Free Republic

A US-led raid on the compound housing the Islamic State's "chief financial officer" produced evidence that Turkish officials directly dealt with ranking ISIS members, Martin Chulov of the Guardian reported recently. The officer killed in the raid, Islamic State official Abu Sayyaf, was responsible for directing the terror army's oil and gas operations in Syria. The Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) earns up to $10 million a month selling oil on black markets.

Former Top Russian Intelligence Official Gunned Down in Moscow The Associated Press Apr 10, 2005 MOSCOW (AP) - Assailants wielding automatic weapons from a passing car gunned down a former top Russian intelligence official while he drove on a Moscow street Sunday, Russian news agencies reported. Col. Gen. Anatoly Trofimov, former deputy chief of the Federal Security Service under President Boris Yeltsin, was shot in his sport utility vehicle around 7:30 p.m. on a northern street, the Interfax news agency reported. He died on the scene. The assailants fired from a small car, the ITAR-Tass news agency said. A woman...

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With the turmoil in Greece proving once and for all that in the absence of a fiscal union, the EMU simply cannot function or if it does, it will be subject to episodic crises stemming from endemic differences of opinion on fiscal policy, outsiders could be forgiven for looking upon the currency experiment as an abject failure. Indeed, the struggle to secure a bridge loan for Athens last week underscored the degree to which non-euro countries are reluctant to put their taxpayers on the hook for problems which they believe are the result of an ill-fated attempt to unite fundamentally...

The Russian government has approved a draft bill that would allow it to seize foreign state assets, without warning. The move is seen as a tit-for-tat gesture, following Western court cases involving Russian firms. According to the new draft bill, Russia will be able to seize foreign state assets from countries which infringe on Russia’s jurisdictional immunity, according to the Russian press. The Ministry of Justice said the new law is meant to bring parity to the existing "jurisdictional imbalance" between Russia and other countries. In other words, Russia will now seize the state assets of other countries in proportion...

Suppose we had a war and Britain didn’t come? Which is sort of what happened in Syria when President Obama, on the advice of Samantha Power, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, declared that we must go in now, this afternoon. No time to discuss. Much as we had heard before in the maelstrom which is the Middle East. Surely, our allies, by which I think we mean Europe, the Atlantic Alliance or “the West,” led of course by our trusty sidekick, Britain, will fall in line. But overnight, the British Parliament voted to just say no. And we...

Turkey has said areas in north Syria cleared of fighters belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group will become safe zones. Saturday’s announcement made by Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, came after Ankara announced it had begun bombing ISIL positions in Syria and and Kurdish fighters' camps in northern Iraq. "When areas in northern Syria are cleared of the (ISIL) threat, the safe zones will be formed naturally," Cavusoglu told a news conference. The conflict in Syria has displaced more than 10 million people, with many residing in makeshift camps near the Turkish border.These...

In defiance of the international arms embargo, Iran last week placed an order with Moscow for a huge fleet of 100 Russian IL78 MKI tanker aircraft (NATO: Midas) for refueling its air force in mid-flight, thereby extending its range to 7,300 km. This is reported exclusively by DEBKAfile from its military and intelligence sources. The transaction runs contrary to the terms of the nuclear accord the six world powers and Iran signed in Vienna earlier this month. These tanker planes can simultaneously refuel six to eight warplanes. Their acquisition brings Israel, 1.200km away – as well the rest of the...

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A U.S.-based non-governmental organization has become the latest casualty in what campaigners say is a global tightening of restrictions on charitable activity by authoritarian governments, by deciding to close its operations in Russia. The MacArthur Foundation, which has operated in Moscow for more than 20 years - financing higher education, human rights and anti-nuclear proliferation campaigns - said new laws had made it "impossible to continue," by placing the charity on a list of "undesirable" organizations - a criticism it said was baseless. "We are entirely independent of the United States government and receive no...

Hundreds of Ukrainian right-wingers were rallying in Kiev on Tuesday to protest against government policies in the wake of a deadly stand-off between radical nationalists and police in the country's west. The radical Right Sector group was one of the most militant factions in the massive protests in Ukraine's capital that prompted pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych to flee the country in February 2014. Since the war broke out in eastern Ukraine between government forces and pro-Russia separatists several months later, the Right Sector has fought on the government side.

At the beginning of my recent article, Will Wisconsin's Ignorance Become America's Ignorance Again? (Pravda.Ru, 03/04/2015), I stated, "Ever since America's politicized, corrupt, unethical, corporate-controlled Supreme Court decided the cases of Citizens United vs. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon vs. FEC (2014), I have written numerous articles for Pravda.Ru describing how these two decisions destroyed the ability of working class Americans to exercise their once fundamental right to freedom of speech and unleashed a torrent of unbridled political corruption that is rapidly replacing democracy with corporate fascism." As the machinations of Wisconsin governor, and newly announced presidential candidate, Scott Walker graphically...

A group of Russian hackers called Cyber Berkut have released a video showing a staged ISIS beheading, hacked from an electronic device from one of the staff of U.S. Senator John McCain. The fake ISIS execution appears to take place inside a film studio and shows a ‘prisoner’ (played by an actor) going through the motions of being ‘executed’ in front of several video cameras. Another actor is dressed as an ISIS executioner who puts a knife to the throat of the prisoner and goes through the motions of cutting him.Recall that since August 2014, the terrorists of the Islamic...

Russian authorities are facing some unpalatable options as they try to keep the economy afloat - unless they can persuade President Vladimir Putin to curb massive military spending. Officials fear that without limiting the defence budget, the government will have to raise taxes, increase the pension age or print money to prevent the state deficit from running out of control. Despite a crisis brought on by diving oil markets and Western sanctions, they believe Russia can muddle through next year provided the price of crude, its dominant export earner, holds near current levels. But even at $60 per barrel, the...

RUSSIAN-backed rebels in Ukraine’s east believed they had shot down a Ukraine Airforce fighter jet as disturbing new footage shows them ransacking the luggage of passengers and crew from Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17. A year ago today, 298 passengers and crew including 38 Australian citizens and residents died aboard the Kuala Lumpur bound commercial flight after it was shot down over east Ukraine, 40km from the Russian border. Much footage exists particularly on the internet of the aftermath of the downed airliner, smouldering over three main wreckage sites about the rebel stronghold of the embattled Dontesk region. But, after a...

We are seeing the emergence of a dual power structure in Central Asia, with China as the dominant economic power and Russia as the big security player. Or, as Alexander Gabuev, senior associate and the chair of the Russia in the Asia-Pacific program at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told Foreign Policy: "China would be the bank and Russia would be the big gun." The confluence comes as Moscow shifts its attention toward Asia after being isolating by the West over the war in Ukraine. China, for its part, is seeking to find new countries it can export goods to as...

“Ukraine is at War,” states Herman Pirchner, Jr., President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C. The AFPC is a much needed Conservative alternative to the Council on Foreign Relations, which although much larger, exhibits too many Globalist themes and aims while diminishing America’s presence on the world stage. President Pirchner explains in his just released treatise that sanctions by the Obama administration and the EU have done little to tamp down Vladimir Putin’s campaign of aggression known as “hybrid warfare.” (1) Russia’s persistence in its Ukraine offensive is deeply rooted in the bloody history of the Ukraine...

A section of a Russian military barracks has collapsed, killing 23 soldiers, near the Siberian city of Omsk, officials say. A further 19 servicemen were rescued. Some have been flown to Moscow for medical treatment.

[W]ith the “no” vote in Sunday’s Greek referendum on bailout terms posing the biggest challenge yet to decades of European integration, risks to the European project resulting from Germany’s rise as the Continent’s most powerful country are becoming clear. On Friday, Spanish antiausterity leader Pablo Iglesias urged his countrymen: “We don’t want to be a German colony.” On Sunday, after Greece’s result became clear, Italian populist Beppe Grillo said, “Now Merkel and bankers will have food for thought.” On Monday, Ms. Merkel flew to Paris for crisis talks amid signs the French government was resisting Berlin’s hard line on Greece....

As chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel leads a nation that prizes fiscal rectitude and adherence to the rules, and, after pledging tens of billions in bailout programs for five years, has expressed scant sympathy for Greece’s demand for more financial help. As de facto leader of Europe, Ms. Merkel faces a very different set of responsibilities, starting with maintaining European unity in general and holding the euro together in particular.

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.” – Margaret Thatcher Greece is liberal economics on steroids, Detroit writ large, and a place where the "takers" outnumber the "makers." In other words, if you want to know what the end road is for the sort of economics pushed by people like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Paul Krugman, Greece is it. According to the World Bank, Greece’s labor participation rate is only 53%. It’s hard for private industry to take advantage of an underemployed populace because government regulations and powerful unions make it difficult...