Free Republic

South China Sea disputes are turning worse. Last week, Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte had a loud and clear message for China: Stay away from our territory or else it could be a “bloody” confrontation. Philippines’s warning comes shortly before China hosts the G20 Leaders’ Summit in the eastern city of Hangzhou on 4-5 September, and one week after a Japan Times editorial revealed that China has set a “red line” for Japan in the South China Sea. China warned Japan “not send Self-Defense Forces to join U.S. operations that test the freedom of navigation in the disputed South China Sea....

An international team of scientists from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is investigating mysterious signal spikes emitting from a 6.3-billion-year-old star in the constellation Hercules—95 light years away from Earth. The implications are extraordinary and point to the possibility of a civilization far more advanced than our own. The unusual signal was originally detected on May 15, 2015, by the Russian Academy of Science-operated RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia, but was kept secret from the international community. Interstellar space reporter Paul Gilster broke the story after the researchers quietly circulated a paper announcing the detection of “a strong...

A darling of the far right and a longtime adversary of civil-rights groups and immigration activists, “America’s toughest sheriff” will soon face Justice Department lawyers in Washington in a years-long legal saga over whether he intentionally defied federal orders to stop racially profiling Latinos. A special section of the Justice Department — dedicated to investigating corruption in publicly elected offices — will decide whether Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio should face criminal contempt-of-court charges, according to a ruling filed in U.S. District Court on Friday. The decision followed several other blows for the Arizona sheriff in the protracted case. In...

"Guests" Angela Merkel will go down in history as the woman who destroyed theBundesrepublik Deutschland, and for absolutely no reason. The childless Ossie, with zero stake in the future of a country she was raised to loathe, opened up the heart of central Europe to Muslim "immigration" -- and now, finally, the Germans have had enough: Germany’s Angela Merkel urged European Union countries that have refused to take on a share of the bloc’s refugees to reconsider, as a new poll indicated that half of Germans don’t want her to seek another term as chancellor. “What I still say...

"Using a sectarian Shi'ite identifier with the title of the new army will inflame sectarian tensions in the region," Talha Abdulrazaq, a researcher at the University of Exeter's Strategy and Security Institute, told VOA. "Iran is asserting itself as a regional or even an imperialistic power." The new force, announced Thursday by a veteran military commander who leads Iranian forces in Syria, is designed to fight in Arab countries and would recruit heavily from non-Iranian Shi'ite Muslims across the region.

HAMBURG—German savers are leaving the security of savings banks for what many now consider an even safer place to park their cash: home safes.

A Danish subsidiary of British defense contractor BAE Systems is selling an internet surveillance package to the government of the United Arab Emirates, a country known for spying on, imprisoning, and torturing dissidents and activists, according to documents obtained by Lasse Skou Andersen of the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information. The documents from the Danish Business Authority reveal an ongoing contract between the defense conglomerate, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence A/S, and the Middle Eastern oil federation dating back to at least December 2014. The contract describes an internet surveillance product capable of deep packet inspection — “IP monitoring and data analysis”...

WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- Poland says German Chancellor Angela Merkel is wrong to criticize European Union partners who are refusing to give refugee protection to Muslims. Poland's deputy foreign minister, Konrad Szymanski, said in an interview Monday on state-run Radio Three that countries such as Poland which reject EU-negotiated refugee quotas are in line with the public mood. Szymanski was responding to Merkel's criticism of EU countries, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, that have rebuffed EU plans to share responsibility across the 28-nation bloc for sheltering people fleeing war and poverty. "I believe it is harmful to Europe and...

Although they are not the top item in the news, the plight of the Yazidi and Christian women captured by the Islamic State is still horrific. The violence against the Yazidi people stem from ISIS members’ view that they are infidels. “My own community has been subject to more than 74 genocides by radical Muslim groups, not just now but throughout the history such as the Ottomans and others. These radical groups, whenever given the chance, will commit their crimes. What happened in Iraq and Syria was that the world remained silent as ISIS expanded,” said Nadia Murad, a young...

Central bankers in charge of the vast bulk of the world's economy delved deep into the weeds of money markets and interest rates over a three-day conference here, and emerged with a common plea to their colleagues in the rest of government: please help. Mired in a world of low growth, low inflation and low interest rates, officials from the Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank said their efforts to bolster the economy through monetary policy may falter unless elected leaders stepped forward with bold measures. These would range from immigration reform in Japan to structural...

These days, the trend is not Pemex’s friend. Mexico’s loss-leading, debt-swamped, state-owned oil giant company announced that in July it had imported 554,000 barrels of oil a day — its highest monthly volume of imports since public records began in 1990. In total, two-thirds of all the oil Mexico consumed in July was imported — a staggering statistic for a country that until not so long ago was home to one of the largest oil fields in the world, the Cantarell. Pemex also acknowledged that its crude production fell a further 5% in July while its natural gas production shrunk...

These combat readiness exercises are being conducted between August 25th and August 31st and include such items as reserve call-up and the functioning of civilian authorities on war footing. Civilian reserves will be called up as part of the drill and briefed on a new system of reserve call-up to be implemented immediately after the end of the review process.

Iraq's government would consider selling crude through Iran should talks with the autonomous Kurdish region on an oil revenue-sharing agreement fail, a senior oil ministry official in Baghdad told Reuters. Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organisation (SOMO) plans to hold talks with the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), possibly next week, about Iraqi oil exported through Turkey, Deputy Oil Minister Fayadh al-Nema said in an interview on Friday evening. "If the negotiations come to a close" without an agreement "we will start to find a way in order to sell our oil because we need money, either to Iran or other countries",...

Norway is planning to build a steel fence at its only border crossing point with Russia, citing the necessity to deter refugees, after thousands for asylum seekers entered the Nordic country through the “Arctic route.” The new fence will be 200 meters long and 3.5 meters high and will stretch from the Storskog-Borisoglebsk border crossing that will also be equipped with new gates, Reuters reports, citing sources in the Norwegian government. The construction of the fence will be finished in the coming weeks before winter frosts set in to make it harder for illegal migrants to cross into Norway via...

Hungary plans to build a second fence on its southern border with Serbia that would enable it to keep out any major new wave of migrants, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Friday. Orban said the new barrier, to be built alongside the existing one, would strengthen defenses to respond if Turkey's policy on migration changed. If that happened, hundreds of thousands could appear at Hungary's border, he told public radio. "Technical planning is under way to erect a more massive defense system next to the existing line of defense which was built quickly (last year)," Orban said. Orban...

Nicolas Sarkozy has joined other conservative French politicians in demanding that border controls for thousands of migrants in Calais be shifted to Britain. The former centre-Right president made the call in a speech in Le Touquet, the northern town where he signed agreements in 2003 allowing British officials to check passports in France and vice-versa, when he was interior minister. The accords were part of a bilateral deal to close a former migrants’ centre at Sangatte, near Calais. But Mr Sarkozy said France can no longer tolerate the presence of about 9,000 migrants living in the squalid “Jungle” camp in...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly survived what European press are calling an assassination attempt Thursday afternoon as she was visiting the Czech Republic. Merkel was leaving the airport in Prague when a man with weapons "attempted to join the motorcade" in a Mercedes and began to "run down police" while doing so, the Sun reported. "He is suspected of attempting to cause a crime — specifically, an attempt to use violence against an official," Josef Bocan, a spokesman for the Czech police, told Express. "He tried to join the procession at all costs, cutting off a police vehicle that was...

Paul Wolfowitz, a top official in the George W. Bush administration referred to as the architect of the Iraq war, said he will likely vote for Hillary Clinton in November. Wolfowitz is part of a growing list of GOP national security and foreign policy officials who have announced their intention to support the Democratic presidential nominee. But though Clinton has proudly announced the backing of other Republicans, it’s less likely she will roll out a news release touting the support from Wolfowitz. As deputy secretary of Defense under Bush, Wolfowitz was among the earliest and biggest cheerleaders for invading...

Rebels backed by Turkey made major gains Sunday in northern Syria, expelling Kurdish-led forces from towns and villages as part of a determined campaign by Ankara to push the militants east of the Euphrates River. At least 35 civilians were killed, according to activists. The dramatic escalation of Turkey's involvement in the Syrian civil war last week aimed to help the Syrian rebels drive the Islamic State group out of the border town of Jarablus. But it also is aimed at U.S.-allied Kurdish forces that have gained control in recent months of most of the territory along the Turkey-Syria border....

Why would a country with the world's largest Jewish population, outside of Israel, admit large numbers of immigrants from countries where hatred of Jews has been taught to their people from earliest childhood? This question is ultimately not about Muslims and Jews. It is about discussing immigrants in the abstract, rather than in terms of the specific concrete realities of particular immigrants in particular circumstances at a particular time and place — that time being now and that place being the United States of America. A hundred years ago, when immigration from other parts of the world was a major...