Free Republic

Amsterdam — The people who shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014 had probably been hoping to hit a Ukrainian military jet, a Dutch court hear on Monday as the prosecution began reading the charges against those on trial. Three Russians and a Ukrainian are accused of shooting down the Malaysia Airlines Boeing in July 2014 with a Russian-made Buk anti-aircraft missile, killing all 298 people on board. The defendants are being tried in absentia, as Russia has refused to extradite them. The prosecution intends to conclude its presentation of evidence on Wednesday. A verdict is not...

Provo police have confirmed that one person was shot during a protest Monday night near the police department. The victim, a 60-year-old Provo resident, remained hospitalized Tuesday but was “stable,” according to police. The man was not part of the protest or counter-protest that had been going on, but was just driving in the area, said Provo Police Sgt. Nisha King.

The 24-year-old Muslim man who carried out the July 16 terrorist attack in Chattanooga was radicalized for at least a year before he opened fire on two military sites and killed five U.S. service members, an FBI agent told the Times Free Press today. The FBI believes people who knew Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez knew he was becoming radicalized before the attack, but failed to report Abdulazeez to authorities, Special Agent Ed Reinhold said. Abdulazeez was radicalized online before he took a July 2014 trip to the Middle East to visit family and discussed committing jihad before he carried out the...

ow badly have US-Israel relations deteriorated in recent weeks? If Israeli media reports are any indication, tensions boiled over to the point where a phone call between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ended due to "communications problems" earlier this week. Both men have not spoken since, according to the State Department. Kerry's spokesperson, Jen Psaki, told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that the two men have not spoken since a brief phone call over the situation in Gaza ended because of "communications problems."

At this point, our readers should be intimately familiar with the timeline leading up to the "Oh Sh!t" moment when the Platte River Networks employee, Paul Combetta, deleted Hillary's emails despite later admitting to the FBI that he "was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's e-mail data on the PRN server" (if not, see "The "Oh Sh!t" Moment: Hillary Wiped Her Server With BleachBit Despite Subpoena"). Once Combetta was summoned to testify in front of Congress, we also learned that the FBI had granted Combetta an immunity...

As the families of U.S. hostages currently held in Iran have struggled for years to rally the determination to bring their loved ones home, newly released emails from the former secretary of State reveal the infuriating truth that those with connections get their case raised to the top. In 2009, Iason Athanasiadis was covering the protests of the disputed election win of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over Mir-Hossein Mousavi for the Washington Times. The Greek citizen was detained by Iranian authorities on June 17, 2009, as he tried to fly out of the country. Athanasiadis was thrown in Evin prison and released...

DOJ Colluded Directly with Clinton Email Witnesses to Limit Discovery (Washington, DC) — Judicial Watch announced today that it submitted a court-ordered discovery plan for the depositions of several top former government officials involved in the Clinton email scandal, including Obama administration senior officials Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Jacob Sullivan, and FBI official E.W. Priestap. Judicial Watch “intends to update the Court regarding the depositions of Hillary Clinton and Cheryl Mills at the conclusion of the 16-week discovery period, unless the Court believes such notice is not necessary.” The plan for discovery is the latest development in Judicial Watch’s July...

When the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted the online accounts of legally targeted foreigners over a four-year period it also collected the conversations of nine times as many ordinary Internet users, both Americans and non-Americans, according to a probe by The Washington Post. Nearly half of those surveillance files contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents, the Post reported in a story posted on its website Saturday night. […] At the same time, the intercepted messages contained material of considerable intelligence value, the Post reported, such as information about...

WASHINGTON - A jailed Russian who says he hacked into the Democratic National Committee computers on the Kremlin’s orders to steal emails released during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign now claims he left behind a data signature to prove his assertion. In an interview with Russia’s RAIN television channel made public Wednesday, Konstantin Kozlovsky provided further details about what he said was a hacking operation led by the Russian intelligence agency known by its initials FSB. Among them, Kozlovsky said he worked with the FSB to develop computer viruses that were first tested on large, unsuspecting Russian companies, such...

ATLANTA (AP) — A government scientist cleaning out an old storage room at a research center near Washington made a startling discovery last week — decades-old vials of smallpox packed away and forgotten in a cardboard box. The six glass vials of freeze-dried virus were intact and sealed with melted glass, and the virus MIGHT have been dead, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

An official timeline of the Office of Personnel Management breach obtained by FCW pinpoints the hackers' calibrated extraction of data and the government's step-by-step response. It illuminates a sequence of events that lawmakers have struggled to pin down in public hearings with Obama administration officials. The timeline makes clear that the heist of data on 22 million current and former federal employees was one sustained assault rather than two separate intrusions to steal background investigation data and personnel records. The document, which bears the seals of OPM and the Department of Homeland Security, is dated July 14 and was prepared...

An army of reddit users believes it has found evidence that former Hillary Clinton computer specialist Paul Combetta solicited free advice regarding Clinton's private email server from users of the popular web forum. A collaborative investigation showed a reddit user with the username stonetear requested help in relation to retaining and purging email messages after 60 days, and requested advice on how to remove a "VERY VIP" individual's email address from archived content. The requests match neatly with publicly known dates related to Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state. Stonetear has deleted the posts, but...

Just one day after the horrific tragedy that left 298 people dead, Russia's Channel One ran a package telling its audience that the entire incident was orchestrated by the United States, specifically by the CIA. A document was broadcast purportedly showing that the U.S. was planning to do the same thing during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Viewers learned that the "U.S. orchestrated this because Ukrainian government is not sophisticated enough to orchestrate this," according to the broadcast, which was translated from the original Russian by CNBC. According to Channel One, Russia's swift economic growth has inspired the United States...

FULL TITLE - "Surprise! The “Khorasan Group” Is Really Core Al-Qaeda – But Obama Can’t Say That, Because He “Defeated” Al-Qaeda" In the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly claimed, “Al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat.” But it was a lie. Al-Qaeda was not on the path to defeat. In fact, several top Bin Laden lieutenants had relocated to the Middle East and Syria in the last few years.In April 2014, Al-Qaeda fighters in Syria split off into two groups.Al-Akhbar.com reported: The global jihad movement has split in two. Members of al-Qaeda will now have to choose between two different...

Casey Cooper is new to the bench, but he’s well-connected . Just three months into his tenure on the federal bench, and before his formal investiture ceremony later this week, newly minted — but well-connected — U.S. District Judge Christopher “Casey” Cooper has been handed one of the most high-profile and politically sensitive American terrorism cases in recent years ... Cooper, 47, was part of the Obama administration’s transition team and is one of the more connected people in D.C. legal circles, Marimow notes. His wife, Amy Jeffress, worked at the Justice Department as a national security adviser to the...

What happens when the president who has politicized law-enforcement to a degree unprecedented in American history meets a terrorist responsible for killing Americans he has recklessly failed to protect, decimating his pretensions about “decimating” al-Qaeda? What happens is: You get the most politicized terrorism indictment ever produced by the Justice Department. Behold United States v. Khatallah, Case No. 14 Crim. 141, quietly unsealed in a Washington courtroom last Saturday while the country dozed off into summer-vacation mode. Ahmed Abu Khatallah, of course, is the only suspect apprehended in connection with the Benghazi massacre, a terrorist attack on a still-mysterious U.S....

It's Friday, and what better way to spend the day that starts with F than talking about Flatulence? Anyone who has accidentally let one rip in a social situation understands the immediate horror associated with getting caught passing gas. But instead of being ashamed when you fart in public, you should embrace your dirty deed with pride, as you may have just helped saved someone's life. Well, that's what a study currently getting some attention might suggest, but it's more complicated than that. The study out of the University of Exeter in the UK found that the hydrogen sulfide gas...

The Obama administration recently gave a $270,000 grant to an Islamic charity that has been banned by Israel and the United Arab Emirates because of alleged financial ties to the terrorist group Hamas and to the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provided the funds last month to the U.K.-based Islamic Relief Worldwide ... In 2014, Israel and United Arab Emirates banned IRW, which is headquartered in Birmingham, England, from operating within its borders alleging that the group supports and funds Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s military arm in Palestine. Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon alleged in...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States moved Wednesday to recover more than $1 billion that federal officials say was stolen from a Malaysian economic development fund and that was used for high-end real estate, fancy artwork and production of the Hollywood film, "The Wolf of Wall Street." The diverted funds paid for luxury properties in New York and California, a $35 million private jet and expensive paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, according to federal government complaints that demand the recovery and forfeiture of the ill-gotten assets. The complaints, filed in Los Angeles, allege a complex money laundering...

Shortened title. Full title: Discovery – 2014 Reddit Archive: Platte River Network’s Paul Combetta (“Oh Shit” Guy) Requesting Tech Help To Strip “VIP’s Emails” A rather stunning discovery has been made by a researcher named Katica who uncovered a July 24th 2014 Reddit thread started by Platte River Network executive Paul Combetta who -at the time- was requesting technical advice on how to strip a “VIP (VERY VIP)” email address from archives stored on a server he has “full access to“.