Free Republic

Britain is facing a new wave of Eastern European immigration which will put British workers’ jobs at risk... Twenty nine million Bulgarians and Romanians will gain the right to live and work unrestricted in Britain in 2014 under European “freedom of movement” rules. Last night forecasters said it could lead to a significant number of new arrivals, in the same way as when Poland and other Eastern European countries gained the same rights in 2004, with the scale likely to be increased by the economic crisis gripping the rest of Europe. And a Government report was disclosed to show concern...

In a letter dated October 10, 2012, and received by its addressee four days later, the Marburg, Germany state prosecutor announced a suspension in the prosecution of medical historian Dr. Armin Geus. As discussed in my recent FrontPage Magazine article, Geus had run afoul of German authorities because of his book Die Krankheit des Propheten (The Sickness of the Prophet), in which Geus had argued that Islam's prophet Muhammad was not divinely led, but rather psychologically disturbed. Despite this victory for free speech with respect to Islam, briefs submitted by Geus' defense lawyers and a public declaration by a German...

WASHINGTON, D.C., Oct 19, 2012 — President Obama has nominated Army General David M. Rodriguez to succeed Army General Carter F. Ham as the commander of U.S. Africa Command, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said, October 18, 2012. U.S. Africa Command is the newest combatant command, and its headquarters is in Stuttgart, Germany. The command encompasses all of Africa and its adjacent waters except for Egypt. The Senate must confirm Rodriguez, who currently is commander of U.S. Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C. "He has served in a variety of key leadership roles on the battlefield," Panetta said in...

Berlin does not feel like an imperial city. … Yet while the German capital has deliberately eschewed the trappings of imperial power, the fact is that Berlin is increasingly the de facto capital of the EU. Of course, the EU’s main institutions—the commission and the council—are still based in Brussels. But the key decisions are increasingly made in Berlin. … This steady accretion of power to Germany is greeted with ambivalence in Berlin. For obvious historical reasons, postwar Germany has never sought a dominant role within Europe. After reunification, the goal was always said to be “a European Germany, not...

Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel, by Sonja Schoepf Wentling and Rafael Medoff (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 238 pp., $15) As a Jewish liberal-turned-conservative, I am asked the question with mind-numbing regularity: how can Jewish voters remain so attached to a Democratic Party seemingly so often hostile to their interests? Given Barack Obama’s stance toward an Israel facing the threat of Iranian nuclear annihilation, needless to say, that question has been posed with particular urgency and confusion during the 2012 campaign. Generally, I offer a variation of the answer...

Germany needs more cameras in public places and more police patrolling the streets, the interior minister said in an interview on Sunday. Attacks were becoming more brutal, despite a decline in general street crime. Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that the country needed more security cameras in public places. …

When David Cameron became Tory leader seven years ago, William Hague is said to have delivered a stern warning on the subject of Europe. Stay well away, advised Mr. Hague, who knew from brutal personal experience as Conservative leader the damage it was capable of doing. Mr. Hague added that Europe should be regarded as a bomb that could never be defused, yet might well go off at any moment. The wisest course was to leave well alone and hope for the best. … It has suddenly become very clear that, seven years after the Foreign Secretary delivered his warning,...

Regardless of who the President is after this close election, the equity markets and the U.S. economy are in trouble. Debt has spread throughout the Western world. The fallout is political dissonance, growing economic hardship and, in some places, mob violence.Ground zero for the spreading fear and panic is Greece, which was once the worldÂ’s greatest civilization and the birthplace of democracy, poetry and philosophy.There is violent evidence of the contradiction from what the ancients taught and what is unraveling in Greece. It would all just be another boring story at the end of the news day, except there is...

The European Union could be destroyed by the "nightmare" euro crisis, and Germany needs to take the responsibility to save the common currency, billionaire fund manager George Soros said on Monday Soros, who made his mark as an investor on a big bet against the British pound in 1992, said the other alternative is for Germany—the eurozone's biggest economy—to simply leave the 17-member currency bloc. … Germany should act as the leader of the union in the same that the United States did for the free world after World War Two, Soros said at a luncheon hosted by the National...

In 1962, then President of Cuba, Fidel Castro recruited two former Nazi SS soldiers to help train his military at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to declassified documents released by Germany's secret intelligence agency, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst). Castro invited four SS officers to Havana, where he offered them quadruple the average salary a German made at that time in exchange for their expertise. Two of the four accepted his offer, the documents, dated October 26, 1962, reveal. The men served in Adolf Hitler's Waffen-SS, a force separate from the army and known as the armed wing of...

At age 11, Ghulam was married off to 40-year-old Jaiz in a rural Afghan village, making her only one of more than 10 million young girls who are being forced to wed men old enough to be their fathers or grandfather every year. In an effort to start a global conversation about the devastating effects of early marriages, which are currently practiced in more than 50 developing countries, the United Nations designated October 11 as International Day of the Girl Child this year. To mark the occasion and draw attention to the problem of child brides, photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair teamed...

A threshold-breaking eleven member states have agreed to push ahead with a financial transactions tax, but the political breakthrough is tempered by a number of unanswered questions. "Today we have received a clear and very welcome signal that there will be enough member states on board for an EU Financial Transactions Tax," EU tax commissioner Algirdas Semeta said Tuesday (9 October). He promised to come forward with a decision in November, but noted that at least nine countries have to formally make a request in order to trigger a legislative process for a splinter group of member states. So far,...

Germany is demanding greater power on the board of the eurozone’s new bank supervisor, a politically charged request that further complicates Europe’s fractious talks on a banking union. Berlin’s proposal for voting weights to match the bigger size of its banking sector gives voice to longstanding German concerns about being outgunned under the European Central Bank’s one-country one-vote governance system. But the idea—raised privately in talks with European officials—touches on some of the founding principles of the single currency and is likely to rile smaller eurozone countries fearful of Germany’s growing willingness to flex its muscles. …

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will tell Greeks she wants to keep their country in the euro when she visits Athens this week, but she faces a hostile reception from a people worn down by years of austerity and recession. Many Greeks blame Merkel, who has publicly chastised them for much of the past three years, for the nation's plight. Opponents, some of whom have caricatured her as a bullying Nazi, have promised protests on Tuesday during her first visit to Greece since the euro zone crisis erupted there in 2009. "She does not come to support Greece, which her policies...

The U.S. brokerage unit and a European unit of the former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc said they settled litigation over $38 billion of asset claims, a major step toward customers and creditors recovering money. ... Lehman emerged from bankruptcy in March, and has paid out or plans to pay out $33 billion of an expected $65 billion to creditors, recovering an average of 21 cents on the dollar

CATALONIA may be the catalyst for a renewed wave of separatism in the European Union, with Scotland and Flanders not far behind. The great paradox of the European Union, which is built on the concept of shared sovereignty, is that it lowers the stakes for regions to push for independence. While a post-national European Union may be emerging out of the euro zone crisis, with a drive for more fiscal union and more centralized control over national budgets and banks, the crisis has accelerated calls for independence from member countries’ richer regions, angry at having to finance poorer neighbors. Artur...

The European Union is poised to ban imports of Iranian gas into Europe as part of its efforts to ratchet up pressure on the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program. … The moves come as European governments and the United States are searching for new ways to pressure Tehran into scaling back its nuclear work after diplomacy foundered earlier this year. Tehran denies its work has any military intentions. …

A study of Western History shows that on many occasions Islam was on its deathbed only to be rescued by Western intervention. The civilizational struggle we now face is one of our own making. The enormity of this abysmal lunacy becomes apparent when one realizes that by the mid-nineteenth century so complete was Islam's collapse that at every point where it survived, it did so only because of imprudent Western assistance. The monster we now face is a resuscitated corpse, and like that of Frankenstein, it has consistently turned on the creator who gave it life. In 1492, the Muslims...

My usually trusty VFW calendar says for today: "Germany reunited; Cold War nears end." Sounded good enough for a column to me. A neat point about the date is that tonight I'm pleased to be going to German Reunification Day at the Riverfront Community Center, hosted by the German liaison office at Fort Leavenworth. When a country loses a war it usually loses territory as well. That happened at the end of WW II when Germany was forced to give up lands it had conquered in the early months of the war. But unlike at the end of WW I,...

Spain is ready to request a euro zone bailout for its public finances as early as next weekend but Germany has signalled that it should hold off, European officials said on Monday. The latest twist in the euro zone's three-year-old sovereign debt crisis comes as financial markets and some other European partners are pressuring Madrid to seek a rescue programme that would trigger European Central Bank buying of its bonds. "The Spanish were a bit hesitant but now they are ready to request aid," a senior European source said. Three other euro zone senior euro zone sources confirmed the shift...