Free Republic

TAIBAD, Iran (AP) — In the face of Afghanistan’s unprecedented boom in opium production, neighboring Iran is trying to baton down its border to slow down smuggling, building moats, walls and other large-scale projects. ... Neighboring Afghanistan has all the makings of a narco-state and is the main source of drugs coming into Iran and headed to other markets in Europe and the United States. Last year, 209,000 hectares (806 square miles) of poppies were planted across Afghanistan, up 36 percent over the year before. They produced an estimated 5,500 metric tons (6,062 tons) of opium, according to the United...

President Obama’s record of lawlessness is prodigious. There is the assumption of a power to rule by presidential decree — unilaterally amending ObamaCare provisions, immigration statutes, and other enactments in flagrant disregard of Congress’s constitutional power to write the laws. There is rampant fraud on the American people — think: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period,” just for a start. In the Benghazi massacre, we see the arc of administration malfeasance: In the absence of congressional authorization, the president instigated an unprovoked and ultimately disastrous war in Libya, empowering virulently anti-American...

**I would be supportive of a world government, if I knew it would be ran by honest people, and there were a checks and balances to ensure power wouldn't be used too corruptly. I know this is a dream. The people who want to rule us are coldhearted people who do not give a damn about anyone but themselves. Live free or die. --Andy 1. "If we do not follow the dictates of our inner moral compass and stand up for human life, then his lawlessness will threaten the peace and democracy of the emerging new world order we now...

Who would you vote for in 2016 St. Louis Journal Business Journal poll....

BERLIN--A close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin praised German diplomacy on Thursday while railing against the U.S. in the latest effort by Moscow to highlight western divisions over the Ukraine crisis. Vladimir Yakunin, president of the Russian Railways and one of the Russian officials on the U.S. sanctions list, lavished praise on Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister, who visited Ukraine this week to endorse the government's planned dialogue with its critics at home. "I know Mr. Steinmeier a little bit myself. I know he is very balanced and a very objective politician," Mr. Yakunin told reporters. "To my mind,...

... These days you can convert everything from real estate to private company stock to hedge fund shares into a charitable kitty. Moreover, depending on what you give, to what kind of charity and how you time your donation, you may get a much more valuable tax break than if you’d just given cash. Example: Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is funding his $100 million commitment to Newark, N.J. schools by donating stock to a supporting organization (a rich man’s donor-advised fund) at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a public charity. If he’d sold $100 million in Facebook shares and...

Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expand edits Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director. R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations. On his new appointment, he commented: “Burisma’s track record of innovations and industry leadership in the field of natural gas means that it can be a strong driver of a strong economy in Ukraine. As a new member of the Board, I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency,...

PARIS/BAKU (Reuters) - France will press ahead with a 1.2 billion-euro ($1.66 billion) contract to sell Mistral helicopter carriers to Russia because cancelling the deal would do more damage to Paris than to Moscow, French diplomatic sources said on Monday. France's move illustrates the limitations of European Union sanctions meant to punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea and dissuade Moscow from intervening in east Ukraine. The United States has been pressing France, Germany and Britain to take a tougher line against Russia. For France, this would mean at least delaying the Mistral contract. For Britain, closing its mansions and...

The plan to void 60 western Colorado energy leases.. is a looming BLM-caused disaster. Hundreds of citizens from Mesa County and other affected areas gathered May 1 in De Beque to protest a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) plan to void existing contracts the government made with private individuals and companies. The meeting in De Beque, a little town dependent almost entirely on gas, oil, coal and cows, was not originally planned by the BLM. Since half of the imperiled leases are in Mesa County, the Mesa County Board of Commissioners joined with various associations and individuals to demand that...

Just hours after last weekend’s ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, one of Pierre Omidyar’s newest hires at national security blog “The Intercept,” was already digging for the truth. Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site’s “senior policy analyst,” speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a “coup” engineered by “deep” forces on behalf of “Pax Americana”: “There’s quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is.” These are serious claims. So serious that I decided to investigate them. And what I found was shocking. Wheeler is partly correct. Pando has...

White House adviser John Podesta told reporters Monday afternoon that Congress could not derail the Obama administration’s efforts to unilaterally enact policies to fight global warming. Podesta said that the president was committed to using executive orders to pass regulations under the Clean Air Act to limit carbon dioxide emissions that they say cause global warming.

In March 2011, Reuters announced a secret order signed by Barack Obama to provide covert support for Libyan rebel forces. The operation became known as Zero Footprint, but after Obama finished with it, Big Foot was identified. For about 18 months before the attacks on our Benghazi Special Mission, intelligence had successfully identified terrorist factions inside the rebel factions. Those terrorists included the Muslim Brotherhood as well as al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, Senator John McCain said the rebels were his heroes. Qadhafi made a fatal mistake, literally, by working toward one currency for Africa, which threatened the West. The idea of a...

Two teams of scientists published studies on Sunday showing that blood from young mice reverses aging in old mice, rejuvenating their muscles and brains. As ghoulish as the research may sound, experts said that it could lead to treatments for disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease. “I am extremely excited,” said Rudolph Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the research. “These findings could be a game changer.” The research builds on centuries of speculation that the blood of young people contains substances that might rejuvenate older adults. In the 1950s, Clive...

Vladimir Putin's recent intervention in Ukraine on the pretext of defending the ethnic Russian population has forced other former Soviet republics to look for ingenious ways to protect their own sovereignties from similar moves. On Monday, the Parliament of Kazakhstan, with a 25% ethnic Russian population and a 4,660 mile-long border shared with Russia, voted to rename the country 'New Illinois,' hoping to attract more American support for their territorial integrity. Kazakhstan's President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is expected to sign the emergency bill into law by Wednesday, setting in motion a complex process for the Central Asian nation of almost 18...

What will Scotland look like after 10 years of independence? If Alex Salmond’s vision is fulfilled, Scotland will have become a prosperous, high-income, high public expenditure, social democracy on the Nordic model, fully at ease with its position in the European Union, and possibly even a signed up member of the euro. An equally plausible scenario, however, is that it will by then have been forced into a vicious fiscal consolidation that will have cut many public services and entitlements to the bone. Gone will be free university education and medical prescriptions. Gone too will be the triple lock on...

The European Commission has exercised historic new EU powers allowing it to revise national budgets for the first time Spain and Italy have been warned that their budgets for 2014 are in breach of European Union rules as Brussels uses new powers to force governments to revise spending plans before national parliaments vote on them. France was also cautioned that plans for painful economic reforms represent only "limited progress" as the European Commission exercised new eurozone powers in a historic shift of sovereignty away from elected governments. "Because in an economic and monetary union, national budgetary decisions can have an...

KIEV, Ukraine, Jan. 16 - As protests here against a rigged presidential election overwhelmed the capital last fall, an alarm sounded at Interior Ministry bases outside the city. It was just after 10 p.m. on Nov. 28. More than 10,000 troops scrambled toward trucks. Most had helmets, shields and clubs. Three thousand carried guns. Many wore black masks. Within 45 minutes, according to their commander, Lt. Gen. Sergei Popkov, they had distributed ammunition and tear gas and were rushing out the gates. Kiev was tilting toward a terrible clash, a Soviet-style crackdown that could have brought civil war. And then,...

If you think Washington is scary now, consider this: Al Gore is not ruling out a 2016 run for president. Al Gore 2000 was awful, proving himself willing to divide the country and put it through hell during his attempt to sue his way into the White House. Al Gore 2016 would be many times worse. He would be a single-issue president, and that issue would be the total destruction of the economy in the name of the debunked global warming hoax.

The 2016 Republican presidential nominating battle is shaping up as the most wide-open in a generation, with a new Washington Post-ABC News poll showing five prospective candidates within four percentage points of one another at the top and a half-dozen more in the mix. The picture is very different on the Democratic side, where former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton is the clear front-runner. In a hypothetical matchup, Clinton leads former Florida governor Jeb Bush — seen by many GOP establishment figures as the party’s strongest general-election candidate — 53 percent to 41 percent. Clinton’s commanding position is fueled...

I periodically (some would say over and over and over again, though occasionally made more palatable by using humor and cartoons) warn that the United States should not become a European-style welfare state. But I wonder whether I spend enough time explaining why this would be a bad idea. After all, some people may think that you get more security and benefits with the European approach, so why not head in that direction. And these folks aren’t just pointing with approval to the Nordic nations. A writer for the New York Times actually thinks we should copy Italy. So it...