Free Republic

North Korea Nukes US In Propaganda Video Kim Jong-Un lays waste to Washington with a submarine-launched nuclear missile in Pyongyang's latest menacing video. 10:20, UK, Saturday 26 March 2016 North Korea has threatened to lay waste to Washington with a submarine-launched nuclear missile in a menacing propaganda video. The four-minute film - titled Last Chance - runs through the history of US-Korea relations, including images of US prisoners of war on Korean soil. It ends with a digitally-enhanced sequence showing a missile emerging from the clouds and slamming into the road in front of the Lincoln Memorial - sending a...

CHICAGO — More people are leaving the Chicago area than any other major city in the United States. According to census data released Thursday, the Chicago area lost more than 6,000 residents in 2015. That now puts the region’s population at 9.5 million. Chicago’s metropolitan statistical area, defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, includes the city and suburbs and extends into Wisconsin and Indiana. The Chicago region’s decline extended to the state. In fact, Illinois was one of just seven states to see a population dip in 2015, and had the second-greatest decline rate last year after West Virginia, census...

Mexicans in the U.S. are profoundly upset about Donald Trump and his stated intentions. No other candidate has addressed illegal immigration with stated intent to fix it, but Trump has. They are not worried about any other candidate because they know they will only take watered-down action on illegal immigration and let things continue as usual. However, with Trump, they see a man awaking the nation to actually do something about the immigration problem and they are VERY upset about it. FYI to all.

China’s ambassador to Indonesia is being summoned over a standoff involving a trawler in the South China Sea, an incident an international expert described as so serious it could alter Indonesia’s foreign policy. Susi Pudjiastuti, Indonesia’s minister for fisheries and maritime affairs, told reporters he would summon the Chinese ambassador, Xie Feng, on Monday to discuss a Chinese fishing trawler accused of illegally fishing in Indonesian waters. Indonesian authorities attempted to capture the trawler on Saturday and arrest the Chinese crew. But they were stopped by a Chinese coast guard boat that reportedly “rammed” the trawler and pushed it back...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and the Philippines have agreed on five locations for U.S. military facilities in the Philippines under a security deal agreed amid rising tensions with China, a senior U.S. official said on Friday. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Amy Searight said the deal was reached under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) signed last year that grants Washington increased military presence in its former colony through rotation of ships and planes for humanitarian and maritime security operations. Searight told the opening of the annual U.S.-Philippines Bilateral Strategic Dialogue in Washington that Manila was a...

Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco appear to be getting a divorce, breaking up their joint venture in U.S.-based refining assets. The two companies joined together to create Motiva Enterprises LLC in 1998, a 50-50 joint venture that operated three refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. But Shell and Saudi Aramco have seen their interests head in different directions. "It is now time for the partners to pursue their independent downstream goals," said Abdulrahman Al-Wuhaib, a senior vice president of Saudi Aramco’s downstream unit. Reuters reported that the relationship started to fray after Motiva announced a $10 billion expansion of...

North Korea's supreme court sentenced American student Otto Warmbier to 15 years of hard labor for crimes against the state, China's Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday. Warmbier, a University of Virginia student, was detained by the North in January for trying to steal an item bearing a propaganda slogan from his hotel in Pyongyang and had confessed to crimes against the state, North Korean media said previously.

It Might Help To Think of Donald Trump In The Context of Argentina's Mauricio Macri Note: Our fellow contributor, Nico, lives in Argentina. Nico is a former Muslim, and aspiring American. But until America gets smart and starts accepting former Muslims (and Arab Christians) as the true Asylum seekers they are, I guess Nico will have to live in Argentina (and we'll just have to put sit here with all the Muslims our President wants to import into our country). Because he lives in Argentina, Nico has watched the rise of Argentine President, Mauricio Macri. Mauricio Macri: Mauricio Macri...

President Barack Obama has been quietly pushing new plans to bring thousands of additional Syrian refugees into the country, despite the concerns of state and county officials and the outrages committed by welfare-dependent migrants in Europe. Obama’s special assistant to the president for immigration policy, Felicia Escobar, recently announced plans to increase America’s intake of migrants, according to the Washington Examiner. “We want to make sure that we can increase our numbers of refugees that are able to settle here,” Escobar said. “The need globally is so, so, so massive right now, given all the displacement and conflict around the...

Jihadis in Syria are using Facebook as a marketplace to buy, sell and barter a wide variety of American-made weapons and munitions ranging from rocket launchers to machine guns. A Facebook page called "The first weapons market in the Idleb countryside" showcases posts with photographs of weapons, claimed to be CIA-supplied, inviting buyers to contact page administrators privately using popular messaging application Whatsapp to discuss sales and transactions. An AGS-17 Soviet-era grenade launcher is listed for $3,800 and below that a thermal camera made by Oregon-based company FLIR, is listed alongside posts advertising the sale of 105mm cannon shells.

OPEC recognizes role of shale. El-Badri largely admitted OPEC’s waning influence due to the rise of U.S. shale. "Shale oil in the United States, I don’t know how we are going to live together," he said in Houston on Feb. 22. “Any increase in price, shale will come immediately and cover any reduction.” The IEA’s report mostly backed up that sentiment. Although the Paris-based energy agency predicted shale would decline substantially in 2016 and 2017, the IEA also said that shale would bring back 1.3 mb/d of liquids production by the end of the decade. Low prices now, but high...

Serbian prime minister Aleksandar Vucic says Americans apparently ‘were not aware that foreign citizens’ were being held at Isis camp

When Barack Obama meets this week with Xi Jinping during the Chinese president’s first state visit to America, one item probably won’t be on their agenda: the possibility that the United States and China could find themselves at war in the next decade. In policy circles, this appears as unlikely as it would be unwise. And yet 100 years on, World War I offers a sobering reminder of man’s capacity for folly. When we say that war is “inconceivable,” is this a statement about what is possible in the world—or only about what our limited minds can conceive? In 1914,...

The proposed major military assault into Syria holds considerable risk for Turkey, not the least of that being a possible accidental escalation of hostilities with Russia, but it now seems unavoidable if Ankara is not to see a major disaster, not only wasting more than five years of intense effort to overthrow the Syrian Gov-ernment of President Bashar al-Assad, but also to avert the unfettered escalation of the Kurdish war to wrench a large part of Turkey away from Ankara to create a new Kurdish state which would link with Iraqi and Syrian Kurds. Already, Turkey has paid an enormous...

It looks like summer camp with the bonfires, the obstacle courses, the young children running around the park grounds; except its jihadi training set up by Iran's regime to prepare young children for the "conquering of Tel Aviv." New alarming images are emerging from Iran's 'Sixth National Children's Memorial,' in which children appearing to be as young as 6 are holding weapons and dressed in military apparel. The gathering, held in a park in the country's southern Fars province in the county of Lamerd, called for the "conquering of Tel Aviv to Jerusalem," with a set goal to disseminate "holy...

CIA Director John Brennan on Sunday said in an interview broadcast late Sunday that it is "inevitable" that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) will try to carry out attacks in the United States. "I'm expecting them to try to put in place - the operatives, the material or whatever else that they need to do or to incite people to carry out these attacks, clearly," Brennan said on CBS's "60 Minutes." "So, I believe that there attempts are inevitable," he added. "I don't think their successes necessarily are." Brennan said the intelligence agency knew in the days...

Before Donald Trump’s blowout win in New Hampshire he shocked the world by saying he would allow the Russians to do the "dirty work" and would “Let them beat the shit out of ISIS also.”. Trump went further, “I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect,” Putin, responded by saying: "He (Trump) says that he wants to move to another level of relations, to a deeper level of...

During celebrations of the anniversary of Iran's Revolution, mock reenactments of the recent capture of ten U.S. sailors by the IRGC Navy were held throughout Iran. In footage of one reenactment, from Qazvin Province, shouts of "Death to America" are heard in the background, while U.S. "sailors" lie on the ground or kneel down, the U.S. and Israeli flags placed next to them.

As the 2016 presidential race starts to heat up it is time to take a look at the remaining serious candidates and what each one might mean for energy policies and energy companies in the U.S. While a lot can happen in the next couple of months, the current leaders for the Republican Party are Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. For the Democrats, the race will likely come down to a long brawl between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. As a bonus, it’s also worth looking at what Michael Bloomberg might do for energy if he enters the...

The so-called "Implementation Day" in the nuclear agreement sealed between the international community and Iran had a number of side-effects, with the release of four Iranian-Americans signaling the most important. These four innocent people were swapped for 7 Iranian regime elements held in detention in America. While this made a lot of noise in the United States and raised major criticism against the Obama administration, it is actually nothing new to those familiar with Iran's "hostage industry". The names of these four prisoners released on Saturday are Christian convert Pastor Saeed Abedini, former U.S. marine interpreter Amir Hekmati, Washington...