Free Republic

After Crimea, what next? In an unauthenticated audio, Ambassadors Chubarov and Sergei Bakharev laugh about taking over areas in Alaska, Venice, Scotland, Catalonia and Miami. Watch out, the Russians are coming! ... The pair...joke that Russia will take control of Alaska, Venice, Scotland and Catalonia, a region of Spain which wants a vote on independence, reports The Guardian {link at URL]... The recording has been posted on Youtube, reports The Guardian [link at URL] ...

Tools unlock secrets of early man By Mark Kinver Science reporter, BBC News website Researchers are confident the tools are 700,000 years old New research shows that early humans were living in Britain around 700,000 years ago, much earlier than scientists had previously thought. Using new dating techniques, scientists found that flint tools unearthed in Pakefield, Suffolk, were 200,000 years older than the previous oldest find. Humans were known to have lived in southern Europe 780,000 years ago but it was unclear when they moved north. The findings have been published in the scientific journal Nature. A team of scientists...

The always humorous Nigel Farage blasted European council president Herman Van Rompuy along with José Barroso in European parliament today, mocking the alleged "breakthrough". Link if video does not play: Nigel Farage on Euro Breakdown Select Quotes: ESM is doomed before it starts Legal Challenges in Ireland and Germany Estonia Justice Says it will not fit their constitution Finns and Dutch have broken agreement made in the middle of the night Perhaps the little countries do not have a say at all anymore Crisis is insolvable Euro Crisis Breakthrough Breakdown - Nigel FarageFarage sarcastically commented to Herman Van Rompuy ......

Millions will remember Maureen Lipman’s TV character Beattie praising her grandson when he ‘got an ’ology’. But the TV advert from 1988 has been blamed by Ukip leader Nigel Farage for encouraging a generation to study for what he considers to be worthless degrees.

People who call gay sex ‘disgusting’ will be allowed to stay in the UK Independence Party. Nigel Farage defended party members with ‘old-fashioned’ views about homosexuality, as he warned that with the government passing same-sex weddings ‘nobody knows where it will end up’. MPs last night backed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, but Mr. Farage said ministers were ‘picking a war with middle England’. …

An Audience With … Nigel Farage features a stage with only a table, a chair, and a bottle of wine as props. Farage thinks it will give him a chance to “explain who I am” and, crucially, to “reach a new audience”. … “We need a much more muscular defense of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Yes, we’re open to different cultures, but we have to defend our values. That’s the message I want to hear from the Archbishop of Canterbury and from our politicians. Anything less is appeasement of the worst kind.” Yet he speaks not as a defender of the...

Video link - 4 minutes or so. This is how to handle an aggressive and biased interviewer. Politicians that are not fast on their feet don't last long in a parliamentary system. The reference to a "whopping 14%" in the last elections - that's up from 7% so, in fact, it's a dramatic increase, which could interpreted as 25% of Conservative supporters switching their allegiance to the UKIP.

A Tory Minister is involved in an extraordinary row over claims that taxpayers’ money was used to fund gay sex parties. The politician is said to have been in a feud with a senior party official accused of using dating app Grindr to invite gay MPs and activists to his suite at the Conservative Party conference. The £70,000-a-year official, who is not an MP, has also been accused of bullying staff and being drunk on duty. He was disciplined after a formal investigation. …

Speaking to The Sunday Times, Ibrahim Mounir, the Brotherhood’s most senior official in the UK, said that the government’s designation of his organization as a terrorist entity could be interpreted by its followers that violence was an option. Related: • Saudi Arabia designates Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist group • Egyptian court sentences 529 Muslim Brotherhood members to death, lawyer says “If this [ban] happened, this would make a lot of people in Muslim communities think that [peaceful] Muslim Brotherhood values . . . didn’t work and now they are designated a terrorist group, which would make the doors open for...

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 flew around Indonesian airspace apparently to avoid detection after vanishing from radar screens on March 8, a media report said today, suggesting the possibility of a more sinister reason behind the jet's disappearance..... After reviewing radar data provided by neighbouring countries, investigators have now found that the jetliner curved north of Indonesia before turning south toward the southern Indian Ocean, CNN quoted a Malaysian official as saying. The official also suggested the possibility of a more sinister reason behind MH370's disappearance a month ago. The plane's flight path clearly showed that someone on the plane was...

A Royal navy ship has arrived in the southern Indian Ocean to verify signals Chinese officials believe could lead to missing flight MH370. The three 'fleeting sounds' have been picked up in the multi-national search currently being conducted 1,000 miles off Australia's west coast. At least one of those 'pings' is believed to have a similar frequency to that given off by a black box. HMS Echo, one of Britain's most sophisticated hydrographic vessels, is racing against time to determine whether the sounds were signals from the plane's black box as the batteries powering the device are expected to run...

In a sudden development, US Ambassador to India Nancy Powell on Monday resigned in the midst of general elections in India in which Narendra Modi is perceived to be a front runner for the post of Prime Minister. The announcement of her resignation to her colleagues in the US mission here today came a week after media reports here that she may be shipped out by the Obama Administration to “clean the state” with India. Powell has been in India for less than three years. “US Ambassador to India Nancy J Powell announced in a US Mission Town Hall meeting...

A Chinese ship searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 detected a "pulse signal" in the southern Indian Ocean on Saturday, but there was no evidence yet that it was linked to the missing plane, state media said. The signal picked up by the vessel's black box detector had a frequency of 37.5kHz, the official Xinhua news agency said -- identical to the beacon signal emitted by flight recorders. The announcement came nearly a month after the Malaysian jetliner disappeared off radar screens en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, triggering an unprecedented international search. Australian...

The fragile Tory truce over Europe disintegrated last night after it emerged that more than 100 Conservative MPs and candidates are set to defy David Cameron at the General Election next year by vowing to leave the EU. The Prime Minister has promised the Tory manifesto will spell out his pledge for a referendum by 2017 on Britain’s links with Europe after trying to win back key powers from Brussels. But Tory rebels will go further and make their own personal manifesto vows to campaign to withdraw from the EU—regardless of any concessions by Brussels. …

Ahead of May’s European Parliament election, with issues such as the economy and immigration to the fore, none of Britain’s three main parties are stealing a march on their rivals. The co-governing, right-of-center Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, led by Prime Minister David Cameron, is struggling. What remains of its traditional support base, including some MPs, often seems opposed to the modernizing, socially-liberal direction of its leadership. […] But viewing the UK's party-political landscape solely in terms of the traditional duopoly (plus the Lib Dems) misses the big political story, and what is likely to be the major...

Nick Clegg accused Nigel Farage of peddling "dangerous fantasies" in an ill-tempered BBC TV debate on Britain's future in Europe. Mr. Farage accused the Lib Dem leader of "willfully lying to the British people about Brussels' grip on UK laws. He also claimed EU immigration had hit the "white working class" the hardest. Instant polls said Mr. Farage had won by a bigger margin than he did in their debate last week.... The UKIP leader accused the Lib Den leader of being "hell bent on getting Britain involved in a war.... He said he did not want Britain to be...

With a Taliban fighter looming in his sights half a mile away, the British sniper knew a clean shot would take down his enemy. What he could not have known was that the single bullet he fired would account for five more insurgents. But, incredibly, his rifle round triggered the explosive vest worn by his target, killing all those around him. The record-breaking shot was fired by a Coldstream Guards marksman on one of the last missions to be carried out by British troops in Afghanistan. UK forces are preparing to leave their last frontline base in Helmand as part...

Eighteen countries, including five of the world’s leading arms exporters, ratified a landmark treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar global arms trade on Wednesday, giving a significant boost to the campaign for the treaty’s entry into force. […] Five of the world’s top 10 arms exporters—Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain—turned in their ratification documents at the ceremony. The other 13 were Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Malta, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Among the hold-outs is the United States, the world’s largest weapons exporter. The Obama administration has signed the treaty but there is strong resistance in...

A student who went to visit family in Iran has been locked up for five months over comments she made to friends on Facebook, her family say. Roya Saberi Negad Nobakht, from Stockport, was arrested as she stepped off a plane in the provincial city of Shiraz and accused of being a spy, husband Daryoush Taghipoor told the M.E.N. Daryoush said his 47-year-old wife has been detained at Evin, an infamous prison in Iranian capital Tehran, on suspicion of plotting to commit crimes against security and insulting Islam. He claimed her arrest was over comments she made on an internet...

The good news is that they’re only overrepresented 200% in London prisons. An investigation into British prisons has revealed that over a quarter of prisoners in the London are Muslims, more than double their population proportion in the UK capital.Data collected by lawyer and shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan revealed that even though Muslims made up just 12% of the population of London, they made up for 27% of the city’s prison population.Furthermore, it was noted that while Muslims in the UK constitute 4.8% of the population according to a 2011 census, 14% of inmates in the country are Muslims....