Free Republic

Does Italy still exist, or is it, as Metternich puts it, a geographic expression? By joining the Euro, it lost its monetary sovereignty. It lost its territorial sovereignty after its defeat in the second world war with occupation by the Americans who have never left since then. It lost its military sovereignty as it is now reduced to taking orders from the USA and organising pretend peace missions in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and bombing Libya (thanks also to grandpa Napolitano)/ The fall of Gaddafi is the cause of the immigration of biblical proportions - from that country that no...

Cairo (AFP) - Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris has offered to buy an island off Greece or Italy and develop it to help hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from Syria and other conflicts. "...I'll...host the migrants and provide jobs for them building their new country," he wrote...he said:..."You have dozens of islands which are deserted and could accommodate hundreds of thousands of refugees."...the "main thing is investment in infrastructure"..."And if things improve, whoever wants to go back (to their homeland) goes back," said Sawiris,...

Sergio Frau suspects Plato was writing about a tidal wave on Sardinia... Writer and journalist Sergio Frau is another. After researching the island for a decade, Frau suspects a mysterious disaster that devastated Sardinia 3,200 years ago was in fact a tidal wave, which boosts the theory that Sardinia and Atlantis are one and the same, reports the Guardian. Stefano Tinti, an expert on tidal waves who recently visited the island with Frau along with a dozen other experts, says 350 tidal waves have occurred in the Mediterranean over the last 2,500 years and one might explain why all of...

Italy’s simmering anti-immigrant sentiment has been stoked by the murder of an elderly couple in their home in Sicily, allegedly by an African asylum seeker. Mamadou Kamara, an 18-year-old from the Ivory Coast, allegedly slit the throat of Vincenzo Solano, 68, and then attacked his Spanish-born wife, Mercedes Ibanez, 70. Ms Ibanez fell to her death from a second-floor balcony, during a robbery that turned violent. Mr Kamara is one of thousands of migrants and refugees living at a vast reception centre at nearby Mineo, in south-eastern Sicily. They are accommodated there after arriving by boat from Libya, and wait...

The risk that groups like Islamic State could smuggle militants into Europe under cover of a huge wave of migrants is much smaller than some politicians suggest, according to security specialists with close ties to governments and intelligence agencies. By the end of July, more than a third of a million migrants and refugees had entered the European Union, mainly via Italy, Greece and Hungary, according to EU border agency Frontex. The flow has continued unabated through August. Once inside the bloc’s borderless Schengen zone, the new arrivals—many from countries like Syria and Iraq where Islamic State holds sway over...

The Republican Party of the 1920's swept into power during a financial crisis. Errors in the Fed’s monetary policy in 1919 in kept rates too low to benefit the sale of Victory bonds. The Fed then tightened excessively due to inflation, creating a financial shock and depression from 1920 to 1921. At that time, the Republican Party viewed increasing tariffs as good policy. Thus, during the sixty seventh Congress, the Emergency Tariff Act of 1921 was passed as a temporary measure until a more comprehensive measure could be drafted. Ultimately, Fordney-McCumber passed in 1922, imposing an ad valorem rate of...

Ahlam El Brinis has been criticised for wearing revealing clothesBorn and raised in the northern city of Padua a model of Moroccan origin hopes to become the first Muslim Miss Italy. Ahlam El Brinis, 20, has been selected for the semi-final of the Miss Italy beauty contest, which will take place in the coastal town of Jesolo (Venice) on September 20. But she faces some tough opposition for her decision. Instagram According to huffingtonpost.it Ahlam has received threats and insults on social media for taking part in the beauty pageant. She has been criticised for posing in revealing clothes...

A Muslim mayor in the Tuscan seaside community of Monte Argentario has provoked a political outcry for refusing to accept any refugees. ... We don’t want refugees here, we don’t have the facilities for them,” Cerulli told The Local on Friday. “We don’t know where to put them, we don’t know what to do with them.” Cerulli, 60, is a former nuclear engineer and aligned with the New Centre-Right party (NCD) of interior minister, Angelino Alfano. During his engineering career he travelled extensively to countries including Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and the US, and is married to an Indonesian woman. He...

Pope Francis has sent his blessing to a lesbian author of children's books dealing with same-sex families, wishing her and her wife well in their work, it emerged on Friday. As Vatican officials scrambled to clarify that the message was simply a standard courtesy which did not signal any change in Church teaching on the subject, the author told AFP she had been pleasantly surprised to have received such a positive response. Francesca Pardi, who writes and publishes books such as "Why you have two mummies", wrote to Francis in June after the publishing company she runs with her wife...

ROME (RNS) The Vatican has given its backing to a central Rome square being named after Martin Luther, a church reformer excommunicated by the pope nearly 500 years ago. A German Catholic priest and theologian, Luther was a key figure in the Protestant Reformation and sparked considerable controversy by challenging the authority of the Catholic Church. He denounced the corruption he saw among clergy in Rome and believed salvation came through faith alone — views that did not sit well with Pope Leo X. Luther was excommunicated in 1521 and was never allowed to return to the Catholic Church, but...

VENICE, ITALY, August 20, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – British singer Elton John publicly criticized Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice, for withdrawing several preschool books that promote homosexual behavior to children under the age of six. During the past weekend, John called Brugnaro "extremely silly" and "boorishly bigoted" in an Instagram post. His post also depicted one of the storybooks that, according to the rock star, promotes an “all-inclusive world where families come in all shapes, sizes and colours.” “Instead of encouraging a world based on inclusiveness, tolerance and love, he's championing a future society that's divisive and fosters ignorance,” the...

Tsunami or melting glaciers: What caused ancient Atlit to sink? By Ofri Ilani At the bottom of the sea, some 300 meters west of the Atlit fortress, lies one of the greatest archaeological mysteries of the Mediterranean basin. About 20 years ago, archaeologists discovered a complex of ancient buildings and ancient graves with dozens of skeletons at the underwater site of Atlit-Yam. The team of marine archaeologists that excavated the site, headed by Dr. Ehud Galili of the Israel Antiquities Authority, came to the consclusion that an ancient settlement once existed there, but sank beneath the surface of the sea...

It's a terrifying vision: A violent eruption of Italy's Mount Etna triggers a massive collapse of one flank of the volcano, sending 35 cubic kilometers of debris--the equivalent of 10,000 Cheops pyramids--hurtling at 400 kilometers an hour into the Ionian Sea. The Big Splash unleashes a 50-meter-tall wall of water that, within a few hours, wipes out coastal settlements across the Mediterranean. This catastrophe happened 8000 years ago--and a Mediterranean monster of similar magnitude could happen again. That's the scenario invoked in an analysis in last week's Geophysical Research Letters. "It was an extraordinary event, probably the largest tsunami unleashed...

Over 2,000 migrants have been ‘saved’ by the Italian coastguard over the past three days, just a fraction of the so-called ‘swarm’ presently migrating north through Europe. As illegals attempting to cross the Mediterranean in unseaworthy boats to Europe were being rescued, yet more found themselves near the end of their perilous journeys just yards away from the British forward border at Calais, France. Despite significant deployments of riot police, security equipment, and sniffer dogs thousands of desperate attempts to break into the Calais port facilities are still made every night. Britain has deployed 100 new border force guards to...

DETROIT -- Fiat Chrysler must offer to buy back from customers hundreds of thousands of Ram pickup trucks and other vehicles -- the biggest such action in U.S. history -- as part of a costly deal with safety regulators to settle legal problems in about two dozen recalls. The Italian-American automaker also faces a record civil fine of up to $105 million. In addition, owners of more than a million older Jeeps with vulnerable rear-mounted gas tanks will be able to trade them in or be paid by Chrysler to have the vehicles repaired. ~SNIP~ Vehicles eligible for buy-back offer...

Gov. Jerry Brown arrived in Rome for climate talks this week with the smallest of entourages – three – and the most comfortable of accommodations. Brown, who typically flies Southwest Airlines in California, flew to Italy with real estate developer George Marcus and his wife, Judy, in their private plane. Brown is combining his trip to a conference here with a vacation with those friends.

Hackers took control of a car and crashed it into a ditch by remotely breaking into its systems from 10 miles away whilst sitting on their sofa. In the first such breach of its kind security experts cut out the engine and applied the brakes on the Jeep Cherokee, sending it into a spin. The US hackers said they used just a laptop and mobile phone to access the Jeep’s on-board systems via its wireless Internet connection. They claim that more than 470,000 cars made by Fiat Chrysler could be at risk of being attacked by similar means - including...

The situation in Athens seems to have calmed down, but former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks Europe has an even bigger issue to worry about: Germany. In a blog post on Friday, Bernanke wrote that the failure of the eurozone as a whole is very much related to the "highly asymmetric outcomes" among member nations. In other words, Bernanke is attributing Europe's woes to the fact that countries like Germany are benefiting at the expense of the monetary union's weaker members, like Greece, Spain, and Italy. Bernanke points to unemployment rates as a clear sign of the disparity in...

Residents in a chic Rome suburb and a northern Italian village staged angry anti-immigrant protests on Friday, with villagers setting mattresses ablaze in a bid to stop authorities from housing migrants. Authorities in the village of Quito plan to accommodate 101 immigrants in empty apartments, but several residents broke into one of the buildings, removed camp beds, mattresses and televisions intended for the newcomers and set them on fire outside. The protesters then put up tents, with the Corriere della Sera newspaper quoting them as saying: “We aren’t going home until they leave — this is an invasion.” Italy is...

While all Eyes are on Greece, Italy’s Banks are Drowning in Bad Debt The real danger to the euro area probably doesn’t emanate from Greece, but from two of its heavyweights, namely France and Italy. A small note in the European press reminds us that all is not well in at least one of these countries, least of all with its banks (currently this is only a “page 16 story”, but it has great potential to eventually move to the front page). Regional distribution of non-performing loans in Italy The note reads as follows:  “Rome – because of the recession of recent...