Free Republic

A nudge by air in 2013. A probe by sea in 2014. Will China take a crack on land in 2015? For the sake of world peace, let's hope not. However, China's nudge and probe record, especially over the last two years, should worry diplomats and alert headline writers. In 2013, China tested Japanese and South Korean political and military reactions by extending its Air Defense Identification Zone over contested islets and maritime boundaries. Tensions spiked as Tokyo and Seoul threatened retaliation. Beijing's 2014 sally into the South China Sea -- a huge oil exploration ship entering disputed waters off...

Ron and Rand Paul have complained about being wrongly dubbed “isolationists” even though that name arguably fits whatever passes for their foreign policy.Now Rand Paul has decided that opponents of bailing out the Castro regime are isolationists. All this proves is that Rand Paul doesn’t know what an isolationist is.“I think a policy of isolationism toward Cuba is misplaced and hasn’t worked,” Paul writes in Time Magazine.Isolationism is a policy that the United States would adopt toward the larger world. An embargo on an enemy state in response to its actions against the United States is not isolationism.Rand Paul is...

There's only one real way to compare military strength, and thankfully the world hasn't had many opportunities lately. Despite the potential powder keg in the South China Sea, standoffs in Ukraine, and proxy wars throughout the Middle East, inter-state warfare between the world's military powers has been all but banished from the global scene (for the time being, at least). For a simpler evaluation of military power, we turned to the Global Firepower Index, a ranking of 106 nations based on more than 50 factors including overall military budget, available manpower, and the amount of equipment each country has in...

According to court records, in 1988 a 16-year-old Mr Wahlberg brutally attacked a Vietnamese man named Thanh Lam with a stick while spewing racial epithets and knocking him unconscious. Seeing police, Mr Wahlberg fled and found Hoa Trinh, another Vietnamese man. He put his hand around Mr Trinh's shoulder and asked the man to help him hide. After the police cars had passed, Mr Wahlberg punched Mr Trinh in the eye, permanently blinding him. According to the police report, during his arrest the future actor used several anti-Asian slurs. He served 45 days of a three-month sentence, all while maintaining...

Among the familiar hucksters who sought to capitalize on the troubles in Ferguson, Missouri, came a new face: Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights and self-styled heir to the non-existent royal houses of Iraq and Syria. “I am deeply concerned,” Prince Zeid said in a press release, about “institutionalized discrimination” in America, and “I urge the U.S. authorities” to conduct “in-depth examinations” of racial justice. Notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that Michael Brown’s death resulted from the criminal acts he engaged in before and during his encounter with officer Darren Wilson, Zeid’s Human Rights Council...

Hong Le Tho, 65, was detained for "posting online articles with bad content and false information that discredit and create distrust among people about state agencies, social agencies and citizens," the Ministry of Public Security said on Saturday on its website.

Calling America’s abortion policies “ultra-permissive,” a new report out Tuesday concludes that the United States is one of just seven countries that allow elective abortions after 20 weeks.Out of the sample 198 countries, independent states and regions worldwide, 59 allow abortion without restrictions. Of those 59, 9 countries limit elective abortions to before the 12th week, 36 countries limit elective abortion at 12 weeks, six countries limit elective abortion to 20 weeks gestation, one country (Australia) allows its state/territories to decide abortion limits, and seven countries allow elective abortion past 20 weeks or have no limit.The remaining 139 countries have...

Critics said the M-14 was what happened when the U.S. government took many years and spent millions of dollars designing a rifle that was really just a glorified M-1 Garand from World War II. The M-14 was the U.S. military’s last battle rifle. It appeared in 1959—the contemporary of the Pentagon’s first jet fighters and ICBMs. With its heavy steel parts and walnut stock, the M-14 looked positively archaic. It was hardly a Space Age weapon. And it only endured as America’s battle rifle until 1970, when the M-16 completely superseded it—the shortest service record of any U.S. military rifle...

Memories of his own service in Vietnam and the destructive nature of combat are never far from the mind of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the first former enlisted man to lead the Pentagon. "Every Vietnam veteran understands," Hagel told CNN's Barbara Starr during an interview outside his office in the Pentagon. "Any veteran who has ever served in a war understands that, and I think we should never forget the consequences of war." Decades after the U.S. conflict in Vietnam, Hagel is using the power of his office to help some of the most troubled veterans of that war get...

The song, which begins with a spoken introduction by Kris Kristofferson, tells the tale of Niles Harris, a soldier in the 173rd Airborne Brigade of the United States Army during Operation Hump in South Vietnam on November 8, 1965. The intro mentions that Harris was "the guy that gave Big Kenny his top hat", and that he was among the wounded who were saved by Army medic Lawrence Joel, the first living African American to receive the Medal of Honor since the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran and two-time Purple Heart recipient, did support the war, and even advocated sending in more troops. But now he is calling for the administration to develop -- and publish -- an exit strategy. "We should start figuring out how we get out of there," Mr. Hagel said. "But with this understanding, we cannot leave a vacuum that further destabilizes the Middle East." Sen. Hagel, who is occasionally mentioned as a GOP presidential candidate in 2008, says our soldiers are getting bogged down in Iraq the way they did in Southeast Asia a...

An incredible air-to-air engagement, where one U.S. pilot alone survived to six North Vietnamese MiGs. A true milestone in the progress of naval aviation, the Vought F-8 has been one of the few carrier-based fighters that could outperform most land-based counterparts. Being the first genuinely supersonic naval aircraft, the Crusader, was a single seat, single engine swept fighter that introduced an unusual feature, the variable incidence wing. Armed with four Colt Mk 12 cannons, the F-8 was called “The last gunfighter”: these guns combined with its high thrust-to-weight ratio and with its good maneuverability, made of the Crusader a good...

As a combat pilot, Air Force Col. Jack Broughton was celebrated for bravery and tactical brilliance during the Korean and Vietnam wars. He received promotions and important assignments and seemed headed to become a general. But a high-profile court-martial during the Vietnam War for allegedly violating the rules of engagement that ruled certain targets off limits ended his career. After leaving the Air Force, Broughton was free to speak out about what he saw as the incompetence of President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in micromanaging the war. Pilots couldn't bomb an enemy outhouse without their approval, Broughton...

A left-wing high school teacher is actually complaining about a text book’s treatment of the Vietnam War, because it is written for the JROTC. “The authors cite then-President Johnson’s 1964 statements that North Vietnam attacked a U. S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin as the impetus for the broader war, ignoring overwhelming evidence from declassified documents that there was no such attack,” Sylvia McGauley writes in the Fall 2014 issue of the Rethinking Schools periodical. McGauley teaches social studies at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Oregon. As it happens, the official account of what happened at the Gulf in...

(Joseph Miller is the pen name for a ranking Department of Defense official with a background in U.S. special operations and combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has worked in strategic planning.) The war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is not a continuation of Operation Iraqi Freedom, nor is it Gulf War III: This is President Barack ObamaÂ’s Vietnam.Early on in the Iraq War, political pundits on the right and the left began to draw comparisons to the Vietnam War because at that point, it appeared as though Iraq was on a glide path to becoming...

Audio 39:53 John Batchelor interviews Gregg Jones author of new book Last Stand at Khe Sahn (Vietnam)

Reporter Nelufar Hedayat looks at the terrible conditions dogs are forced to live in just to keep the black market in dog meat supplied A shocking new TV documentary will reveal how hundreds pet dogs are being stolen every day in Vietnam for the lucrative dog meat trade. Unreported World shows disturbing evidence of how dogs are stolen, force-fed, kept in cramped cages and slaughtered for meals. Here, reporter Nelufar Hedayat exclusively reveals the horrors she witnessed. The smell of dog and filth permeated the whole room along with frantic, high-pitched barking from the hundreds of dogs crammed into the...

Russian President Vladimir Putin met Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia, on August 12, 2014. It was his first official visit to the Russian Federation as President. And Vladimir Putin was the first leader to invite him for a visit outside the Arab world since his swearing-in as head of state. The agenda included introduction to a selection of Russian military hardware for sale. (1) The two leaders agreed to expand cooperation in the field of arms exports to Egypt in addition to studying the establishment of a logistics center Masri on the Black...

(Reuters) - Nearly 40 years after the United States helicoptered its last soldiers out of Vietnam in an ignominious retreat, Washington is moving closer to lifting an arms embargo on its former enemy, with initial sales likely to help Hanoi deal with growing naval challenges from China. Senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the initiative said Washington wants to support Vietnam by strengthening its ability to monitor and defend its coastline, and said unarmed P-3 surveillance planes could be one of the first sales. Such aircraft would also allow Vietnam to keep track of China's increasingly assertive activities in the...

Airlines like Air New Zelanad and RyanAir have come under fire for their less-than-family friendly promotions, but the Vietnamese low-cost carrier, VietJetAir, is facing backlash over racy publicity photos that weren't part of an official ad campaign. Ngoc Trinh, a Vietnamese lingerie model, recently posted pictures of herself along with other women wearing skimpy bikinis in the VietJetAir’s colors to her Facebook page, according to the Daily Mail. They were allegedly captioned: “Just finished shooting promo photos for VietJet Air for 12 hours nonstop from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm.”