Free Republic

The United States will withdraw its troops from Niger, a source familiar with the matter said late on Friday, adding that an agreement was reached between U.S Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and Niger's leadership. As of last year, there were a little more than 1,000 U.S. troops in Niger, where the U.S. military operated out of two bases, including a drone base known as Air Base 201 near Agadez in central Niger at a cost of more than $100 million. Since 2018, the base has been used to target Islamic State militants and Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen,...

The US risks losing its military presence in another African country as the government of Chad sent a letter threatening to end a critical security agreement, according to four US sources, a move that threatens to cede more US influence in the region to Russia. In a letter sent to the US defense attaché last week, Chadian officials threatened to cancel the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, which determines the rules and conditions under which US military personnel can operate in the country. While the letter did not directly order the US military to leave Chad, the officials told...

She really aired her dirty laundry. A Bedford-Stuyvesant woman who apparently came home to find her boyfriend in bed with another woman went berserk, tossing his clothes and other items from her sixth-floor balcony in a caught-on-video tirade. Neighbors watched, and filmed, as shirts and pants piled up and snagged in a tree below the scorned girlfriend’s Atlantic Avenue apartment. “Oh wow, she’s giving them a show,” exclaimed a neighbor who recorded the rampage from a few floors below. The 34-year-old woman was so enraged by the alleged cheater, that she stripped naked during the Nov. 20 rampage, police and...

A recently divorced woman lost her entire 401(k) savings to a scammer she met on Tinder who convinced her to invest in cryptocurrency — the latest “pig butchering” scheme targeting lonely people. Rebecca Holloway, 42, a mother-of-three, said she was swindled out of $100,000 by a scammer claiming to be a French entrepreneur named “Fred” after the two matched on Tinder in March, the Daily Mail reports. She added: “Looking back, the signs are so obvious. But at the time you want to believe it’s real.” The scam that hit Holloway is the latest example of “pig butchering,” a term...

Many Sudanese now fear "all-out civil war", according to the Forces for Freedom and Change (FLC), the civilian bloc ousted from power in the 2021 putsch led by the two generals, then allies and now at war. Calls to arm civilians are multiplying. In Darfur, already ravaged by a deadly war in the 2000s, local militias, tribal fighters and armed civilians have joined the fighting. Governor Minni Minnawi, a former rebel leader now close to the army, called on the population on Sunday to take up arms "to protect their property". "We need to arm ourselves, because everyone is in...

The U.S. military has successfully completed the evacuation of the American embassy in war-torn Sudan, President Joe Biden said late Saturday evening. Biden confirmed the evacuation of U.S. government personnel from Khartoum and that the administration would continue to assist Americans in Sudan. "I am proud of the extraordinary commitment of our Embassy staff, who performed their duties with courage and professionalism and embodied America's friendship and connection with the people of Sudan. I am grateful for the unmatched skill of our service members who successfully brought them to safety. And I thank Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia, which were...

The man behind a hugely embarrassing leak of highly classified military documents is believed to be a young gun enthusiast who shared the secrets in a group for gamers. Known as "OG" in the Discord chatroom, the man allegedly claimed to spend parts of his day inside a secure facility where phones were banned, according to a story published by the Washington Post. He initially typed up versions of highly secret documents and posted them for the group of about 25 active members from various countries to read, but later switched to posting slews of photos of the documents themselves....

N'DJAMENA, March 23 (Reuters) - Chad has nationalized all the assets and rights including hydrocarbon permits and exploration and production authorisations that belonged to a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil (XOM.N), the Central African nation's energy and hydrocarbons ministry said in a statement on Thursday. Exxon Mobil said in December that it had closed the sale of its operations Chad and Cameroon to London-listed Savannah Energy (SAVES.L) in a $407 million deal, but the Chadian government contested the agreement, saying the final terms were different from what Exxon Mobil had presented. It warned that it may ask courts to block Savannah's...

In a tit-for-tat response to the New York Post’s explosive report alleging Hunter Biden introduced a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm he was working for to his vice president dad, the Daily Beast has come up with a scoop [1] that the hard disks in which Hunter’s emails were found were provided to Rudy Giuliani by a Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui on behalf of dissident members of Chinese Communist Party. According to the report, “Weeks before the New York Post began publishing what it claimed were the contents of Hunter Biden’s hard drive, a Sept. 25 segment on...

A blackened, broken leg bone from Earth’s prehistoric past may hold the answer to when early humans diverged from apes and started their own evolutionary path.The fossilized find, first uncovered two decades ago, suggests that early humans regularly walked on two feet some seven million years ago... Since many consider bipedalism the major milestone that put our own lineage on a different evolutionary path than the apes, Sahelanthropus could be the very oldest known hominin—the group consisting of modern humans, extinct human species and all of our immediate ancestors.The species could even be our oldest non-ape ancestor, if its lineage...

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Two days after the presidential election on Nov. 2, 2020, the Oath Keepers were already convinced that victory had been stolen from President Donald Trump and members of the far-right militia group were making plans to march on the U.S. Capitol. “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, wrote fellow members, according to court documents. “Too late for that. Prepare your mind. body. spirit.” Five days after the election, when The Associated Press and other news outlets declared Democrat Joe Biden the winner, the documents say Rhodes told Oath...

The Israeli intelligence blog Debka File reports that pro-Iranian Houthi troops have taken over control of the strategic straits (Bab el-Mandeb) at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. This choke point threatens all commercial and military maritime traffic from the oil rich nations bound for the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. "Control of the Red Sea Bab el-Mandeb Straits passed Tuesday, March 31 to pro-Iranian Yemeni forces when the Yemeni Army’s 117th Brigade loyal to the former Yemeni President Ali Saleh handed positions guarding the waterway to two Houthi commando battalions trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guards. This is revealed...

Email is unrelated to the laptop or hard drive purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden EXCLUSIVE: A list of “key domestic contacts” for a joint venture involving Jim and Hunter Biden and now-bankrupt CEFC China Energy Co. included former Vice President Joe Biden's current running mate Sen. Kamala Harris, among other prominent Democrats, Fox News has learned. An email exclusively obtained by Fox News, with the subject line “Phase one domestic contacts/ projects” and dated May 15, 2017, Biden’s brother, Jim Biden, shared a list of “key domestic contacts for phase one target projects.” The email is unrelated to the laptop...

"salacious revelations about Murphy’s life resurfaced in the aftermath after those killings, including something he wrote in 2015 about sharing his “hot young girlfriend” with a “stranger from Tinder.” Just before Christmas, Sydney Watson asked Murphy about it on Blaze TV, and it did not go well. He cursed her and attempted to intimidate her for bringing up the incident."

Chad's President Idriss Debby has died while visiting troops on the front lines of a fight against northern rebels, an army spokesman said on Tuesday. Deby's death comes just one day after he was declared the winner of a sixth term in office, marking over 30 years in power.

The United States has ordered its non-essential staff in Chad to leave the African country as rebel fighters approached the capital on Sunday after early election results showed President Idriss Deby on course to extend his three-decade rule. Deby, who seized power in 1990 at the head of an armed rebellion, is a staunch ally of France and the United States in the fight against Islamist militants in the arid Sahel region. "Due to their growing proximity to N'Djamena and the possibility for violence in the city, non-essential U.S. government employees have been ordered to leave Chad by commercial airline,"...

Goulfey, a town located about fifty kilometers from Kousseri in the northern region of Cameroon, is experiencing a new captivating look. Most tourists who arrive here are fascinated by the design of this small sultanate situated at the edge of the Logone River and close to Ndjamena, the Chadian capital. Goulfey, is a clay dwelling built centuries ago. It was converted to a museum and also acts as a cultural centre where young people come to learn about the rich culture of the Kotokos. "First and foremost. this museum serves the history of the Kotoko principality. So this mass of...

N’DJAMENA (Reuters) - Four soldiers in southwest Chad were killed and dozens injured in an explosion on a boat thought to have been caused by an improvised bomb, a local official said on Wednesday, suggesting it was the work of Islamist group Boko Haram. Chad has suffered attacks on its soil from Nigeria-based Boko Haram since 2015. The jihadist insurgency first erupted in northeast Nigeria in 2009 before spreading into Chad, Niger and northern Cameroon, and killed more than 30,000 people. The blast occurred on Tuesday night on a boat travelling near Ngouboua, around 25 km (15 miles) from the...

ISLAMIC State is taking over swathes of Africa like it did in Syria and Iraq with "staggeringly brutal" tactics, the Pentagon has warned. According to a report from West Point, the US officer training academy, the group's expansion and regrouping on the continent shows "Islamic State is far from defeated". "By the summer of 2020, it had become resolutely clear that the Islamic State was a changed organisation, but by no means a beaten one," the report, published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Centre, said. The Pentagon report said there has been a "marked upward curve of claimed cumulative attacks...

Update (1000ET): Donald Trump Jr. has just raised an interesting question in a tweet: Is Twitter censoring the Hunter Biden stories from the NY Post at the behest of the Communist Party of China? "There needs to be an immediate government investigation into @twitter/@jack. Not just because of their blatant election interference to protect Biden, but to find out if they're censoring these NY Post stories at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party. Put Jack under oath!!!" Don Jr. tweeted. There needs to be an immediate government investigation into @twitter/@jack. Not just because of their blatant election interference...