Free Republic

Social activists Gaia Parisi and Matilde Rizzo are just friends -- but when Italy's ultra-conservative Interior Minister Matteo Salvini visited their hometown, the 19-year-olds couldn't resist the chance to photobomb him with a same-sex kiss. Salvini, who is leader of the far-right, anti-immigrant League Party, recently endorsed and addressed an anti-LGBT and anti-abortion World Congress of Families event in Verona, Italy. The group's stated mission is to "defend the natural family." (Ours is) ... a message of love and tolerance against the language and the attitude of hatred that politicians like Matteo Salvini keep spreading," Parisi told CNN. "But also...

Russian warplanes in Syria are targeting civilian oil refineries and trucks while deliberately ignoring ISIS facilities to allow the extremist group to continue its oil trade with the Assad regime, local activists claim. Citizen journalists from the Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently group claimed Russia's airstrikes are aimed at destroying local oil facilities which are mostly owned by the local population 'and have no direct links with ISIS'. Oil trucks that move between the ISIS-held cities of Deir Ezzor and Raqqa, owned by civilians, are also targeted by Russian jets.

Belgium has called for vast refugee camps holding up to 300,000 refugees to be built in Greece in a desperate attempt to stem the flow of migrants from Syria and other nations outside Europe. At an emergency summit of European leaders yesterday, Belgian migration minister Theo Francken raised the spectre of setting up 'closed facilities' in Greece to be operated by the EU. He said that the Greeks 'now need to bear the consequences' of being too weak to guard their own borders and called for Athens to face an EU 'sanction mechanism' under which the rising number of refugees...