Free Republic

A Greek exit from the euro would see the euro collapse like a house of cards, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis warned in comments that triggered a spat with Italy. "Greece's exit from the euro is not something that is part of our plans, simply because we believe it is like building a house of cards. If you take out the Greek card, the others will collapse," Varoufakis said in an interview with Italian public broadcaster RAI that was aired on Sunday. Varoufakis also incurred the wrath of his Italian counterpart Pier Carlo Padoan by comparing Italy's problem with its large...

BEIRUT — A senior official with the militant Hezbollah group says they have a list of military targets inside Israel to hit in any future war. Hezbollah commander in south Lebanon, Sheik Nabil Kaouk, made his comments Sunday in response to this week's release by Israel's military of maps and aerial photographs of what it described as a network of Hezbollah weapons depots and command centers in south Lebanon.

All is well. Reuters declared that the US is experiencing a "sturdy recovery". This is the same phony news agency that used to choke on the word recovery when used by the Bush administration. Now some American conservatives are warning that Republicans are being dangerously bearish on the economy, that there are signs, weak as they are, that a recovery is underway. Matthew Continetti of the conservative Weekly Standard states that the "natural tendency of economies is to grow". Nevertheless, he seriously questions whether Obama would now benefit from a recovery. Unfortunately most conservatives remain as uninformed about economic history...

Teheran 'lied' over plutonium production By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor (Filed: 17/06/2005) Iran falsely reported the timing of experiments to produce plutonium, a fissile material used in nuclear weapons, a report by the United Nations watchdog said yesterday. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that Teheran had earlier admitted that it had produced plutonium in breach of the international rules, but claimed that the work had ended in 1993. But IAEA inspectors have now forced Teheran to admit that the work continued until 1998. The quantities involved are small, but in a statement, the American representative to the IAEA,...

NEW YORK: George Galloway, the British MP who taunted Tony Blair over Iraq after scoring an upset victory in last week's general election, is facing fresh accusations he received oil allocations from Saddam Hussein's regime and may have used a children's charity to conceal payments. A US Senate committee published new evidence yesterday that the former Labour MP received allocations for millions of barrels of oil. The investigation said Charles Pasqua, the conservative former French interior minister, also received the "lucrative" allocations under the UN's oil-for-food program.

CNN and USA Today spiked how a new poll documented how the biggest and most influential national media outlets are packed with liberals. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press survey, released on Sunday, of reporters, editors, producers and executives for national media outlets, found five times more identify themselves as liberal, 34 percent, than conservative, a mere 7 percent, with another 54 percent claiming to be moderate. But in citing the poll on Monday’s Inside Politics, Judy Woodruff ignored the finding about the ideologies of journalists and in a 400-word USA Today article, which was accompanied...