Free Republic

A car bomb attack at a police station has killed four people and injured up to 10 people, while the city's U.S. consulate has also come under fire, news agencies have reported. Reuters, quoting Turkey's Dogan news agency, reported that at a police station in the Istanbul neighborhood had been rocked by a blast early on Monday morning. The agency, quoting the Istanbul's governor's office, added that three attackers and a police officer had been killed in an exchange of gunfire following the explosion. Istanbul police headquarters confirmed to Dogan that three police officers and seven civilians were wounded in...

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly opened up for the first time this morning about all the criticism she and Fox have gotten about last week’s Republican debate, talking with MediaBuzz host Howard Kurtz. And, basically, she took the high road, not necessarily singling out Trump but instead defending her tough questions and saying, “If you can’t get past me, how are you gonna handle Vladimir Putin.” She explained that the goal was, for every candidate, to “drill down to their most vulnerable areas and then give them a chance to explain them” because these same things will most definitely resurface in...

Russia is secretly working with environmental groups campaigning against fracking in an attempt to maintain Europe's dependence on energy imports from Moscow, the secretary-general of Nato has said. Speaking at the Chatham House foreign affairs think-tank in London, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Russia was mounting a sophisticated disinformation campaign aimed at undermining attempts to exploit alternative energy sources such as shale gas. He said: "I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence...

Who stands to benefit if Denton bans fracking? Those behind the petition drive say it will benefit the Denton residents because they won’t have to worry about wells being fracked less than 300 feet away from their homes, which is what happened to several neighborhoods in South Denton. Economist Ray Perryman said the result will be millions of dollars and jobs lost for Denton, costing the city up to $251.4 million over 10 years. Being the oil capital of the country and one of top producers of oil and gas worldwide, the stakes will be high when Denton voters cast...

As the debate over how to regulate fracking — and whether to permit the process at all — rages in the U.S. and Europe, there are powerful interests that can benefit from blocking its expansion, namely, existing oil and gas producers, such as the Gulf States and Russia. There have been plenty of rumors that the governments of such places have supported anti-fracking activists, but now NATO has more or less officially accused Russian intelligence agencies of supporting anti-fracking NGOs in Europe. The FT reports: Russian intelligence agencies are covertly funding and working with European environmental groups to campaign against...

Few things scare Vladimir Putin, the Russian head of state who routinely poses with his shirt off, flies airplanes to douse the fires threatening the lives of millions of Russians, shoots Siberian tigers with tranquilizer guns, and still finds time to steal Super Bowl rings. However, there is one thing the leader of Russia, an 8th degree black belt, actually fears: hydraulic fracturing. This technology, also known as “fracking,” has revolutionized the way oil and natural gas are produced in the United States, which is likely why Putin has gone to great lengths to discredit this new technology and attempted...

Executives at a Bermudan firm funneling money to U.S. environmentalists run investment funds with Russian tycoons. A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president...

PUNGESTI, Romania — Vlasa Mircia, the mayor of this destitute village in eastern Romania, thought he had struck it rich when the American energy giant Chevron showed up here last year and leased a plot of land he owned for exploratory shale gas drilling. But the encounter between big business and rural Romania quickly turned into a nightmare. The village became a magnet for activists from across the country opposed to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Violent clashes broke out between the police and protesters. The mayor, one of the few locals who sided openly with Chevron, was run out of...

Pity the poor Eastern Europeans. Fifty years under the domination of their massive Soviet eastern neighbor then the collapse of Communism there two decades ago offered undreamed of opportunities to join both the European Union and NATO. But they still remain dependent on the Russian Federation for the majority of their oil and gas needs, and the new capitalists in Moscow do not hesitate to charge the highest prices possible. According a number of East European nations, particularly Poland and Bulgaria, are actively investigating the possibility of establishing hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") operations on their territory to develop an indigenous natural...

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a billionaire businessman and nephew of Saudi King Abdullah, said the production of shale oil and natural gas in the United States and other countries, primarily done through fracking, is a real competitive threat to “any oil-producing country in the world,” adding that Saudi Arabia must address the issue because it is a “matter of survival.” New shale oil discoveries “are threats to any oil-producing country in the world,” said Prince Alwaleed in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “It is a pivot moment for any oil-producing country that has not diversified. Ninety-two...

(CNSNews.com) – “Promised Land,” the anti-fracking film written and produced by Hollywood stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski, was made in part by a production company owned by the government of Arab oil emirate Abu Dhabi – a state in direct competition with American oil and gas producers. The film is financed in part by Image Nation Abu Dhabi, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media which is owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, one of 13 Arab emirates that makes up the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and serves as that country’s capitol. Abu Dhabi media was created by the...

Any American who has been paying attention over the past 20 years realizes that the real key to America’s national security is energy independence. In short, we’re funding both sides in a global Islamic insurgency characterized by violent terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda. This is happening because we are dependent on foreign sources of energy. Most of OPEC—even our so-called “allies”—is hostile toward us in some way, shape or form. The nations that produce and export much of the world’s oil are populated by wealthy sheikhs and mullahs who support Jihad in various ways, including by funding charities that...

In July, the United States and the European Union finally bridged their differences and slammed Russia with severe sanctions in the wake of the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The pincers and scalpels of the previous rounds were discarded; this time, it was whole industries—defense, finance, and energy—that were targeted, including Sberbank, Russia’s largest commercial bank. If the first round of U.S. sanctions was met with ridicule among the Kremlin elite—Vladimir Putin’s gray cardinal Vladislav Surkov, sanctioned back in March, joked that what he likes in the United States is Tupac Shakur, dead since 1996—there’s not much bluster this...

The first researchers to systematically document ill health in livestock, pets, and people living near fracking drill sites were Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald. Bamberger, a veterinarian, and Oswald, a professor of molecular medicine at Cornell University, used a case study approach-looking at individual households-to search for possible effects (Bamberger and Oswald 2012). Many fracking chemicals are known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors or other classes of toxins (Colborn et al. 2011). Bamberger and Oswald's studies, carried out during the ongoing fracking boom, uncovered serious adverse effects including respiratory, reproductive, and growth-related problems in animals and a spectrum of symptoms in humans...

After years of unfounded hysteria from so-called environmentalists, the media and Hollywood that fracking causes drinking water contamination, the Environmental Protection Agency just issued a major blow to anti-fracking activists. A new report from the EPA, based on a study sanctioned by Congress, shows drinking water contamination only results if fracking wells aren't built or maintained properly, which is a rarity. "We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more of these mechanisms...

“Politics makes strange bedfellows.” That was 19th-century author/editor Charles Dudley Warner’s famous take on the vagaries and queer alliances that typify the so-called art of statecraft. But the odd lineup of forces on the recently concluded Iran nuclear deal takes some explaining beyond the truism embedded in Warner’s observation.The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was announced on July 14 is a deal that was brokered by the United Nations Security Council, the European Union, Iran, the Obama administration — and most importantly of all, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the private “think tank” that has been the...

In a Spiegel interview, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev discusses morals and politics in the nuclear age, the crisis in Russian-American relations and his fear that an atomic weapon will some day be used. […] “It was clear to me that relations with America and the West would be a lasting dead end without atomic disarmament, with mutual distrust and growing hostility. That is why nuclear disarmament was the highest priority for Soviet foreign policy.” […] “(C)an we really imagine a world without nuclear weapons if a single country amasses so many conventional weapons that its military budget nearly tops...

Russian officials have ordered to inspect and remove books by well-known British historians John Keegan and Antony Beevor from libraries, saying they promote Nazi-era stereotypes. The move is among a raft of measures to streamline historical narrative by limiting alternative viewpoints, as well as ending the perceived foreign influence from fields such as education. The regional education ministry in Sverdlovsk, near the Ural Mountains, issued a decree telling school and university libraries to 'check the availability of books' by the historians and 'take measures to remove them from access by students and teaching staff'.

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a speech last month repeated his periodic claim of a U.S. hand behind the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and the posted text alluded to a year-old conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton had admitted as much in her memoir. “Some Americans have confessed in their own memoirs [including Hillary Clinton’s memoirs] that they have played a role in creating, developing and establishing DAESH and today too, they are supporting them,” Khamenei told an Eid al-Fitr (end of Ramadan) gathering of government officials and Islamic ambassadors on July 18,...

From the moment an account is created, Microsoft begins watching. The company saves customers' basic information - name, contact details, passwords, demographic data and credit card specifics - but it also digs a bit deeper... and finding answers is not easy, as one privacy expert exclaimed, "there is no world in which 45 pages of policy documents and opt-out settings split across 13 different Settings screens and an external website constitutes 'real transparency'."