Free Republic

Britain is to blame for illegal immigrant problems on the French side of the Channel because of its lack of commitment to the “European project”, the mayor of Calais has claimed. Natacha Bouchart accused the British government of “despising” the native population of Calais and said the UK should be forced to sign up to Europe’s open borders agreement. Miss Bouchart intensified her war of words with Britain as the French port struggles to cope with thousands of illegal immigrants, mainly from African countries, who have gathered in the town to attempt illegal crossings into this country. She repeated previous...

France's Conservative UMP Party and its allies appear to have come first in the final round of departmental elections. The UMP, led by former President Nicolas Sarkozy, appeared set to secure at least 65 local councils, exit polls suggested, up from 41. Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front also appeared to have made gains, while the ruling Socialists and their allies may lose about 30 departments. These elections are seen as a test case ahead of 2017's presidential election. French Prime Minister Manual Valls admitted it was "incontestable" that the Socialist Party had lost ground.

The eurozone is "untenable" in its current form and cannot survive unless countries are prepared to cede sovereignty and become a "United States of Europe", the manager of the world's biggest bond fund has warned. The Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) said that while the bloc was likely to stay together in the medium term, with Greece remaining in the eurozone, the single currency could not survive if countries did not move closer together.

NEW evidence has emerged that the Germanwings Airbus A320 that crashed in southern France yesterday dived for 18 minutes, and not eight as previously thought. France’s Transport Minister Segolene Royal said this morning that the crew had stopped responding to radio messages at 10.30am, with the plane flying over the Mediterranean sea. The aircraft crashed into the side of a mountain in the French Alps at 10.48am, suggesting that the plane had descended from 28,000ft to 2,000ft without signalling an emergency. Ms Royal added that events in the cockpit in the 60 seconds between 10.30am and 10.31am were ‘crucial’ and...

"Hundreds of Polish residents took to the streets to give a hero's welcome to a convoy of U.S. troops who are driving through eastern Europe and deliver a damning message to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Children climbed on to Stryker armoured vehicles and even offered souvenirs to the troops, who stopped to pose for pictures in the main square of the eastern Polish town of Bialystok. Meanwhile other residents lined the roads and applauded as the troops from the 3rd Squadron of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment of the American Army passed by." "The scenes mirrored those in France after Paris...

Mike Bird March 24, 2015Things are finally looking up again for Europe. The pace of the eurozone's sudden improvement across a bundle of economic indicators has shocked analysts since the turn of the year. But there has been a rapid turnaround from gloom to boom in just a few months. What's going on? As recently as Autumn, everyone thought Europe was bogged down in a protracted perma-recession, characterised by deflation, lack of GDP growth and continent-wide political paralysis. Here's what's going on, and why. (snip)

It was just over a month ago that I appeared on the Fox Business Network and recommended that U.S. investors put their money to work in Europe. To say that my recommendation was greeted with skepticism would be an understatement. After all, as the host pointed out, Europe was on the verge of bailing out a Marxist government in the form of Greece. And my closing recommendation to invest in Germany was greeted with a roll of the eyes and a barely stifled yawn. Fast forward one month, and Germany is the hottest market on the planet. The German DAX...

For decades, the American left has contrasted the U.S.’s allegedly hidebound approach to economic and social issues with the enlightened way nations like France, Germany, and Sweden typically handle those matters. It’s a framework that seems to be falling apart, according to New York magazine’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells, mostly as a result of Europe’s overall shift to the right. “The [European] continent is no longer a subject of liberal pining and aspiration,” wrote Wallace-Wells in a Tuesday article. “Europe and Israel have…been examples of alternative ways in which American society might be arranged, if it were less individualistic, more communal. But...

KALISZ, Poland — For evidence of how much President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has jangled nerves and provoked anxiety across Eastern Europe, look no farther than the drill held the other day by the Shooters Association. The paramilitary group, like more than 100 others in Poland, has experienced a sharp spike in membership since Mr. Putin’s forces began meddling in neighboring Ukraine last year. Thirty students took an oath to defend Poland at all costs, joining nearly 200 other regional members of the association — young men and women, boys and girls — marching in formation around the perimeter...

"The prime minister will visit the Kremlin following an invitation from Russian President Vladimir Putin," a government source said without giving reasons for the change of date. Tsipras, a former Communist, has made no secret of seeking closer ties to Russia at a time when Moscow is at loggerheads with the European Union over the conflict in Ukraine. A number of Greek officials have openly broached the prospect of Athens turning to Russia or China for financial assistance if loan talks with the EU end in failure.

For half a century, memories of the Holocaust inoculated the Continent against overt anti-Semitism. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest in a mounting tide. Today, right-wing fascist strains of Jew-hatred are merging with a new threat from radicalized Islamists, confronting Europe with a crisis, and its Jews with an agonizing choice.

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...