Free Republic

President Donald Trump issued a dire warning to would-be immigrants making their way toward the U.S., warning that thousands of U.S. troops being sent to the border would return fire if caravan members throw rocks at them. Trump has already ordered thousands of troops to the southern border, and was asked after delivering a fiery speech at the White House whether he envisioned them firing on the people making there way approaching the border on foot. 'I hope not. I hope not. It's the military. I hope there won't be that. But I will tell you this: Anybody throwing stones,...

All or nothing at all -- three-quarters of a country never appealed to him, nor did the idea of a political entity called Northern Ireland that was created in 1920, comprising the six northeastern counties of Ireland in the province of Ulster. Gerry Adams is still adamant about the need for a united Ireland. As a political entity, the Republic of Ireland, first called the Irish Free State, was created in 1922. On November 18, 2017 the 69-year-old Adams, president since 1983 of Sinn Fein, the left-wing political party, announced that it was time for a change and that he...

Seattle is about to embark on a civic experiment that most experts predict will be an economic disaster; a $15 an hour minimum wage is set to go into effect on April 1st. And some restuarants in the city have already shuttered their doors and are either going out of business or moving to friendlier climes. This was entirely predictable - and was predicted when the measure passed the Seattle city council. Restuarants are particularly sensitive to this sort of increase in wages since most of their employees are paid at the minimum, and such a large percentage of their...

We were trying to build a central government in a country that never had a central government. Afghanistan is called a country but it is really just a name for a territory housing a bunch of loosely related tribes who occupy the land between Pakistan and the other Central Asian ‘stans. Many of the Afghans, probably the majority, practice a brutal, fundamentalist kind of Islam full of executions, beatings, with special attention being meted out on women and homosexuals. People of different religions aren't exactly favored either, to put it mildly.

It's been the amazing, runaway boom of the past decade. If you'd put your money into gold at the lows about 10 years ago, you'd have made a nearly 400% return. That's left pretty much everything else—stocks, China, let alone housing—in the dust. But with gold now trading near record highs, the big $1,200-an-ounce question is obvious.

January 15, 2008 Buying a hybrid is currently a pastime for early adopters and those who are prepared to pay to salve their environmental conscience . Do the return-on-investment (ROI) math and you’ll realize that the fuel savings never bridge the economic rationale gap because of the higher initial cost of hybrids. That appears about to change! Ultra-capacitor-based energy storage systems have long promised a breakthrough for the automotive industry and AFS Trinity’s announcement of the real world performance specs of its plug-in hybrid system is landmark. The company’s patent-pending Extreme Hybrid (XH) technology employs a proprietary dual energy storage...

The giant flies Just as Airbus's super-jumbo makes its maiden flight, Boeing bounces back WHEN the new A380 took off from Airbus's French production base in Toulouse on April 27th, it should have been the European aircraft manufacturer's big week. The successful first test-flight of a 555-seat super-jumbo was quite an event. Instead, Airbus's American rival Boeing almost stole the show. On April 25th, Boeing said that, if all the options are taken up in a new order for widebody jets from Air Canada, the value at list prices would be around $15 billion—making it one of the biggest aircraft...

SANTIAGO, Chile I made a pilgrimage to Santiago seeking to resolve the Social Security debate with a simple question: What would Pablo Serra do? I wanted to compare our pensions to see the results of an accidental experiment that began in 1961, when he and I were friends in second grade at a school in Chile. He remained in Chile and became the test subject; I returned to America as the control group. By the time we finished college, both of our countries' pension systems were going broke. Chile responded by pioneering a system of private accounts in 1981. America...