Free Republic

The C.I.A. and an Afghan intelligence official said that the shooter had been part of an Afghan “partner force,” known as a Zero Unit, trained and supported by the agency in the southern province of Kandahar. The Afghan refugee accused of shooting two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., fought in the late days of the U.S. war there as part of a “Zero Unit,” a paramilitary force that worked with the C.I.A., according to a person briefed on the investigation and an Afghan intelligence officer familiar with the matter. The units were known for their brutality and labeled “death...

At least 12 people were killed and 27 others wounded on Tuesday in an attack on Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, according to officials. It was the first major attack to hit the city in more than a decade and comes as Pakistan is facing a resurgence of assaults by several insurgencies. An attacker detonated a bomb near the entrance of a courthouse around lunchtime, according to the Pakistani interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi. He said the attacker had tried but failed to enter the court complex, with hundreds of lawyers, defendants and judges inside. The attacker died at the scene, the authorities...

One morning in 1972, the French author Jean Raspail was at his home on the Mediterranean coast when he had a vision of a million refugees clamoring to enter Europe. “Armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil,” he wrote. “To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.” At the time Raspail was a respected writer best known for his travelogues. But the racist novel that resulted from that episode, “The Camp of the Saints,” would become his most...