Free Republic

Deal reached; BLM will release confiscated cattle to rancher Posted: Apr 12, 2014 3:06 PM EDT Updated: Apr 12, 2014 4:57 PM EDT By Caroline Bleakley, Senior Online Editor LAS VEGAS --  A deal has been reached between Bundy family leaders and the BLM, but not without some very tense moments.Armed Bundy family leaders met with BLM officers Saturday afternoon in Mesquite to discuss the fate of the Bundy's cattle that the feds removed from BLM land, over the past week. The cattle are being held at a holding area in Mesquite.Prior to the meeting, hundreds of protesters, some armed, tried...

User Actions Follow ✨✨ Starr ✨✨ ‏@Gator_Girl_2489 Pay attention people!! WATCH http://www.ustream.tv/channel/thepetesantillishow … #BundyRanch Reply Retweet Favorite More

U.S. Senator Harry Reid recognized nine years ago that connections between his official duties and the lobbying activities of his relatives could lead to ethical questions. In 2003, the Nevada Democrat publicly banned relatives from lobbying him or his staff after newspaper reports showed that Nevada industries and institutions routinely turned to Reid's sons or son-in-law for representation. Now, questions surrounding family ties are flaring again in Nevada around the Senate majority leader. He and his oldest son, Rory, are both involved in an effort by a Chinese energy giant, ENN Energy Group, to build a $5 billion solar farm...

As a family in Clark County, Nev. continues to face an onslaught of heavily armed federal agents determined to kick them off of their ranch, reports have surfaced that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might be behind the entire ordeal. The ranch, which has been in Cliven Bundy’s family for more than a century, is ground zero for a growing showdown between federal authorities and individual rights activists. Despite attempting to silence protesters by limiting them to so-called “First Amendment areas,” law enforcement personnel, legislators, and militia members are heading to the site in droves to express their outrage over...

On April 8, Ukrainian Interior Ministry troops recaptured a government administration building in the eastern city of Kharkiv from pro-Russian demonstrators. Over the previous weekend those demonstrators had stormed the building, along with government buildings in the neighboring cities of Donetsk and Lugansk. After taking the building, the protesters had called for intervention from the Russian army, which lurked just over the border with some fifty thousand troops, presumably ready for action after more than a month of training exercises. Ukraine’s acting interior minister Arsen Avakov announced that the building in Kharkiv had been retaken without violence. This news was...

The rancour has strained ties between Malaysia and China, whose government also has put pressure on authorities in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia's environment minister told AFP Friday that China had postponed plans to send a pair of pandas to Malaysia next week. China had agreed in 2010 to lend the two giant pandas for 10 years in Beijing's latest use of "panda diplomacy" to cement ties with other countries.

By now you’re familiar with the standoff between the federal government, i.e. the Bureau of Land Management, and 67 year-old rancher Cliven Bundy. .. The BLM asserts their power through the expressed desire to protect the endangered desert tortoise, a tortoise so “endangered” that their population can no longer be contained by the refuge constructed for them so the government is closing it and euthanizing over a thousand tortoises. The tortoises, the excuse that BLM has given for violating claims to easements and running all but one lone rancher out of southern Nevada, is doing fine. In fact, the tortoise...

Website FreeRepublic Exposes BLM “document dump” that suggests attempted cover-up of Sen. Reid/Chinese gov’t takeover of ranch for solar farm. The Bureau of Land Management, whose director was Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) former senior adviser, has purged documents from its web site stating that the agency wants Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle off of the land his family has worked for over 140 years in order to make way for solar panel power stations. The first segment of the document pulled by the feds from BLM.gov. Deleted from BLM.gov but reposted for posterity by the Free Republic, the BLM document entitled “Cattle...

Millions of fake pills from China, some with no active ingredients and others with the wrong contents, have been uncovered and confiscated by customs officers in France. ... “Drug research in China has fallen under a cloud since 2006 because 13 of the top 20 global drug makers have set up research and development centers in China. Yes, it’s cheaper to do research there, but, as one auditor said, ‘with cheaper research comes greater risk,’” she wrote. ... There also are whole factories in China with up to 15,000 people employed for the purpose of counterfeiting products.

The price of bitcoin recovered from a low of roughly $380 and rose past $420 at press time on 11th April, on the news that Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), had issued new statements potentially clarifying the central bank’s position on bitcoin. According to reports, during Boao Forum, Xiaochuan offered his opinion on the nascent technology, saying that China would not seek to ban bitcoin and other digital currencies entirely.

Frontline units of the Pakistani navy have been equipped with C-602 anti-ship cruise missiles purchased from China, according to the Kanwa Defense Review published by Andrei Chang, also known as Pinkov, a Canadian a military analyst. Pakistan ordered about 120 C-602 anti-ship cruise missiles from China back in 2009. The first batch of the missiles, enough to equip a company, were delivered in 2011. After personnel completed training on using the missiles, the Pakistani government said that the C-602s have already been deployed to frontline naval units. The missiles were purchased to provide a countermeasure to India's BrahMos supersonic cruise...

Possible missile cruiser could outweigh rival surface combatants There is evidence that China is in the early stages of building a positively enormous missile cruiser—one that could be bigger and potentially more powerful than any equivalent American or Japanese vessel. On April 6, China Defense Blog—an Internet forum for close observers of Chinese military developments—republished a series of photographs that recently circulated on China’s firewalled national Internet. The photos, reportedly snapped at the Wuhan Technical College of Communication, depict what appears to be a mock-up of a large surface warship—the kind of mock-up used for testing radars and other sensors....

Curious what the fate of the petrodollar is? Look no farther than this Interfax update blasted moments ago by Bloomberg: "Gazprom Considers 'Symbolic' Yuan Bond Issue, Interfax Says." Bloomberg adds that the gas giant is considering proposals from potential organizers to market bonds in yuan, Interfax reports, citing people with knowledge of the matter. -Gazprom unlikely be able to gain more than $300m due to mkt volume, newswire reports -No mandates, deal timeline yet -Issue may add new investors, become a “topical” public relations act amid tensions with U.S., EU Well, yes. It's called "symbolic" for a reason. More importantly,...

An 11-year-old girl found wandering alone and disoriented in China was the victim of horrifying abuse at the hands of her father, it has emerged. The young girl's mouth had been stitched up with fishing cord and her head submerged in boiling water, her skin had been pierced with sewing needles, and she had been hung upside down and beaten, according to reports. The girl, named as Xiao Li, who is now recovering in hospital, has scars all over her body and chunks of hair are missing from her scalded scalp. Local news reports in China said the girl was...

Bitcoin prices crashed today as Chinese businesses began receiving official deposit shutdown notices from banks, confirming recent suspicions of an impending crackdown. Exchanges will stop account recharging via bank accounts between now and 15th April. Even though the news has been anticipated for over a week now, bitcoin prices sank under $403 from a high of $450.74 on the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index after companies began making public announcements on their sites.

Sydney - The search zone for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has been limited to a narrow strip of the Indian Ocean, with the authorities confident that they will find the aircraft “in a matter of days” after two new sets of underwater signals were detected. :snip: They have all been heard within an area about 20 miles long and 10 miles wide, about 650 miles off the north-west coast of Australia, although a final search zone is yet to be demarcated. :snip: All the signals have been detected along a narrow strip of the Indian Ocean in an area...

....The southern tip of the Ryukyu Islands sits only about 80 miles east of the Senkakus. Unlike the uninhabited Senkakus, the Ryukyus host not only roughly 1.5 million Japanese residents, but also the U.S. Marine and Air Force bases that anchor the U.S. presence in the East China Sea. Occupying the Ryukyus would fracture the U.S. strategic position in East Asia -- separating U.S. forces based in Japan (to the north) from those at Bahrain, the other permanent U.S. hub in Asia, far to the west. At a bare minimum, U.S. ships and aircraft would have to detour around Chinese-held...

TOKYO - Japanese fighter jets were scrambled a record high 415 times in response to Chinese aircraft approaching Japanese airspace in fiscal 2013, the Defense Ministry said Wednesday. That surpassed the previous record of 306 times the previous year, said the ministry which began releasing such data by country in fiscal 2001.

This is a bad morning. I was greeted by a headline in the New York Times that said Defense Secretary “Chuck Mullet” Hagel was planning to submit a budget to Congress to cut the size of the military to a level not seen since 1940, before the U.S. entered World War II. The article went on to say that the Pentagon realized that this would be an inadequate force for even very small wars and certainly would not allow the U.S. to police the world and keep control of contingencies like a North Korean attack on the South or a...

Australian official says since Ocean Shield vessel has reacquired signal he is 'optimistic' plane will be found soon The search area for the missing Malaysia airlines flight MH370 has been drastically reduced after two further detections of pings consistent with those of a black box from a plane late on Tuesday. The head of Australia’s Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre, Angus Houston, said on Wednesday the Australian defence vessel Ocean Shield had detected two further pings on Tuesday – one in the afternoon and one in the late evening – that had allowed the search area to be further refined to...