Free Republic

Once upon a time, the world's biggest government pension fund, Japan's $1.1 trillion Government Pension Investment Fund, or GPIF, was apolitical, and merely focused on preserving the people's wealth. Then everything changed, and with the reckless abandon of a junkie on a crack cocaine binge, aka Abenomics, the GPIF management was kicked out, and its entire mandate was flipped from preserving wealth, to gambling on #Ref! P/E stocks, in hopes of recreating the wealth effect of the super-rich (the only problem: Japan has reached its breaking point and the higher the USDJPY, and thus the Nikkei rises, the more...

Boehner and GOP elite are playing checkers while Obama and his comrades in the Democratic National Communist party are playing chess. So Let me explain to you all what is going to happen in the next few months. First of all, when the time arrives to ‘defund’ homeland security it will FAIL. The socialists will all scream in unison about national security and suddenly be worried about terrorism and disease entering the country. [And anything bad that does happen will be blamed on the GOP naturally] They will be everywhere talking up this now found appreciation for Homeland security and...

For a long time I resisted the word "torture" when discussing the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used against high-value captives in the war on terror. I don't think I can do that anymore. The report put out by Diane Feinstein and her fellow Democrats may be partisan, one-sided, tendentious and "full of crap," as Dick Cheney put it the other night on "Special Report with Bret Baier." But even the selective use and misuse of facts doesn't change their status as facts. What some of these detainees went through pretty obviously amounted to torture. You can call it "psychological torture" or...

TAMPA (FOX 13) - A Tampa man is under arrest after police say he and an accomplice crashed a stolen SUV through the front of a convenience store, and stole the ATM inside. Police are still looking for the other suspect. Thursday morning around 4 a.m., investigators say, Dwayne Chambers, 37, and another man slammed into the front of the Shubh Mini Market on Orient Road, driving a stolen Jeep Grand Cherokee. The video shows the vehicle back through the front entrance, pull forward, then two suspects run into the store. One of them, identified as Chambers, yanked the ATM...

Google is going to close its engineering office in Russia, the Financial Times says. Russian authorities have been cracking down on internet activity throughout 2014. In Russia, a new law forces tech companies to keep all data about Russians inside the country's borders. Google has so far declined to comment. The government asked Google to remove 253 links from its search engine during a six-month period in 2013, the FT reports. Google may well be joined in its escape by a host of entrepreneurs and engineers who want to work in less restrictive environments.

KITCHENER — A Kitchener anesthetist specializing in pain management has been charged with two counts of fraud after he billed the Ontario government for services he didn't provide. The Ontario Provincial Police Anti-Rackets branch arrested and charged Dr. Kulbir Singh Billing, 63, on Monday night. He will appear in Ontario Court in January. He faces two counts of fraud over $5,000. OPP Sgt. Peter Leon said the charges stem from billings to the Ontario government from 2010 to 2013. Leon said billings were made to the Ontario Health Insurance Plan and the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board for services that...

It might not be as fragrant as evergreen but this giant beer keg Christmas tree sure taps into the festive spirit. The Genesee Brewing Co. in Rochester, New York, spent around two weeks constructing the 23-foot-high structure out of 300 stainless steel half-barrels. Employees laced it with 600 feet of green LED lighting and placed a rotating sign bearing the company's name on top instead of an angel.

Millions of Americans face catastrophic loss of electrical power during a future magnetic space storm that will disrupt the electric grid and cause cascading infrastructure failures, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document. DHS’ Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stated in an internal 2012 fact sheet outlining its response plan for severe “space weather” that the actual impact and damage from a future solar storm is not known.

In single-sex classes, which are common for sex education, students must be allowed to go to the class of the gender they consider themselves to be rather than their actual gender, the U.S. Department of Education directed schools that receive federal funds in a Dec. 1 memo. The memo, from the department's Office for Civil Rights, provides guidance for K-12 schools for when they are allowed to have same-sex classes or extracurricular activities and remain in compliance with Title IX, a 1972 law to protect against gender discrimination in education programs that get federal aid. Schools may divide students by...

Outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently reported on the efforts his department has made against sexual assault within the ranks of the military. A year ago, President Obama directed Hagel to conduct a full review of progress being made, and while Hagel reported a decrease of twenty-five percent in the prevalence of sexual assault, he said "[t]here’s much more to be done." One area of progress Hagel cited was simply in the reporting of such assaults, which he said has increased by 50 percent in just a year. He said it is believed now that one in four assaults...

Shannon Maureen Conley was just 19, barely out of high school and a convert to Islam, when she fell in love with a Tunisian man who said he was an Islamic State fighter in Syria. And, according to a criminal complaint, she wanted to leave her Denver suburb and join him. Over the course of five months the FBI talked to Conley nine times, trying to persuade her not to go to Syria. But it didn't work. According to a local news report, her father tipped off the FBI after he found her one-way ticket from Denver to Turkey. Conley...

One of the senior officials of terror group ISIS has shared in an interview that it was the American Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq that facilitated the birth of the terror group, as it gave jihadists the unique opportunity to congregate and build their plans and ideology. The revelations came in an extensive interview The Guardian conducted with a man who chose to identify himself by the name of Abu Ahmed. The man admitted that he has grown disillusioned with many of the extreme actions ISIS has taken over the past year. Bucca, established in the wake of the...

A restaurant in Tokyo has announced that it will refuse to serve couples on Christmas Eve because their happiness would serve to remind single patrons of their loneliness. The owner of PiaPia, a pasta restaurant in the Hachioji suburb of west Tokyo, has placed a handwritten sign in the window of the restaurant that reads, "We will be refusing entry to all couples on December 24, with no exceptions!" The message is accompanied by an outline of a male figure in blue and a female figure in red and a heart with a large red cross through the image. As...

I believe they call that amnesty. Today I chatted with David Wasserman, who closely tracks House districts for the Cook Political Report.Wasserman recently wrote that due to population shifts and redistricting that have resulted in huge concentrations of Democratic votes in Dem districts — wasting a lot of those votes — Democrats can now expect that the percentage of seats they win will consistently trail their victory in the overall popular vote by about four percentage points.Even if Democrats were to get something approaching neutral maps in these big states, Wasserman estimates, it could result in just a couple...

In the middle of the cavernous and ornate Al Aqsa Mosque on top of Judaism’s holiest site – the Temple Mount – an Islamic cleric began drawing a crowd as he delivered an impromptu sermon warning the Jewish people that they are about to be “slaughtered without mercy.”

Dear Readers, This is a hard one to write. After more or less 15 years of continuous newspaper syndication, this column you are reading is the end of the line. I am not ceasing to write, of course. All of my content -- columns, essays, posts, and, of course, books -- will continue to appear at my website, www.dianawest.net, and elsewhere. But my weekly conversation with readers in good old-fashioned newsprint stops at the bottom of the page. In some ways, that's too bad. For one thing, there is a kind of journalistic romance to appearing on the pages of...

The Michael Brown & Eric Garner circus has demonstrated (again) that the media are happy to fill the air with 'X reacts to Y' and 'Y reacts to Z' and 'Z reacts to X' - conveniently arriving back at X to start another cycle - without ever engaging in actual journalistic due diligence. Despite billions in state of the art satellite trucks, audio/video gear and an army of reporters, the media (apparently) cannot bring themselves to break out of the mode of providing a megaphone to those who are already screaming unintelligibly. In the 90s, before the truth about his...

I have never understood why people ever feel compelled to say they hate the sin, but not the sinner. I think it was Jesus who first said those words, so I suppose Christians want to present themselves in the best possible light in hopes of getting a place with a pool in Heaven. Even though I’m not a Christian, I’m certainly willing to grant that Jesus was a much nicer guy than I am. Still, it seems fairly obvious that without sinners, those pesky sins would quickly disappear. To my way of thinking, Barack Obama is the single biggest sinner...

n February, Iranian hackers took down the computer system of gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson’s casino empire, wiping hard drives clean and shutting down email. Las Vegas Sands, the world’s largest gaming company, was devastated by the attack. But until a Bloomberg Businessweek report Thursday night, the company had never revealed the extent of the hack. Coming months before the recent hack on Sony Pictures, the hit on Sands is now believed to be the first major destructive cyberattack on a U.S. business, although there are likely others that have gone unreported. From the instant the offensive started, Las Vegas Sands...

An interesting observation tweeted by Townhall and The Federalist columnist Amy Otto caught my eye last night: We just won a historic election. Let's tell those people that Elizabeth Warren has their back. #genius— Amy Otto (@AmyOtto8) December 12, 2014 Otto had put her finger on a fascinating condition: The hideously named “Cromnibus” bill, which narrowly passed the House on Thursday with 219 votes, had united the conservative wing of the GOP and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in opposition. For many conservatives, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) far better represented their position...