Free Republic

Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Wednesday. Putin and Francis spoke privately for about 50 minutes before exchanging gifts and making brief remarks in front of reporters present for the event. The meeting, Putin’s second with the pontiff, came as one U.S. diplomat said he hoped the Vatican might use the occasion to “continue to express its concern” about Russia’s recent actions, “particularly about what’s happening in Ukraine.” After their discussions, Putin gave the pope a gold-thread embroidered portrait of the Russian Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was destroyed in the Soviet era...

Israel built and exploded so-called "dirty bombs," explosives laced with nuclear material, to examine how such explosions would affect the country if it were to be attacked by the crude radioactive weapons, the Haaretz daily newspaper reported Monday. Israeli defense officials and scientists refused to comment on the report when reached by The Associated Press. However, Israel has what is widely considered to be an extensive nuclear weapons program that it has never declared.

When Russia annexed Crimea, the Kremlin installed a reputed gangster known as "the Goblin" to run the peninsula. When Moscow's agents abducted Estonian law enforcement officer Eston Kohver, they used a mafia-run smuggling ring to set him up. And of course, organized crime groups have played a prominent role in the Moscow-instigated conflicts in Transdniester, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Donbas. It has become something of a cliche to call Vladimir Putin's Russia a "mafia state." But cliche or not, the term actually fits. Not just because the Kremlin and organized crime groups are closely linked. And not just because Moscow...

KYIV -- An investigation by RFE/RL shows that Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko may have used his presidential influence to shut down investigations into damage of a protected historic site caused by unauthorized construction on his private property in central Kyiv. Two reports broadcast on RFE/RL's Ukrainian-language television program, Schemes, reveal that over the course of seven years, Poroshenko quietly purchased a plot of protected land in Kyiv's elite Pechera district and recently quashed an inquiry into the damage of an 18th-century structure caused by construction work on his plot. The revelations come as Poroshenko, soon to mark his first year...

Ukrainians, Russians! Free Russian and Ukrainian journalists! I have not yet proven, but have derived from private sources of data tomorrow morning (today, at 5 am) from the Naro-Fominsk Donbass leaving more than 500 "contract", which took place 3-month intensive training, including their snipers. The selection came mainly those who have had combat experience, a lot of Caucasians Muslims. They are going to kill Ukrainians people themselves and voluntarily - those who want to kill for money or are just brainwashed assassins. According to other unconfirmed reports, the road to the destination column will take 5 days (armored vehicle?). Mercenaries...

http://ok.ru/video/7348225335 Ukraine Enemies not realize WHAT has awakened in all Ukrainians! Glory to the Heroes! The glory of the nation, death of the enemies. Ukraine above all! https://www.facebook.com/petr.sukhan?fref=nf

Abundant, reliable, affordable oil and natural gas empower people. They support job creation, mobility, modern agriculture, homes and hospitals, computers and communications, lights and refrigerators, life and study after sundown, indoor plumbing, safe drinking water, less disease and longer lives. Hydrocarbons make plastics, pharmaceuticals and synthetic clothing. They create fertilizers and pesticides, to improve crop yields, reduce food prices and improve nutrition. But Sierra Club, 350.org and other radicals want to keep America’s oil and natural gas bounties in the ground. They block leasing, drilling and fracking. They block pipelines that transport oil and gas to refineries, power plants, factories...

The Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko Friday voiced support for LGBT rights, saying he believed an 'Equality March' planned for Saturday in Kiev should take place as planned. "I don't see any reason to impede this march because it's a constitutional right of every citizen of the Ukraine," he said. No president of the Ukraine — a post-Soviet state of 40 million conservative Orthodox Christians — has ever voiced support of the country's LGBT communitby. In neighboring Russia, laws banning gay propaganda have been passed and there have been cases of gays being brutally attacked.

Newly declassified documents from Operation SOLO, an FBI program to infiltrate the Communist Party of the United States, reveal that a journal called Freedomways, which was influential in the black community for decades, was subsidized by the Soviet and Chinese Communist Parties. Freedomways grew out of a Soviet campaign, launched after the Russian revolution, to exploit the “Negro question” in the U.S. and manipulate blacks and members of other minority groups for Communist purposes. The goal was a “Soviet America.” In 1981, a communist-inspired Black Liberation Army, with the help of the Weather Underground, waged a campaign of terrorism and...

“We’re certainly not going to coordinate with a brutal dictator who’s massacred so many of his own citizens,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters on Tuesday. “That’s just an absurd proposition. That’s certainly not going to happen.” She was talking about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “And—look,” Harf continued. “There’s nothing ideological about standing up and saying Bashar al-Assad has no place in the future of Syria. And we are not going to partner with a brutal dictator like that to defeat a terrorist organization.” …

Senseless head-butting needs to give way to sensible brain-storming Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has called on America to end its attempt to remove Syria’s President Assad from power in return for Russia’s co-operation to militarily confront Islamic State. Lavrov reportedly told Bloomberg on 2 June 2015 : “The U.S.’s “obsession” with [Syria’s President] Assad isn’t helping in the common fight against the threat from Islamic State… “People put the fate of one person whom they hate above the fight against terrorism. Islamic State can go “very far” unless stopped, and air strikes alone “are not going to do the...

While most Americans like the idea of drug testing for welfare recipients, they LOVE the idea of drug testing for members of Congress. According to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, 64 percent of Americans favor requiring welfare recipients to submit to random drug testing -- a measure pushed by Republican lawmakers in recent years -- while 18 percent oppose it. But an even stronger majority said they're in favor of random drug testing for members of Congress, by a 78 percent to 7 percent margin. Sixty-two percent said they "strongly" favor drug testing for congressional lawmakers, compared to only 51 percent...

Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.” St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even...

Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.” St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even...

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to punish the editor of a newspaper which published video footage it said showed the MIT state intelligence agency helping send weapons to Syria. The Cumhuriyet newspaper published footage on its website on Friday which it said showed gendarmerie and police officers opening crates of what it described as weapons and ammunition on the back of three trucks belonging to MIT. "The individual who has reported this as an exclusive story will pay a high price for this," Erdogan said in a television interview with state broadcaster TRT late on Sunday. "I will not...

Syrian insurgents rushed reinforcements into combat on Tuesday against rival Islamic State militants who have seized crucial territory near the northern city of Aleppo in recent days, building on the momentum the group has achieved in other battlefield successes in Syria and Iraq. Amid increased fears that Aleppo could be the next big prize to fall to the Islamic State in the latest twist to the four-year-old Syrian civil war, Syrian opposition leaders accused the government of essentially collaborating with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, by bombing other rival insurgent groups, even though the government and...

BEIRUT: Al-Qaeda’s Syria wing Nusra Front said members of the Alawite minority sect should renounce President Bashar Assad and change their beliefs in order to be safe, the group’s leader said in footage broadcast Wednesday. “If they drop weapons, disavow Assad, do not send their men to fight for him and return to Islam then they are our brothers,” Abu Mohammad al-Golani told Al-Jazeera TV in a rare interview. Golani said Alawites were part of a sect that had “moved outside the religion of God and of Islam. We will continue our focus on Damascus and on toppling this regime,”...

A senior Iranian general said on Monday that the leadership of Saudi Arabia, a regional rival, was on the edge of collapse and would be toppled soon, “God willing.” Saudi-led bombardments on Yemen are “shameless and rude and an affront to all Islamic values,” the head of the 150,000-strong Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, said during a speech in Tehran.

In Russia this April, a Baptist pastor was jailed for professing his faith. Pavel Pilipchuk's five-day detention was brief, but excessive. It followed his refusal to pay a heavy fine for organizing street evangelism in the city of Oryol, around 200 miles south of Moscow. By not informing city officials of his plans, the pastor had violated Russia's law regulating public demonstrations, a local court ruled. Pilipchuk's plea that "Christian hymns and conversation are not demonstrations" fell on deaf ears. So did his appeal to Russia's constitutional guarantees of religious freedom. Freedom of speech and assembly are also increasingly under...

The Chechen parliament have threatened to send weapons to Mexico in retaliation to the U.S. Congress calling for defensive lethal aid to be sent to Ukraine. On Tuesday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favour of sending arms - the resolution was passed 348 to 48. U.S. senator for Wisconsin Ron Johnson branded it "absolutely necessary" that president Obama provide lethal and nonlethal military assistance to Ukraine, in light of the attacks by Russian-backed rebels on civilians in Mariupol in January. In response, Chechnya's parliamentary speaker Dukuvakha Abdurakhmanov said that the U.S. has "no right" to advise Russia...