Free Republic

Even as Greece desperately tries to avoid defaulting on its debt, American companies are preparing for what was once unthinkable: that Greece could soon be forced to leave the euro zone. Bank of America Merrill Lynch has looked into filling trucks with cash and sending them over the Greek border so clients can continue to pay local employees and suppliers in the event money is unavailable. Ford has configured its computer systems so they will be able to immediately handle a new Greek currency. No one knows just how broad the shock waves from a Greek exit would be, but...

Gangs are one of the most basic, and most potent, building blocks of stateless Fourth Generation war. We commonly think of gangs in connection with crime. But through most of history, the line between crime and war was blurred, often to the point of vanishing. (See Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century.) It was the state that drew the line clearly, but today in much of the Middle East and elsewhere states and the state system are collapsing. What is succeeding the state looks much like the 14th century Europe Tuchman describes: people and regions are at...

BEiRUT – Syrian fighters said they destroyed five helicopters in a raid on a military airport between the northern cities of Aleppo and Idlib Wednesday, while state television said the attack was repelled. Abu Mossab, a rebel who said he took part in the attack, said via Skype that rebels shelled Taftanaz military airport with two tanks captured from the army and destroyed five helicopters. “We destroyed five helicopters as well as buildings in the airport,” Abu Mossab said, although the facility remained in army hands after the raid in which the rebels lost two men before pulling back. “The...

What would you do if your son liked wearing dresses? One dad in Germany decided to put on a skirt of his own in support his little dress-loving fellow. When Nils Pikert's now 5-year-old son started wearing dresses, it turned a few heads but was generally not a big deal in their cosmopolitan hometown of Berlin. But when the family picked up and moved to the smaller South German village, all that changed, reports Gawker. Even though he loved wearing dresses, Pickert's son was too shy to put one on in public for fear of being laughed at, especially...

Lampooning religion has proven an easy way to get into hot water in recent years. Caricatures poking fun, or outright hostility, at Islam have been especially prone to producing controversy -- or even violence. Now, however, it is Germany's Christians who find themselves on the receiving end of an indelicate cartoon. Several religious leaders in Kassel, the western German city that is currently hosting the semi-decadal art exhibition Documenta, have protested against a drawing advertising a show in the city's caricature museum. "I find it problematic when a caricature disparages the very heart of a faith," Barbara Heinrich, a Protestant...

The Supreme Military Council of the Syrian rebels released on a statement on Tuesday which said that the rebel forces took control of an army missile base in Damascus, in which ten ready-to-launch missiles were found. Some of the missiles, according to the statement, were converted to carry non-conventional warheads. “During the successful operation, the operatives of the Free Syrian Army found a large number of rockets ready for launching, with enormous destructive capability, and they were very surprised to find missiles that were converted to carry non-conventional warheads and which can be equipped with chemical or biological warheads,” said...

Fearing additional attack on German soil, Germany offered Black September political upgrade of PLO, 'Der Spiegel' reports. BERLIN – For years, Germany’s government had contact with the organizers of the Black September terror group that was responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli sportsmen and a German police office at the 1972 Olympic Games, German newspaper Der Spiegel reported Sunday. Several months after the murders, the West German government proposed a secret meeting between one of the organizers of the Palestinian terrorist group and then-foreign minister Walter Scheel. The aim of the clandestine meeting was to create a “new basis...

When Greece makes a $3.98 billion loan payment this month to the European Central Bank, one of its international lenders in bailouts, Germany -- which is putting up much of the rescue monies -- will reap the biggest profit, eFXnews reported. FT Deutschland noted that by 2026, when Greece is expected to finish paying off $325 billion in two bailout packages, that Germany could realize $15.8 in gains. In the meantime, Germany has already made significant gains from the very low interest rate it paid to finance its debt as shown in the calculations of economist Jens Boysen-Hogrefe of Germany's...

The president of France formally asked the Syrian opposition to form a provisional government on Monday. "France asks the Syrian opposition to form a provisional government – inclusive and representative – that can become the legitimate representative of the new Syria, “ President Francois Hollande announced in an address at the presidential palace to a group of new French ambassadors. “We are including our Arab partners to accelerate this step. France will recognize the provisional government of Syria once it is formed.” .....

Three years in prison have become a closer prospect for some German followers of Russian punk band Pussy Riot. The Catholic Church has pressed charges against Cologne Cathedral intruders, who now face longer prison terms than their heroes. The three protesters have been charged with disturbing a religious service which, according to German law, could mean up to three years in jail. "The right to demonstration cannot be set above the right to religious freedom and the religious feelings of the congregation,” Cologne Cathedral’s dean told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. Three women from Pussy Riot received a two-year prison sentence...

It has been exactly twenty years now, but the images just won’t go away. I remember August 24, 1992 as if it was yesterday. I was eleven years old and on TV I saw houses burning, people applauding, cheering and shouting, “We’ll get all of you!” and “Germany for Germans! Foreigners out!” Those words were directed towards the more than one-hundred people trapped inside the houses. It was in Rostock- Lichtenhagen, a huge housing complex in East Germany, where several thousand Asylum seekers and immigrants were living among some ten thousand Germans. Just days before German authorities planned to evacuate...

Market News International is reporting that the German Finance Ministry may ask Greece to exit the euro "temporarily" while it straightens out its finances. From MNI, citing unnamed "senior eurozone officials" as sources: The officials said that in the view of German Finance Ministry officials mulling the plan, it is now the most likely scenario. But it is not a done deal. There is strong opposition to such a plan among some key European officials, and no decision is likely at least until the end of the year. “It is another working scenario which is not new but has emerged...

A Siberian tiger attacked and killed a female keeper at Cologne zoo on Saturday before being shot dead, a zoo spokesman said. The gate of the tiger's enclosure had not been properly shut, allowing the big cat to jump on the woman and maul and bite her. She later died of her wounds in hospital. The director of the zoo, Theo Pagel, shot the tiger dead from a rooftop, the spokesman added. Police briefly cleared the area after the incident but the zoo later reopened for visitors. The victim's name was not released but she was said to have been...

This week a German doctor in Bavaria filed a criminal complaint against Rabbi David Goldberg. Rabbi Goldberg’s “crime”? He performs ritual circumcisions on Jewish male infants in accordance with Jewish law. The doctor’s complaint came shortly after a ruling by a court in Cologne outlawing the practice of male circumcision. The Austrians and the Swiss also took the ruling to heart and have banned infant male circumcision in several hospitals in Switzerland as well as in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg. Denmark and Scandinavian governments are also considering limiting the practice of circumcision which has constituted one of the foundational...

One simply has to watch the words of the leaders in the Middle East to understand why there won’t be peace anytime soon. “Jerusalem is a Muslim and Christian city, and there will be neither peace nor security until the Israeli occupation, settlements, and settlers leave the city,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday. “Jerusalem’s identity is Arab, and the city’s and Christian holy sites must be protected from Israeli threats.” He added that Israeli excavation work in Jerusalem and in the Western Wall tunnels beneath the mosque “will not undermine the fact that the city will forever be...

BERLIN - In the debate in Germany over circumcision, you often hear people say jokingly that if cutting the foreskin off a baby boy’s penis for religious reasons is outlawed then piercing little girls’ earlobes shouldn’t be allowed either. But that’s just the scenario that may be shaping up. After a Cologne court ruled in June that circumcision was illegal, a Berlin judge is examining whether or not ear-piercing should be as well. The issue has come up in conjunction with a suit against a tattoo studio by the parents of a three-year-old girl whose ears were pierced at the...

A German politician is facing a barrage of criticism after denouncing gay couples as the biggest threat to the country’s prosperity after the euro crisis. Katherina Reiche, a state secretary for Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), laid her cards on the table on Tuesday, telling Bild newspaper that Germany's future “lies in the hands of families, not in same-sex partnerships.” What she called, “this demographic development”, was “next to the euro crisis, the biggest threat to German prosperity.” Merkel's Union must, Reiche added, “clearly state that it backs the idea of family, children and marriage, and that society is not...

Iran's Supreme Leader has ordered the country's Revolutionary Guards to intensify its campaign of terror attacks against the West and its allies in retaliation for supporting the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. According to Western intelligence officials, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave the order to the elite Quds Force unit following a recent emergency meeting of Iran's National Security Council in Tehran held to discuss a specially-commissioned report into the implications for Iran of the Assad regime's overthrow. Damascus is Iran's most important regional ally, and the survival of the Assad regime is regarded as vital to sustaining the...

Female students in Iran have been barred from more than 70 university degree courses in an officially-approved act of sex-discrimination which critics say is aimed at defeating the fight for equal women's rights. In a move that has prompted a demand for a UN investigation byIran's most celebrated human rights campaigner, the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, 36 universities have announced that 77 BA and BSc courses in the coming academic year will be "single gender" and effectively exclusive to men. ... Mrs Ebadi, a human rights lawyer exiled in the UK, said the real agenda was to reduce the proportion...

Jewish groups and Israeli politicians on Wednesday lashed out at German authorities after Bavarian prosecutors filed criminal charges against Rabbi David Goldberg for performing a circumcision. The rabbi has been slapped with charges of committing bodily harm, in the first known case to arise from an anti-circumcision ruling in May. "The charges laid against a Jewish religious leader for performing a fully legal action is outrageous and a very troubling escalation sending a deeply problematic message to the Jewish community,” European Jewish Congress (EJC) President Dr. Moshe Kantor said. “It has been many decades since a Jew was charged for...