Free Republic

Two trains in Gothenburg and Södertälje, near Stockholm, were evacuated after receiving bomb threats on Thursday. Police asked national rail company SJ to temporarily halt all train traffic in and out of both Gothenburg and Stockholm, a spokesman for SJ told The Local at 3 pm. […] “All information we have is that at 1:10 pm, we got a threat and the train had to stop at Södertälje Syd. So all passengers had to leave the train and now technicians are looking at it,” Carina Skagerlind told The Local at around 3 pm. “We make no comment on how we...

Despite thousands of French nationals having been radicalized, the country’s controversial first center for deradicalization stands empty, just five months after opening. But the French government refuses to close it. The center at Beaumont-sur-Vernon in the Indre-et-Loire department of central France opened in September, despite much opposition from local residents and politicians. Its aim was to free those who have been convinced by the ideology of jihadism and help them reintegrate into society. […] But while it was meant to house 25 voluntary participants by the end of December, the center now stands empty after its last resident was sent...

U.S. President Donald Trump’s order temporarily banning entry to people from seven Muslim-majority countries is wrong and Britain does not plan to adopt a similar policy, Prime Minister Theresa May said on Thursday. …

The ship docked on the outskirts of the commercial hub, Yangon, where it was due to unload 500 tonnes of food and emergency supplies, with the rest of its 2,200 ton cargo bound for southeast Bangladesh. Almost 69,000 Rohingyas have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh in the past four months from a security force crackdown. The aid shipment from mostly Muslim Malaysia has stirred opposition in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where many see the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Malaysia has been an outspoken critic of Myanmar over the crisis in Rakhine state, which erupted after nine policemen were killed in...

As judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals weigh the legality of President Trump’s immigration executive order, a Republican push to split up the controversial court -- and shrink its clout -- is gaining steam on Capitol Hill. Republican Sens. Jeff Flake and John McCain of Arizona introduced legislation last month to carve six states out of the San Francisco-based court circuit and create a brand new 12th Circuit. They argue that the 9th is too big, too liberal and too slow resolving cases. If they succeed, only California, Oregon, Hawaii and two island districts would remain in the...

Rosie Ayliffe’s daughter, 20-year-old Mia Ayliffe-Chung, was killed during a knife attack in August 2016. Her alleged killer, Smail Ayad shouted “Allahu akbar” — an Arabic phrase meaning “God is great” — during the attack. However, authorities said there was no indication the assault was motivated by extremism.“Any fool can shout ‘Allahu akbar’ as they commit a crime,” Rosie Ayliffe wrote. “This vilification of whole nation states and their people based on religion is a terrifying reminder of the horror that can ensue when we allow ourselves to be led by ignorant people into darkness and hatred.”

Pope Francis repeated his appeal for people to build bridges of understanding, not walls as he marked a feast day of a Sudanese immigrant amid a global uproar over the Trump administration’s attempts to impose a travel ban on seven mostly Muslim countries. The pope didn’t refer to President Donald Trump in his comments. But at the end of his audience, he noted that Wednesday marked both the church’s day of reflection for young victims of human trafficking and coincidentally the feast day of St. Josephine Bakhita. She was a 19th-century Sudanese slave who, after migrating to Europe, became a...

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Hamas-CAIR works energetically to block all measures outlawing sharia. If they continue, this will be America’s future. President Trump needs to revive the investigation and prosecution of Hamas-CAIR that Obama scuttled. ... A sinister British Sharia court and one girl’s tireless hunt for her father’s killer: How a brutal murder in Pakistan uncovered revenge killings in Lancashire,” by Martin Sixsmith ... The Muslim council of elders, or Sharia court, listened intently as the plaintiff outlined his case. He’d been disrespected by a neighbour, he told them, and in such a small Pakistani community, people talk. As...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House has released a list of 78 attacks it describes as “executed or inspired by” the Islamic State group.</p> <p>The White House says most did not get sufficient attention.</p> <p>The list includes incidents like a truck massacre in Nice, France, that killed dozens and received widespread attention, as well as less high-profile incidents in which nobody was killed.</p>

In a series of nine tweets over the weekend, President Donald Trump defended his executive order temporarily suspending immigration from seven terrorist-infiltrated countries, and he slammed the federal judge in Washington State who temporarily blocked the order, calling him a “so-called judge” in one of his tweets. The liberal media seized on that remark. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), asked if he had “concerns” about Trump’s comment, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, “Yes, I think it is best not to single out judges for criticism. We all get disappointed from time to time at the outcome...

Lawyers for Washington state and Minnesota have told a federal appellate court that restoring President Donald Trump’s ban on refugees and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries would “unleash chaos again.” The filing with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco came early Monday after the White House said it expected the federal courts to reinstate the ban. Washington and Minnesota said their underlying lawsuit was strong and a nationwide temporary restraining order was appropriate. If the appellate court reinstated Trump’s ban, the states said the “ruling would reinstitute those harms, separating families, stranding our university students...

One day after Iran defied Trump with a new missile tests and threatened enemies with "roaring missiles" following Friday's Iran sanctions, confirming our Friday report, House Speaker Paul Ryan said that despite the troubling escalation in sanctions, the Iran Nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration is likely to remain in place. "A lot of that toothpaste is already out of the tube. I never supported the deal in the first place. I thought it was a huge mistake, but the multilateral sanctions are done," Ryan said in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" airing Sunday. Speaker Paul...

It makes more sense to rigorously enforce the Iran nuclear deal than to dismantle it, said Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, signaling diminishing support for pulling the United States out of the deal. Ryan, speaking on “Meet the Press” in an interview to be broadcast in full on Sunday, said the removal of sanctions under the nuclear rollback for sanctions relief deal reached in 2015 between Iran and six major world powers, meant it would be too hard to reconstitute the sanctions. “A lot of that toothpaste is already out of the tube,”...

Iran’s missiles will come down on the country’s enemies if they do wrong, a senior commander in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard was quoted as saying in a Saturday report from semi-official Tasnim news agency. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, chief of the Guard’s airspace division, said: “If the enemy does not walk the line, our missiles come down on them.” Hajizadeh’s comments came during a Revolutionary Guard military exercise aimed at testing its missile and radar systems. The exercise was taking place in a 35,000-square-kilometer (13,515-square-mile) area in Semnan province in northern Iran. …

A story that has not received much attention, is the growing hostility towards Muslims by Buddhists in Thailand and Burma. After the killing of 20 Buddhist monks by Muslims, a leading Thai Buddhist monk called for Buddhists to defend themselves against Muslims http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/prominent-buddhist-monk/2497804.html

Seattle, Washington – U.S. District Judge James Robart on Monday expressed a strong anti-police bias when dealing with a case involving Seattle police union’s contract negotiations. Judge Robart went on a rant about deadly force statistics against black people and proclaimed, “Black Lives Matter.” Judge Robart is presiding over a 2012 consent decree requiring the city to adopt reforms to address Department of Justice allegations of biased policing and excessive force. The proposed changes will have a major effect on all union members, including discipline being investigated and determined by non-law enforcement investigators. The changes make it faster and easier...

The White House is preparing to fight for President Donald Trump’s immigration order after a federal judge on Friday halted it nationwide. A chaotic night set up the nation for a second straight weekend of widespread uncertainty over the controversial ban, this time with the administration on defense. Federal Judge James Robart, a George W. Bush appointee who presides in Washington state, temporarily stopped the order. US Customs and Border Protection then alerted airlines the US government would quickly begin reinstating visas that were previously canceled, and CBP advised airlines that refugees that are in possession of US visas will...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” on Thursday that President Donald Trump’s executive order pausing immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries “wasn’t communicated … in the right way governmentally” to ensure smooth implementation, which gave the Left the opportunity to mischaracterize the policy. “It wasn’t explained in the right way, and it wasn’t communicated — it seems to me — in the right way governmentally to make sure that it was implemented smoothly in the beginning, and so a lot of the way the left has now mischaracterized what I think is a policy that...

And this is precisely why change to the Iranian regime will never come from within it. It cannot. Absolute dictatorial regimes – be they religious or otherwise – are structured for the purpose of perpetuating themselves. They are not democratic in nature, subject to the will of the people they rule or even of the people within them. Any true moderate or reformist influences will not enjoy a fair and equal opportunity to advance based on the merits of their ideas in the eyes of their peers. They will be silenced and stamped out as “heretical”. Iran desperately needs a...

Sweden will extend border controls and ID checks in the south of the country by a further three months, the country's government has confirmed. The border controls at ports in the south of Sweden and on the Swedish side of the Öresund Bridge to Denmark were brought in during the autumn of 2015, a year where Sweden received a record 163,000 asylum applications. ID checks on trains crossing the Öresund Bridge were introduced soon after. The measures in the passport-free Schengen zone are only supposed to be temporary and originally designed to last six months, but they were extended by...