Free Republic

What sometimes seem like epic battles to reshape the world generally fade to irrelevance very quickly. To take just one recent example, 20 years ago the Justice Department was trying to break up Microsoft because the software giant was perceived as too powerful to be challenged by other firms. Today, of course, all the talk is of Google and Apple with Microsoft struggling to find a niche. Only a few events and documents -- like the American Declaration of Independence -- are worthy of celebrating even a century or two later. On Monday, June 15, the Magna Carta turns 800,...

A survey published by the Pew Research Center on Wednesday showed that the majority of Germans would be against their country using military means to defend a NATO ally against Russian aggression. Despite the notion that an attack on one is an attack on all being enshrined as Clause 5 in the NATO Charter, 58 percent of Germans said they would be against helping a NATO member on the border with Russia militarily. Only 38 percent of Germans said they would agree with the triggering of Clause 5 under such circumstances. …

This week England’s Former Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks gave a speech described by the media as doom and gloom at a conference in Herzliya. He admitted a belief that the BDS movement had succeeded in making the State of Israel a “divisive factor” in Jewish life and claimed that, as a result, supporting Israel was “almost impossible” for European Jews. It was an astonishingly defeatist speech, which is troubling enough. But most disturbing was the false dichotomy he presented to European Jews. In his own troubling words he said, “Jews have been faced with a choice: live in Europe...

Wasn't sure where to put this so here goes... Please vote conservative in this poll as it is being freeped big time by the liberals. It ends at 9:00 pm EST thanks http://northumberlandview.ca/discussion/index.php?topic=220.0

Al-Qaida-linked militants in eastern Libya declared holy war — or jihad — on the local Islamic State affiliate after one of their senior leaders was killed Wednesday by masked gunmen, which set off clashes between the rival groups that left 11 people dead on both sides, including a top militant commander. The hours-long fighting in the eastern coastal city of Darna erupted after gunmen opened fire on Nasser Akr, an al-Qaida-inspired militant once held in the United Kingdom on terrorism charges. The 55-year-old veteran jihadi, who fought in Afghanistan, was killed along with his aide.

Dinosaur fossils, it was long thought, are simple objects. The fossilization process leaves the overall shape of a dinosaur's bones intact, but all the microscopic structures inside them — the blood cells, connective fibers, and other sorts of soft tissue — inevitably decay over time. The photo above, from a new study published today in Nature Communications and led by Sergio Bertazzo of Imperial College London, shows an extremely zoomed-in view of a 75-million-year-old theropod claw, taken from the London Natural History Museum's collection. When researchers scraped tiny pieces off the fossil and looked at them under an electron microscope,...

What would you have done? Would you have left Saddam Hussein in power? The inquiry, familiar to all of us who opposed the war, is put in a finger-stabbing sort of way — as though that clinched it; as though the answer is so obvious that the peaceniks can only stammer. Just ask them what they would have done and watch them squirm! Elsewhere, the tactic is more typical of left-wing polemicists than of the Right. ‘How could you stand by and see...?’ is a favourite way of arguing for state intervention (and taxpayers’ money) for any amount of expensive...

<p>The video made me cry because it showed me how black children are not allowed to play. How they’re not allowed to just be (expletive deleted) kids. How their play becomes criminalized and how they’re socialized to become black adults who internalize that their very breathing selves are criminal.</p>

King Edward VIII was forced to abdicate in 1936, and soon took the title of the Duke of Windsor. He has always been known for his pro-Nazi sympathies. However, the extent of his betrayal could never be fully verified due to the secrecy of the Royal Archives. The Royal Archives have always ensured that letters from German relatives of the royal family in the run up to World War II remain closed. Naturally, such censorship has led to endless conspiracy theories. But over the past eight years I have accumulated damning evidence by sifting through 30 archives all over the...

LONDON, May 16 (IranMania) - Iran is working to obtain long-range missiles which could threaten the whole of Europe, the former head of Israel's military intelligence said, AFP reported. "Iran already has surface-to-surface missiles capable of being equipped with nuclear warheads with a 1,500 (930 miles) kilometer range but it will in the future have missiles with a range of 5,000 kilometers, which will threaten the whole of Europe," Aharon Zeevi told a conference in Tel Aviv. Iranian President Mahmoud "Ahmadinejad is promising the end of history in two or three years' time and I suggest that we believe him,"...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says the Group of Seven wealthy democracies have agreed that the world should phase out the use of fossil fuels by the end of this century. Merkel said Monday that the G-7 leaders committed themselves to the need to “decarbonize the global economy in the course of this century.” That is a technical term for ending the use of oil, gas and coal – but not nuclear power – and replacing them with alternative sources of energy such as wind and solar power.

One is the plight of Greece, with the nation's leftist government and its creditors engaged in the latest round of brinksmanship over its debt. Greece is running out of cash, but international creditors are refusing to release bailout money unless the government makes concessions. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, elected on a platform of fighting back against European-imposed austerity, has refused to budge. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, had expected to have a proposal from Tsipras several days ago, but he was "visibly angry," according to The Guardian... A Greek exit would pose a challenge to a beleaguered...

JERUSALEM, Israel -- What does the Presbyterian Church USA and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters have in common? They both support boycotting Israel, a sweeping movement that's trying to delegitimize the Jewish state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says a great struggle and international campaign is being waged against his country to "blacken its name." "It is not connected to our actions; it is connected to our very existence," Netanyahu said. "It does not matter what we do; it matters what we symbolize and what we are." Just this week, the CEO of French mobile phone giant Orange said he'd cut...

Oops! A British army tank drove over an oncoming Toyota on a public road on Monday, crushing the bonnet in the process. For the second time this year, a British tank has been involved in a public crash while out on exercise in Germany. This time a tank drove over the bonnet of Toyota which was being driven by an 18-year-old woman. The soldiers were able to rescue the woman from the car and no serious injuries were reported. In a similar incident in February, blamed on a mechanical failure, a British tank drove into the garden of an elderly...

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They were picked up by radar in the early hours of this morning and were then given life jackets by Royal Marine Commandos before being transported from the landing craft on to the 19,000 tonne ship. There were shocking scenes of barefoot men and exhausted pregnant women piling onto the ship before they were huddled together while they waited to have security checks. Most of them had nothing with them except a plastic carrier bag and mobile phones. They were given water and some bread while they waited for the news of when they were going to dock in Italy....

'Who needs Westeros? We’ve got Wester Ross.'

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Requiring photo ID is “racist,” except when it’s done by Obama, the NAACP, unions, or any other liberals Former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee recently announced that he wants to be the Democrats’ 2016 presidential candidate.In July 2011, Governor Chafee signed a bill that requires voters to show photo ID. In March 2012, Obama’s Justice Department blocked Texas’s voter ID requirement, claiming that it was “racist.”However, the very same Justice Department requires photo ID for everyone who enters.So let’s say that someone is denied their right to vote because they don’t have voter ID, and they...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday stepped up his attacks on foreign media a day ahead of legislative elections, telling the Guardian to “know your limits” and lamenting that “Jewish capital” was behind the New York Times. Erdogan has during the campaign leading up to Sunday’s polls repeatedly criticised foreign media, amid growing concerns over an erosion of freedom of expression in Turkey under his rule. In one of its final pre-election rallies in the eastern province of Ardahan, Erdogan took offence at an article in the Guardian critical of his rule, including an editorial titled “Growing autocracy threatens...

President Obama's stunning declaration that the global image of the United States has greatly improved under his administration is another example of his ideology and narcissism's blinding him to his many policy failures. During a White House event with the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative, he managed to turn the subject to himself, saying, "People don't remember -- when I came into office, the United States in world opinion ranked below China and just barely above Russia. And today, once again, the United States is the most respected country on earth." As evidence, the White House cited a Gallup poll,...