Free Republic

In 2013, Rosatom, backed by the Russian state, acquired a Canadian uranium mining company, now called Uranium One, which has assets in the U.S. Uranium is a key material for making nuclear weapons. Through the deal, Russia is able to own about 20 percent of U.S. uranium production capacity. However, Colin Chilcoat, an energy affairs specialist who has written extensively about Russia's energy deals, said that the company only extracts about 11 percent of uranium in the U.S. The deal also “doesn’t allow for that uranium to be exported at all,” Chilcoat told Fox News. “It’s not like it’s leaving the...

One thing that that has puzzled a lot of people since the selection of Pope Francis two years ago is how a left-leaning Pope could succeed two very serious conservative Popes—John Paul II and Benedict XVI—who you would have thought had stacked the ranks of the Cardinals with clergy that would perpetuate their theological and philosophical outlook. Was Benedict hounded out of office by some kind of internal Vatican scandal perhaps? Was there some ecclesiastical version of a coup?There’s no evidence that I’m aware of—until now. Three days ago the National Catholic Register ran a very curious article about...

Mohamud is appealing his 2013 conviction on grounds that he was entrapped by undercover federal agents posing as al-Qaida members and the warrantless surveillance of his foreign communications violated his constitutional rights. It marks the first time a federal appeals court is considering whether the National Security Agency’s foreign surveillance programs — the same ones that came under scrutiny after the Edward Snowden leaks a few years ago — violate the Fourth Amendment rights of criminal defendants. Stephen Sady, Mohamud’s public defender, and another attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union urged the court for a new trial on grounds...

The family of Stanford professor Zhang Shoucheng, a world-renowned physicist and venture capitalist, denied speculation on Chinese social media that his death was connected to tensions in US-China relations or the arrest of Huawei’s CFO in Canada on Saturday. Zhang, a tenured professor of physics at Stanford University, was internationally recognised for his work in quantum science. He was also the founding partner of Danhua Capital, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital fund investing mainly in early-stage technologies. Zhang died on Saturday, December 1, according to his family. He was 55. “There is no police investigation, and the authorities have no...

Intercepted conversations between representatives of the Iranian and Argentine governments point to a long pattern of secret negotiations to reach a deal in which Argentina would receive oil in exchange for shielding Iranian officials from charges that they orchestrated the bombing of a Jewish community center in 1994. The transcripts were made public by an Argentine judge on Tuesday night, as part of a 289-page criminal complaint written by Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor investigating the attack. Mr. Nisman was found dead in his luxury apartment on Sunday, the night before he was to present his findings to Congress. In...

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A chief strategist of Venezuela's government-backed cryptocurrency is a former U.S. congressional intern who once organized protests against the same socialist administration he's now helping to circumvent U.S. financial sanctions.Gabriel Jimenez, 27, was catapulted to something of tech stardom in Venezuela last month when he stood alongside President Nicolas Maduro and two Russian businessmen on national TV signing a contract to position the petro, as the fledgling currency is known, among international investors."It's a company founded and led by young Venezuelan geniuses, boys and girls of Venezuela, who have one of the most technologically advanced blockchain...

As he prepared for his presidential run over the last year or so, a hawkish Sen. Ted Cruz has said U.S. policy in the Middle East and elsewhere is a mess because of President Obama’s weakness — particularly his failure to enforce his own “red line” after the Syrian regime used chemical weapons. “A critical reason for Putin’s aggression has been President Obama’s weakness,” the senator said in a typical appearance, on ABC News last year. “You’d better believe that Putin sees that in Syria,” Cruz added. “Obama draws a red line and ignores the red line.” This takes quite...

A US Air Force officer has defected to Iran and shared information that could cause "serious damage" to America's national security, officials have revealed. The former Air Force intelligence specialist was charged with espionage and was accused of working for Iran, according to an unsealed federal indictment. The announcement arrived after Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers and other senior officials held a call with reporters to discuss what they called “a national security related action involving Iran”. Mr Demers was joined by US Attorney for Washington, Jessie Liu, FBI Executive Assistant Director for National Security Jay Tabb,...

Inside the government, some officials called her “Wayward Storm.” Her real name was Monica Elfriede Witt, an exemplary Air Force counterintelligence agent who had studied Persian and carried out covert missions in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But by mid-2013, Ms. Witt had become disillusioned with the government — why, exactly, remains a mystery — and had left the military. Thoughts of betrayal consumed her, federal prosecutors now say, until she finally acted on them at the Iranian Embassy in Kabul, where they say she “told all.”

In 2013, hundreds of CIA officers — many working nonstop for weeks — scrambled to contain a disaster of global proportions: a compromise of the agency’s internet-based covert communications system used to interact with its informants in dark corners around the world. Teams of CIA experts worked feverishly to take down and reconfigure the websites secretly used for these communications; others managed operations to quickly spirit assets to safety and oversaw other forms of triage. “When this was going on, it was all that mattered,” said one former intelligence community official. The situation was “catastrophic,” said another former senior intelligence...

Abstract Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2011-100411 Statistics from Altmetric.com Article has an altmetric score...

"...one faction, of one party, in one House of Congress, in one branch of government, doesn't get to shut down the entire government, just to refight the results of an election."

A Kuwaiti paper reveals another monstrous Obama betrayal. We thought the Obama administration could stoop no lower when it was revealed that the administration transferred $1.7 billion in untraceable cash to the Islamic Republic as ransom for the release of four Americans hostages they were holding. We were wrong. In its twilight weeks, the administration gave its consent to allow the Iranians to receive 116 metric tons of natural uranium from Russia as compensation for its export of tons of reactor coolant. According to experts familiar with the transaction, the uranium could be enriched to weapons-grade sufficient for the production...

ISTANBUL- A crackdown on political dissent in Turkey is widening to participants in a major civic unrest 5-years ago. Prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for a prominent actor, a leading journalist/civil society activists.The arrests are in connection with the 2013 protests known as Gezi. The unrest began over plans to turn Gezi Park in central Istanbul into a shopping mall. The protests quickly transformed into broader demonstrations opposing the government and, in particular, then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At its peak, the unrest saw millions of people take to the streets across the country.For Erdogan, who is now president, the...

Changes made to absentee voting procedures five years ago in North Carolina may have emboldened workers to run the type of illegal “ballot-harvesting” operation alleged to have been used in a disputed congressional race, election experts and lawmakers said. Some observers are concerned that the changes made it possible for more people to apply for absentee ballots. Then so-called harvesters could collect unsealed ballots and manipulate them or throw out ones from minority voters who might have otherwise gone to the polls. The heavily Republican Legislature crafted the 2013 law that scaled back some voting options amid a national GOP...

On Tuesday The Guardian ran an exclusive claiming that “Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign.” According to The Guardian, Manafort met with the WikiLeaks’ founder at the embassy three times—in 2013, 2015, and in spring 2016. While acknowledging that the purpose of the claimed meeting is unknown, The Guardian implies Manafort’s supposed March 2016 secret rendezvous concerned WikiLeaks’ role in releasing the hacked Democratic National Committee emails. “The revelation could shed new light on the sequence of events...

This story, which broke on Nov. 2, got mighty little attention from the national media. I wonder why: In 2013, hundreds of CIA officers — many working nonstop for weeks — scrambled to contain a disaster of global proportions: a compromise of the agency’s internet-based covert communications system used to interact with its informants in dark corners around the world. Teams of CIA experts worked feverishly to take down and reconfigure the websites secretly used for these communications; others managed operations to quickly spirit assets to safety and oversaw other forms of triage. “When this was going on, it was...

More than 70 foreign nationals working as spies for the CIA in Iran and China were systematically identified and slaughtered in the past decade, due to a ridiculously weak web-based system the CIA used to communicate with foreign assets it couldn’t reach directly. This according to a devastating November 2 report in Yahoo News written by journalists Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin (center-left, but generally trustworthy). Although the Iranian roll-up occurred in 2011, and the Chinese rout occurred from 2010 to 2012, the CIA did not remedy the root cause of the problem in its transient messaging scheme until 2013,...

During the Obama presidency, the U.S. administration was wary of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had come to power in Egypt after the country’s first-ever free elections. Despite his declared support for democracy and change in the Arab world in the wake of the Arab Spring, then-President Barack Obama did not take a strong position and reject the coup against President-elect Mohamed Morsi. The coup, as we know, led to the military’s return to power in the largest Arab country — along with tyranny, repression, corruption and mismanagement. That is the conclusion that David D. Kirkpatrick arrives at in his excellent...

The White House dismissed the bulk of President Barack Obama’s premier panel of outside intelligence advisers earlier this year, leaving the blue-ribbon commission largely vacant as the public furor built over the National Security Agency’s widespread tracking of Americans’ telephone calls. The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board stood 14 members strong through 2012, but the White House website was recently updated to show the panel’s roster shrinking to just four people. In the past four years, the high-powered group has waded into the implications of WikiLeaks for intelligence sharing, and urged retooling of America’s spy agencies as the United States withdraws...