Free Republic

A pregnant journalist was recovering in hospital last night after a pro-Kremlin political leader in Russia told two male aides to ‘violently rape’ her. Nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky launched his extraordinary tirade after reporter Stella Dubovitskaya asked him an innocuous question about sanctions against Ukraine. The 67-year-old MP’s outburst came before a deadly gunfight at a Ukraine checkpoint controlled by pro-Russian separatists tore apart an Easter truce.

A museum dedicated to the victims of U.S. and NATO military aggression has opened in the North Caucasus city of Vladikavkaz. The exhibition, which is housed at the National Scientific Library of North Ossetia, opened Thursday to visitors over the age of 16, and displays artifacts "attesting" to "the state terrorism" of Western nations, organizer Vyacheslav Lagkuyev said, Interfax reported. Among the themes of the exhibition are the conflicts in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan — each of which has its own display in the museum. The U.S. war in Vietnam and the NATO bombing of Serbia are also detailed in...

WASHINGTON -- This may shock you. During the eight years of the Reagan Presidency I was not his biggest fan. I looked not so much at what he accomplished but what he didn't accomplish. My expectations were that government would get smaller under President Reagan. It didn't. I was disappointed. I looked at the agencies left in place -- the National Endowment for the Arts, the Legal Services Corporation (which has done so much damage) and A.I.D. -- and I felt that the Reagan Administration did not make a real effort to curtail them. I was disappointed. Also there was...

The United Nations Security Council will meet for an emergency session to discuss the escalating crisis in eastern Ukraine at 8 p.m. ET on Sunday. "The Council will meet at 8 at Russia's request," a council diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity. Another diplomat said negotiations were under way on Ukraine's participation. Russia's Foreign Ministry said earlier it would put an urgent discussion of the situation in Ukraine on the Security Council agenda, calling Kiev's plans to mobilize the army to put down a rebellion by pro-Russian militants in eastern Ukraine "criminal".

A group of MPs representing both majority and opposition parties have asked Russia’s Prosecutor General to probe the events leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union. They view possible action against former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. In the letter, signed by two MPs from United Russia, two Communists and one representative of populist nationalist party LDPR, the parliamentarians claim that at the March 1991referendum the majority of Soviet citizens voted that their country should remain united, and therefore the actions of several top officials that led to USSR breakup were unlawful. They also noted that in November 1991 the...

Satellite images which appear to show Russian warplanes, combat helicopters, armour, artillery near Ukraine's border have been released. The organisation's top military commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove said a probable airborne or special forces brigade deployement could also be spotted on the pictures as Russian armed forces maintained their presence the area's military bases.

In June 1981, the Soviet Union began building a huge, nuclear-powered reconnaissance ship specifically designed to sail thousands of miles to the U.S. missile test site at the remote Kwajalein Atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There, the vessel would sit for months, hoovering up electronic data in order to determine what America’s most secretive weapons could do. But the spy ship Ural, completed in May 1983, sailed only once—from the Baltic shipyard where she was built to her home port of Vladivostok—and never went anywhere near Kwajalein. Hobbled by faulty hardware, cursed with bad luck and starved...

Earlier today, Garry Kasparov accused NBC Sports of pushing Putin propaganda. This latest downplay of decades of communism probably won’t make Kasparov change his mind about the network that’s airing the Sochi Olympics. Many viewers of the opening ceremony couldn’t believe their ears when the narrator referred to decades of Soviet-era communism as a “pivotal experiment”:

KIEV, Ukraine –  More than 100,000 demonstrators chased away police to rally in the center of Ukraine's capital on Sunday, defying a government ban on protests on Independence Square, in the biggest show of anger over the president's refusal to sign an agreement with the European Union. Thousands of demonstrators tried to storm the nearby presidential administration building, but were driven back by riot police using tear gas and flash grenades, which produce a loud bang but are not intended to cause injury. The standoff continued, with more demonstrators arriving. The protest was led by prominent opposition politicians, who...

Four Ronald Reagan historians have slammed the portrayal of former President Reagan in the movie "The Butler," saying that the 40th president's "attitudes toward race" as shown in the movie are inaccurate. They begin the article, "What 'The Butler' gets wrong about Ronald Reagan and race," published in The Washington Post, by recounting instances in Reagan's life when he decried racism and took a stand for the African-American community. While serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild, for example, "Ronald Reagan called upon the entertainment industry to provide greater employment for black actors." That position was controversial at the...

Putin talks NSA, Syria, Iran, and Drones in Exclusive Video

OK..it's sort of a slow news day. All anyone wants to talk about is Megyn Kelly getting the 9pm slot at FOX News. So, rejoicing as I am in the completely unexpected success of my beloved Red Sox this season, and hopeful of pissing off as many Yankees fans as possible, I thought I'd start a baseball thread.

Using Dark Force to Maintain Sith Power DESERT HOT SPRINGS, CA – Sometimes a casual remark is all that is needed to reveal what a person really thinks. Kinda like the way liquor will loosen a man’s lips. Obviously, the city of Desert Hot Springs is not the evil empire. But read the city manager’s emails and its obvious he thinks it is. This is no case of sloppy sentence construction. In an email to a private citizen Rick Daniels is caught politicking, using city equipment and on city time. The email to [Name Withheld] was attempting to sway this...

If President Obama is truly the "Reagan of the Left," then it's only fair to ask: What does Obama consider "evil" and an "evil empire?" After all, since Obama's second inaugural address, commentators both left and right have been busily comparing Obama to Reagan. The Daily Beast: "[Obama] wants to do for liberalism...what Ronald Reagan did for conservatism." E.J. Dionne: "Obama's role model is Ronald Reagan[.]" Charles Krauthammer: "[Obama's] second inaugural address... is his self-proclamation as the Reagan of the Left." Besides noting the stark ideological differences of each president, most pundits agreed that Obama shares with Reagan not just...

President Vladimir Putin signed a controversial measure banning the adoption of Russian children by U.S. families, the Kremlin said Friday. The action could affect hundreds of American families seeking to adopt. Americans adopted close to 1,000 Russian children last year, according to U.S. State Department figures.

The New York Yankees' World Series hopes may have just taken a hit, as shortstop Derek Jeter fractured his left ankle in game one of the American League Championship Series against the Detroit Tigers on Saturday night. Jeter suffered the injury while fielding a ground ball in the top of the 12th inning, with New York trailing 5-4. He immediately went down in pain, staying face down momentarily.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry's over the weekend condemned a U.S. State Department statement that said Washington was closely monitoring territorial disputes in the South China Sea, and that China's establishment of a military garrison for the area risks "further escalating tensions in the region". The mosaic of rival territorial claims in the South China Sea has become Asia's worst potential military flashpoint. Beijing has said its disputes with Vietnam, the Philippines and other southeast Asian claimants should be settled one-on-one, and it has bristled at U.S. backing for a multilateral approach to solving the overlapping claims. "We are entirely entitled...

During his visit to Vietnam in early June, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta displayed eagerness to have the U.S. military return to the bases it once occupied at Cam Ranh Bay. The Pentagon lost its foothold there when South Vietnam fell to communist forces in the mid-1970s, and military officials have longed to regain access. Once Washington established diplomatic relations with Hanoi in 1995, that objective seemed to be an attainable goal rather than a hopeless wish. The Vietnamese government, worried about China’s growing power in the region, may now be receptive to a renewed U.S. military presence at...

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — The Obama administration pressed Beijing on Thursday to accept a code of conduct for resolving territorial disputes in the resource-rich South China Sea, a difficult U.S. mediation effort that has faced resistance from the communist government. It has endeared the U.S., however, to once-hostile countries in Southeast Asia. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' annual conference. Sitting across from each other at a long table in a grand hall with chandeliers, Clinton stressed the different ways Washington...

China recently declared that most of the 3.5 million square kilometers South China Sea had become Sansha, the latest Chinese city. The area China claims is within the city limits comprises over two million square kilometers of largely open ocean and a few hundred tiny islands and reefs, many of which are only above water during low tide. Sansha is administered from one of the Paracel islands (Woody Island). The U.S. government responded by asking that China obey international law. China currently claims South China Sea areas close to neighboring nations, except for areas about 22 kilometers from the coast....