Free Republic

The United States has pulled the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier that has been central in the fight against the Islamic State, from the Persian Gulf, military officials said Thursday. NBC News reported that the U.S. Navy now, for the first time since 2007, has no aircraft carrier in the sea. The aircraft carrier was taken out late Thursday so that it can undergo maintenance, but its temporary removal is also part of budget cuts. The nuclear-powered USS Theodore Roosevelt, which houses approximately 5,000 troops and 65 combat planes, has played a large role in the Obama administration bomb...

Washington (CNN)A number of cruise missiles launched from a Russian ship and aimed at targets in Syria have crashed in Iran, two U.S. officials told CNN Thursday. Monitoring by U.S. military and intelligence assets has concluded that at least four missiles crashed as they flew over Iran. One official said there may be casualties, but another official said this is not yet known.

American Decline: Chinese forces head to Syria to join with Russia in filling Obama's power vacuum and purportedly fight the Islamic State. A false move involving NATO member Turkey could mean world war. Russian and Chinese military sources now confirm that Chinese warships are en route to the Middle East to get in on some of the action of humiliating the U.S. In just a week and a half, Moscow has upended the dynamics of power in the Mideast by taking on the role that President Obama relinquished: acting like a superpower in a regional conflict that has implications extending...

The Obama administration has privately reminded foreign governments and U.S. bankers that sanctions against Iran remain in effect, cautioning against a rush by Western companies to invest in Iran's oil industry and other businesses until the country fully complies with the July nuclear agreement. The U.S. State Department recently cabled a message, known as a demarche, to embassies around the world to reiterate that sanctions on Iran are still in place, diplomatic and government sources told Reuters on Friday. The demarche stressed that sanctions on Iran would not be lifted until the International Atomic Energy Agency verifies that Tehran has...

Turkish forces are said to have shot down a Russian jet after it flew into the country's airspace, according to unconfirmed reports on social media. It has been claimed by eyewitnesses that there was a large explosion in Huraytan, northern Syria, while three fighter planes were seen overhead. Rumours of a jet being shot out of the sky come amid heightening tensions between Russian president Vladimir Putin and the West.

Russia told Assad to shoot down Turkish plane, murder captured pilots, ‘leaked Syrian documents’ show. Devastating intelligence papers purport to prove jet was downed on Moscow’s orders, pilots captured alive by intelligence unit and then killed; Damascus had claimed June incident was an accident October 1, 2012 DAMASCUS,— Contrary to previous reports, the two pilots of a Turkish F-4 Phantom which was shot down by Syria in June were not killed in the crash, but were murdered by the Assad regime on Russian orders, according to a devastating series of alleged Syrian intelligence documents leaked to and published by Al-Arabiya...

Russian jet SHOT DOWN by Turkey after it flew into their airspace, according to reports A RUSSIAN jet has been shot down by Turkish forces after it flew into the country's airspace, according to as yet unconfirmed reports circulating on social media.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the alliance was ready to deploy troops in Turkey. Meanwhile, Ankara threatened to terminate the natural gas contract with Russia. According to Stoltenberg, the NATO army may appear in Turkey to protect the country from threats coming from the south. The statement was made against the background of reports of violation of Turkish airspace by Russian fighter jets. According to Stoltenberg, NATO is ready to protect all of its allies, including Turkey, from any threats. He added that the Russian operation in Syria was a "cause for concern," Pravda.Ru reports. Turkey has accused...

One of Germany’s representatives at the worldwide meeting of Catholic prelates on family has pointedly told the gathering that church teaching preventing divorced and remarried persons from receiving the Eucharist makes people “doubt God.” Berlin Archbishop Heiner Koch has used his 3-minute address during the deliberations to directly address one of the issues known to be creating the most disagreement among the prelates, saying he is often asked why remarried couples are barred from the Eucharistic table. The church’s theological arguments “do not silence the questions in the hearts of people,” Koch told the assembly. “Is there no place at...

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson defended his controversial remarks this morning in which he suggested that 6 million Jews would not have been slaughtered if they had easy access to guns. “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” Carson said on CNN Thursday. “I’m telling you there is a reason these dictatorial people take guns first." The Anti-Defamation League condemned the comments, saying in a statement: “Ben Carson has a right to his views on gun control, but the notion that Hitler’s gun-control policy...

Almost declared dead only months ago, Germany’s populist far-right is seeking a comeback amid a record wave of asylum-seekers, hoping to anchor itself in mainstream politics. As Chancellor Angela Merkel has opened the doors to unprecedented numbers of refugees, she initially earned popular support but also quickly faced xenophobic hecklers who angrily branded her a “traitor” and worse. Anti-foreigner fury has flared most visibly at rallies of the resurgent PEGIDA movement, short for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident.” “Merkel is guilty, commits ethnocide against the German people,” read a banner at last week’s protest in Dresden, Saxony...

After the initial euphoria, Germany now faces daily clashes in refugee centres, a rising far-right, a backlog of registrations, and dissent among the ranks of Angela Merkel’s government.The realities of shouldering Europe’s refugee crisis are coming home to Germany, amid daily reports of clashes in asylum seeker homes; bureaucrats overwhelmed by a backlog of registration claims and deep divisions within chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative ranks over how to manage the enormity of the challenge. Just weeks after Merkel responded to the refugee crisis with the declaration: “Wir schaffen es – We can do it” – the euphoric mood has been...

On Thursday, Republican 2016 presidential contender Dr. Ben Carson stated on CNN that the Holocaust would have been less likely had Jews been armed. In his new book, A Perfect Union, Carson contends, “Through a combination of removing guns and disseminating propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.”

When Barack Obama accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, he predicted that the occasion would be remembered as "the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth." Some seven years later, America is weaker, and the world is a far more dangerous place. President Obama did not end the war in Iraq. His precipitous withdrawal of American troops allowed the Islamic State group to take control of major cities and Iran to become the puppet master in Iraq. His decision to announce when the U.S. would...

A German county has declared an emergency ahead of the arrival of some 1,000 refugees on Monday. Officials in Main-Taunus county west of Frankfurt say the unusual action aims to make it easier for authorities to cope with the influx, for example by suspending certain building regulations. In a statement Friday, they said it was the first time since 1945 that a disaster has been declared in the country.

Angela Merkel has launched a withering attack on eastern European leaders for failing to learn from their memories of life behind the Iron Curtain in their handling of the refugee crisis. Calling upon her own experience of growing up in communist East Germany, Mrs Merkel criticised leaders including Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, for building new fences in Europe despite having escaped their own isolation at the end of the Cold War. “We eastern Europeans – I'm counting myself as an eastern European – have seen that isolation doesn't help,” the German chancellor told MEPs at a meeting on...

Over the last week, the world has once again looked on aghast as President Vladimir Putin has taken violent advantage of regional instability to re-establish Russia's influence, this time in the Middle East. Despite promises to join the United States in a counterterrorism effort against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Putin is on a mission to protect Russian assets in the Mediterranean by propping up his client, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Ted Cruz Ted Cruz Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been caught flat-footed as Putin's actions threaten to inflame and destabilize an already acute crisis. Enough already. We don't need...

Two men are waiting for their lunch inside a drafty airport hangar -- one is an 80-year-old from Pakistan, the other an 18-year-old Albanian. A throng of people are waiting and the line can take up to an hour, but the young man has run out of patience. He climbs over the barrier and pushes forward, gets his food and then sits down at a table. A short time later, the elderly man addresses him angrily. A dispute that began banally enough on Sunday, Sept. 27, ended in a mass brawl after the young Albanian hit the old man in...

Putin’s air campaign in Syria is not only supporting Assad, it’s giving cover to fighters from the so-called Islamic State. Last June, the U.S. embassy in Damascus accused Bashar al-Assad’s air force of clearing a path for an ISIS advance on Syrian rebels in the Aleppo town of Azaz. “Reports indicate that the regime is making air strikes in support of [ISIS’s] advance on Aleppo, aiding extremists against Syrian population,” the embassy account tweeted, following up with a broader accusation: “We have long seen that the regime avoids [ISIS] lines, in complete contradiction to the regime’s claims to be fighting...

On Oct. 7, Russian warships in the Caspian Sea fired 26 high-tech cruise missiles at rebel targets in Syria—a staggering 1,000 miles away. The missiles in question, which the Pentagon calls SS-N-30s, were mostly unknown to the outside world before the Oct. 7 raid. Even close watchers of the Russian military were surprised to see them. The missile attack was also highly visible. In many ways, it was an announcement to the world, and America in particular, that the once-dilapidated Russian navy is back in action—and that Putin’s missileers are now among the planet’s most advanced. Planning for the missile...