Free Republic

He had no doubts at first, but slowly they emerged. He was struck, he says, by the fact that the first coins bearing Muhammad’s name did not appear until the late 7th century — six decades after the religion did. He traded ideas with some scholars in Saarbrücken who in recent years have been pushing the idea of Muhammad’s nonexistence. They claim that “Muhammad” wasn’t the name of a person but a title, and that Islam began as a Christian heresy. Prof. Kalisch didn’t buy all of this. Contributing last year to a book on Islam, he weighed the odds...

Natural gas stopped flowing through a pipeline that runs from Russia through Ukraine on Wednesday, according to officials in both countries. The effects of the halt, though long expected, could ripple through Europe’s energy sector and potentially affect Moscow’s ability to fund its war in Ukraine. Here’s what you need to know: What happened?Why did this happen now?What will it mean for Europe?The most affected countriesWhat happened? Ukraine refused to renew an agreement that allowed Russia to send natural gas through a pipeline to Europe. The deal was honored even after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, kicking off the bloodiest...

...eight months after Russia invaded Ukraine, Lukashenko’s Russian-enabled grip on power risks slipping as Moscow pressures him to get more involved in the faltering military campaign next door in Ukraine. Artyom Shraibman, a Belarusian political analyst who fled to Poland after a brutal crackdown on postelection protests in 2020, cautioned that it was unclear exactly what Putin had asked of the Belarusian leader in St. Petersburg but, he added: “it is very clear that Lukashenko is not yet willing to join the war” because of the immense political risks that would bring. Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, a Belarusian opposition leader and a...

On June 6, 1944, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the green light for the largest amphibious military operation in history. Codenamed Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of the heavily Nazi-fortified coast of France's Normandy region has come to be more popularly known as D-Day. On that monumental patriotic battle hung the balance of power in World War II (1939-1945) and the fate of the world. "Higgins was not native to the South. … He grew up in Nebraska, where, at various ages, he was expelled from school for fighting. Higgins' temperament improved around boats. He built his...

After more than a week sleeping in a frigid encampment on the border between Belarus and Poland, and an abortive foray across the frontier repelled by pepper spray and police batons, Mohammad Faraj gave up this month and retreated to a warm hotel in Minsk, capital of Belarus. Soon after, however, he watched with surprise and excitement a video report on Facebook claiming that Poland was about to open its border and urging all those who wanted to enter the European Union to gather at a gas station near the encampment that the migrants had nicknamed “the jungle.” Mr. Faraj,...

This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates. MOSCOW — A deadly shooting erupted near the fortresslike headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service in central Moscow on Thursday evening, the security agency said in a statement that also reported several people had been wounded. Russian news reports said up to three people had been killed. “An unknown person opened fire near building #12 on the Bolshaya Lubyanka street,” the security service statement said, according to the Interfax news agency. “Some people were injured.” The statement also said that the assailant had been “neutralized” and was being identified....

As you likely know, it’s the 75th anniversary of D-Day, when 160,000 Allied troops invaded the beaches of Normandy, undertaking the largest from-the-sea invasion in the history of human warfare and marking the beginning of the end for the Axis. The actual business of getting over 100,000 soldiers and a metric crapton of vehicles and equipment from the ocean on to land is a decidedly non-trivial problem, one that the Allies solved with a brilliant but simple patented plywood boat: the Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel (LCVP), also called the Higgins Boat.      The Higgins Boat, named after its inventor, Andrew...

THEN: In 1939, the U.S. Navy awarded the relentless Andrew Higgins with a contract to build his Eureka boats for the military. Despite his now-famous contribution to the U.S. effort in World War II -- most notably his Higgins landing craft, a later version of the Eureka boat -- the path to this contract was bumpy and difficult, something that only someone as determined as Higgins could overcome. Although the New Orleans boat builder had successfully sold his boats to the Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers, the Navy was more interested in developing its own technology than testing...

As chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel leads a nation that prizes fiscal rectitude and adherence to the rules, and, after pledging tens of billions in bailout programs for five years, has expressed scant sympathy for Greece’s demand for more financial help. As de facto leader of Europe, Ms. Merkel faces a very different set of responsibilities, starting with maintaining European unity in general and holding the euro together in particular.