Free Republic

Raúl Castro knows a sucker when he sees one. Having watched Barack Obama, the world’s worst negotiator, hand concession after concession to the mullahs of Iran, he is going for a big score in the current negotiations over resumption of diplomatic relations, at President Obama’s initiative. Far from being grateful that he has been handed huge plums, he is making ridiculous demands. (And given Obama’s track record, you can’t call them unrealistic.) Alastair Jamieson reports for NBC News: Cuban President Raul Castro has demanded that the United States hand back its Guantanamo Bay military base - an apparent bargaining tool...

Boko Haram jihadists have reportedly closed in on the Nigerian city of Maiduguri, which has an estimated population of two million, along with another 200,000 who are currently taking refuge within its borders. Residents have said that the Boko Haram terrorists warned them that they are readying “a big grave” for Maiduguri’s residents and that “there will be no mercy.” A local resident told the CBC regarding Boko Haram, “They kept saying they were chasing us so that we can all run into the big grave they are preparing for us in Maiduguri.”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has agreed to testify before the House Select Committee investigating the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, CNN reports. Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel’s Democratic ranking member, told CNN Tuesday that Clinton had agreed to testify before the committee late last year. “The chairman asked me back in September to inquire as to whether Secretary Clinton would testify,” Cummings said. “She immediately said she would and that she wanted to come in December, but if December did not work, she would come in January. She said, ‘I’ll do it,...

Haider Eid, an associate professor at al-Aqsa University in the Gaza Strip, who also has a blog with Al Jazeera, pre-recorded his remarks to the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Vancouver, Canada. Eid apologized for not being able to attend the convention:“Unfortunately, I have not been able to leave Gaza” for at least eight conferences. He even remarked that he “had to think twice about participating in your extremely important panel” at the MLA, which had less than a dozen people in the audience. He then blasted Israel, “Gaza has been under a medieval siege by apartheid Israel since...

The leader of Pakistani politico-religious party Jamaat-e Islami is claiming that the Western "extremist standpoint" on the freedom of news organizations to publish "blasphemous caricatures" of Islam's prophet Muhammad will ultimately lead to World War III. In addressing the thousands in attendance at a Friday protest over the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which publicized cartoons portraying Muhammad, the influential chief of the Jamaat-e Islami party, Sirajul Haq, demanded that the United Nations make laws designed to prevent the media and others from mocking religious personalities. Haq explained that the West's leniency and tolerance in dealing with those who mock...

The pilots of AirAsia Bhd. Flight 8501 cut power to a critical computer system that normally prevents planes from going out of control shortly before it plunged into the Java Sea.. The action appears to have helped trigger the events of Dec. 28, when the Airbus Group NV A320 plane climbed so abruptly that it lost lift and it began falling with warnings blaring in the cockpit.. The pilots had been attempting to deal with alerts about the flight augmentation computers, which control the A320’s rudder and also automatically prevent it from going too slow. After the initial attempts to...

Close to 300 Muslim students armed with iron bars and sticks attacked a Christian boys' school in northern Pakistan, reportedly in retaliation to French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo's controversial drawings of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. The attack left four Christians injured. "It is very sad that Islamic radicals attack Pakistani Christians because of Charlie Hebdo. Christians condemn the blasphemous cartoons. It is a shame that even after 67 years since the birth of Pakistan, Christians have not yet been considered Pakistani citizens, but are seen as 'Western allies,'" Nasir Saeed, director of the NGO Center for Legal Aid Assistance &...

The terrorist group known as Daesh, “Islamic State,” ISIS or ISIL has threatened to behead President Barack Obama and turn the United States into a Muslim province, installing sharia law and incorporating America into its fledgling caliphate. “Know, oh Obama, that we will reach America. Know also that we will cut off your head in the White House and transform America into a Muslim province,” said an ISIS fighter in a video obtained by MEMRI, before beheading a Kurdish soldier. The statement was delivered from a street in Mosul, Iraq, which ISIS fighters have taken and where U.S. Marines formerly...

Nick Kukich died last Monday. It may not mean much to you in the scheme of things, but it should. It should because Nick was part of the dwindling number of World War II veterans who went to war to defeat Nazism and Fascism in order to keep America strong, free and democratic. He was, in short, part of the Greatest Generation. Nick, who died in a nursing home in Delaware, was 99 years old and lived a full lif

A Greek politician who claimed that Jews “don’t pay taxes” has been elected as Defense Minister, Greek media reported Thursday night, amid already-high concerns over rising anti-Semitism in the country that is only expected to worsen following recent elections. Panos Kammenos of the Syriza party made the comments during an interview with Greek Ant-1 TV, according to New Greek TV, on December 18—just days after the drive-by shooting at the Israeli Embassy in Athens. Local Jewish leaders were outraged at the comments. “It is a disgrace that a leader of a party in Parliament does not know that Greek Jews...

The eurozone experienced negative inflation for the second month in a row, according to a flash estimate published today (30 January) by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical office. Inflation is expected to be at −0.6%, with consumer prices falling further than economists had forecast. The fall represents the biggest decline in prices in the history of the euro. […] The drop was driven by the fall in energy prices (−8.9%, compared with −6.3% in December). […] The deflationary spiral comes as Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), is trying to tackle deflation with a policy of...

Russia's top general said on Friday a strong nuclear arsenal will ensure military superiority over the West as Moscow forges ahead with a multi-billion dollar plan to modernize its forces by 2020. Russia, facing a likely recession because of a fall in oil prices and sanctions over Ukraine, must deal with new forms of Western aggression, including economic confrontation, said Chief of the Armed Forces General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov.

TEL AVIV – A consulting firm almost entirely composed of former staffers of President Obama’s re-election campaign has been hired to run an election effort in Israel aimed at defeating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The conservative blogosphere is reporting Jeremy Bird, national field director for Obama’s 2012 campaign, is now working for a new non-profit group, V15, that is running an effort to defeat Netanyahu in the upcoming election. A closer look at Bird’s consulting firm as well as its working relationship with the Israeli groups finds he is just one of scores of former senior Obama election campaign staffers...

You say "Jeb Bush," Thomas Roberts says "the Kouachi brothers." It's got to be one of the strangest political Rorschach test results of all time. MSNBC's Roberts believes that Jeb Bush would have a "big onus" around his neck if he runs for president "because if we hear 'Bush' we're automatically going to go to people bringing up the Kouachi brothers and their photos of Abu Ghraib that radicalized them about Iraq." View the video here.

Special agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and officers with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have seized since October illegally imported Chinese honey valued at $2.45 million destined for U.S. consumers. HSI and CBP have stepped up efforts regarding commercial fraud investigations that focus on U.S. economic, and health and safety interests. Anti-dumping schemes create a divergent market that negatively affects legitimate businesses.

In exile in Argentina, the world’s most wanted man was writing a defense of the indefensible. He rejected “so-called Western culture” whose bible “expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.”Instead he looked to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” whose good opinion of his crimes he wanted.

Top Pentagon officials and a Denis Kucinich do distrusted Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, they opened their own dialogue with the Libyan regime. Their communications with the Gadhafi regime was an effort to avoid war. Tapes of conversations between them and the Gadhafi regime were found in Tripoli. The authenticity of the tapes have been verified by the participants on the tapes reveal confidential conversations with Gadhafi’s son and another top official in Libya. The tapes have been reviewed by the Washington Times. The tapes show that in unfiltered conversations with top Libyan leaders, that criticisms of Hillary were...

It is time to attempt that hardest of things—to see ourselves for who we are, to see what it is we are doing and what is being done to us. Two things prompt the thought. We have the latest news on Washington’s confrontation with Russia, and we have a newly precipitous decline in the national conversation on this crisis. In my estimation, we reach dangerous new lows in both respects. It is always difficult for the living to see themselves as suspended in history. Being up against the rock face of events, being the stuff of which events are made,...

A German carnival has dropped plans to build a "Charlie Hebdo" float with a cartoonist forcing a pencil into the barrel of a terrorist's gun, after receiving messages from locals worried about safety if the float went on show. * snip * The Charlie Hebdo-inspired float had been chosen through an Internet vote.

Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli. The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials’ unfiltered conversations with Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community’s...