Free Republic

“No more billions for the greedy Greeks” or “Merkel shoots down new proposals from Athens”: these are just a couple of the bold headlines Germans have digested with their morning coffee in recent months. In a country still massively reliant on traditional forms of media—newspapers, and above all television—for its news, these headlines matter. […] Political discussion on TV is dominated by talk shows such as Anne Will, Günther Jauch and Hart aber Fair (Hard but Fair), where although people outside the mainstream may be invited, “counter-opinions are generally squashed or have little chance of piercing through,” Mühl-Benninghaus pointed out....

United States' projected debt over the next 25 years looks a lot like Greece's over the past 25. With all the chaos unravelling in Greece, Congress would be wise to do what it takes to avoid reaching Greek debt levels. But it's not a matter of sticking to the status quo and avoiding bad decisions that would put the budget on a Greek-like path, because the budget is on that path already. A quarter-century ago, Greek debt levels were roughly 75 percent of Greece's economy — about equal to what the U.S. has now. As of 2014, Greek debt...

Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country's already bloated deficit. Greeks aren't very welcome in the Rue Alphones Weicker in Luxembourg. It's home to Eurostat, the European Union's statistical office. The number crunchers there are deeply annoyed with Athens. Investigative reports state that important data "cannot be confirmed" or has been requested but "not received." Creative accounting took priority when it came to totting...

Barack Obama says that we shouldn’t be alarmed by what is happening over in Greece. On Tuesday, he told reporters that this “is an issue primarily of concern to Europe” and that “I think the markets have properly factored in the risks involved“. And apparently Obama is not too concerned about the debt crisis in Puerto Rico either. In fact, the Obama administration has already completely ruled out any sort of federal bailout for the island. Barack Obama is assuring us that everything is going to be just fine and that we are not headed for another global financial crisis....

(Reuters) Vladimir Putin with Jose Maria Aznar, then Spain's prime minister, at Moncloa Palace on June 13, 2000. One of Russia's largest organized-crime syndicates allegedly operated out of Spain for more than a decade with the help of close allies of President Vladimir Putin, then the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Bloomberg reports. Prosecutors in Madrid have filed a 488-page petition to charge 27 people with money laundering and fraud in connection to the St. Petersburg-based Tambov crime syndicate's setting up shop in Spain in 1996. Vladislav Reznik, now the deputy head of the finance committee in Russia's lower house...

The French man who beheaded his boss and tried to blow up a chemical plant had a "terrorist motive" and links to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) in Syria, despite his claim that he carried out his grisly act for purely personal reasons, a prosecutor said. "This corresponds very precisely to the orders of Daesh [Isil] which calls regularly for acts of terrorism on French soil and in particular to cut the throats of unbelievers,” said Paris chief prosecutor Francois Molins. "The decapitation recalls the habitual modus operandi of this terrorist organisation," he told reporters.

Former US Presidential candidate and publisher of Forbes Magazine, Steve Forbes, used the platform of his magazine to pen an open letter to the prime minister and finance minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis. The full text of his letter appears below. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Dear Prime Minister Tsipras and Finance Minister Varoufakis: You may have won a four-month reprieve of sorts from your creditors, but your situation is desperate, and everyone knows it, most particularly Europe’s paymasters, the Germans. As you just painfully learned, your ability to blackmail your creditors is a fraction of what it once was. Businesses,...

Global support for ISIS may be much bigger than previously known, according to a new report that found as many as 42 million Muslims around the world have positive feelings about the black-clad army of barbarians that established a so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq last year. The report from the New York-based research institute Clarion Project crunched numbers from four recent polls surveying Arab public opinion toward ISIS. Clarion found the terror group's supporters are 8.5 million strong, but more than 42 million of the world's estimated 1.5 billion Muslims feel at least somewhat positively about the terror group....

Greece joins Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe on the latest to be in debt to the International Monetary Fund. As Athenians rallied underneath thunderclouds to show their support for keeping Greece in the eurozone of single currency nations, their broke government defaulted on a $2.2-billion payment to the International Monetary Fund. At midnight on Tuesday, Greece joined Sudan, Somalia and Zimbabwe as countries in arrears to the IMF. Also at midnight, the bailout assistance package that began in February 2012 formally expired, leaving Greece without access to any emergency finances. In Washington, the IMF acknowledged that Greece had failed to meet...

Recently, Parisian taxi drivers decided to deal with competition they have been getting from a new Internet car service called Uber by rioting and physically attacking cars they suspected of being part of that company. French authorities decided to deal with the situation by detaining two Uber executives and accusing them of running an “illicit service,” according to a Monday story in USA Today, The action illustrates how a bureaucratic, European socialist company reacts to change brought on by technology and entrepreneurial activity, by trying to ban it.

LEVENS, France, - Mud run participants might have to start worrying about more than sprained ankles or scraped knees after more than 1,000 people became sick to their stomach after participating in an event last week in France. The regional health agency in southern France said 1,000 of the 8,400 participants involved in the Levens Mud Day on June 20 reported symptoms of acute gastroenteritis. The agency said the stomach ailments -- mostly diarrhea, vomiting and fever -- were caused by norovirus, a highly infectious disease that causes an inflammation of the stomach or intestines. The U.S. Centers for Disease...

The two leaders of Uber in France were taken into custody Monday as part of a probe into their ride-booking app which has sparked violent protests from regular taxi drivers, AFP claimed, citing various sources. The pair are believed to be Thibault Simphal,the director general of Uber France and Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, the directorgeneral of Uber Europe... An investigation was opened in 2014 into the application used to put paying clients in contact with cheaper, private drivers who do not face the same regulations as cabbies. The probe is focused on whether UberApp equates to "illegal organisation" of a system that...

Greece has threatened to seek a court injunction against the EU institutions, both to block the country's expulsion from the euro and to halt asphyxiation of the banking system. “The Greek government will make use of all our legal rights,” said the finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. “We are taking advice and will certainly consider an injunction at the European Court of Justice. The EU treaties make no provision for euro exit and we refuse to accept it. Our membership is not negotiable,“ he told the Telegraph.

France has deported 40 foreign imams for "preaching hatred" in the past three years, a quarter of them since the January terror attacks in Paris, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Monday. The minister vowed to clamp down on mosques and preachers inciting hatred after a suspected Islamist beheaded his boss during an attack on a gas factory last week. The attack, which had the hallmarks of a jihadist act but is also believed to have personal motivations, was the second in six months in France which is battling to curb radicalisation that has seen hundreds of citizens leave to...

The attack Friday at a Tunisian beach resort killed at least 18 Britons, but officials said Monday the actual number was likely to be 30. That would make it by far the deadliest terrorist attack on Britons since the London transport bombings 10 years ago. Yet it was just one of three terrorist attacks on three continents that followed one another in frightening succession last week. While it is not yet known whether the attacks were linked, they have left officials in numerous countries concerned about how to keep their citizens safe. Not long after that, a bomb ripped through...

It is always those in the middle -- and especially what Marxist intellectuals call the petit bourgeois, the aspiring, hard-working workers and savers -- who are hurt the hardest It was Adam Smith who put it best. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”, he wrote in reply to an over-excited young man who thought that Great Britain was facing devastation after a setback during the US war of independence. Smith was right about the specifics as well as the general point, of course: America was thankfully soon to win its independence, and both Britain and the...

French Finance Minister Says Economy in Dire Straits, Predicts Two Atrocious Years Ahead (TS//SI//NF) (TS//SI//NF) The French economic situation is worse than anyone can imagine and drastic measures will have to be taken in the next 2 years, according to Finance, Economy, and Trade Minister Pierre Moscovici. On 19 July, Moscovici, under pressure to reestablish a preretirement unemployment supplement known as the AER, warned that the situation is dire. Upon learning that there are no funds available for the AER, French Senator Martial Bourquin warned Moscovici that without the AER program the ruling Socialist Party will have a rough time...

In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics. Of course, the economics behind the program that the “troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) foisted on Greece five years ago has been abysmal, resulting in a 25% decline in the country’s gross domestic product. I can think of no depression, ever, that has been so deliberate and had such catastrophic consequences: Greece’s rate of youth unemployment, for...

David Cameron today called on the BBC not to use the phrase 'Islamic State' when referring to the terror group operating in Iraq and Syria. The Prime Minister - who calls the group 'ISIL' - said Muslims would 'recoil' at the phrase being used to justify the 'perversion of a great religion'. He insisted that the battle against extremists targeting Britons around the world can be won but will require 'extraordinary resolve and patience'. Gunman Seifeddine Rezgui targeted tourists at the Tunisian beach resort of El Kantaoui near Sousse on Friday morning, killing 38 people including up to 30 British...

The Greek market may be shocked and defaults of various debt instruments may emerge. While Americans are eagerly signing petitions to ban the American flag on the heels of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam leader call to ban the Stars and Stripes “due to its links to racism” or are busily banning anything attached in any way to the Confederate flag and our history, the United States and the world are in serious financial trouble driven by out-of-control debt, particularly the most visible nation of all, Greece. Healthcare for illegals, gay marriage, and other non-stop crises occupy American overwhelmed minds,...