Free Republic

President Barack Obama’s administration is reportedly considering putting some muscle behind its opposition to new settlement construction by Israelis in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. According to reports, the administration is weighing the possibility of imposing sanctions on the Israeli government. “Senior Israeli officials said that White House officials held a classified discussion a few weeks ago about the possibility of taking active measures against the settlements,” Haaretz reported on Thursday. When confronted with this rumor, administration officials did not deny it. “A few senior American officials approached by Haaretz did not deny this, but refused to disclose...

Members of Congress are demanding that President Obama come clean about controversial reports that he is considering leveling sanctions on Israel, according to a letter sent Friday afternoon by lawmakers to the White House. The Obama administration has found itself engulfed in controversy since reports emerged Thursday that the White House and State Department had met in secret to strategize about imposing sanctions on Israel for its continued building of houses in contested Jerusalem neighborhoods. State Department and White House officials have continued to dodge questions from reporters on the matter, maintaining that they will neither confirm nor deny the...

For the first time in history, an American president is considering slapping sanctions on the state of Israel.  The reason?  Israel is building new housing on its own land. Washington Free Beacon: The classified meetings were reportedly held several weeks ago and included officials from both the State Department and White House, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, which first reported on the meetings. The possibility of sanctioning Israel for its ongoing construction sends a signal that the Obama administration is willing to go further in its denunciations of Israel then any previous White House. At the same time, the...

The Obama administration is refusing to discuss reports that emerged early Thursday claiming that the White House is considering imposing sanctions on Israel for continuing construction on Jewish homes in Jerusalem. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf dodged several questions on Thursday when confronted with reports that the administration had held secret internal meetings to discuss taking action against Israel for its ongoing building in East Jerusalem. The classified meetings were reportedly held several weeks ago and included officials from both the State Department and White House, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, which first reported on the meetings. The possibility...

The Obama administration is refusing to discuss reports that emerged early Thursday claiming that the White House is considering imposing sanctions on Israel for continuing construction on Jewish homes in Jerusalem. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf dodged several questions on Thursday when confronted with reports that the administration had held secret internal meetings to discuss taking action against Israel for its ongoing building in East Jerusalem. The classified meetings were reportedly held several weeks ago and included officials from both the State Department and White House, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, which first reported on the meetings. The possibility...

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-100-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored. The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power...

Sweden's minority, center-left government teetered on the brink of collapse on Tuesday after just two months in office when a far-right party announced it would vote against the 2015 budget, effectively dooming it to defeat. The anti-immigration Sweden Democrat party, which holds the balance of power in parliament, said it would support an alternative budget proposed by the center-right Alliance opposition bloc, leaving the government isolated.

A political crisis erupted in Sweden Tuesday when the extreme-right Sweden Democrats, the country's third largest party, vowed to block the new leftist-green government's budget, a move that could trigger new elections. "The Sweden Democrats will work towards taking down every government and every budget proposal that supports increased immigration at today's levels," the populist party's acting leader Mattias Karlsson said in a press conference. The party -- which holds the balance of power in parliament -- said its decision was in reaction to the minority government's pro-immigration policies. It pledged instead to support a rival budget proposal from the...

The left-of-center government of Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has been forced to call new elections less than three months after taking office.  Unable to pass a budget through the Rikstag (parliament), Lofven faced a choice of either resigning or calling snap elections, slated for March 22, 2015.  Although the budget was the trigger, most observers believe that immigration policy is at the root of the fall.  David Crouch of the U.K. Guardian explains: Sweden’s far right plunged the country into unprecedented political upheaval on Wednesday by forcing the government to gamble on fresh elections in the spring after the...

Britain is already a lame duck within the EU’s internal governing structure and is losing influence “by the day” in Brussels, even before David Cameron holds a referendum on withdrawal. This self-isolation has upset the European balance of power in profound ways, leading ineluctably to German hegemony and a unipolar system centered on Berlin. […] Such is the verdict of Roman Prodi, the former Italian premier and ex-president of the European Commission. […] “Germany is exercising an almost solitary power. The new presidents of the Commission and the Council are men who rotate around Germany’s orbit, and above all there...

Password guessing The U.S. intelligence community has launched a multi-year research project to develop a superconducting computer, awarding its first contracts to three major technology companies.IBM, Raytheon BBN and Northrop Grumman won the contracts, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity said Wednesday, without disclosing financial details.If it works, the Cryogenic Computer Complexity (C3) program could lead to a new generation of superconducting supercomputers."The energy demands of today's high-performance computers have become a critical challenge for the Intelligence Community that the C3 program aims to address," IARPA said in a statement. Such computers use massive amounts of energy.Competition from Europe, Japan...

The EU's top human rights court on Thursday ordered France to pay thousands of euros to Somali pirates who attacked French ships for "violating their rights" by holding them an additional 48 hours before taking them before a judge. The Somali pirates were apprehended on the high seas by the French army on two separate occasions in 2008 and taken back to France for trial. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said that French authorities should have brought the pirates before a judge "without delay" when they arrived on French territory after being held at sea. The EU’s top...

Mr Gorbachev said there was still time to defuse the standoff between Moscow and the West, as he and his western counterparts had done during the Perestroika period. “Now there are once again signs of a Cold War,” he said in an interview with Tass, the state-owned news agency. “This process can and must be stopped. After all, we did it in the 1980s. We opted for de-escalation, for the reunification (of Germany). And back then it was a lot tougher than now. So we could do it again.” Mr Gorbachev, 83, who has run a civil society foundation since...

PUNGESTI, Romania — Vlasa Mircia, the mayor of this destitute village in eastern Romania, thought he had struck it rich when the American energy giant Chevron showed up here last year and leased a plot of land he owned for exploratory shale gas drilling. But the encounter between big business and rural Romania quickly turned into a nightmare. The village became a magnet for activists from across the country opposed to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Violent clashes broke out between the police and protesters. The mayor, one of the few locals who sided openly with Chevron, was run out of...

The Russian markets opened on December 1 to a catastrophe. The price of Brent crude oil fell below $70 a barrel, causing the ruble to drop heavily yet again. There had been some signs that the Russian currency was beginning to claw back some of the ground lost this year, but another step-down in the price of oil to below the psychologically important $70 level kicked the legs out from under the nascent rally. Against the dollar, the ruble exchange rate had dropped 9.3% by midday, taking it below the key RUB50/$ for the first time. You’d have to go...

Katya Golubkova and Vladimir Soldatkin, Reuters November 27, 2014MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's most powerful oil official Igor Sechin said in an interview with an Austrian newspaper that oil prices could fall below $60 by mid-way through next year. Sechin, chief executive of Rosneft, Russia's largest oil producer, also said U.S. oil production would fall after 2025 and that an oil market council should be created to monitor prices, the same day the OPEC cartel met in Vienna and left its output targets unchanged. "We expect that a fall in the price to $60 and below is possible, but only during...

Every central banker knows the importance of trust. In a world of fiat currencies--bank notes backed by nothing other than more bank notes--shoppers and firms must have confidence that cash will retain its value in order to hold it. That trust is being tested in Russia, where the rouble has fallen 23% against the dollar in the past three months. Such a plunge inevitably brings inflation in the form of more expensive imports, a worry given that consumer prices in Russia are already rising at over 8% a year. Yet in recent weeks there have been creeping signs of something...

Energy-rich Russia's currency extended Friday its slide into record low territory and the government lowered its crucial oil price forecast in the wake of OPEC's decision to leave its output target unchanged. The ruble shed another 1.6 percent against the dollar and stood near the 49.35 mark in evening trading on the Moscow Exchange. It gave up the same percentage point and was valued at almost 61.55 against the euro -- also a historic low. The beleaguered currency has been trying to find its footing ever since the OPEC cartel decided on Thursday evening not to cut back production to...

Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Turkey on Monday will have trade and energy issues at its heart, but is not expected to bridge deep differences over Syria and Crimea. The two issues have tested a relationship usually kept on track by mutual economic advantage: Russia is Turkey's main energy supplier, and Ankara is Moscow's second biggest trade partner after Germany. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has strongly criticized Russia's backing for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And Turkey has strong links with the Muslim Tatar population of Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in March. With Erdogan and Putin set to...

Technology is cheaper and West doesn’t use oil to fund a welfare state Give Saudi Arabia credit: Whoever sets oil-production policy for the desert kingdom has guts. Unfortunately, the sheiks have made what’s likely to become a sucker’s bet.You know this part already, but the 12-nation Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries last week declined to cut production, sending Brent crude oil futures tumbling to their cheapest point since 2009. The Saudis appear to be spoiling for a fight, trying to find out exactly how cheap oil must be to force surging U.S. shale-oil production to seize up like an...