Free Republic

The daredevil climber who attempted to scale Trump Tower on Wednesday is a 20-year-old man who traveled to Manhattan from Virginia and staged his stunt in the hopes of winning a meeting with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, police said... He was taken to Bellevue hospital in Manhattan for a psychiatric evaluation, and it was not yet clear what charges he might face for his high-rise high jinks.... The Spider-Man-like escapade began around 4 p.m., as the candidate was holding a rally in Virginia.... he climber’s ascent ended abruptly around 7 p.m., when emergency responders were able to yank him...

A high-profile member of the World Health Organization’s recent "investigative" trip to Wuhan to uncover the origins of COVID-19 has accepted research grants from the Chinese Communist Party and runs a controversial U.S.-based organization which collaborates with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Peter Daszak’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party call into question the validity of his and the World Health Organization (WHO) investigative team which concluded that it is “extremely unlikely” COVID-19 came from a Chinese Communist Party lab. Their claims echo Chinese Communist Party narratives, and Daszak himself implored the world to not “rely” on U.S. intelligence for...

Ben Turner, the founder of FraudSpotters, a company that specializes in producing fraud detection software for insurance companies, said he recommends an audit of the Dominion voting machines after his review of the data. Turner wrote that he was shocked by Sidney Powell’s claims that Dominion voting system switched votes from Trump to Biden. Turner said his goal was to disprove Powell’s claims, but his analysis revealed troubling concerns.In his analysis, Turner writes: “Statistical analysis of past presidential races supports the view that in 2020, in counties where Dominion Machines were deployed, the voting outcomes were on average (nationwide) 1.5%...

LAS VEGAS (CBS LOCAL) — Apparently what happens in Vegas, may not actually stay in Vegas. A paranormal researcher named Joshua Warren claims he is the first person to ever discover a time warp, which he found near the city. Warren said he has been measuring the rate of time all over in areas between Las Vegas and the top secret Air Force site known as Area 51. Last week he found a spot in the desert just north of Vegas where he claims time has slowed down. Using what’s known as a “differential time rate meter,” also known as...

"A 'twisted ideology' drove an Israeli soldier to fatally shoot a Palestinian assailant in the head as he lay subdued in the road," the US news site Vice claims, based on a classified IDF report on the recent incident. "A few seconds before the attack, few seconds before the attack, as came up in the investigation with Sergeant M, (Azariya) told him that 'a terrorist that wounded their friend needs to die," the site reported, adding that "Sergeant M tried to calm the soldier down telling him, 'Relax, our wounded friend will be just fine.'" Despite this, Azariya still shot...

Position Objective: To use a variety of undercover investigative methods to conduct field investigations in PETA's focus areas, including the use of animals for food, clothing, experimentation, and entertainment

(Reuters) - U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria's civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday. The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has declared that there is no proof that in-person voter fraud is a problem. He's about to see proof that even he can't deny.In a new video (below) provided to Breitbart.com, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas demonstrates why Holder should stop attacking voter ID laws--by walking into Holder’s voting precinct and showing the world that anyone can obtain Eric Holder’s primary ballot. Literally. The video shows a young man entering a Washington, DC polling place at 3401 Nebraska Avenue, NW, on primary day of this year--April 3, 2012--and giving Holder’s name and address. The poll worker promptly...

MINSK -- A jailed senior state prosecutor who was investigating corruption among State Security Committee (KGB) officials has been sent to a KGB hospital for an examination, RFE/RL's Belarus Service reports. Svyatlana Baykova was arrested five months ago while investigating corruption among high-ranking KGB personnel. She has been held in pretrial detention in Minsk since March. Mikhail Vouchak, Baykova's lawyer, told journalists today that she was suffering from kidney failure and her condition is "critical." Baykova was on a hunger strike for several days in June. Vouchak said he hopes that after the medical examination Baykova will either be transferred...

TORONTO – Canadian archeologists have found a ship abandoned more than 150 years ago in the quest for the fabled Northwest Passage and which was lost in the search for the doomed expedition of Sir John Franklin, the head of the team said Wednesday.

UN investigator accuses US of shameful neglect of homelessUN special rapporteur says wealthy US ignoring deepening homeless crisis while pumping billions into bank rescues Chris McGreal in Los Angeles guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 November 2009 15.12 GMT A United Nations special investigator who was blocked from visiting the US by the Bush administration has accused the American government of pouring billions of dollars into rescuing banks and big business while treating as "invisible" a deepening homeless crisis. Raquel Rolnik, the UN special rapporteur for the right to adequate housing, who has just completed a seven-city tour of America, said it was...

UNITED NATIONS – A U.N. human rights investigator warned the United States Tuesday that its use of unmanned warplanes to carry out targeted executions may violate international law. Philip Alston said that unless the Obama administration explains the legal basis for targeting particular individuals and the measures it is taking to comply with international humanitarian law which prohibits arbitrary executions, "it will increasingly be perceived as carrying out indiscriminate killings in violation of international law." Alston, the U.N. Human Rights Council's investigator on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, raised the issue of U.S. Predator drones in a report to the...

(IsraelNN.com) United Nations investigator Richard Falk said Tuesday in an interview with the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) that he stood by a statement he made in 2007 comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. He said his “provocative” remark was meant to raise awareness of the suffering of Gaza Arabs. If the remark had been made regarding Sudan’s treatment of Darfur, where hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions forced out of their homes, “I think there would be no reluctance to make that comparison,” Falk said. The reason people are more willing to compare Sudan to Nazi Germany than Israel...

A day laborer's claim that he was hired under false pretenses, kidnapped and abandoned in Tijuana was false, an investigator for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said in a statement Wednesday. Jose Felix Gutierrez left for Mexico on his own May 9 but told his sister he and others had been kidnapped, handcuffed and forcibly removed from the country, said a statement by Detective Jesse Venegas. Gutierrez had been upset over the death of a fellow day laborer in a traffic accident last month at a popular informal day-labor pickup place at Arrow Route and Grove Avenue in Rancho...

A private investigator who worked to get condemned inmates off death row pleaded guilty Monday to forging documents to support their appeals. Kathleen Culhane, 40, admitted that she forged documents to try to stop the executions of four condemned inmates since 2002, including Michael Morales, who was sentenced to death for the 1981 rape and murder of a Central Valley teenager. The plea agreement by the San Francisco-based investigator was entered in Sacramento County Superior Court and settles a case that the state attorney general called the largest fraud ever against the state's criminal justice system. "This case is not...

Federal prosecutors allege that a law enforcement official who was investigating a fake passport scheme was subjected to an illegal background check by indicted private eye Anthony Pellicano, who was representing the subject of the probe. Prosecutors claim Pellicano had checks run on George Mueller, an investigator with the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, and five other people connected to the probe of a Frenchman named Christopher Rocancourt. Mueller said that while he was investigating Rocancourt in the mid-1990s, Rocancourt called him to boast of a "contact" with access to confidential law-enforcement information. "Knowing that a suspect in a...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The investigator accused of fabricating juror statements in a bid to win clemency for a man condemned to die Tuesday is under investigation for previous cases she worked on for a state agency that defends death row inmates. Investigator Kathleen Culhane, whose worked is being questioned in the case of Michael Morales, was employed by the Habeas Corpus Resource Center between 2001 and 2005, the agency said Thursday. Culhane generated what prosecutors believe were bogus juror declarations from six jurors saying Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger should spare Morales, who raped and murdered a 17-year-old Lodi girl in...

BEIJING (AFP) - The UN's chief torture investigator has praised China's leaders for acknowledging the widespread abuse of prisoners in the nation's jails, as he begins a historic 12-day fact-finding mission. Manfred Novak, the UN Human Rights Commission's special rapporteur on torture, said Beijing had offered him freer access to detainees than the United States was prepared to give him on a recently scrapped trip to Guantanamo Bay. "There is a growing awareness that torture is quite widely practised in the common criminal proceedings (in China) by the police and that something needs to be done," Nowak said in an...

DAMASCUS, Syria - Syria's top prosecutor has invited the chief U.N. investigator in the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister for talks on coordinating the U.N. probe with Syria's newly opened one, the official news agency reported Wednesday. Prosecutor-General Ghada Murad, who heads the Syrian probe into Rafik Hariri's killing, has asked U.N. investigator Detlev Mehlis to come to Damascus "to search for the best means and mechanisms of cooperating between the two commissions," the Syrian Arab News Agency said. In a letter to Mehlis, Murad said her commission "highly appreciates your mission and is keen to unveil the...

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - Chief UN investigator Detlev Mehlis was embroiled in a raging controversy over why he left out the names of key Syrian suspects from his final report on the murder of Lebanon's ex-premier Rafiq Hariri. Mehlis, who led a four-month UN probe into the massive bomb blast that killed Hariri and 20 others in Beirut in February, handed over his report to UN chief Kofi Annan on Thursday. The report was also sent to the 15 members of the UN Security Council and the Lebanese government before being made public. The document cited "converging evidence" of Syrian...