Free Republic

“I think it’s (Trump’s proposed border wall) a moral abomination…I think it’s like the Berlin Wall. I think it’s like any other wall designed to separate human beings and block out people who are running away from the humanitarian disasters. I just think it’s wrong.” (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Feb, 20.) Could the ironies be any richer? Could AOC’s “powers of reasoning” be showcased any more starkly? To wit: The Berlin Wall (which even die-hard leftists like AOC seem to recognize as a “moral abomination”) was designed to keep desperate suffering people from escaping en masse from what Ocasio-Coretz and Bernie Sanders...

Trump joined world leaders at the Art and History Museum in Brussels •He and First Lady Melania Trump were greeted while a jazz band played •Waiters carried trays with white wine, but neither Trump nor Melania grabbed one •He could be seen smiling and chatting amiably with world leaders •Melania, who speaks German among other languages, spoke one-on-one with Germany's Angela Merkel •She changed out of her navy blue Calvin Klein dress into a white $7,450 Elie Saab dress •Earlier Trump posed for a 'family photo' •He demanded countries DOUBLE defense spending to 4 per cent of GDP •Early he...

A video has emerged showing an Arab youth attacking two Jewish men in broad daylight on the streets of Berlin on Tuesday. The attack happened at around 8 pm on Tuesday evening in the Prenzlauer Berg district, police report. The two Jewish men, who were reportedly wearing kippas, were verbally attacked by a group of three youths, who used anti-Semitic epithets against them. One youth then emerged from the group of three young men and attacked a 21-year-old Israeli with his belt, while shouting “Jew” at him. The victims of the attack were able to record footage of it on...

Angela Merkel is essentially the de-facto global head of modern political liberalism.  The central tenet, almost religious-based in its importance, is the lunacy within “climate change”.  However, as most reasonable people have concluded, the ‘climate discussions’ are more about controlled global economics than any actual concerns about planetary climatology.   Bottom line, it’s the economics that really matter beyond all else.

Summits of world leaders are usually highly choreographed affairs that leave little to chance. They are held in locations that are easily shielded from demonstrators. And policy differences are papered over by envoys behind closed doors well ahead of time. But the G20 meeting in Hamburg next week will be different. Host German Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken a high-risk gamble by choosing to hold the summit in the center of the northern port city, partly to show the world that big protests are tolerated in a healthy democracy. This has created a huge challenge for police. On the policy...

TURKISH leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insisted he will lead the world to “rise up” against Germany as tensions between the two nations continue to escalate. President Erdogan has launched a series of attacks on Berlin after officials cancelled rallies aimed at courting an estimated 1.5 million ethnic Turkish voters in Germany before an upcoming referendum. The Turkish leader accused Germany of Nazi-type behaviour after the pro-Erdogan rallies were banned, in a widening European Union backlash that also includes Austria and the Netherlands. President Erdogan told a rally in Istanbul: “We will talk about Germany’s actions in the international arena...

On Tuesday, Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Afghan immigrant who was a teenager in Queens during the Sept. 11 attacks, pleaded not guilty to federal terrorism conspiracy charges in New York. This is a scary story. Police stopped and searched Zazi's rented car on the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 10, as the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks loomed and President Obama was about to join world leaders at a U.N. confab. According to the U.S. attorney's office, Zazi flew to Pakistan in August 2008 to receive bombmaking instructions, returned to use the Internet and nine pages of handwritten bombmaking...

German Billionaire Commits Suicide After VW Losses In killing himself German billionaire Adolf Merckle has become the latest casualty of the global financial crisis, his family saying on Tuesday he was broken by the struggle to salvage their business empire. Merckle, who was the world's 94th-richest person in 2008 according to Forbes magazine, spent his life building a business conglomerate with about 100,000 employees. The empire was poised to come crashing down after his family made wrong-way bets on skyrocketing Volkswagen shares. The family has been under pressure to sell some assets or seek bridging loans and has been in...

WATERTOWN, Wis. -- Fred Merkle was born in Watertown, Wis., in 1888, but he spent only one year there before his family moved to Toledo, Ohio. Still, that didn't prevent Watertown resident David Stalker from claiming Merkle as the town's very own. He spearheaded an effort to erect a monument in Merkle's honor. Set in black marble with a baseball perched on top, the monument notes that Merkle was a "potent line-drive hitter and agile first-baseman." It says he was a member of six World Series teams. However, there is no mention on the monument of the play that earned...

One hundred years ago this afternoon, the New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs played a game that can still be found on baseball's figurative Mount Rushmore, next to the Bobby Thompson home run game, the Sandy Amoros catch game, Don Larsen's perfect game, and the game where Carlton Fisk waved it fair. No one who played in or saw the game is alive. The Polo Grounds, where it was played, was demolished a half century ago. Doesn't matter. Some games just endure. More specifically, what happened on Sept. 23, 1908, was this. With the first breezes of autumn in...

At the dawn of the atomic age, scientists began work on what might have been the nastiest weapon ever conceived.Those who came of age during the era of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are probably too young to remember the happy days when "our friend the atom" promised electricity too cheap to meter and cars that would run forever without a fill-up. With atom-powered subs like the Nautilus cruising under the polar icecap in the mid-1950s, could anyone doubt that atom-powered rocketships, airplanes, and even automobiles would be far behind? A funny thing happened to that dream on its way...

...[T]he TV networks... say they have revamped the way they collect and analyze polling data, using more sophisticated equipment and better communications. To tone down their competitive instincts in "calling" states for either candidate, some are blocking their news desks from watching rivals' shows. All the networks are also striving to get their respective "decision desks" -- the units that make the calls -- to work more closely with the producers and reporters.... CBS News said the computers VNS used weren't sophisticated enough to compare voting data with historical information and were incapable of raising red flags where they were...

Rumsfeld: We're going to Munich, obviously, for the Security Conference, the so-called Werkunde Conference, but the NATO Ministers have arranged an informal meeting prior to that, the day before, to, in effect, get prepared for the Istanbul Summit, which is in June. It will be the first meeting with the new Secretary General. There is a good agenda. Seven invitees will be coming in. We have the issues on strengthening NATO's role in Afghanistan. There will be discussions [about] Iraq. I guess there's now something like 24 or 26 NATO members and invitees who currently have forces in either Afghanistan...