Free Republic

Britain may come away empty-handed when European Union leaders carve up a package of top EU jobs next week, due to its fierce opposition to Jean-Claude Juncker’s appointment as the next European Commission president. Prime Minister David Cameron angered his peers in June by breaking with a tradition of taking decisions by consensus and forcing them to vote on whether Juncker should head the EU executive. Only Britain and Hungary voted “no”. Cameron publicly branded Juncker a “career insider of Brussels” and said his selection was a bad day for Europe. “After the mess at the last summit, many leaders...

Germany’s highest court ruled on Tuesday that the European bailout fund, the ESM, was in line with the country’s constitution, throwing out numerous objections by euroskeptics. Confirming a preliminary ruling dating from September 2012, the Federal Constitutional Court said it saw no obstacles to Germany taking part in the €500-billion European Stability Mechanism, set up to bail out troubled countries and their banks. Nevertheless, in the ruling, presiding judge Andreas Voßkuhle insisted that it must be “the Bundestag [lower house of parliament] which retains sole responsibility over Germany’s public income and spending, even with regard to its international and European...

I was reading a news item in the Guardian the other day. Didn't get very far. This was the first sentence: "The Church of England said yesterday that police counter-terrorism operations were directed disproportionately against Muslims and risked alienating them." At that point, I fell off the chair, howling with laughter. Not because of the strikingly non-ecumenical character of the infanticidal thugs at Beslan, the bombers of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, the murderers of the 12 Nepalese workers, the terrorist suspects arrested in north London on Friday, or the beheaders of two American hostages and impending beheader of a...

In the dining rooms of agreeable Ivy League colleges, they fret about imposing western values on the developing world but not a whit about imposing anti-western values, all of which were developed in the west -- from Communism and Fascism to subtler grievances like "neo-colonialism".......