Free Republic

Why isn't Obama apologizing to the Germans for WWII?

Bombing of Hospitals Called Routine.” That was the August 9, 1973, Newsday coverage of congressional hearings on “clandestine U.S. air and ground activities in Cambodia and Laos”: U.S. commanders in Vietnam placed no restrictions on ground or air attacks against Viet Cong or North Vietnamese hospitals a Senate committee was told yesterday by several Vietnam veterans. In direct testimony and in letters, the veterans said hospitals often were considered targets rather than areas to be avoided as required by the Geneva convention on warfare.… The committee also has been trying to determine who ordered a dual reporting system in which...

Android phone with military grade security priced at Dh64000A new tech startup unveiled its first device yesterday, promising to be the world's fastest, most secure device. Offering worldwide network compatibility and military grade security, Solarin comes with a price tag of $17,400 (about Dh64000). Sirin Labs was formed in December 2014 with $72million as seed capital and as the founders say with an aim to produce the best and most secure smartphone. The company has partnered with multiple solutions providers in its attempt to create the device which they say is aimed at world's top businessmen who want every...

Russia is now preparing an offensive in order to create a land corridor through mainland Ukraine to the Russian-occupied Crimea, according to Deputy Secretary of National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Mykhailo Koval who addressed the participants of the meeting of the Interparliamentary Assembly of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, the Seimas of Lithuania and the Sejm and the Senate of the Republic of Poland, an UNIAN correspondent reported.

Bernie Sanders started out by running against Wall Street. These days he’s running against Israel. Running against Wall Street was hard. The Sanders campaign had to produce actual numbers. Americans were shocked to learn the higher taxes they would be facing in the People’s Republic of Bernie. Prominent economists on the left and the right tore his economic plans to shreds. The Sandernistas responded by touting the support of the country’s most prominent Marxist economist, the son of the Rosenberg Stalinist atom bomb traitors and an instructor at Chemeketa Community College. Bashing Israel is a lot easier and appeals to...

You might have a hard time relating to Memorial Day, like I used to. Even though my grandfather and father were soldiers in the two World Wars, ours was not a military family. I didn’t know any soldiers, none of my friends were and nobody I knew in my community was one either. Vietnam was over by the time I was in high school. It was a time of relative peace and quiet. Then I moved to Israel in my twenties and got married. Now my own children are soldiers. All of their friends are soldiers. Everywhere I look I...

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said Friday that an interest rate hike would be appropriate in the coming months if the economy keeps improving. While economic growth was relatively weak at the end of last year and beginning of this year, it appears to be picking up now based on recent data, Yellen said during a discussion at Harvard University. She said she expects the Fed to “gradually and cautiously increase” its key interest rate “and probably in the coming months, such a move would be appropriate.” …

The Rape of Nanking and the evil human experiments done by Unit 731 usually come to mind when we think of Japanese war crimes. Unfortunately, those awful incidents weren’t isolated cases. Fueled by racism, fanaticism, and finally desperation as their defeat seemed inevitable, the Japanese in World War II perpetrated several acts on par with Nazi war crimes. 10Laha Airfield MassacreFebruary 1942 This ghoulish event, which killed more than 300 Australian and Dutch POWs, followed the Japanese capture of the Indonesian island of Ambon. Allegedly as an act of reprisal after the Allies destroyed one of their minesweepers, the Japanese...

Developed in the fifth century A.D. by St. Augustine, the doctrine of a “just war” empowers rulers to wage war only as a last resort to confront grave wrongs. As Augustine wrote: “Peace should be the object of your desire; war should be waged only as a necessity.” Later, the Summa Theologica, written by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1260s and 1270s, clarified that war could only be waged by a properly instituted authority like the state, that it could not occur for purposes of self-gain, and that attaining peace must be its central aim.

Barack Obama on Friday paid tribute to the "silent cry" of the 140,000 people killed by the world's first atomic bomb attack and sought to renew attention in his unfulfilled vision of a world without nuclear weapons, as he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima. "Death fell from the sky and the world was changed," Obama said, after laying a wreath, closing his eyes and briefly bowing his head before an arched monument in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park that honors those killed on Aug. 6, 1945, when U.S. forces dropped the bomb that ushered in the nuclear...

TAMPA — Packed with robots and trucks and guns and drones, the Tampa Convention Center's exhibition hall this week has been transformed into a showroom for the latest in war gadgets. It's all part of the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, a major annual confab that brings military commanders together with defense contractors to figure out what commandos need in a dangerous and ever-changing world. The anchor, of course, is U.S. Special Operations Command, which has an annual budget of several billion dollars to spend on commando-specific goods and services. This year, about 350 companies set up shop at the...

This to me, is a total disgrace to America and our Veterans that served during Viet Nam. We have a wall with names of fallen Veterans that served this Country for it's freedoms and making it safe, and this President goes there and offers them weapons and other things... Maybe I am upset because a lot of people I knew served there, people I grew up with, boys that I dated, men that I rode with, that never came back home... I was privledged to see the "Viet Nam Wall" when I went with the Rolling Thunder out of PA....

A century ago, the two greatest fleets of the industrial age fought an inconclusive battle in the North Sea. The British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet fielded a total of fifty-eight dreadnought battleships and battle cruisers, ships over the twice the size of most modern surface combatants. Including smaller ships, the battle included 250 vessels in total.

For many of us concerned with liberty, the letters “NDAA” have come to symbolize Washington’s ongoing effort to undermine the U.S. Constitution in the pursuit of constant war overseas. It was the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2012 that introduced into law the idea that American citizens could be indefinitely detained without warrant or charge if a government bureaucrat decided they had assisted al-Qaeda or “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States.” No charges, no trial, just disappeared Americans. The National Defense Authorization bill should be a Congressional mechanism to bind the president to spend...

Emerging markets fund manager Mark Mobius doesn’t think there will be a trade war if Donald Trump is elected president. Trump’s positions on trade—including raising tariffs on Chinese imported goods—have raised concerns that we could end up in an all out trade war between the US and China. Speaking at the SALT Conference in Las Vegas on Friday, Mobius, the executive chairman of Templeton Emerging Market Group, said it won’t come to that. He thinks Trump will get deals done. “When people ask me, I say, ‘I don’t like what he says, but I like the way he says it,”...

Libyan officials attached to the government in Tripoli are warning that the country will have to halt the majority of its output from southeastern fields within a month’s time as the Hariga port remains under blockade over an export dispute between rival governments. Fields in the south-east which provide the majority of the Libyan oil output will be shut down in a month unless blockade on the Mediterranean Sea terminal Marsa el-Hariga if lifted, officials in Tripoli have warned on Tuesday. Factions loyal to the eastern government in Tobruk, and the parallel National Oil Company in Benghazi, have been in...

The Huffington Post has published a photograph (above) of former Mexican president Vicente Fox giving Donald Trump the finger, taken a day before Fox apologized to Trump in an interview with Breitbart News. He also said some of Trump’s proposals could lead to war. “Don’t play around with us,” Fox said. “We can jump walls. We can swim rivers. And we can defend ourselves.”

A Confederate monument capped with a statue of Jefferson Davis will be removed from a spot near the University of Louisville campus where it has stood since 1895. The stone monument honoring Kentuckians who died for the Confederacy in the Civil War will be moved to another location, University President James Ramsey and Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said during a surprise announcement Friday.

Hidden among the ballyhoo about a collaborative freeze in production growth, a less visible but far more effective dynamic has affected, and likely will affect, oil supply and price: military intervention. There have always been three routes out of the unsustainably low prices: natural decline/growth of supply/demand, collaboration constraints on supply, and military conflict. Since January, while the talk of a growth freeze had no effect whatsoever on actual supply, the natural decline/growth did reduce the overhang by a couple of hundred thousand barrels of oil per day. Meanwhile, two little-discussed and less-understood military interventions took a combined 900,000 bopd...

President Barack Obama, speaking in Germany on Monday, said we’re fortunate to be living in the “most peaceful” era in human history. […] “That may surprise young people who are watching TV or looking at your phones,” he said, “and it seems like only bad news comes through every day, but consider it’s been decades since the last war between major powers.” […] “Around the world we’re more tolerant, with more opportunity for women and gays and lesbians as we push back on bigotry and prejudice,” he said. (He notably did not mention transgenders, a topic that is making headlines...