Free Republic

President Obama has gotten more death threats in a shorter period of time than any other president in US history. The legion of right side talk radio gabbers, the GOP induced professional mobsters who commit orchestrated mayhem at health care townhalls, the birthers, the countless websites and chatrooms that crackle with anti Obama venom, and the endless montage of race baiting cartoons, characterizations and depictions of Obama and First Lady Michelle have created a viperous climate of hate and that knows no bounds. The stock assumption is that race is the reason that Obama is a bigger target than any...

Journalist-turned-Croatian independence fighter Eduardo Rosza-Flores was asked in an interview a few years ago with the Hungarian edition of Elle Magazine if he would ever assassinate someone for a cause. "Only if [that person] comes to kill others," said Rozsa, according to an English version of the transcript posted on one of his blogs. "To protect and save the lives of my friends." The question now is whether Rozsa, a Hungarian-Bolivian, felt that way about Bolivian President Evo Morales. Rozsa was killed early last Thursday morning in a hotel room in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. The government...

The murder of a Chechen man in Vienna on January 13 threatens to derail a torture case against Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov in Austria, in which the victim was a key witness. The 27-year-old Umar Israilov, a former anti-Russian guerrilla later forced to join Kadyrov's security forces, said he had himself seen the Chechen president and his men torture opponents, in an interview with the New York Times last December. "How can we go on without the main witness?" said a representative of the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), which filed a complaint last June in Vienna.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon was set Wednesday to announce a UN probe into the assassination of former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto during a flying visit to Islamabad, the foreign ministry said. Ban's visit here -- his first since taking office two years ago -- follows a stopover in Afghanistan and comes two days after unidentified gunmen kidnapped a top UN official in southwest Pakistan. It also comes amid rampant unrest in Pakistan's border areas, with Taliban rebels disrupting a crucial NATO supply route into Afghanistan and government forces engaged in bloody fighting in the northwest Swat valley. Ban's talks will...