Free Republic

China: Two Incidents Open Pandora’s Box – Analysis May 22, 2012 By Bhaskar Roy Two incidents, one regarding Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, and the other involving a blind human rights activist and self-taught lawyer Chen Guangchen, destroyed the myth that the Chinese system is a well oiled machine. Policy, individual, and bitter factional rivalries are kept sealed from the public to ensure the Party’s inviolability. This is the biggest political quake the country has experienced since the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. The new age of social communication, the internet, has also damaged the Party’s secrecy. Even people inside the...

There’s a sinister method to this madness The man who plowed his car at top speed into the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany on Friday, killing and injuring numerous people, was a curious case. Taleb al-Abdulmohsen had lived in Germany for years, all the while presenting himself as an ex-Muslim and cultivating connections with high-profile critics of Islam. This led numerous media outlets to present him as an “anti-Islam” terrorist, and German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who for years has ignored and denied any connection of Islam with terrorism and smeared critics of Islam and mass Muslim migration in Germany...

When the White House named Jesse Lee as its Director of Progressive Media and Online Response to rebut criticisms on social-networking media, some people argued that the Obama administration had taken a big step toward becoming Big Brother. At the time, I argued that this was nonsense, and that the White House had a right to respond to criticism — but that Lee’s job was a task better left to the DNC, which traditionally served the role of political response. Instead of looking hip and timely, attacking Twitter users would make the Obama administration look petty and thin-skinned, and would...

Fairey, , "Some of the works are about gridlock in Washington. Washington is too intertwined with corporate America . . . I had a lot of hope for Obama, but it's not panning out. He's not pushing hard enough."

<p>ISTANBUL -- The allegations can be heard almost everywhere in Turkey now, from farmers' wives eating in humble kebab shops, in influential journals, and from erudite political leaders: American troops have raped thousands of Iraqi women and young girls since ousting dictator Saddam Hussein.</p>