Free Republic

There were 5,700 new cases of female genital mutilation recorded in England in 2015-16, the first annual statistics show. The figures, published on Thursday by the Health and Social Care Information Centre and covering the period of April 2015 to March 2016, show that in 18 cases the practice had been undertaken in the UK. The age group for which FGM was most common was five- to nine-year-olds, accounting for 43% of the total number of cases where the age at the time of being cut was known. In all there were 8,660 attendances where FGM was identified or a...

Turkish lawmakers convened Thursday to endorse sweeping new powers for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that would allow him to expand a crackdown in the wake of last week's failed coup. The 550-member parliament is set to approve Erdogan's request for a three-month state of emergency. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party account for 317 members in the chamber. In an address to the nation late Wednesday, Erdogan announced a Cabinet decision to seek the additional powers, saying the state of emergency would give the government the tools to rid the military of the "virus" of subversion.

Miss Turkey 2006 has been found guilty for sharing a poem that insulted Turkish President Erdogan. Erdogan’s dictatorship continues to crack down on potential threats to the Turkish state. This time, the dangerous Miss Turkey 2006 (27-year-old Merve Buyuksarac) has been found guilty for sharing a poem that insulted Sultan Erdogan. The Istanbul court gave Miss Turkey a suspended sentence of 14 months for “publicly insulting” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on condition that she does not insult the Sultan again within the next five years. Merve Buyuksarac is the latest of over 2,000 defamation cases President Erdogan has filed in...

Brazil's federal police today arrested 10 people and smashed a network allied to ISIS that was preparing 'acts of terrorism' at next month's Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. President Michel Temer has called an emergency cabinet meeting and Justice Minister Alexandre de Moraes said the operation spanned nine states across Brazil, although the arrests were made in the southern states of Sao Paulo and Parana. A court in Parana said there were indications the group was planning to use weapons to launch attacks similar to the Paris atrocities in November last year. Earlier this month Mr Moraes said a jihadist...

In Secondhand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it’s like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012, Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and contrived media accounts, giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians who still carry memories of oppression, terror, famine, massacres—but also of pride in their country, hope for the future, and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to...

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham urged Donald Trump to clarify his position on defending European allies after a New York Times article quoted the GOP presidential nominee as not fully supportive of the NATO alliance treaty. “Statements like these make the world more dangerous and the United States less safe,” Graham, R-S.C., said this morning. “I can only imagine how our allies in NATO, particularly the Balkan states must feel after reading these comments from Mr. Trump,” Graham said. “I’m 100 percent certain how Russian President Putin feels – he’s a very happy man.” Trump, in a New York Times interview...

TEL AVIV – Confronting the U.S. is the only choice Iran has left, Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani warned Wednesday. The remarks came following legislation proposed by U.S. opponents to the Iran deal to further sanction the Islamic Republic, and the UN’s first bi-annual report, which said that Iran was not following the “spirit” of the nuclear agreement signed last year by continuing ballistic missile tests. “Majlis (Iranian Parliament), utterly regretting the UN chief’s move, is warning the US administration and its House of Representatives and Senate that injurious measures against the nuclear agreement have reached such a point that...

Following a brutal attack on a German train on July 18 by an ax- and knife-wielding teenager who was an Afghan refugee, the Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attack. Four people were injured in the attack, one critically. The attacker, identified in an ISIS video as Muhammad Riyad, reportedly shouted the Islamist slogan “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) during the assault, which took place in the German city of Wurzburg. The ISIS-linked online Amaq news agency said Riyad was an ISIS “fighter.” The Amaq statement said: The perpetrator of the stabbing attack in Germany was one of the...

Under the guise of fighting “violence against children,” the Obama administration has joined forces with socalist foreign regimes and various United Nations agencies in a “global partnership” to wage war on parental rights. The controversial worldwide initiative, which aims to criminalize spanking and smacking as disciplinary tools, among other things, is part of the UN's Agenda 2030, also known as the “Sustainable Development Goals.” Essentially, the UN is betting that framing the assault on families as a bid to end “violence against children” — something nobody in their right mind would oppose — will make it easier to pursue the...

The attack seemed like a garden-variety digital holdup. A computer intruder, calling himself the “Albanian hacker,” left a message for the administrator of a website for an Illinois internet retailer: Pay two Bitcoins, or about $500 at the time, and the intruder would “remove all bugs on your shop!” Such demands are typical among underground hackers who infect computers with malicious code and seize control of them, freeing them only after receiving a payment. But this case was more than a surreptitious digital mugging. The trespasser had ties to the Islamic State Hacking Division, a terrorist cyber unit, and before...

Turkey has said it will suspend the European Convention on Human Rights during a state of emergency declared in the aftermath of last weekend’s coup attempt. “Turkey will suspend the European Convention on Human Rights insofar as it does not conflict with its international obligations,” the deputy prime minister, Numan Kurtulmus, was quoted as saying by the state-run Anadolu news agency. The state of emergency will allow the government to rule by decree, passing bills that have the force of the rule of law unless they are overturned by parliament, where the majority of MPs belong to the ruling Justice...

LADAKH: Tipu Sultan, Maharana Pratap and Aurangzeb are surveying the vast open valleys hugging the mountain ranges of eastern Ladakh, ready to counter any threat from China, which lies just across the border. If you are wondering how the three rulers, separated by hundreds of years, have come together, these are the names of three tanks of a regiment the Indian Army has positioned about six to eight months ago in eastern Ladakh. India did briefly use tanks here in the 1962 India-China war (five were air dropped) but they were withdrawn after the humiliating defeat. Now, the tanks of...

NOAA claims global temperatures are the hottest ever, based on some rather spectacular junk science. NOAA doesn’t actually have any temperature data over most of the land surface.They never had any data from most of the southern hemisphere.

Aleppo (Syria) (AFP) - Syrian residents and the opposition expressed outrage on Wednesday at the brutal beheading of a child by a rebel group in Aleppo city, branding it a "heinous act". The horrific murder, captured in footage circulated on social media Tuesday, was carried out by Islamist rebels who accused the boy of fighting alongside government forces.Snip...The faction had already been accused of abuses, with Amnesty International earlier this month saying it was among several rebel factions committing war crimes and other violations of international law. In Washington, the State Department said it was aware of reports of the...

...An officer and two members of the public were knifed and four other PCs injured after a water fight and party in Hyde Park spiralled out of control in the city's worst bout of violence since the 2011 riots... Officers manage to push the crowds back towards Marble Arch, where a small group stormed a nearby branch of McDonald's. Terrified staff were forced to flee as teens leaped over the fast food chain's counters and stole food from the racks. Commander Harrington said that the violence was not in any way related to the Black Lives Matter protests, adding: 'I've...

For example, asked about Russia’s threatening activities that have unnerved the small Baltic States that are among the more recent entrants into NATO, Mr. Trump said that if Russia attacked them, he would decide whether to come to their aid only after reviewing whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.” Mr. Trump had nothing but praise for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s increasingly authoritarian but democratically elected leader. “I give great credit to him for being able to turn that around,” Mr. Trump said of the coup attempt on Friday night. “Some people say that it was...

A MAN is in custody after he set himself alight and drove a vehicle filled with gas bottles into a Western Sydney police station underground carpark, in what is suspected to be an attempted terror attack. It is understood the bottles did not detonate when the car rammed into the gates of Merrylands police station carpark about 7pm tonight. The driver was not arrested until about 8pm, after police closed off Memorial Ave, and he was taken to Westmead Hospital to be treated for minor burns.

The following anecdotes of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world occurred or were reported in April. They are categorized by theme, or familiar patterns: Muslim Attacks on Christian Churches United States: A pro-ISIS group calling itself the United Cyber Caliphate defaced the website of the Christian Reformed Church in the city of Lamont, Michigan. A 15-year-old teenage girl discovered the website’s defacement—which consisted of a YouTube ISIS propaganda video and Arabic text—while searching for the church’s phone number. The video’s spokesman says, “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses and enslave your women by the permission of Allah,...

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. wouldn’t necessarily defend other NATO countries if they were attacked by Russia. In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Trump essentially said the U.S. would not abide by the military alliance, one provision of which declares an attack on one to be an attack on all.

Britain's newest and most advanced £1.1billion nuclear submarine limped into Gibraltar yesterday after she crashed into a merchant ship during a training exercise. HMS Ambush was submerged when it suffered a 'glancing' collision with a tanker as it surfaced at around 1.30pm, the Ministry of Defence confirmed. Its submariners looked grim and had their heads bowed as they stood next to its badly dented turret as it was towed into Britain's key Mediterranean port on Wednesday afternoon. The Royal Navy says its newest 7,400 tonne high-tech hunter-killer submarine has 'world leading sensors' - yet it still smashed into the merchant...