Free Republic

**SNIP** U.S. authorities claim that human smugglers like El Lobo (the wolf) are at the heart of the current border crisis because they have facilitated the travels of the 57,000 unaccompanied immigrant children who've been apprehended in South Texas since October. "We cross them in inner tubes. If they're 3 or 4 years old, I have to cross them myself. I can't let them drown," he says. The Wolf wears Reeboks with pink soles, a black polo shirt and a thin mustache. He's handsome in a bad-boy sort of way. We sit in an open-air lunchroom on a back street...

Tens of thousands of children unaccompanied by parents or relatives are flooding across the southern U.S. border illegally, forcing the Obama administration and Congress to grapple with both a humanitarian crisis and a budget dilemma. An estimated 60,000 such children will pour into the United States this year, according to the administration, up from about 6,000 in 2011. Now, Washington is trying to figure out how to pay for their food, housing and transportation once they are taken into custody. The flow is expected to grow. The number of unaccompanied, undocumented immigrants who are under 18 will likely double in...

“They should be sent back as soon as it can be determined who responsible adults in their families are. There are concerns about whether all of them can be sent back, but I think all of them who can be should be reunited with their families… We have to send a clear message: Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay. We don’t want to send a message that’s contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.”

McALLEN, Texas (AP) — Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets.

Gina Haspel refused to say Wednesday during her confirmation hearing to be CIA director if she oversaw the waterboarding of terrorism suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in 2002. Haspel reportedly became chief of base at a CIA black site in Thailand in October of that year. Nashiri arrived in November and was waterboarded at least three times before being transferred in December to a different facility, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who was influential in drafting an intelligence committee report partially released in 2014, asked Haspel to give a "yes or no" answer to whether...

Revelations that an FBI informant insinuated himself into the Trump campaign have led some congressional investigators to rethink their theories on how and why former President Barack Obama's Justice Department began investigating the 2016 Trump presidential effort. Most reporting has focused on the July 31, 2016, creation of a document formally marking the beginning of the FBI counterintelligence probe targeting the Trump campaign. The document, known as the electronic communication, or EC, is said to have focused on the case of George Papadopoulos, the peripheral Trump adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to special counsel Robert Mueller about his...

Part 1: George Papadopoulos and Josef Mifsud Inaction. It's been rattling around my head for a long time. Why was there no action? Why didn't obama do something? barack obama was warned about Russian meddling in 2014. The Obama administration received multiple warnings from national security officials between 2014 and 2016 that the Kremlin was ramping up its intelligence operations and building disinformation networks it could use to disrupt the U.S. political system, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials. As early as 2014, the administration received a report that quoted a well-connected Russian source as...

Dead malls are popping up all over the states, particularly in the Midwest, where economic decline has sped up the "going out of business" process. This map, put together by a Dead Malls Enthusiasts Facebook group, shows that well. As Americans are faced with multiple shopping options and more stores are leaving malls, it should be interesting to see if malls and mall culture will survive. What you are about to see is what happens when malls are abandoned. It's apocalyptic and really, really creepy....

Companies controlled by Israeli mining magnate Beny Steinmetz sued fellow billionaire George Soros, claiming he cost them at least $10 billion through a defamation campaign that stripped them of rights to an iron ore deposit in Guinea and other business opportunities around the world. Soros funded law firms, transparency groups, investigators and government officials in Guinea in a coordinated effort to ensure BSG Resources Ltd. lost the rights to the Simandou deposit in April 2014, BSGR said in a complaint filed Friday in Manhattan federal court.

“I like you. You and me, we’re going to be best friends.” It is early January, and Eric Schneiderman is sitting in his 25th-floor office above Lower Manhattan, doing his best Donald Trump impression, puckering his lips into a duck face, scrunching up his nose and lowering his voice into something that resembles the president’s outer-borough growl. Schneiderman is recalling his meeting with Trump in 2010. Back then, Schneiderman was running for attorney general of New York, and Trump was still in his pre-birther, reality TV host phase. Trump had donated money to one of Schneiderman’s opponents in the Democratic...

FAISALABAD, Pakistan — The father of Imran Awan — an IT aide to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz who investigators concluded made “unauthorized access” to House servers — transferred a USB drive to a Pakistani senator and former head of a Pakistani intelligence agency, the father’s ex-business partner, Rashid Minhas, alleged. Minhas told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Imran Awan’s father, Haji Ashraf Awan, was giving data to Pakistani official Rehman Malik, and that Imran bragged he had the power to “change the U.S. president.” Asked for how he knew this, he said that on one occasion in 2008 when...

FLASHBACK 2014: Facebook caught manipulating users: A recent study conscripted Facebook users as unwitting participants during a weeklong experiment in direct emotional manipulation. The study set out to discover if the emotional tone of a users’ News Feed content had an impact on their own emotional makeup, measured through the tone of what they posted to the social service after viewing the skewed material. Nearly 700,000 Facebook users were shown either more positive, or more negative content. The study found that users who were given more positive news feeds posted more positive things, and users who were given more negative...

Turkey, which has developed rather odd relationships with some of its neighbors in recent years because of its reckless foreign policy, has begun treating Kurdish notables coming from Iraqi Kurdistan as official leaders. According to former Turkish Consul-General at Erbil Aydin Selcen, when Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Massoud Barzani used to come to Turkey, he was received in Istanbul and not in Ankara, the capital. The meetings were not held in palaces but at less-impressive locations. The Kurdistan flag was never displayed. Meetings were held in Arabic, not Kurdish. To give the impression that the meetings were unofficial, nobody wore ties. In short, everything was...

"The polonium trail started on 16 October 2006 when Litvinenko met Lugovoi and Kovtun in London. ..." "When Lugovoi and Kovtun's movements were mapped against the sites of polonium contamination, there was an exact match. The evidence of guilt was strong. In May 2007, the then Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald announced that Andrei Lugovoi was to be charged with murder and his extradition would be sought from Russia. Kovtun was charged in 2010. ..." Prof Norman Dombey, a physicist who has a deep knowledge of Russian nuclear sites, gave evidence at the public inquiry. Dombey says there is...

“What we were looking for was not an Ebola expert,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, “but rather an implementation expert.” But what exactly was Klain hired to implement — a public health campaign or a political one? The New York Times let slip the Ebola Czar’s true purpose through an anonymous Democrat operative: “He’ll control the message better than most people would, which is really important from an economic standpoint, from a health standpoint, but it’s also important from a political perspective. If anybody can get the way this is being reported and discussed under control in a...

The height of the Ebola outbreak in Africa, Europe, and the United States also coincided with a period in which the Obama administration came under the heaviest scrutiny over its response to that health crisis. Amid criticism, President Barack Obama rejected calls from lawmakers to impose some travel restrictions on the areas affected by Ebola, but he did say his administration was open to appointing one figure to oversee his government’s response to the crisis. Days later, Obama appointed Ron Klain, a long-time Democratic political operative and veteran of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns, to serve as...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has “quietly” put an end to most work at the Office for Access to Justice (ATJ), one of the lesser initiatives of the Eric Holder era, according to a Thursday New York Times report.The tiny ATJ was founded in 2010 under then-Attorney General Eric Holder. Its last published organization chart, from 2015, shows only three appointees and their support staff. ATJ distributed grants and drafted “statements of interest” aimed at supporting the right to competent legal representation for the poor and indigent secured by the U.S. Constitution and the Supreme Court’s famous 1963 decision in...

If you had told me on the morning of July 7 that I would have lunch on July 8 with the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, I would have likely countered with tales of flying pigs or Hamlet-writing monkeys. I knew the odds. In 2013-14, the TWA 800 Project Team made a systematic attempt to get the NTSB to reopen the investigation into the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. The Project Team included high-level whistleblowers, family members of the victims, and eyewitnesses. Collectively, team members had a whole lot more juice than I did, but for all...

WASHINGTON — Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmentalist and Democratic political donor, announced Monday that his advocacy group, NextGen America, will spend $30 million to help Democrats retake the House in 2018, with the aim of eventually impeaching President Trump. Mr. Steyer also announced that he would not run for Senate or governor in California, as had been speculated. Mr. Steyer, who was a major donor to President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, emerged as the largest single political donor of the 2014 midterm election. His group spent $74 million to back Democrats that year, and $87 million in the 2016 elections....

blah, blah, blah ... "The executive at Vkontakte, or VK, Russia’s equivalent to Facebook, emailed Donald Trump Jr. and social media director Dan Scavino in January and again in November of last year, offering to help promote Trump’s campaign to its nearly 100 million users, according to people familiar with the messages...." Looks like Nellie Ohr was looking for Russian Social Media Users in 2014: