Free Republic

Boris Yeltsin, who died on April 23, was a towering figure in Russian political history. But was he, as so many US obituaries and editorials have described him, the "Father of Russian Democracy"? As though a wave of historical amnesia had swept over the media, few commentators seemed to remember that it was Mikhail Gorbachev, upon becoming Soviet leader in 1985, who launched the democratic reforms of "perestroika" and "glasnost"--ending censorship, permitting, even encouraging, opposition rallies and demonstrations, beginning market reforms and holding the first free, multi-candidate elections. (Indeed, Yeltsin was the chief beneficiary of those reforms.) [...] After August...

With “UCK” (KLA) spray-painted on a church, an Albanian Muslim in Kosovo snaps a photo of his fellow tribesman urinating on a burned-out remnant of this formerly Christian land. These are our murderous “allies”, whose terrorism we will reward in the coming weeks and months with independence — which they will unilaterally declare in any case, along with war against NATO, UN and the EU if necessary. *EXCLUSIVE*_______*EXCLUSIVE*_______*EXCLUSIVE*_______From a source in Washington who attended an open hearing on Tuesday of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs:At the hearing, titled “The Outlook for the Independence of Kosova” (the Islamic and dhimmi...

    U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice addresses the media ahead of NATO's foreign ministers meeting in Oslo, Norway, Thursday, April 26, 2007. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed Russians concerns over Washington's plans to deploy anti-missile defenses in Europe on Thursday, saying the American interceptors would pose no danger to Moscow's nuclear arsenal. (AP Photo/Yves Logghe) OSLO, Norway -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday dismissed as "ludicrous" Russian concerns that Washington's plans to deploy anti-missile defenses in Europe would endanger Moscow's nuclear arsenal.A flurry of high-level talks in recent weeks has failed to soften...

Daniel Drew, the legendary 19th century Wall Street insider, reputedly said that all he wanted in any deal was "a little unfair advantage." Most of America's trade competitors seem to want the same thing, or even a big unfair advantage. Imagine how it would help the competitiveness of American exporters if U.S. companies could cut their prices an average of 19 percent in Europe and 17 percent in Asia. Imagine what it would also mean if foreign imports into the United States from overseas were raised by the same percentages. U.S. financial generosity to our allies after World War II...

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — A planned Russian-German natural gas pipeline along the Baltic seabed will cut through a disputed coastal zone that comes under Polish and Danish regulations, Poland's economy minister said Wednesday. Minister Piotr Wozniak said plans for the 750-mile pipeline show it will slice through a stretch of some 62 miles of water that Poland and Denmark are in conflict over, with each country claiming it as an exclusive economic zone. Still, Poland insisted that its regulations should apply in the area, and that the pipeline's construction must comply with them. Several coastal nations have expressed concern over...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Ask the leading Republican presidential candidates about dealing with illegal immigration, and inevitably the answer focuses on tightening border security and building fences. What voters aren't hearing a lot about is giving legal status, under certain conditions, to illegal immigrants in the United States, even though each of the top three GOP candidates has supported such a policy. The reason has a lot to do with a deep fissure in the GOP base: Business and industry are demanding more low-wage workers, while grass-roots conservatives are demanding that those workers be shipped home. From coffee shops in Iowa...

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will press Russia on its opposition to quasi independence to Serbia's Kosovo province, when she visits Moscow next month, an official said Tuesday. But, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack downplayed the Kremlin's threat to veto the independence vote should it come up in the United Nations Security Council. McCormack said it was well known that the Russian government has "some real reservations" about Ahtisaari's plan for supervised independence for Kosovo. But he asserted that Titov had not actually threatened a Russian veto of the scheme and said the United States and other Security Council powers...

MOSCOW - To Western eyes, it was the new, democratic Russia. Boris Yeltsin, the man who had wrested the country from the grip of communism two years earlier, was facing what he described as an armed "mutiny" by communist holdovers in the country's elected parliament. So when Mr. Yeltsin sent troops and tanks to disperse the Supreme Soviet legislature and arrest its leaders, Western leaders cheered his actions. But many Russians were appalled. "When I heard [then US President Bill] Clinton describing Yeltsin's actions as 'a triumph for democracy,' I was horrified," says Viktor Kremeniuk, deputy director of the official...

[...] Yeltsin was a true hero and the hope was that he would use this momentum to further the move toward democracy and a market system that Gorbachev had just begun. I was in Moscow at the time of the coup attempt and when Yeltsin put down the coup, the public was thrilled and proud of themselves in a way I had never sensed in Moscow before or since. The trouble was that Yeltsin stood by as others, including some American advisers, allowed some of Russia's most prized assets to be turned over to a very few undeserving individuals. Overnight...

Scientists exploring a mine have uncovered a natural Sistine chapel showing not religious paintings, but incredibly well preserved images of sprawling tree trunks and fallen leaves that once breathed life into an ancient rainforest. Replete with a diverse mix of extinct plants, the 300-million-year-old fossilized forest is revealing clues about the ecology of Earth’s first rainforests . The discovery and details of the forest are published in the May issue of the journal Geology. “We’re looking at one instance in time over a large area. It’s literally a snapshot in time of a multiple square mile area,” said study team...

I have done an awful lot of thinking and research on the effects of increased trade and the "race to the bottom" - meaning that developed countries are forced to lower their standard of living to effectively compete with less developed countries. The end result of all this at this point is this: there is no way to stop it from happening. In other words, we are entering a period of decreased living standards that could last 50-100 years during which the developed world's standard of living decreases while the developing world's standard of living increases. Until we reach a...

[...] the mass killing and expulsion of ethnic Armenians from Turkey [] took place between 1915 and 1917, [] is widely recognized as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey disputes that characterization, however, saying there was no organized campaign to kill Armenians and that the deportations took place in the context of war. As the last witnesses reach the twilight of their lives, the question of how to judge what happened in those years remains center stage in the region's complex politics. The international campaign for universal recognition of the massacres as a genocide has been generally led...

ANTIBIOTICS, one of the great medical advances of the 20th century, are being threatened by their careless use in the 21st century. Time and again, disease-causing bacteria in humans become resistant to antibiotics because they are prescribed for the wrong conditions or because patients fail to complete the full course of the prescription. A third, highly avoidable cause of resistance is the use of antibiotics in poultry or livestock. The Food and Drug Administration has before it now an application to use on cattle an antibiotic from a family of antibiotics crucial to treating humans. The agency should follow the...

NEW YORK -- During the Great Depression, New York's ebullient mayor Fiorello LaGuardia dubbed the popular marble lions that frame the steps of the city's main library Patience and Fortitude -- a reference to the strengths residents would need to summon to survive the economic tumult. Robert Brown, chief investment officer at Genworth Financial Asset Management, contends Americans will eventually need to call on those same attributes if the US dollar continues to fall as he and many other analysts expect. [...] While the economic shift would likely draw out some winners in the US economy, such as companies that...

[...] Everyone wants a patron saint. "It's like a wave we are witnessing," he said. He pulled out a recent letter from the church's patriarch, Alexy II, approving a request from Rus, a special forces police unit long involved in controversial counterterrorism operations in Chechnya, that the legendary 13th-century military commander and saint Alexander Nevsky be named its patron. [...] Moribund during the Soviet era, the Orthodox Church has been reborn as a powerful force in Russian life, building congregations across the country. The church has also become increasingly identified with a strand of patriotism that celebrates a strong centralized...

KIEV — Thousands of opponents of Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych blocked the entrances to the Constitutional Court on Wednesday, forcing riot police to intervene to allow judges in for the second day of hearings into the legality of a presidential decree dissolving the parliament. The session began more than one hour late after helmeted police linked arms and formed a corridor to usher judges through a scrum of flag-waving demonstrators, which included rival lawmakers pushing and shoving each other outside the court’s black metal gates. The hearing began with 16 of the 18 judges in place, said chief judge...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Immigration problems are better handled by the federal government, said members of a state House committee Wednesday that voted down a proposal to punish businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. The idea of increasing penalties for those companies never had much of a chance in the House Environment and Natural Resources Council, where a number of members are in the agriculture business -- one of the main industries targeted by the bill. It was defeated 12-1. Rep. Juan Zapata, the bill's sponsor but not a member of the committee, said he pushed the idea to raise...

"I WOULD ban religion completely," British pop-music star Elton John said in a much-noted interview last November. "It turns people into hateful lemmings, and it's not really compassionate." It isn't exactly news that many people find religion odious, but what is being called the New Atheism has lately become a booming industry. A profusion of books, articles, and lectures extols secularism and derides faith in God as pernicious and absurd. Such antipathy to religion was once relegated to the edges of polite society. Today it shows up front and center. A California congressman is cheered for announcing that he is...

Serbia will be the focus of intense diplomatic attention this week as senior Russian and Chinese officials visit Belgrade and Europe’s top diplomats travel to Moscow. The flurry of activity signals the beginning of the countdown to independence for Kosovo, according to analysts, despite Serbia’s strong opposition to ceding the province that has been governed as a United Nations protectorate since 1999. “Maybe this activity is the beginning of the first of the last round of such maneuverings,” said Ivan Vejvoda, director of the Belgrade office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “The U.S. and Britain want...

In the 1950's 30% of US employees were in manufacturing - almost 1 in 3 jobs. This country was a relative manufacturing super power, we were the world's richest and most productive country. In 1994 approximately 1 in 8 jobs were in manufacturing. In 2014 if the US government (Bureau of Labor Statistics) projections are accurate that figure will have slipped to 1 in 12 jobs. The government is telling us in black and white that the policies they are enacting will decrease both absolute and relative manufacturing employment to levels below that of the 1950's - over 2 million...