Free Republic

President Vladimir Putin has denied owning a sprawling luxury estate by Russia's Black Sea, after opposition figure Alexei Navalny accused him of hiding the property due to corrupt financing. In an almost two-hour-long film shared on YouTube last week, Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) showed drone footage of an opulent 68-hectare (168-acre) "secret palace" that boasts an enormous mansion, two helipads, an arboretum and an underground ice hockey rink. The film alleged the property, which is worth $1.35 billion, was paid off through an intricate web of illicit funds orchestrated by Putin and his allies.

The Prince of Wales was a "most likeable person", President Gaddafi a "mad clown" and Michael Jackson was "surprisingly shy". The private diaries of Ronald Reagan, which are about to be published for the first time, reveal a US president who was worried about imminent Armageddon but who also fretted about how he would handle chopsticks in front of the Chinese. The man who was credited with ending the Cold War reveals that he was "lonesome" when his wife, Nancy, was away and refused to talk to their son, Ron Junior, after he hung up on him. His carefully handwritten...

The China Factor and the Overstretch of the US Hegemony 3 books that can change your mind in 2005 about the geo-politic and geo-economic dynamics going on Interviews by Jorge Nascimento Rodrigues, editor of Gurusonline.tv, Jannuary 2005 Transition Report is a quarterly online journal edited by Gurusonline.tv George Zhibin Gu, the Chinese consultant based in Shenzhen and author of the forthcoming "China's Global Reach" (Haworth Press, US) Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and author of "The Sorrows of Empire" (Metropolitan Books, US) André Gunder Frank, associate of the Luxembourg Institute for Education and International Studies and...

BARF ALERT! NEW YORK - Martina Navratilova defended comments about the United States she made to a German magazine last month and said she may run for public office one day. Navratilova complained in the German weekly Die Zeit that money matters too much in her adopted homeland and that she "exchanged one system that suppressed freedom of opinion for another." "It's depressing — decisions from America are based only on how much money comes out of them in the end, and not on the question of how much health, ethics or the environment suffer," Navratilova was quoted as saying....