Free Republic

Radical left-wing icon former California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums was a hired lobbyist for Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. June 9, 2016, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned. Dellums, who represented liberal San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., is a long-time darling of left-wing political activists. He served 13 terms in Congress as an African-American firebrand and proudly called himself a socialist. He retired in 1996. The former congressman is one of several high-profile Democratic partisans who was on Veselnitskaya’s payroll, working to defeat a law that is the hated object of...

A Scarlet Letter (A) once marked a harlot (OK, OK!… by Puritan New England 1650 standards!) In 1944-45 a French woman with a shaved head meant she was guilty of much the same –but with the added onus of having “slept-in-sin” with the enemy (Germans.)(Please, amigos! Let’s argue about the morals and merits of these designations another time! My point is that these “brands” were a way to let the world know—easily and without going into a long inquiry--what these women had been up to.) Well, without a long inquiry, all you really need to know about a news network’s propensity...

The progressive billionaire speculator George Soros has said he will ‘fight back’ against the “dominant ideology” of nationalism, whilst admitting that favoured globalist project the European Union is “on the verge of a breakdown”. Wistfully writing that Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) once ‘epitomised the optimism about the spread of Western-style democracy’ after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Financial Times described the scrutiny the global progressive body is experiencing amidst a wave of patriotism and populism and the ‘wilting’ attraction of the leftist agenda. Soros, alluding to the collapse of the USSR, told the left-liberal newspaper: “It’s déjà...

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a proverb that has long, and apparently mistakenly, been attributed to Bedouins. It’s unfair to them, as it contains the false-dichotomy fallacy. Sometimes the saying is correct, as when the Allies decided in World War II to side with Josef Stalin against Adolf Hitler. Other times, both options are equally bad. This is, however, the way many people insist on reacting to George Soros and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the two men currently going toe-to-toe for control of much of the globe’s hearts and minds. You either side with one or...

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel is considering joining French President Emmanuel Macron at the World Economic Forum in Davos next week in what could turn into an epic clash of competing world views with U.S. President Donald Trump. Merkel, who has been struggling to put together a government since a German election in September, had been expected to skip the annual gathering of leaders, CEOs, bankers and celebrities in the Swiss Alps for a third straight year. But after clinching a preliminary coalition agreement with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) on Friday, German officials said Merkel could travel...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union’s trade tsar has no idea what Donald Trump will tell his audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, but she is clear what the EU’s message to the U.S. president will be. America is shooting itself in the foot by withdrawing from global leadership on trade, Cecilia Malmstrom, the 49-year-old Swede who has served as Europe’s trade commissioner for the past three years, told Reuters. Under Malmstrom’s direction, the EU has juggled a dizzying array of trade talks over the past year. In July it clinched a preliminary deal with Japan....

WASHINGTON, DC — Attendees at a protest Thursday expressed frustration over former U.S. President Barack Obama’s failure to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, which he promised to do on the first day of his presidency. The protesters also denounced President Donald Trump. An imam calling for Gitmo, as the facility is commonly known, to be shut down also urged authorities to detain U.S. President Donald Trump in a similar facility for refusing to give into the demonstrator’s demands. Many demonstrators placed the blame on the fairly new U.S. President Donald Trump for keeping the detention center, ignoring his predecessor’s eight...

I do believe Cuba’s responsible. I do believe that. And it’s a very unusual attack, as you know. But I do believe Cuba is responsible.” (President Trump regarding strange attacks on U.S. diplomats in Cuba that resulted in brain damage.)“What we’ve said to the Cubans is: small island, you’ve got a sophisticated security apparatus. You probably know who is doing it. You can stop it. It’s as simple as that.” (Secretary of State Rex Tillerson regarding same attacks.)Recently brain-damage was confirmed on the U.S. diplomats who served in the U.S. embassy in Cuba. So to most reasonable people, the KGB-founded...

Sen. Marco Rubio pushed back Sunday against comments from a Republican colleague that the United States has found no evidence of “sonic attacks” in Cuba. The Florida Republican charged the attacks were a “documented fact.” In a series of tweets Sunday, Rubio dismissed comments by Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a longtime advocate for improving ties with Cuba, stating that any U.S. official briefed on the mysterious events in Havana “knows full well that while method of attack still in question, that attacks and injuries occurred isn’t.” “It’s a documented FACT that 24 U.S. govt officials & spouses were victims...

The leader of the Liberal group in the European Parliament has slammed the bloc’s Foreign Minister and top diplomat for failing to raise human rights concerns on a trip to Communist Cuba. High Representative of the European Union (EU) for Foreign Affairs and Vice-President of the European Commission Federica Mogherini used the trip to boast that the EU is now Cuba’s most important trading partner, and also met with dictator Raúl Castro. She also made a subtle dig at President Donald J. Trump, saying the EU would continue the approach to Cuba championed by predecessor Barack Obama “regardless of the...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Behind the scenes, the U.S. military is planning for nearly a half-billion dollars in new construction during the Trump administration, including a Navy request to build a $250 million, five-bed hospital here that has been singled out for study by a Senate committee. Despite President Donald J. Trump's campaign promise to reduce costs at the remote U.S. Navy base -- at one point he mused that his new Cuba policy might import cheap, local labor from across the minefield -- the Pentagon's appetite to spend at this outpost of about 5,500 residents and 41...

Barack Obama will no doubt be chronicled, among other things, as the first anti-American president. No wonder; he’s the product of an educational system that has become increasingly radical and anti-American with each passing decade, and his mother was a stereotypical leftist anthropologist with a passion for the Third World. The pattern is unmistakable. As Luis Fleischman notes, Obama wanted to make deals with our enemies, Iran being the most dramatic example. But just look at Latin America: The Obama Administration tried to avoid confrontations with anyone it wanted to make a “historic deal” with. Most of these “historic deals”...

While Mexican leaders have emphatically denounced Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s call to build a wall along the United States’ southern border, Guatemala's President Jimmy Morales is offering a helping hand. In a Spanish-language interview with the New York Times en Español, Morales – a TV comedian before getting elected to the country's highest office – said that he is offering the billionaire businessman bargain workers to build his proposed wall. "To the gentleman who wants to build a wall, I offer cheap labor," Morales said during the interview, according to the Hill. "We have high-quality labor, and we'll gladly build...

The president of Guatemala has offered Donald Trump "cheap labor" to build a wall on the border of the United States and Mexico. "We have high-quality labor, and we'll gladly build," President Jimmy Morales said in a Facebook Live interview conducted by The New York Times en Espanol, reported The Hill. "Tell us the dimensions, and we know how to do it," said Morales.

Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Saturday joined his predecessor in office in unloading on Donald Trump, calling the Republican front-runner's campaign racist and saying his discourse on immigration is fueling anti-American sentiment around the world. Calderon, a conservative who was president of Mexico from 2006 to 2012, even said he thought Trump was trying to exploit the same social feelings and resentments as did Adolf Hitler. "I think his logic of exalting white supremacy isn't even acting against immigration - Donald Trump is the descendant of migrants - it is acting and speaking against immigrants who have a different...

GUATEMALA CITY — Just hours after tendering his resignation as president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina was sent to jail to await the conclusion of a hearing examining his role in a multimillion dollar customs fraud case that has shaken the nation and sent reverberations throughout the region. The decision to jail Mr. Pérez Molina highlighted the seismic change sweeping through Guatemala after the corruption accusations in April, and offered a dramatic validation of a growing street demonstration movement demanding his ouster and prosecution. For much of Guatemala’s violent history, marked by dictatorship and military repression, such a scene would...

Havana, Cuba. Your Holiness: Now that your name is no longer so popular on the Island of Cuba, I have decided to write you these lines. I suspect that this decline in your prestige has to do with the scant companionship you have provided us, as well as with the distance that you have placed between yourself and the Cuban people. If I insist on threading these ideas it is because I am certain that your work as head of the Church–that is, of the Earth–is a far cry from the love, justness, and fairness that we knew from John...

Back in September, a strange mystery was unfolding in Cuba. American officials and their spouses were experiencing some kind of attack, but nobody was really sure what was going on. People experienced a wide range of symptoms, from headaches and difficulty concentrating to hearing loss and brain damage. Many reported hearing high-pitched, painful noises prior to experiencing the symptoms. Medical experts have been unable to explain what kind of weapon is affecting these officials, or even what’s wrong with them. But new results from doctors at the University of Miami and the University of Pennsylvania have provided a valuable clue:...

A Cuban state media outlet confirmed last week that the nation’s capital, Havana, is suffering significant shortages of toilet paper. While the absence of common goods in the communist nation is not uncommon, such acknowledgment of a problem is rare. The state newspaper Juventud Rebelde (“Rebellious Youth”) reported on Wednesday that toilet paper had “disappeared” from stores in Havana, announcing that the government’s state-run producer of toilet paper had acquired new machinery to generate toilet paper. “They are not the super-machines, but they have an elevated technology level,” toilet paper engineer Manolo González García told the newspaper. One advantage of...

Doctors treating the U.S. embassy victims of suspected attacks in Cuba have discovered brain abnormalities as they search for clues to explain hearing, vision, balance and memory damage...It’s the most specific finding to date about physical damage, showing that whatever it was that harmed the Americans, it led to perceptible changes in their brains. The finding is also one of several factors fueling growing skepticism that some kind of sonic weapon was involved. Medical testing has revealed the embassy workers developed changes to the white matter tracts that let different parts of the brain communicate, several U.S. officials said, describing...