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A “Special Report” panel today discussed how G7 leaders met today in The Hague and announced that they would be excluding Russia from the G8 and boycotting a planned summit in Sochi. Jason Riley, of the Wall Street Journal, said Russian President Vladimir Putin is rebuilding the Russian empire while President Barack Obama and our allies in Europe are sitting around discussing international law and “kicking Putin out of clubs he doesn’t care about in the first place.” Riley said Putin knows that the administration doesn’t have the stomach for confrontation and will continue to take advantage of that.

THE HAGUE—Leaders of the world's largest economies agreed Monday to effectively remove Russia from the Group of Eight nations in response to Moscow's military intervention in Ukraine. The leaders, meeting in emergency session, also agreed that they would begin to exert punitive sanctions on Russia's energy, banking, finance and arms industries unless Moscow dialed back plans to seize the region of Crimea from Ukraine. "This group came together because of shared beliefs and shared responsibilities. Russia's actions in recent weeks are not consistent with them," the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Canada, Japan and Italy said in a joint statement. "We...

Russia is winning the Ukraine crisis. While Moscow may have suffered some economic sanctions, the world saw a disobedient Russian neighbor being forcibly brought to heel. The land grab was no doubt designed to encourage the others—Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Georgia – all those unfortunates who live nearby. And it will. There are other winners, even on the side of the somewhat hapless angels. Like Germany, which is currently less an angel, and Poland, which is currently more. Before taking a mildly more aggressive position on sanctions Friday, Germany had been the least enthusiastic major European power about aggressively confronting Russia....

Cars were set alight and stink bombs set off after a far-left demo against “state repression” descended into chaos in Berlin over the weekend. Two policemen were injured and 17 protesters arrested in the 12-hour long police operation across the city, which saw almost 2,000 officers deployed. Organizers said they were protesting against heavy-handed police tactics such as those seen in Hamburg in early January, where disturbances led to a long crackdown and police restricted zone. Over the course of the weekend, an estimated 1,300 people took to the streets in Kreuzberg, Moabit and Friedrichshain including feminists, members of the...

William Hague has warned Russia that it faces long-term "isolation and stagnation" over the crisis in Ukraine. The foreign secretary said it was time to consider a "new state of relations" different to that of the past 20 years. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, he said the UK and its European allies would not "run scared".

STOCKHOLM—A dispute between the Swedish armed forces and ThyssenKrupp AG TKA.XE +1.39% threatens one of the German industrial giant's most-profitable operations and could shake up the growing global submarine business. The row, which is partly over export possibilities, has prompted Sweden to yank contracts for the next generation of Swedish submarines from ThyssenKrupp, the world's largest exporter of nonnuclear submarines. Sweden has signaled that it instead is considering giving the work to Swedish defense company Saab AB. Currently, Saab doesn't build manned submarines, but it acknowledges it is trying to poach engineers from ThyssenKrupp's submarine unit, which is based around...

German police have arrested a former Nazi medic on suspicion of "multiple counts" of aiding and abetting murder when he was serving as a medic in the Auschwitz death camp, according to the local prosecutors’ office. A 93-year-old suspect was arrested on Monday at his home near the town of Neubrandenburg, in the federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in northern Germany. A doctor examined the man after his arrest and determined that the suspect “was in good enough health to be held in custody while authorities investigate further,” according to Stefan Urbanek, spokesman from the prosecutors' office in Schwerin, the state...

resident Barack Obama flies Sunday to a Europe shaken by Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea and his threats against eastern parts of Ukraine. At a summit conference at The Hague on preventing nuclear terrorism – scheduled long before the Ukraine crisis – Obama will confer with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders. On Monday afternoon Obama will meet with President Xi Jinping of China, Russia’s neighbor and sometime rival. Putin has forced the United States and Europe to refocus on the origins of the modern transatlantic alliance -- the 1949 NATO defense partnership designed to prevent a Russian invasion...

An overwhelming majority of Lufthansa pilots voted on Friday to go on strike over pay and conditions. No date has yet been set for the action. Of the airline's 5,400 pilots, 99.1 percent voted to take industrial action on Friday. The as-yet unscheduled strike could hit Europe's biggest airline any time in the coming weeks. Flights operated by Lufthansa, Lufthansa Cargo and Germanwings will be affected. Pilots' union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) said it would give 48 hours' notice before any strike, in order to minimise inconvenience to passengers. Pilots would also avoid the busy period over the Easter break from...

Germany on Saturday accused Russia of trying to splinter Europe, as a Cold War-style struggle over the future of ex-Soviet Ukraine ratcheted up following the Kremlin’s defiant annexation of Crimea. The haunting warning from a nation whose friendship Russian President Vladimir Putin had nurtured over his 14 years in power came amid Western efforts to shore up backing for the besieged interim leaders in Kiev who toppled a Kremlin-backed regime last month. […] The foreign minister of Germany—its economic power playing a decisive role in forging Europe’s response to Putin’s increasingly belligerent stance—warned that the continent’s entire future was at...

Back in 2010, I shared a video that predicted a catastrophic end to the welfare state. I said it was an example of “Libertarian Porn” because: …it is designed for the dark enjoyment of people who think the government is destroying the nation. If you don’t like bloated government and statist intervention and you think that the policies being imposed by Washington are going to lead to hyperinflation and societal collapse, then you will get a certain level of grim satisfaction by watching the video. While I also stated in that post that I thought the video was far too...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has declared the G8 to be dead, thanks to Russia’s take over of the Crimea: German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared the Group of Eight leading nations defunct given the current crisis in Ukraine, in a clear message to Russia that the world’s seven other major industrialized countries consider its actions in Ukraine unacceptable. “As long as there is no political environment for such an important political format as the G-8, the G-8 doesn’t exist anymore, not the summit nor the format,” said Ms. Merkel, in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. “Russia is widely isolated in all international...

A senior Russian diplomat signaled a possible shift Wednesday in Russia's position on the ongoing Iranian nuclear talks amid tensions with the United States and other Western countries, according to The Associated Press. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was quoted by the Russian news organization Interfax as saying the recent sanctions announced by the European Union and U.S. may force Russia to retaliate by altering its stance on the Iran talks. Such a move would dramatically escalate tensions between Russia and the West, which are already high amid Russia's annexation of Crimea on Tuesday. "We wouldn't like to use...

Right on cue, as it becomes obvious that Europe needs to be less dependent on Russian gas and oil, environmental groups here in the US have begun stepping up presure on President Obama to reject building the infrastructure necessary to help realize that strategic need. A coalition of environmental groups is calling on the administration to reject permits that would build Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) export terminals. Environmental groups called on President Obama Tuesday to reject pending applications to build liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, citing the negative impacts from natural gas throughout its life cycle.The pressure from green...

The continuing crisis in Ukraine has the reputedly peaceful Swedes rethinking the nation's defense doctrine, and some are using the situation as a way to push for NATO membership in the run-up to parliamentary elections. Only a few weeks after announcing cuts to the defense budget, Finance Minister Anders Borg told the TT news agency Wednesday "there is a lot indicating" that more money will have to be allocated to military defense. Much of the political debate leading up to the elections in September has been focused on the need to spend more on education and other domestic policies, so...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - With a few strokes of his pen, Vladimir Putin has in recent days both created the Republic of Crimea and annexed that new entity into the Russian Federation, thereby violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine. To hear Putin tell it in his address to the Duma, this action is not only perfectly legal, it also rights a historical wrong in which Russia was “robbed” of its rightful claim to the Crimean peninsula in 1954. President Obama has disputed the legality of these actions, observing that “President Putin seems to have a different set of lawyers making a...

JERUSALEM, Israel -- Israel cannot depend on the U.S. to take the lead against the Iranian nuclear program, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said Tuesday. His remarks came just as the P5+1 (U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China and Germany) are about to begin the next round of talks on Iran's nuclear facilities. The U.S. should be leading the campaign against Iran, Ya'alon said, but instead it's making deals with it. Israel will do what it must to defend itself. "We thought that the one who needs to lead the campaign against Iran is the U.S.," the defense minister said during...

Here again we see the violent thuggery that is at the heart of people like this rapper and so very many of his coreligionists and Leftist allies. They cannot answer their opponents; they cannot meet them on the level of rational discourse. And so they move to shut them down through threats on the one hand and smear campaigns on the other. It is the mark of a culture of deep insecurity; however, faced as it is with a culture of appeasement and cowardice, it could prevail. “Geert Wilders to take legal action against rapper over video,” from Dutch News,...

London (CNN) -- Whatever U.S. and European leaders may say, it seems clear a majority of the residents of Crimea were only too happy to abandon Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. The referendum held there on Sunday was illegal according to Ukrainian constitutional law and took place under duress, following the large-scale incursion of "pro-Russian forces" -- and voters did not have the choice to say "no" to severing ties with Kiev. But these failings aside, it appears plain that most of Crimea's population, with the exception of the Tatar minority and some ethnic Ukrainians, was content to return...

Germany’s highest court ruled on Tuesday that the European bailout fund, the ESM, was in line with the country’s constitution, throwing out numerous objections by euroskeptics. Confirming a preliminary ruling dating from September 2012, the Federal Constitutional Court said it saw no obstacles to Germany taking part in the €500-billion European Stability Mechanism, set up to bail out troubled countries and their banks. Nevertheless, in the ruling, presiding judge Andreas Voßkuhle insisted that it must be “the Bundestag [lower house of parliament] which retains sole responsibility over Germany’s public income and spending, even with regard to its international and European...