Free Republic

Japan, the third world economy, has virtually no gas and oil reserves. The situation is somewhat paradoxical since no country can prosper without oil and gas. Thus, the Land of the Rising Sun has been successfully coping with the situation by importing oil in tankers from the Middle East, liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and that same Middle East. Japan also needs coal for its CHP plants, which it purchases from Australia, Indonesia and China. Recently the country held its hopes high for nuclear power industry. After the tragedy at Fukushima 1 in 2011, however, nuclear power...

The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write. No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007. Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former...

Obama spent the six years between 1979 and 1985 in Los Angeles at Occidental College and then in New York at Columbia University and in the workplace. His memoir, "Dreams From My Father," talks about this time but not in great detail; Siddiqi, for example, is identified only as "Sadik" — "a short, well-built Pakistani" who smoked marijuana, snorted cocaine and liked to party. Obama's campaign wouldn't identify "Sadik," but The Associated Press located him in Seattle, where he raises money for a community theater. Together, the recollections of Siddiqi and other friends and acquaintances from Obama's college years paint...