Free Republic

Many of the graphic images being shared on social media are really from Syria or Iraq, finds the broadcaster. […] “A #BBCtrending investigation has found that many of these images are not from the latest conflict and not even from Gaza. Some date as far back as 2009 and others are from conflicts in Syria and Iraq.” …

No-go Zones (NGZ) are typically referred to as being places where non-Muslims dare not tread, even in their own countries. Take heart. There appears to be a new dynamic at work unfolding in a British town known as Leicester. There, Muslim women who wear burkas in public feel like they’re entering NGZ’s themselves. A new book by two brainiacs at the University of Leicester features the “plight” of these victims: Muslim women who wear a full veil say there are no-go areas in Leicester which they feel frightened to visit – even in a car. They claim they are subjected...

Mumbai: Deals worth at least £370 million (around Rs.3,800 crore) were signed between India and the UK on Monday, the first day of a visit by George Osborne, the British chancellor of the exchequer, and William Hague, the country’s foreign secretary. The Indian Air Force and companies such as the Mahindra Group and Cipla Ltd were among those that signed business agreements with UK-based corporations. Osborne told a press conference in Mumbai that India’s defence ministry has signed a £250 million contact with missile maker MBDA of the UK for the supply of advanced short range air-to-air missiles (ASRAAM) to...

Orphan Black has cloned itself another season. BBC America has renewed the critically hailed sci-fi series led by Tatiana Maslany for a third season, greenlighting 10 more episodes for a spring 2015 premiere. Production on the new season kicks off in Toronto in September. The one-hour clone drama has become a crucial benchmark for the cable network as it expands its foothold in original scripted programming beyond British staple Doctor Who. Orphan Black has attracted more that its share of accolades since its March 2013 launch, earning Maslany — who plays nearly a dozen characters — a Golden Globe nomination...

Captain Mark Gold sprang into action after his wife and kids spotted two men attacking Leanne Ware by Cardiff’s freezing River Taff in February, a court heardA soldier saved a woman beaten unconscious from being drowned in a river by her lover, a jury heard. Captain Mark Gold, 43, sprang into action after his wife and kids spotted two men attacking Leanne Ware, 31, at a river. He told Cardiff crown court : “A lady was on the floor in the foetal position. "She was unconscious, she wasn’t trying to defend herself from the kicks and punches, and she wasn’t...

BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, has signed a contract with a start-up that it has been nurturing through its Labs accelerator programme in a bid to measure audience engagement with its media content. The start-up, known as CrowdEmotion, uses facial coding webcams to capture people’s emotions and see how they react to certain TV shows. The BBC Worldwide Insight team said it plans to run CrowdEmotion trials on a number of BBC TV shows, including Top Gear and Sherlock – two of the organisation's most popular and lucrative series. David Boyle, executive vice president at BBC Worldwide...

Scientists at Oxford University and Kings College London develop blood test which can predict the onset of Alzheimer's so that drugs could target the disease before symptoms appear A blood test has been developed to predict if someone will develop Alzheimer’s within a year, raising hopes that the disease could become preventable. After a decade of research, scientists at Oxford University and King’s College London are confident they have found 10 proteins which show the disease is imminent. Clinical trials will start on people who have not yet developed Alzheimer’s to find out which drugs halt its onset. The blood...

New evidence supporting moon formation via collision of 2 planets by Staff Writers Oxford, UK (SPX) Jun 09, 2014 A new series of measurements of oxygen isotopes provides increasing evidence that the Moon formed from the collision of the Earth with another large, planet-sized astronomical body, around 4.5 billion years ago. This work will be published in Science* on 6th June, and will be presented to the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in California on 11th June. Most planetary scientists believe that the Moon formed from an impact between the Earth and a planet-sized body, which has been given the name Theia....

A Christian-run bakery in the U.K. could be facing a court case after it refused a request from a customer to make a cake featuring the "Sesame Street" characters Bert and Ernie with a slogan to "support gay marriage." Ashers Baking Company in Belfast declined the order from the customer, a gay rights activist, but now mat face legal action from watchdog group Equality Commission, BBC News reported on Tuesday. In a statement, the 24-year-old general manager of the Christian bakery said that the order, featuring portraits of the two puppets side by side alongside the logo of gay rights...

At least 20 prominent figures are believed to be among a "powerful elite" of paedophiles who abused children for "decades", according to a former child protection manager. Police were said to be investigating more than ten current and former politicians over alleged child abuse, but Peter McKelvie told BBC Newsnight: "I would say we are looking at upwards of 20 and a much larger number of people who have known about it and done nothing about it."

LONDON - America owes much of its freedom to its British heritage. But today, Britain is losing its freedom. Many Americans were stunned when British authorities arrested Liberty Great Britain party leader Paul Weston in April for publicly reciting Winston Churchill's criticism of Islam. The calendar might say it's 2014, but in Britain it's starting to feel like George Orwell's "1984" because "Big Brother" has decided that certain things can no longer be said. Arrested over Churchill Weston quoted from Winston Churchill's book, The River War, in which he wrote: "How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its...

...extremists are now focused on Middle East and giving them publicity in west is counter-productive. The government and media have blown the Islamist terrorism threat out of proportion, giving extremists publicity that is counter-productive, a former head of Britain's intelligence service has said. Sir Richard Dearlove, chief of MI6 at the time of the Iraq invasion, said that Britons spreading "blood-curdling" messages on the internet should be ignored. He told an audience in London on Monday there had been a fundamental change in the nature of Islamist extremism since the Arab spring. It had created a major political problem in...

Bert and Ernie Gay Marriage Cake Leaves Christian Bakery Facing Court Threat 07 Jul 2014 A Christian-run bakery is facing legal action from a Government agency for refusing to produce a cake carrying a picture of the Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie and the slogan “support gay marriage”. Ashers Baking Co, based in Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland, cancelled an order for a novelty cake with a picture of the puppets arm in arm printed onto the icing saying that it went against the directors’ religious beliefs. They believe that producing the cake with the slogan and the logo of QueerSpace,...

Prime Minister David Cameron has declared that the British Parliament is "too white" – implying that only people from ethnic minority backgrounds can represent ethnic minorities, and that only white people can represent white people. The comments were pulled from his foreword in the book 'Rainbow Over Westminster' where he claims that there is "much more to be done" to get more people of ethnic minority extraction into Parliament.

For years, computer simulations have predicted that sea ice should be disappearing from the Poles. Now, with the news that Antarctic sea-ice levels have hit new highs, comes yet another mishap to tarnish the credibility of climate science. Climatologists base their doom-laden predictions of the Earth’s climate on computer simulations. But these have long been the subject of ridicule because of their stunning failure to predict the pause in warming – nearly 18 years long on some measures – since the turn of the last century. It’s the same with sea ice. We hear a great deal about the decline...

The European Commission is going to withdraw its draft directive on maternity leave, a proposal which has been stalled in the EU Council of Ministers for close to four years. The commission's directive, which would force employers across the EU to allow 20 weeks fully-paid maternity leave, was agreed by the European Parliament in 2010, but cannot become EU law without the agreement of the council, which represents the governments of member states. Because council has refused to move on the issue, the commission is withdrawing the draft directive under its Regulatory Fitness and Performance (REFIT) programme, a programme devised...

A recent report criticized a major U.K. broadcasting company for providing too much of the perspective against man-made global warming in its news coverage. BBC Trust, which is the governing body of the BBC, released a report Thursday that evaluated the news company’s coverage of science impartiality. “… ‘over-rigid’ (as Professor Steve Jones described it) application of the Editorial Guidelines on impartiality in relation to science coverage, which fails to take into account what he regards as the ‘non-contentious’ nature of some stories and the need to avoid giving ‘undue attention to marginal opinion’. Professor Jones cites … the existence...

The hostility towards Christians is reaching fever pitch in the liberal West. The rights of Christians to practice their faith has come under sustained attack from some liberals, and too often those in positions of power. The past few weeks the right of Christian parents to educate their children in the Christian faith as protected by Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights was placed under sustained attack by liberal columnists, particularly at The Times and The Guardian. Even though their argument relied on alleged discriminatory practices carried out in non-faith state schools, it seemed Christian faith schools...

CAMBRIDGE, England – The papers spent years hidden in a milk churn beneath a Russian dacha and read like an encyclopedia of Cold War espionage. Original documents from one of the biggest intelligence leaks in history — a who's who of Soviet spying — were released Monday after being held in secret for two decades.

Members of the Cambridge Five spy ring were regarded by their Soviet handlers as hopeless drunks incapable of keeping secrets, newly-released files suggest. Documents from the Mitrokhin Archive have been opened to the public for the first time after being kept at a secret location for more than 20 years. But 19 out of 33 box files containing typewritten versions of his notes, all in Russian, can be viewed by visitors to the archive centre.