Free Republic

I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous “biographies” were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in “socialism.” Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to...

The military airlifted the suspected hijackers of the Arctic Sea and most of its Russian crew from Cape Verde to Moscow on Thursday, after the lumber freighter mysteriously vanished and reappeared in the Atlantic. Eleven of the 15 crew members arrived in Moscow, while the captain and three sailors remained on the ship, which was adrift about 200 nautical miles from the West African island nation of Cape Verde. Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said the freighter was sailing to the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk. The sailors and their suspected captors arrived in two separate Il-76 cargo jets at the...

RIGA (Reuters) - Hundreds of Latvians knitting 4,500 pairs of woollen mittens as gifts for the November NATO summit have been told to avoid a folk symbol said to ward off evil since it looks like a Nazi swastika. A spokeswoman for the NATO leaders' summit said the Latvian Thunder Cross, or Fire Cross, will not figure in the design of any of the thousands of unique pairs of mittens some 300 Latvians are producing for NATO delegates lest it be misinterpreted. The Thunder Cross is a folklore symbol used as a charm against evil for Latvians. It quite commonly...