Free Republic

Actor Michael Douglas is speaking out about an ugly confrontation with a jerk who gave his 14-year-old son “his first taste of anti-Semitism.” The two-time Oscar winner revealed the incident happened last year when he and wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, took their two young children on a family vacation to Europe. “During our stay at a hotel, our son Dylan went to the swimming pool. A short time later he came running back to the room, upset. A man at the pool had started hurling insults at him,” Douglas wrote in an op-ed piece in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. The 71-year-old...

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

On Thursday, the European Parliament voted to approve its “Annual Report on Human Rights and Democracy in the World 2013 and the European Union’s policy on the matter,” which declares both same-sex marriage and abortion to be fundamental human rights. The Parliament, which enjoys freedom from voter accountability, continues its legislative activism, pushing member states toward more liberal positions on virtually every social issue, and slinging loose language such as “homophobia.” The report says it is “regrettable” that women and girls’ bodies “still remain an ideological battleground,” and calls for the EU and its member states to recognize the inalienable...

Russia's quick and dirty annexation of Crimea, carried out under the watchful gaze of barely disguised Russian special forces, remains a bitter bone of contention a year on. By the West it is regarded as an act of unilateral Russian aggression that triggered a wider Ukrainian crisis. The Russian narrative remains that it was a justified reaction to the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's president by pro-Western mobs in Kiev, and the perceived threat that a new Ukrainian government could nationalize its historic naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

Europe as an entity and as an ideal is more needed than ever. The individual countries of Europe need the collective power of Europe to assert their interests, influence and values. Yet, as the impasse over Greece confirms, the continent is in crisis. Many assume that some form of compromise is in the offing. Debt can somehow be kicked down the road. The Greek government will bend; the troika of creditors — the EU, ECB and International Monetary Fund — will bend and somewhere in the middle the two will come together. I do not see it. Greece is part...

I was in Brussels last week at a meeting of European fieldsports body, The European Federation of Associations for Hunting & Conservation (FACE), of which the Countryside Alliance is an active member. I am honoured to be FACE’s UK Chairman and to represent British sporting interests at the highest level and I can feed back some interesting points from the meeting.

"Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus," wrote Robert Kagan in "Of Paradise and Power," published in 2003, just as the United States went into Iraq. Americans, he wrote, see themselves in "an anarchic Hobbesian world," where security and a liberal order depend on military might, while Europe is "moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation." A dozen years later, Europeans and not a few Americans have been asking how well Mars has been working out for America. But Americans and an increasing number of Europeans should also be...

The 28 EU member states gave their final approval to new rules regarding plastic bags on Monday. Member states are required to reduce the use of flimsy plastic bags by 80 percent by 2025. However, they are given a choice on how to achieve that goal. According to the new rules, EU countries are permitted to introduce extra taxes on plastic bags or even ban single-use plastic bags on a national level.Margrete Auken, a Danish Member of the European Parliament from the Green Party, pushed the new legislation through and called the approval “a historic breakthrough in tackling the pervasive...

On the morning of March 20, 2015, a solar eclipse will pass over all of Europe, visible from Turkey to Greenland. A decade ago, that probably wouldn't have mattered to anyone except people who love astronomy (and all the schoolchildren building pinhole cameras to observe the sun.) But now, three percent of Europe's electricity grid comes from solar power, making the March event a proving ground for this renewable energy technology. In the span of two hours, 35,000 megawatts of electricity will fade from the grid, and then return. To put that in perspective, a typical coal plant in the...

Austria's parliament has passed a law banning foreign sources of financing to Muslim organisations and requiring imams to be able to speak German, in a move closely watched by other European nations facing growing problems with radical Islam. The text aims to promote what conservative Integration Minister Sebastian Kurz calls an "Islam of European character" by muting the influence of foreign Muslim nations and organizations, and offering Austrian Muslims a mix of increased rights and obligations in practising their faith in the central European country. But the law has generated opposition from several quarters, including Austrian Muslim groups that call...

Japanese motorcycle giant Yamaha will join the four-wheel market by launching small cars in Europe as early as 2019 to meet rising demand for energy-efficient vehicles, a company official said Friday. The firm has been mulling manufacturing four-wheel vehicles for years, exhibiting a prototype 1,000 cc engine car and an electric-car battery at the 2013 Tokyo Motor Show. Yamaha is planning to build car plants in Europe to sell them in the region before 2020, the company spokesman said, without elaborating. "As small cars are already prevalent in Europe, our first car launch will be (there)," he said. "But we...

Internationally-recognized pop music sensation Madonna on Thursday said anti-Semitism and "growing intolerance" in Europe, and especially in France, has reached a level that "feels like Nazi Germany." During an interview with Europe 1 radio that is set to be aired in-full on Friday morning, the pop diva said "anti-Semitism is at an all-time high," in France and Europe. Setting aside a fall off stage during her performance at a Brit Awards, the 56-year-old star expressed her concern over the "climate of extreme fear" that has surfaced across the European continent, and which she likened to the era during the rise...

Heck, who cares if the "neighbors" in question have a knife to your throat. Bill Nye, foppish self-proclaimed Science Guy, appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher this past Friday night and demonstrated why he ought to stick with his true vocation as a global-warming bedwetter. During a panel discussion on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's suggestion that European Jews fearful for their lives should come "home" to Israel, Nye mocked the idea and blamed Jews for not being friendlier to predators who consider it a holy rite to slaughter them

Bardot has written: “I am fed up with being under the thumb of this population which is destroying us, destroying our country.”

The kippah is prohibited all over Europe. It is the symbol of a continent that is inexorably emptying itself of its Jews. Wearing a Jewish yarmulke is a revolutionary revolt in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Malmö and Brussels. Europe has lost half of its Jewish population, not since the Holocaust, but since 1960 to the present. Just stand in front of the the famous Portuguese synagogue of Amsterdam, built in 1675, in a period in which the Netherlands welcomed the Jews from all over the world, and you will understand what it means being a Jew in Europe. The police will...

ISIS is planning to use Libya as a “gateway” to Europe and has raised the possibility of storming southern European cities to cause “pandemonium” or closing international shipping lines in the Mediterranean Sea. This according to documents released by ISIS supporters and propagandists and obtained by the Quilliam Foundation, a Britain-based think tank that focuses on counter-extremism. The purported ISIS documents, obtained and reviewed by WND, received widespread news coverage. However, some of the more sensational possibilities described within the pages were largely overlooked. The documents indicate ISIS views Libya as not just fertile ground for a headquarters but as...

The headline in the UK newspaper, The Independent, says it all: Libya civil war: Italy ready to train anti-Isis forces to protect its own borders. Europe is getting scared of ISIS, especially Italy, whose southern islands are only 185 miles from the coast of Libya, where ISIS recently beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians on the beach. It doesn’t help that ISIS recently threatened to conquer Rome. With the historical record showing that ISIS typically lives up to its threats, I can understand why the Italians are worried. Couple the threat of being conquered with the reality of terrorists living amongst you...

Even the Obammyboppers of an otherwise adoring media seem to understand his big conference on "countering violent extremism" is a bit of a joke. Undeterred, President Obama has unveiled the summit's bumper sticker: "Religions Don't Kill People. People Killed People." It got him through to the next round in the middle-school debate-team county quarter-finals, so who knows the impact it will have on the Islamic State. I'm thrilled to discover that my tax dollars are now going to fund something called the International Center for Excellence in Countering Violent Extremism. Seriously. It's in Dubai. But perhaps we can open a...

A very well written comment in the Economist refers to the Gun Watch article on the comparison of European Murder rates to those in the United States.   It is so well done that I will quote it in its entirety.  From the Economist comments section, kudos to guest-sosaoel: I'll give the author credit for trying to be reasonable as well as thanks for having the integrity to try shooting for himself. However I must correct a number of glaring errors. We oppose gun control because it has never been credibly demonstrated to work. Ever. Yes, there have been some...

<p>FORT STEWART, Georgia — The U.S. Army is sending more than 3,000 Fort Stewart soldiers to Europe to help assure American allies in the region and deter Russian aggression in Ukraine.</p> <p>Officials at the southeast Georgia Army post said Tuesday that soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division will deploy next month.</p>