Free Republic

Donald Trump's return to the White House has brought NATO spending back under scrutiny, with Washington's warning that Europe should be prepared to defend itself from Russian aggression refocusing minds in Brussels. The United States will 'no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship' regarding the war in Ukraine and will not be taken for 'suckers', Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week as he declared that fellow Nato members should be spending more. The US is by far the biggest spender on defence overall - forking out a total of $967.7billion, equivalent to 3.38 per cent of the country's gross domestic...

BERLIN (Reuters) -The German government has retreated from a plan to legally commit itself to meeting NATO's 2% military spending target on an annual basis, a government source told Reuters on Wednesday.A corresponding clause in a draft of the budget financing law passed by the cabinet of Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Wednesday was deleted at short notice, the source said.The change means that Germany will be able to stick to its current pledge of meeting the 2% target on average over a five-year period.This wording is softer than Scholz's original pledge in a speech on Feb 27, 2022, in which...

You may never have heard of Camille Howard of New Orleans's Jefferson Parish. But if you pay taxes, you've helped her repair her home with federal flood insurance (NFIP) -- no less than four times since she has owned it, and seven times before that. And therein lies a tale of policy mistakes and taxpayer liability. The federal government says some 120,000 properties nationwide have received "multiple" taxpayer subsidized flood insurance payments -- at a cost of $7.25 billion. An astounding 26,000 of those have received four or more flood payments. One property in Houston flooded 16 times and sucked...