationary (falling) or going...

THE Abbott Government is set to give the green light to the nation’s biggest ever military purchase allowing Defence to order up to 86 American made stealth fighter jets for the RAAF. The planes will cost about $90 million each when they roll off the assembly line between 2018 and 2020 and the overall project will cost some $14 billion during the 30-year life of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It is understood that a submission to buy will be presented to Cabinet’s National Security Committee for approval within weeks. The head of the Pentagon’s largest ever defence project to...

SHIPBUILDER Austal has received funding to build two more vessels for the US Navy, taking the value of its current order book to record levels. The company has received funds to build vessels seven and eight under a $US3.5 billion contract it has with the US Navy to construct 10 Littoral Combat Ships.

A man has been arrested for allegedly trying to smuggle drugs into a prison using a drone, Australian police say. The drone was "hovering in the vicinity of a prison" in Melbourne on Sunday afternoon, police said in a statement. The drone appeared to have "four engines" and was carrying "a small quantity of drugs", police added. Australia's parliament recently held a roundtable on drones and privacy. During the roundtable, Brad Mason, secretary of the Australian Certified UAV Operators Association, said there was "a lot of illegal and unauthorised use of UAVs. "We understand that the regulator is doing its...

• JOHN Howard has been named Australia’s best prime minister of the past 40 years, followed by Bob Hawke, with Gough Whitlam and Kevin Rudd tying for third place. The poll, conducted last week by Essential Research and provided exclusively to The Australian, shows that 39 per cent of voters ranked Mr Howard, the Liberal prime minister from 1996 to 2007, as the best. Labor’s Mr Hawke was rated as the best prime minister by 14 per cent of voters. A further 8 per cent of voters chose Mr Whitlam while another 8 per cent selected Mr Rudd. Paul Keating...

ONE of the great popular misconceptions about climate-change sceptics such as Ian Plimer, Bob Carter, Cardinal George Pell and me is that we're all Big-Oil-funded, Gaia-ravaging, nature-hating emissaries of Satan. We can't look at a lovely pristine beach, apparently, without praying for a nice, juicy oil slick to turn up and wipe out all the pelicans and turtles and sea otters. But this isn't actually true. I love our beautiful planet at least as much as your $180,000-a-year (for a three-day week) climate commissioner Tim Flannery does. One of my great heroes is Patrick Moore, the Canadian co-founder of Greenpeace...

Democrats believe they've hit on the perfect issue to distract from the horror of Obamacare in the 2014 elections: the minimum wage. Apparently, increasing the minimum wage was not important for American workers during the first five years of Obama's presidency -- least of all his first two years, when Democrats controlled Congress and could have passed anything. (And did!) No. The minimum wage did not become a pressing concern until an election year in which the public's hatred of Obamacare is expected to be the central issue. As The New York Times explained, Democrats see the minimum wage as...

Napoleon famously said that 'an army marches on its stomach', but who knew that soldiers from across the world would be powered by such a diverse range of foodstuffs including Tabasco sauce for the British and a shot of alcohol for the Italian troops? Operational ration packs including canned, freeze-dried or pre-cooked food are dished out to many servicemen and women on the front line, providing enough food to get them through 24 hours and millions of pounds have been spent on making them as appetising as possible, with gadgets including heaters to warm the meals also included in the...

<p>Abortion proponents push for easy access to abortion, deemphasizing its after-affects to the point they absolutely refuse to acknowledge post-abortion depression, which further incapacitates those actually living through it.</p> <p>This is such a tragedy. Charlotte Dawson, RIP, was born in New Zealand but achieved fame in Australia as a model and a judge on Australia’s Next Top Model.</p>

Twenty journalists, including four foreigners, have gone on trial in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. They face charges including aiding a terrorist organisation - as the Muslim Brotherhood was designated in December - and endangering national security. Eight defendants are in custody, among them al-Jazeera's Egyptian-Canadian bureau chief Mohamed Adel Fahmy and Australian correspondent Peter Greste.

Australia has confirmed that it will acquire eight Boeing P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, with the first examples to be delivered in 2017. The aircraft will be fully operational by 2021, says prime minister Tony Abbott in a statement. His statement pegs the deal’s value at A$4 billion ($3.6 billion). “These state-of-the-art aircraft will dramatically boost Australia’s ability to monitor its maritime approaches and patrol over 2.5 million square kilometres of our marine jurisdiction – an area equating to nearly 4 per cent of the world’s oceans,” says Abbott. Canberra has also approved an option for an additional four examples....

The parents of Cameron Stewart Baird, the Special Forces commando killed in action in Afghanistan last year, received the Victoria Cross (VC) on his behalf today. Governor-General Quentin Bryce presented the medal at a ceremony in Canberra that paid tribute to the life and bravery of the Tasmanian-born corporal. Corporal Baird, 32, from the Sydney-based 2 Commando Regiment, was shot dead during a battle to take an insurgent-held compound in the village of Ghawchak, in Afghanistan's Khod Valley, on June 22 last year. He is the 100th (Australian) recipient of the medal, the highest award presented for bravery during wartime.

LAST year, during a naval exercise off California, a dummy missile fired at an American warship roared through the cruiser’s defences and slammed into its superstructure, starting a fire and injuring two sailors. The dummy missile, with no warhead fitted, punched a hole half a metre wide in the port side of the guided missile cruiser USS Chancellorville, which returned to port for repairs. When a similar American missile was fired at the Australian frigate HMAS Perth in an exercise off Hawaii, the Australian crew shot it down using technology developed in the suburbs of Canberra and Adelaide. The Australian...