Free Republic

A key witness in a war crimes case against a senior Kosovo figure has been found dead in Germany, the EU rule of law mission in Kosovo (EULEX) said Wednesday. "EULEX confirms that Agim Zogaj, known as witness X in the Klecka case, was found dead in a park in Germany," the mission's statement said. It added that the "German authorities are conducting the necessary investigation to determine the circumstances of his death." According to local media reports, Zogaj had agreed to testify in the case of Fatmir Limaj, one of the most prominent commanders of the ethnic Albanian guerrillas...

Ed Husain's autobiography The Islamist: why I joined radical Islam in Britain, what I saw inside and why I left (Penguin, 2007) is a remarkably candid account of the life of a British-born Muslim who was initially seduced by radicalism but gradually came to his senses to return to the more spiritual and devotional Islam that had defined his early years. It is also an important work, in that it both carefully grounds the issue of radicalisation that has so dominated recent intellectual and political discussion of Muslim communities in Britain, and points to potential solutions. Ed Husain grew up...

FULL TITLE: Seattle's Green River killer confesses to slaying nearly DOUBLE the 49 women he's convicted of killing in first ever interview A Seattle-area truck painter who was unmasked as the Green River serial killer has claimed he murdered up to 80 women over two decades - nearly double the number he was convicted of killing. Gary Ridgway is currently serving 49 consecutive life sentences in a Washington state prison. But in a series of interviews conducted over the past five months, he is now claiming there are significantly more victims and he says he is coming clean to help...

The House Oversight investigation into President Joe Biden and his family's influence-peddling schemes digs all the way back to ties to the late-’90s big tobacco settlement, including James Biden's deal-working caught on FBI tapes in an unrelated 2008 bribery scheme. James Biden's deal-making getting picked up on FBI tapes in 2008, as The Washington Post reported Sunday, are resurfacing amid the House Oversight investigation and the official impeachment inquiry. Mississippi trial attorney Richard Scruggs admitted to paying James and Sara Biden's "consulting firm" $100,000 to help grease the wheels for the Senate to pass a 1997 big tobacco law that...

Instead of a repeat of the “Roaring 20s” from a century ago, this decade is now looking more like a no-recession 1990s boom economy, according to UBS Global Wealth. For a brief patch in 2021, markets were awash with talk of another “Roaring 20s” playing out. But that bullishness faded as inflation climbed above 5% and the Federal Reserve pivoted away from talk of “transitory” inflation to warning of the risks of it becoming trenchant. Then came the rate shocks of 2022, which left the S&P 500 SPX with a 19.4% loss, its worst yearly losses since 2008. The roughly...

Are Hong Kong's liberties gradually being taken away? THROW a frog into boiling water and it jumps out; gently bring it to the boil, and the frog, never noticing the incremental increases in heat, allows itself to be cooked. Is Hong Kong a frog in a pot in Beijing's kitchen? If so, then on September 24th the temperature rose another notch. On that day, Hong Kong's government formally began—by circulating a consultation paper—the process of enacting a controversial set of laws against subversion, sedition, treason and other ills, as required by Article 23 of the Basic Law, the territory's constitution....

If you're looking for a hit of '90s nostalgia, here are 12 of the most popular websites from the naughty nineties still up and running today. From its humble beginnings at CERN, the World Wide Web has indeed come a long way since it was first invented by the respected British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. From plain-looking text-only websites to slow internet speeds and unreliable connections, the World Wide Web has survived and evolved into so much more, so much that we're now at the cusp of Web3. In this article, we'll go down memory lane to the historic...

The U.S. military is looking into an incident on Saturday in which it lost communications with 50 long-range nuclear-armed missiles based in the northern United States. The U.S. Air Force's new Global Strike Command lost communications with the missiles for about 45 minutes, and says it immediately dispatched troops to inspect the sites. The check determined there was no damage and no evidence of sabotage. A spokesman for the command says investigators believe a faulty circuit board at a control center was to blame. The spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel John Thomas, says experts found that the same type of part failed...

The three Louisiana churches went up in flames in a span of 10 days, each doused in gasoline and torched with oily shop rags in the middle of the night. Each Baptist congregation was predominantly black, causing church leaders to fear that white supremacists may target their parish next. But as the fears swirled, the arsonist, 22-year-old Holden Matthews, was busy planning his next album cover, according to text messages obtained by prosecutors He burned down the three churches in St. Landry Parish, federal prosecutors said Monday, because he wanted “to raise his profile as a ‘Black Metal’ musician.” Matthews,...

President Trump, in an interview on “Hannity” on Tuesday, slammed the World Health Organization (WHO) for its “China-centric” views, adding the global health agency’s projections and pronouncements about the coronavirus pandemic have been routinely wrong. One of WHO’s earliest flawed pronouncements, the president told host Sean Hannity, was to strongly recommend against the U.S. restricting travel from China. Earlier Tuesday at a news briefing, Trump said he may put a “very powerful hold” on U.S. funding to the WHO. Sen. Lindsey Graham also said that the World Health Organization (WHO) should not receive funding from the United States under its...

Fifteen summers ago, America's news media informed us that black churches throughout the South were being torched by white racists. The purported wave of arsons dominated the airwaves and generated thousands of newspaper articles. Pundits, politicians and preachers decried the terrorism and the hate it represented. In fact, it never happened. Here is the little-known story of how an obscure radical group teamed up with a leftist national church organization, an unprincipled President and a legion of compliant news outlets to create a media firestorm -- one based entirely on lies.

How can I tell I'm getting old? My go-to music choices don't even come close to popular music currently topping the charts. When I drive my son to preschool, I proudly blast the classic rock station -- which now plays music from the 1990s. If listening to the likes of Pearl Jam and U2 makes me an old fogey? I can deal with that. Perhaps this is something my parents would have argued a few decades ago, but I firmly believe that there is a good amount of music from the '90s that was so solid it will never be...

A brutal Maoist guerrilla group that terrorized Peru during the 1980s but pretty much disappeared when top leaders were captured in the 1990s is making a resurgence. In the latest of several recent attacks by the Sendero Luminoso, known in English as the Shining Path, 14 government soldiers were killed in an ambush this month. It was, a Sendero leader said afterward, "the strongest blow" against the government in quite a while. It also was not an isolated incident. "It's like that horror movie, 'Friday the 13th,' " said Bernard Aronson, President George H.W. Bush's assistant secretary of state for...

WHOLE TITLE: "EXCLUSIVE: ANOTHER 90s scandal returns to haunt the Clintons - billionaire accused of being front for Chinese Communist bid to influence Bill's 1996 election finally faces being questioned after years on the run" Ng Lap Seng, 68, was at center of illegal foreign donations scandal during Bill Clinton's presidency. The Macau-based billionaire funneled $1.2 million to Bill Clinton's campaign through an Arkansas Chinese restaurant owner. Congress demanded he was questioned as it investigated whether the Chinese Communist party was trying to influence the 1996 election. But Ng went on the run while the Chinese restaurant owner was jailed....

Living With Osama bin Laden: First Wife Tells of Husband's Bid To Train His Sons As Suicide Bombers Daily Mail Reporter 12th October 2009 Osama bin Laden was a tyrant who trained his own children to be suicide bombers and murdered their pets, his first wife has revealed. In a new book about her time living with bin Laden, Najwa Ghanem has told how she gave birth to 11 of his 14 children because bin Laden said that Islam needed many warriors. And millionaire bin Laden would not allow any modern appliances in his home, even refusing his son medicine...

Streaming through California as the presidential primary comes to a close, Hillary Clinton looked past Bernie Sanders last week and moved to claim ground on economic issues for the general election ahead. First, with Donald Trump rising in national polls, Clinton amplified her criticism of his business record, accusing the New York businessman of rooting for the 2008 housing market collapse so that he could profit from it. Second, she sought to remind voters that it was a Clinton who was president during the 1990s, an extended period of economic prosperity. While dispatching her husband, Bill, to campaign for her...

Whatever Bill Clinton’s exact role in a Hillary Clinton administration would be, it’s no surprise that she is looking to tie herself to his economic legacy. Bill Clinton’s second term was the last time the U.S. economy was unequivocally strong; for most voters this November, it was the best economy they’ve ever known. But while Hillary Clinton wants voters to look back fondly on the first Clinton presidency, she should hope they don’t remember too much about what happened next.... the Clinton boom, and even some specific Clinton policies, also helped sow the seeds for the far more severe Great...

Fourteen survivors and victims of the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 filed suit against Iraq in federal district court in Washington, D.C., last week, claiming that Iraqi officials gave money and training to Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols. McVeigh was executed last April. Nichols, convicted of manslaughter and given a life sentence in federal court, is awaiting trial in Oklahoma state court, where survivors are determined that he get a death sentence. Nearly a year after McVeigh's execution, the case remains controversial. Families of victims have accused the federal government of shoddy detective work, and some even have claimed...

File picture of former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. (Agence France-Presse) LAHORE: Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has admitted in an interview that Islamabad supported and trained groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in the 1990s to carry out militancy in Kashmir. The former army chief has also said that Lashkar leaders like Hafiz Saeed and Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi enjoyed the status of heroes at that time. Speaking to Pakistani news channel Dunya News on Sunday, Mr Musharraf said, "In the 1990s, the freedom struggle began in Kashmir...At that time, Lashkar-e- Taiba and 11 or 12 other organisations were formed. We supported...

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Only the Islamic State (ISIS) can “fulfill our ambitions and dreams,” said firebrand Kurdish cleric Mulla Krekar, who was recently freed from a Norwegian jail. “The Islamic State is not something strange; it is the only element that can fulfill our ambitions and dreams,” he said in an Al Jazeera interview. The 58-year-old preacher added that all Muslims calling for resistance to the extremist Sunni ISIS “Caliphate” are “cowards,” and accused them of following orders from the United States and Shiite Iran. He called upon ISIS to appoint someone “with the courage to fight the infidels...