Free Republic

Has John Heilemann ever gotten this riled up over the commies ruling Cuba? If so, I missed it. But on his Bloomberg TV show tonight, Heilemann got on his populist high horse to blast the British monarchy on the occasion of the visit to the US of Prince William and Princess Kate, mocking them as "undereducated" and calling for the British monarchy to be "done away with tomorrow." In Heilemann's view, the real "royalty" on view at the Brooklyn Nets game tonight will be Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Lebron James. View the video here.

Unborn baby a 10 weeks Seven years ago, a baby girl (who cannot be named for legal reasons) was born to a 19 year old mother who had drunk heavily throughout her pregnancy, despite warnings from healthcare workers that her drinking could damage her baby. This girl and, indirectly, her mother, are now making headlines. The girl was badly harmed by her mothers drinking. She now has Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), which has lead to retarded growth, facial abnormalities, intellectual impairment and other major complications. For the last five years her Local Authority has tried to secure Criminal Injuries...

TWO vastly different sets of opinion are set to clash on Thursday as Russell Brand and Nigel Farage are set to meet in a Canterbury edition of Question Time next week. Comedian and equality activist Russell Brand will sit alongside the leader of the UKIP party Nigel Farage on Thursday December 11. Fireworks between the two men are likely: Brand is a left-wing campaigner who has previously called Farage "that racist bloke", while Farage said, in a column for The Independent, that Brand "talks in riddles about how he'd run the country" and "doesn't really say anything". Russell Brand has...

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-100-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored. The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power...

Britain is already a lame duck within the EU’s internal governing structure and is losing influence “by the day” in Brussels, even before David Cameron holds a referendum on withdrawal. This self-isolation has upset the European balance of power in profound ways, leading ineluctably to German hegemony and a unipolar system centered on Berlin. […] Such is the verdict of Roman Prodi, the former Italian premier and ex-president of the European Commission. […] “Germany is exercising an almost solitary power. The new presidents of the Commission and the Council are men who rotate around Germany’s orbit, and above all there...

BREAKING NEWS: The sister of American hostage Luke Somers says he was killed in a failed rescue mission in Yemen. Lucy Somers said: "We ask that all of Luke's family members be allowed to mourn in peace."

'Ian McLagan of the Faces and Small Faces has died at the age of 69, after suffering a stroke. Ultimate Classic Rock reports that the legendary keyboard player suffered a "massive stroke" and passed away in hospital in Austin, Texas. McLagan was born in 1945 in Middlesex. He joined the Small Faces in 1965 and continued to play with the band after they changed their name to the Faces in 1969, when Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood joined. The Faces split in 1975, and McLagan began work as a session musician, playing with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne,...

The American mother of a 14-year-old boy killed by an online gaming partner in Britain says she did everything she could to protect her son: She limited his access to electronics, installed parental controls and forbade him from using the same server as a boy she had grown suspicious of. However, though Lorin LaFave, 47, said she warned both British police and her son, the boy, Breck Bednar was murdered by someone he met online on Feb 17. Computer engineer Lewis Daynes, 19, pleaded guilty last month to Breck's stabbing murder that day in Daynes' house in Grays, Essex, England....

The United Kingdom’s 2010 Strategic Defense and Security Review—a budget drill, really—imposed devastating cuts to what had been one of the world’s best militaries. The British Army, Royal Air Force and Royal Navy each had to give up weapons and manpower in the interest of saving money. But arguably the most damaging reductions fell on the navy, which had to surrender both of its remaining Invincible-class light aircraft carriers years earlier than previously planned. And the Harrier jump jets that flew from the flattops went, too—leaving the navy without carrier-launched fighters for the first time since a plane took off...

As the Dutch central bank looks to repatriate some of its gold reserves back from the New York Federal Reserve, Dennis Gartman, the editor and publisher of The Gartman Letter, has questioned what reputational damage this could cause for the U.S. The Dutch central bank last week confirmed that it was shipping gold from the U.S. to the Netherlands to "spread its gold stock in a more balanced way", adding that it would have a "positive effect on public confidence". It comes after the Germans made a similar move in 2013, indicating that it would transfer 300 tons from New...

Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up. I was attacked by a...

Tickets on cross-Channel ferries will rise in price by £50 because of new EU emissions rules, operator P&O Cruises has announced. P&O, Britain’s biggest operator, said a return ticket for a family of four traveling from Dover to Calais will increase in price from £160 to £210 from January 1. The company blamed new rules set in Brussels, which force operators of ships in the English Channel, North Sea and Baltic Sea to adopt more expensive low-sulfur fuel, called marine gas-oil. They will also have to install filtering equipment, called “scrubbers”, costing millions of pounds. …

As many as 13,000 people in Britain are being held in conditions of slavery, four times the number previously thought, it has been revealed. In what is said to be the first scientific estimate of the scale of modern slavery in the UK, the Home Office has said the number of victims last year was between 10,000 and 13,000. They include women forced into prostitution, domestic staff and workers in fields, factories and fishing boats.

'It’s a popular myth, and there’s good reason for it, that Muhammad is Britain’s most popular boy’s name. Except that is apparently what the data presented by the website BabyCentre has revealed this morning. These numbers were widely reported, including by the Guardian (we have subsequently updated our news story to make clear that it is a survey and not official national statistics). The BabyCentre.co.uk names are simply a sample based on 56,157 members of the site who gave birth in 2014. Reporting on this seems to have overlooked that there are comprehensive statistics available from official bodies, although only...

British intelligence officials have Christmas-spectacular” target=”_blank”>uncovered a plot by terrorists to blow up five European passenger jets during the Christmas holiday, security analysts said. And law enforcement agents with the United Kingdom are taking the threat so seriously that they very nearly banned all carry-on luggage at the airports, the Sunday Express reported.

Prince Charles's coronation should include a reading from the Koran, a Church of England Bishop has said. Lord Harries of Pentregarth, a retired Bishop of Oxford, said that such a gesture at the traditionally Anglican service would be "creative" and make Muslims feel "embraced" by the nation. Speaking in the House of Lords yesterday, the retired bishop, who continues to serve as an assistant in the Anglican diocese of Southwark, said that the Church of England should be "exercising its historic weiterlesen. Dazu berichtet dailymail.co.uk weiter: Koran should be read at Prince Charles' coronation says top bishop. The gesture would...

Vermont’s incumbent governor, Peter Shumlin, wants his state to become the first to launch a government takeover of its health-care system. But the results of last month’s election could give him pause. He was unable to secure a majority of votes this November — after winning 58 percent of the vote two years ago. Now the state legislature will determine whether to send Shumlin back for another term. What happened in between? Vermont botched the launch of its state-run insurance exchange. By 2017, the exchange is supposed to serve as the “infrastructure” for a single-payer system, with the state picking...

'A lot of planning goes into a wedding but one thing you can’t account for is a rock star staying in the same hotel and dropping by to give an impromptu performance. The Who front-man Roger Daltrey was staying at Mar Hall in Glasgow as the band are on their 50th anniversary tour. It also happened to be where Susan and Carl Smith were having their wedding. The bride had spotted him earlier in the day and asked for a photo, but a few of her friends managed to persuade him to drop in on the reception. After giving a...

TERRORISTS are plotting to blow up five European passenger jets in a Christmas "spectacular", security experts say. The threat has been taken so seriously it came close to leading to an outright ban on all hand luggage, a senior insider has revealed. Mobile phones and electronic devices could still be banned from plane cabins, with the threat of a 9/11-style coordinated attack on London and other major cities feared imminent. The warning comes as Whitehall officials admit that a terror strike on the UK is now "almost inevitable" particularly with British jihadis returning from fighting alongside the Islamic State in...

Representatives of Eurosceptic and far-right groups from Italy to Bulgaria gathered at the National Front party conference in Lyon at the weekend to warn France and Europe of a “neo-Ottoman” onslaught of Islam-preaching, benefit-stealing migrants. Digging through the history books, Heinz-Christian Strache, the head of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), warned that “Arab armies plundered Lyon in 725 and are now busy doing the same in Iraq and Syria”. Strache went on to blast Europe’s mainstream parties for, among other things, stoking “mass immigration, ideological terror, gay marriage and gender theory”. The Austrian far-right leader was one of seven foreign...