Free Republic

France is calling him “the backpack hero”, a young Catholic pilgrim on a walking tour of cathedrals who came face to face with the man who stabbed several children in a park in Annecy. Henri, a 24-year-old management and philosophy student, was near the playground in Le Paquier Park when he saw the man attacking children in a stroller as their mother desperately tried to shield them on Thursday. Video footage shows him trying to block the assailant with one of his two backpacks, pursuing the man into the playground, and throwing one of his bags at the attacker. So...

Al Arabiya English Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing to become the Prime Minister of Israel for the third time. He has until December 21 to form a government before taking office. In a wide-ranging interview with a group of print and television journalists at Al Arabiya, Mr. Netanyahu discussed Israel’s relations with Arab states, the US alliance structure in the Middle East, unrest in Iran, Israel’s new hard-right government, the future of the US-brokered maritime border agreement with Lebanon, and the Russia-Ukraine war. Mr. Netanyahu reiterated the paramount importance of normalization with Saudi Arabia, which would be a “quantum leap” toward...

America’s Lebanese fantasy hits a road-bump Lebanon Follow Tony Badran Published: 13 December ,2022: 12:39 PM GST Updated: 13 December ,2022: 01:25 PM GST For the past two years, the Biden administration has been hell-bent on getting Saudi Arabia to underwrite the US project of administering Lebanon. And for two years running, the Kingdom has refused, having no desire to bankroll an Iranian equity run by Hezbollah. The administration, however, is demanding US allies suspend disbelief and pretend that Lebanon is in fact a real, normal state. In the latest iteration of its Lebanese project, the Biden team is trying...

The head of NATO expressed worry that the fighting in Ukraine could spin out of control and become a war between Russia and NATO, according to an interview released Friday. “If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in remarks to Norwegian broadcaster NRK. “It is a terrible war in Ukraine. It is also a war that can become a full-fledged war that spreads into a major war between NATO and Russia,” he said. “We are working on that every day to avoid that.”

The US has been mostly silent, other than issuing a few meek statementsIt is difficult to understand what US President Joe Biden’s administration is doing in northern Syria, where its allies the Syrian Kurds have been bombed to high heaven by Turkish forces. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insisted that he also intends to mount a land operation against America’s partners there. Although Turkey for some time had been bombing and assassinating members of the US-allied Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), this current offensive is different. It is designed to deal the Kurds a fatal blow. What is incomprehensible is that...

A special event was held at the Patriarchal Monastery of the Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Thekla in Maaloula, Syria, on Monday, when the holy habitation was given a complex of solar panel-powered electrical equipment. The equipment will provide power to all the monastery buildings, including the church, the sisters’ cells, and the buildings where they carry out their obediences, reports the Russian Orthodox Representation to the Antiochian Orthodox Church. The ceremony was attended by a number of Russian state officials. The Church was represented by Archimandrite Philip (Vasiltsev), the representative of Patriarch Kirill to the Antiochian Church. The delegation was greeted...

Vladimir Putin’s Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov has declared “Big Jihad” and urged Russian Muslims to fight Ukraine’s “demons” and “satanic democracy.” Kadyrov, one of Putin’s most fanatical backers, urged his supporters to lay waste to Ukraine and backed calls from Russian allies to wipe cities “off the face of the f—ing Earth.” -snip- “I swear with the Almighty’s name, this is the Big Jihad, which we must all take part in and we will not stop. “We will be killing them wherever they are. No matter who is helping them, America or Europe. “There is nothing to worry about. They...

Syria may not only be to blame for the refusal of Palestinian factions to accept a cease-fire with Israel, but also for the terror attack which killed eight Yeshiva students in Jerusalem on Thursday, the London-based newspaper Al-Hayat reported on Saturday. According to the report, a senior Egyptian official told the paper that "Syria may be interested in focusing the international attention on the situation in Gaza and the West Bank, instead of the situation in Lebanon." Asked whether Hizbullah was responsible for the Jerusalem shooting spree, the official responded that "there was not enough evidence, but that an investigation...

Residents express anger at Angela Merkel’s open border policy.. Some have expressed anger at former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open border migrant policy after a Syrian national was arrested for the murder of a teenage girl whose body was found at a sewage treatment plant. 17-year-old Tabitha E. left an apartment in Asperg, southern Germany, on Tuesday afternoon last week, but the alarm was raised after she didn’t return home that evening. After an extensive police search, the girl’s body was found on Sunday at the Leudelsbach sewage treatment plant. After the home of a suspect was search and investigators...

Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to meet with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran on Tuesday, the Russian state-owned news agency RIA reported Monday, citing spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. The trip signifies a new era of Turkey-Iran-Russia relations, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also heading to Tehran to meet his Iranian and Russian counterparts this week. This comes in the wake of US President Joe Biden visiting the region. The goal of the July 18-19 meeting in Iran is ostensibly part of the Astana process relating to Syria, and could have significant ramifications for Syria, which remains...

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) - Syria said Wednesday it will recognize the "independence and sovereignty" of Ukraine's eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions and contacts will be established to set up diplomatic relations. (snip) Earlier this month, Russia claimed to have taken control of 97% of one of the two provinces that make up Ukraine's Donbas, bringing the Kremlin closer to its goal of fully capturing the eastern industrial heartland of coal mines and factories.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper implied in a new book former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressured then-President Donald Trump to launch a military strike against Iran. Quotes in his book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times, were redacted after the Department of Defense prohibited their publication.

Lavrov got the "idea" to utter the sad sentence to make distorted and cynical use of historical Nazism, some time after the "talks" between Russia and the "moderate" Abu Mazen --infamous Holocaust distorted since the 1980s-- on the Temple Mount, as a payback for denouncing Bucha and other massacres _______________ CHRONOLOGY: "Russia's message to Israel: a telephone conversation between Putin and Abu Mazen," Elior Levy, Reuters. While Israel is facing riots in Jerusalem, preparing for a political crisis with Jordan and exchanging stings with the Kremlin, the Russian president spoke by telephone with the Palestinian Authority chairman. According to...

Italian television interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

Syria's Assad offers an explanation of western motives

An IS fanatic has been found guilty of murdering Sir David Amess MP. The Southend West MP was stabbed more than 20 times during a constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex on 15 October 2021. A jury at the Old Bailey took just 18 minutes to convict Ali Harbi Ali of murder and preparing acts of terrorism. The 26-year-old from Kentish Town, north London, had denied the charges and claimed he targeted the MP over his vote for airstrikes on Syria. Sir David's family sat in court just a short distance from Ali as the verdicts were delivered. The judge, Mr...

In late 2016, Syrian government forces had sealed off Aleppo's rebel-held eastern half, with 270,000 people inside, and for months they and Russian warplanes blasted it to rubble. Food was scarce. .. Hashem and other Aleppo survivors on Tuesday mark the 11th anniversary of Syria’s revolution-turned-civil war. This year, many of them are not just reflecting on their own fates, they are watching in shock as Ukrainians face familiar horrors: bombardment, brutal siege and flight from their homes. In Syria's war, Russia helped President Bashar Assad's government gain the upper hand with a ruthless strategy. One by one, they locked...

We've been beating the drum on the Biden administration's reportedly imminent and shocking giveaway to Iran for days -- harping on the appalling substance of the rumored capitulation, as well as the humiliating reality that the US delegation relied on Kremlin diplomats as intermediaries. The Iranians, Russians and even the Chinese were apparently quite pleased by what the United States was willing to surrender, which was said to be so outrageous that several members of Biden's own team quit in protest, mid-talks. Congress, meanwhile, has been kept in the dark on specifics, by design. Would the legislative branch even have...

CAIRO (REUTERS) - ARAB League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit on Saturday led Arab foreign ministers in lambasting Turkey's military operation in northeast Syria as an "invasion of an Arab state's land and an aggression on its sovereignty". Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohamed Ali Alhakim, president of the current Arab League session, also condemned Turkey's offensive into Syria during an emergency meeting of the body, called by Egypt. The offensive "will exacerbate humanitarian crises, increase the suffering of the Syrian people, and strengthen the ability of terrorists to reorganize their remnants," Alhakim said. Alhakim and Lebanon's Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil called...

Iran reports unusually: Two Revolutionary Guards fighters killed in Israeli attack yesterday morning in Damascus pic.twitter.com/to3EEmKeGp— roi kais • روعي كايس • רועי קייס (@kaisos1987) March 8, 2022