Free Republic

Dozens of high-ranking Turkish military officers formerly posted at NATO headquarters in Brussels and SHAPE military headquarters in Mons are among more than 125,000 people President Recep Tayyip Erdogan alleges helped launch a failed coup against him in July. Erdogan calls them "terrorist soldiers." Several of these officers agreed to speak with Deutsche Welle under cover of anonymity. They want to know if any visiting dignitary is going to ask Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu for details on what's happening to them, how he'll reassure them the alliance that it can get along just fine without some of its best-trained...

Pinehurst, N.C. — A local survivor of Pearl Harbor has spent a lifetime making sure people don't forget the terror that killed so many of his comrades. Roy "Swede" Boreen, 96, escaped a ship where more than 440 sailors were killed. He has lived in Pinehurst for more than 30 years, and Wednesday the community rallied around him in tribute. At age 21, Boreen prepared to die a terrible death, coated in oil, bobbing in sea water. Minutes earlier, he'd looked out a porthole aboard the U.S.S. Oklahoma.

The Defense Ministry is mulling manufacturing the planned new IDF armored personnel carrier - the Eitan - in the US and purchasing it with US military aid. The planned new IDF armored personnel carrier (APC) - the Eitan - will be manufactured in the US and purchased by Israel with US military aid, according to internal discussions by the IDF land forces and the Ministry of Defense. Such a decision is liable to disappoint Israeli defense companies and dozens more small and medium-sized companies in Israel involved in the Merkava tank program. These companies hoped that their involvement in the...

Last year the Swedish defense company SAAB made its final delivery of 96 Gripen planes ordered by the Swedish government. Now, despite having thousands of flying hours and many years left, the fighter jets are destined for the scrapheap. The Swedish government is buying even newer Gripen planes. Gripen C/D is an advanced fighter jet with attack and surveillance capabilities, which unlike its Gripen predecessors is also compatible with NATO standards and thus more easily exportable. SAAB has sold or leased the plane not only to the Swedish government but to South Africa, Hungary, Thailand, the Czech Republic and even...

<p>The nation's first elected Somali-American lawmaker says she was harassed and called "ISIS" by a taxicab driver in Washington, D.C.      Minnesota Rep.-elect Ilhan Omar detailed the incident on her Facebook page on Wednesday. She said the cab driver called her ISIS, lobbed sexist taunts and threatened to remove her hijab during a brief ride on Tuesday after a White House meeting on criminal justice reform. She did not provide information about the driver. Omar, 33, says she is troubled by growing animosity toward Muslim people. Her campaign staff did not immediately respond to a request for comment.</p>

N. Korea building 8th runway exclusively for Kim Jong-un: report SEOUL, Dec. 8 (Yonhap) -- North Korea is building another runway exclusively for its leader Kim Jong-un in the North's South Pyongan Province, a U.S.-based broadcaster said Thursday. Curtis Melvin, a researcher at the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University, told Radio Free Asia (RFA) that the 870-meter-long airstrip in Unsan County, the eighth one for Kim, is located near a cement plant, mine and new industrial complex being built. The location of the airstrip strengthens the belief that it will be used for Kim's field inspections of industrial facilities,...

Cold Arctic air hitches a ride on a 'roller-coaster' jet stream to bring us a more blustering winter than 2014 With cold, blustering snowstorms battering the West Coast and the Prairies, you might be tempted to say "What global warming?" But climate change may, in fact, be to blame for this oh-so-Canadian winter. "Doesn't global warming mean that we're going to get warmer, shorter winters? Well, in some areas, yes, but it actually could mean we could see colder episodes," Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips told CBC News.

Afghan Senate members have certified the existence of documents affirming that Taliban collected endorsements from both Iran and Russia. Indeed, Taliban members are located in the cities of Mashhad, Yazd and Kerman in Iran. They often travel to and fro between the two countries, according to locals at the border of Afghanistan. The Iranian Foreign Ministry denied these reports. A number of deputies of the Council of elders of Afghanistan, advocated that: “Moscow supplied the Taliban with ammunition in order to restrain the widening influence of ISIS and its affiliated groups in Afghanistan and preclude threats against the Central Asian...

THE Bomb Squad and Hazmat were deployed to an electricity substation in Penrith following the discovery of a device with what looked like a detonator attached to it this morning. Workers at the Kingswood electricity substation on Smith Street found what’s understood to be a petrol bomb with a detonator shortly before 9am. THE Bomb Squad and Hazmat were deployed to an electricity substation in Penrith following the discovery of a device with what looked like a detonator attached to it this morning. Workers at the Kingswood electricity substation on Smith Street found what’s understood to be a petrol bomb...

Jawdat Belal palms the steering wheel of a driving school's hybrid car with one hand, turning the vehicle down a residential street in Esquimalt, B.C. Instructor Steve Wallace sits next to him, offering constant directions and corrections. "You've gotta start doing hand-over-hand; you've gotta get rid of [that habit], OK? Right turn here. Signal right," he says. "You can't be doing that ... they'll flunk you," says Wallace with a laugh. "That's your father. Your father's letting you get away with that."

President Obama has thrown in the towel on his long-sought goal of closing the Guantanamo Bay prison. White House press secretary Josh Earnest Wednesday acknowledged that the prison, which houses some of the worst terrorism suspects apprehended by the United States, will not close before Obama lea

Oh, the irony! Can’t trust Russian-made jeeps, huh?

Seventy-five years ago on Dec. 7, shortly before 8 a.m., hundreds of Japanese aircraft dove from the sky in a surprise bombing attack on a United States naval base in Hawaii, killing more than 2,400 Americans. The attack on Pearl Harbor shocked and outraged the nation and led it into war at a time when Congress and the American people had been split on the response to an already embattled world. News articles from Dec. 8 reflected a sudden shift in the national mood. According to New York Times articles from Dec. 9 and 10, 1941, thousands of men rushed...

"The ability of ISIL to not just mass inside of Syria, but then to initiate major land offensives that took Mosul, for example, that was not on my intelligence radar screen," Obama told Zakaria, using the administration's term for the Islamic State terror group.

Following President-elect Donald Trump’s acceptance of a congratulatory phone call on December 2 from Tsai Ing-wen (shown, right), the president of the Republic of China (ROC, popularly known as Taiwan) the communist government of the mainland People’s Republic of China (PRC) issued a formal complaint about Trump’s action. On December 3, the People’s Republic’s foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang issued a statement asserting that “there is only one China in the world.”

People lay flower wreaths at the Jasenovac camp, known as "Croatia's Auschwitz", situated about 100 kilometres southeast of Zagreb (AFP Photo/)Zagreb (AFP) - The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre on Tuesday condemned a pro-Nazi slogan on a memorial plaque in a small Croatian town that housed a notorious World War II death camp. Former paramilitaries placed the plaque in central Jasenovac to honour 11 fellow fighters killed in the area at the start of Croatia's 1990s independence war. It carries the official emblem of the HOS paramilitary forces, which includes the slogan used by the country's WWII Ustasha regime. "It is...

For a younger generation, the “where were you when” moment is September 11, 2001, an atrocity that prompted comparisons with Pearl Harbor, whose survivors were preparing to mark the 60th anniversary of the attacks that year. The two cataclysms had much in common—they were unexpected, horrific, and destroyed thousands of lives—but they also quickly took on the character of their very different cultural epochs. Pearl Harbor aroused American resolve that channeled itself into a unified war effort, one that would produce an industrial war-making machine such as the world has never seen—just what was needed to win a war such...

There is over a month left until Trump's inauguration, and the President-elect's hard-hitting negotiating style may have scored yet another economic victory: according to a statement issued by Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer and a major Apple Inc supplier, the company said it was in preliminary discussions to expand its operations in the United States. "While the scope of the potential investment has not been determined, we will announce the details of any plans following the completion of direct discussions between our leadership and the relevant U.S. officials," it said in a statement. Foxconn in its statement did...

Pearl Harbor was attacked 75 years ago on December 7, 1941. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously predicted the following day, the date has lived in infamy. That is especially true for one South Carolina man, the third generation of a family that has fought to restore the reputations of two men initially held responsible for the attacks on the naval base and nearby U.S. Army facilities. A quick history lesson: Without provocation or warning, Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S. bases early on Dec. 7, killing 2,403 Americans and wounding 1,178. The raid brought the United States...

TEL AVIV – In a first, Israel denied entry to a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement activist who arrived at Ben-Gurion airport Monday on a tourist visa. Dr. Isabel Phiri, Associate General Secretary for the World Council of Churches (WCC) for Public Witness and Diakonia, was stopped at the airport at the behest of Interior Minister Aryeh Deri – the first case of its kind since a Knesset bill was introduced allowing authorities to bar supporters of the boycott Israel movement from visiting the country.