Free Republic

Well, look what’s back: the instantly compelling and ultimately confounding parlor game of “What do we do about flag burning?” Dormant for years, largely because this is something virtually no one ever does, the flag burning issue is back. You could hear it knocking lightly when several idiotic pro athletes decided to lodge their concerns over policing issues by showing public disdain for the flag that is a symbol of the nation that has made them free and wealthy. Throw in the Donald Trump victory, which has dredged up some of the most hateful and juvenile reactions in election history,...

At the height of the frenzy of China’s Cultural Revolution, victims were eaten at macabre “flesh banquets”, but 50 years after the turmoil began, the Communist Party is suppressing remembrance and historical reckoning of the era and its excesses. Launched by Mao in 1966 to topple his political enemies after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution saw a decade of violence and destruction nationwide as party-led class conflict devolved into social chaos.

Convicted leftist terrorist Susan Rosenberg must be counted among the unlikeliest candidates ever to be awarded a university teaching post. Just four years ago, Rosenberg was serving out the 16th year of a 58-year sentence for the possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives and a stockpile of illicit weapons. Moreover, the onetime member of a leftist terrorist outfit called “The Family” was also a suspect in a 1981 robbery-gone-awry that left three people dead in Nyack, New York. However, next January students at Hamilton College, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York, will know Susan Rosenberg,...

(トランプ氏の天安門事件「暴動」発言 謝罪求める声) (“Voices Now Demanding Apology from Trump Who Calls Tienanmen Massacre a “Riot”) (Translation from the original Japanese by FReeper AmericanInTokyo):”In the most recent TV debate between candidates for the Republican nomination for President in the USA, Mr. Trump referred to it as a “riot” (boudou: 暴動) when Chinese students stood up in Tienanmen Square and requested freedom, in Beijing, China in 1989. Real estate magnate Trump was answering a question from the moderator in the March 10 debate in Miami, with respect to the suppression of Chinese university students. They were only pleading for freedom but were...

China's Zhao Details Tiananmen Debate Posthumous Memoir Castigates Party By John Pomfret Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, May 15, 2009 Zhao Ziyang violated one of the central tenets of Communist Party doctrine: He spoke out. But it is only now, four years after his death, that the world is hearing what he had to say. In a long-secret memoir to be published in English and Chinese next week, just in time for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the former head of the Chinese Communist Party claims that the decision to impose martial law around Beijing in May...

Tehran, 17 Jan. (AKI) - One of the five Iranians arrested last week by the US army in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil is wanted in Austria in connection with the assassination of Kurdish leader Andol Rahman Ghassemlu in 1989. Mahommad Jaafari Sharoudi was one of five Iranian officials detained last week in the Kurdish-controlled city on charges of being connected to a faction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Pasdaran, that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq. Abdol Rahman Ghassemlu, the historic leader of Iranian Kurds, was killed in an apartment in the outskirts of the Austrian capital...

Washington, D.C. - Social media is ablaze with rumors that Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has died. Iranian state-media has yet to confirm or deny such rumors. Cairo-based journalist Gamal Sultan wrote on social media that Khamenei died after suffering from a bout with prostate cancer, after surgery failed to alter the course of his demise, according to Rassd News Network. Daniel J. Levy of The Times Of Israel wrote on Twitter late Saturday: “Hearing unconfirmed reports from a usually very reliable source of Ayatollah Khamenei’s death today.” On Friday, Iranian media confirmed that “The commander of the Islamic Revolution,...

It is imperative that anyone wanting to be up on the War On Terror should go out of his way to learn as much about the players involved as possible. The AP/Yahoo! reports on an Egyptian character called Mustafa Abu al-Yazid who has been named as a contact of suspected Denver-based Muslim Najibullah Zazi.

WASHINGTON — When the U.S. State Department announced this week that it finally is going to designate the Haqqani network as a foreign terrorist organization, it was a nonevent for most of our countrymen. That's because few Americans know how deadly the organization is. For that we can thank those at Foggy Bottom who are wedded to the naive hope of a near-term "diplomatic breakthrough" in Afghanistan. Couple that misguided belief with the Obama administration's self-deception that the radical Islamic jihad against the West ended with the demise of Osama bin Laden and it's understandable why the Haqqani network...

When Jihad Came to America by Andrew C. McCarthy On May 2 and 3, 1990, the U.S. embassy in Cairo alerted its counterpart in Khartoum that Egypt’s “leading radical,” Omar Abdel Rahman, was on his way to Sudan. Warning that his ultimate plan might be to seek exile in the United States, the Cairo embassy asked its colleagues to pass along any information they might learn about his activities on Sudanese soil. What did U.S. officials already know about Abdel Rahman in 1990? As the 9/11 Commission would later determine, they knew that he had been arrested repeatedly in Egypt...

CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE READ. This article was published in 1989. A prescient article by Michael Lewis in 1989 looked at the systemic risk of a Japanese earthquake. TO SUMMARIZE: An earthquake destroys the Tokyo Stock Exchange and all financial records. Shares of Western insurance companies lead a global selloff. Japan liquidates overseas holdings. This causes the U.S. bond to collapse. Recession ensues. Lewis observes that a huge earthquake devastates Tokyo roughly every 70 years or so For the past 400 years. 1923, 1853, 1782, 1703 and 1633.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Warren Zimmerman, the last U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, died Tuesday of pancreatic cancer. He was 69. Zimmerman, a career Foreign Service officer, was named ambassador to Yugoslavia in 1989 by the first President Bush. At the time, the former communist country was breaking up into warring factions, and Zimmerman led the administration's efforts to keep the state together. Bush recalled Zimmerman in 1992 to protest the outbreak of civil war. The war lasted until 1995 and pitted the country's Muslims, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Catholic Croats against each other. The war killed 260,000 and forced 1.8 million...

A Virginia man who once spent eight years on the run from naval investigators was arrested in Somerset County early today with a trove of high-powered weapons, including a grenade-launcher and two assault rifles, along with maps of a U.S. military base and a civilian neighborhood, authorities said. The federal government’s Joint Terrorism Task Force quickly joined the investigation into Lloyd R. Woodson, 43, who had been staying at a Branchburg motel since last week. Woodson, whose last known address was in Reston, Va., was wearing a bullet-proof vest and carrying one of the assault rifles — customized to shoot...

<p>IF YOU ENJOYED the election crisis of 2000, you’re going to love what Democrat leaders are cooking up for November.</p> <p>"George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party," charges Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson. (2) Some might dismiss Miss Iverson's comment as hyberbole. However, Soros' massive soft-money contributions have indisputably given him power over Democrat strategy.</p>

Copenhagen climate change talks must fail, says top scientistExclusive: World's leading climate change expert says summit talks so flawed that deal would be a disaster Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 December 2009 20.54 GMT The scientist who convinced the world to take notice of the looming danger of global warming says it would be better for the planet and for future generations if next week's Copenhagen climate change summit ended in collapse. In an interview with the Guardian, James Hansen, the world's pre-eminent climate scientist, said any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so...

The Kurdish Halabja Centre CHAK has submitted new and possibly incriminating evidence in the appeal case against Dutch businessman Frans van Anraat. The documents were reportedly supplied by the Iraqi tribunal that sentenced former dictator Saddam Hussein to death. In December last year, Frans van Anraat was sentenced to 15 years in jail. The court in The Hague found him guilty of supplying materials for chemical weapons to the Saddam Hussein regime in the 1980s. He was acquitted of complicity in genocide because he reportedly did not know that Saddam Hussein intended to use poison gas on the Iraqi population....

Poland remembers its bloodless revolution of 1989 By VANESSA GERA WARSAW, Poland (AP) — It began in Poland at the ballot box: A season of revolutions that toppled communist regimes from Berlin to Bucharest was set in motion 20 years ago this week by the first semi-free elections ever to take place in the Soviet-dominated eastern bloc. On Thursday, Poles celebrate the anniversary of the ballot, which delivered a sweeping victory to Lech Walesa's pro-democracy Solidarity movement, kicking off a stream of events that will culminate with celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall this November and the Dec....

Poland: From Soviet satellite to 'Tiger of Europe' 7:26 a.m. EDT, Sat May 30, 2009 (CNN) -- Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland's former finance minister, recently said his country is enjoying "its best period in 300 years." CNN looks at how the country emerged from communism to become one of eastern Europe's most stable and thriving democracies. Solidarity leader Lech Walesa Solidarity leader Lech Walesa addresses striking workers in Gdansk, Poland in 1989. Modern Poland gained independence in 1918 only to be overrun by Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Almost six million Poles, including the majority of...

Former Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang's secret journals were smuggled out of China and are to be published May 19th, for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations.

When new information about Americans who had cooperated with the Soviet KGB began to emerge in the 1990s, no individual case generated as much controversy as that of the journalist I.F. Stone, who had long been installed in the pantheon of left-wing heroes as a symbol of rectitude and a teller of truth to power before his death in 1989.