Free Republic

-excerpt- The troops surrounded the valley and unleashed a barrage of rockets, tank shells, bombs and gunfire in an hours-long assault, according to two human rights groups and a witness, killing more than 100 people and leaving no survivors in one of the bloodiest days of a crackdown by President Bashar Assad against a nine-month popular uprising.

Turkey is doing its utmost to head off a bill in the French National Assembly that would criminalize the denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915. The Armenians claim that one and a half million Armenians died as result of mass deportations by the Turkish Ottomans. Turkish President Abdullah Gul warned the French that they were jeopardizing centuries of friendship in return for "small political calculations". The Turks view French president Nicolas Sarkozy as hostile to them and a major roadblock in their quest to join the European Union. The political calculations Gul referred to were apparently Sarkozy's wish to...

Natalya Murakhver, a New York food writer and mother of an 18-month year old daughter, loved her premium brand orange juice -- the "100 percent pure" and "not from concentrate" kind that comes in the colorful carton and tastes consistently delicious. That is, until she said she learned from her first-time moms group that there's a "secret ingredient" in all premium orange juices that companies are not required to put on their labeling. Now, after writing Whole Foods, she refuses to buy her favorite, "365" juice, amid uncertainty about its contents. "One of the moms said she had read about...

The following article is a ** MUST READ ** for anyone who wants to know how public opinion against Israel is fed by the media and academia. Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Yemini's article brilliantly demonstrates how the international community's slanted narrative -- which ignores Muslim and Arab violence against Muslims and Arabs -- does injustice to Israel, which is falsely painted as the ultimate source of all conflict and violence in the world today.

Was the alledged Srebrenica genocide like the Jenin genocide?That is, in terms of real facts and evidence.Jenin- Massacring Truth:["Two years ago [2002], spurred to act by a series of suicide bombings that took the lives of some 87 Israeli citizens and wounded 570 others, the Israeli Defense Force attacked what it believed to be a terrorist stronghold in the heart of the West Bank town of Jenin, a place of densely packed buildings and labyrinthine alleys and home to a close-knit core of Palestinian fighters thought to be responsible for 25 per cent of the bombings.What happened that day was said...

Seven decades after Pearl Harbor and one decade after 9/11 we Americans dare not remain willfully oblivious to the threat of the Black Swan. Our grand American experiment is more vulnerable now that it was in 1941 and it is certainly more precariously balanced than it was in 2011. These conundrums are what Donald Rumsfeld might describe as the "known unknowns" but by definition a Black Swan event is as surprising as it is earth shattering. So all of these threats which beset us are by definition not Black Swan events. They are known risks. There are many more risks...

Americans' hostility toward members of Congress is at a record high, a new Gallup Poll found. Seventy-six percent of those surveyed said most representatives do not deserve to be reelected, the highest number in the 19 years Gallup has asked the question and six points higher than in August, just after the contentious debate over raising the debt ceiling. Only 20% said most members should be reelected, a record low. "If voters' current sentiments toward Congress prevail through next November's election, it is possible that control of the House would flip back to the Democrats," wrote Frank Newport, editor in...

As Cyber Monday draws near and debate continues about the Stop Online Piracy Act, the U.S. government has again seized a bevy of domain names it says belong to Web sites that deal in counterfeit goods. Blog TorrentFreak ran a list of more than 130 domains it said were seized by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security's Immigrations and Customs Enforcement division as part of "Operation in Our Sites." TorrentFreak called the move the largest such round of seizures to date.

Expert unease over deadly flu virus 'created' in Dutch laboratory Friday 25 November 2011 Dutch scientists have created a flu virus which is so deadly there is doubt about whether the research should be published, the Volkskrant reports on Friday. The paper says American experts are worried detailed information could fall into the wrong hands and that terrorists could recreate the virus as a weapon. The fears are notable because the work was carried out on behalf of the National Institutes of Health in the US. The research team, led by Ron Fouchier, professor of virology at Erasmus teaching hospital,...

For the first time in Turkey's history, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has apologized to the Kurds for bombing raids against their people in the mid 1930s. "If there is need for an apology on behalf of the state, if there is such a practice in the books, I would apologize and I am apologizing," Erdogan declared. He made the apology in a televised speech that followed a debate with Republican People's Party leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of Turkey's main opposition party. Kilicdaroglu's family is based in the southeastern town of Tunceli, once known as Dersim, where the 1930's massacre...

U.S.-based multinational corporations added 1.5 million workers to their payrolls in Asia and the Pacific region during the 2000s, and 477,500 workers in Latin America, while cutting payrolls at home by 864,000, the Commerce Department reported. The faster growth abroad was concentrated in emerging markets, such as China, Brazil, India and Eastern Europe, according to economists Kevin Barefoot and Raymond Mataloni, of the U.S. Commerce Department. "Judging by the destination of sales by affiliates in those countries," the economists wrote in a recent survey, "the goal of the U.S. multinational corporations' expanded production was to primarily sell to local customers...

WHAT THE ISLAMIST-APPEASER BBC OMITTED IN INTERVIEWING JORDANIAN ARAB "KING" Nov-14-2011BBC News Special: Lyse Doucet speaks to King Abdullah of Jordanhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/2011/11/111114_king_abdullah_of_jordan_interview.shtml___1) "King" Abdullah of Jordan outrageously said -typically- propagated to BBC that if Israel would have just solved the "Palestinian" problem, it wouldn't had to deal with Iran nukes... that Iran wouldn't want -then- to attack Israel... The BBC Reporter --of course-- "forgot" to press about the clear genocide the Islamic Republic has repeatedly reiterated in 1994 (in Argentina by Iranian official Mohsen Rabbani),[1][2] in 2005 [3][4][5][6] and 2007 [7] (by Ahmadinejad) for Israel to be WIPED OFF, Period. What's...

I think my Ukrainian heritage fuels my twin obsessions with Soviet history and economics. Sadly, this often puts me on opposing ideological ground from my good friends and fellow alumni of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which recently helped bring Utopia in Four Movements to Iowa City's local tax-supported theater. Sam Green, the filmmaker who narrated the exploration of "the battered state of the utopian impulse," on one hand described socialism has having gone "monstrously wrong" and on the other expressed open sentimentality for the Russian and Maoist revolutions. He showed pictures of executed Cambodians and also said a copy of...

Many ethnic Armenians who read ex-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recently published memoirs ...are spitting fire over her descriptions of her battles with the US-based Diaspora Armenian lobby. Both in 1991 as a presidential aide (to then US President George Bush) and in 2007 as secretary of state (under then President George W. Bush), Rice worked to defeat the congressional push for recognizing the World-War I-era slaughter of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. ... Sassounian charged that Rice had behaved as "a spineless official of a banana republic" by allegedly caving in to Turkish interests.

Police in Denver and Salt Lake City swept anti-Wall Street protesters from their camps as demonstrators and supporters in Portland, Ore., flooded a city park area in defiance of an eviction order on Sunday. In Portland, crowds that swelled to thousands and went toe-to-toe with police moved back onto sidewalks and downtown's Lownsdsale and Chapman squares after closing Southwest Third Avenue and Madison Street overnight.

Everybody knows that Turkey, Egypt, North Africa, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and other Islamic nations (there are 57 in all) are nearly 100% Muslim. Those countries were Christian, Buddhist and Hindu. Exactly how did this change to Muslim happen? When you read history it seems that Islam came, and, magically, the countries are Islamic. But of course an event of this magnitude did not simply happen. But our schools insist that Islam “just happens.” In fact, the entire history of the rise of Islamic imperialism is denied in the curriculum of our private, state and religious schools. Our schools...

In January of this year, an African-American man living out his life in a Maryland nursing home succumbed to Alzheimer's disease. Because he was not a sports hero or a member of America's brain-dead entertainment industry, the nation barely noted either his life or his passing. His name was Samuel Frederick Yette. Born into the segregated South in 1929, Mr. Yette earned a bachelor's degree from Tennessee State University and a master's from Indiana University. Then, following his U.S. Air Force service in the Korean War, he became an award-winning journalist who worked for several newspapers and magazines. In 1964,...

Planned Parenthood is fighting back against a claim by Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain that abortion clinics are put in African American communities as part of a "planned genocide" to kill black babies before they are born. Cain stood by his statement when questioned about it on Sunday, saying he would direct people to the words of Margaret Sanger, the late founder of Planned Parenthood and a supporter of eugenics. "Seventy-five percent of those facilities were built in the black community. In Margaret Sanger's own words, she didn't use the word 'genocide,' but she did talk about preventing the increasing...

Christian apologist William Craig has offered a response to atheist intellectual Richard Dawkins who called him "a deplorable apologist for genocide" in his column last week. In a speech at the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford University on Tuesday, Craig responded to Dawkins' allegations during the question and answer session. “There was no racial war here, no command to kill them all,” he said, alluding to extermination of the Canaanites in the Old Testament, “the command was to drive them out.” He then said: “I would say that God has the right to give and take life as He sees fit....

The United Nations will warn this week that the world's population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet's resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal.