Free Republic

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The chief executive and a managing partner of the collapsed Dubai private equity firm Abraaj Capital Ltd were arrested on U.S. charges that they defrauded their investors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a federal prosecutor said on Thursday. Abraaj founder and Chief Executive Arif Naqvi was arrested in the United Kingdom last Friday, while managing partner Mustafa Abdel-Wadood was arrested at a New York hotel on Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Griswold said at a hearing in Manhattan federal court. Abdel-Wadood appeared at the hearing and pleaded not guilty to securities fraud, wire fraud...

The Early Neolithic site of KTG, located on the North African Mediterranean coast near the Gibraltar strait (Fig. 1a), predates and partly overlaps in time with IAM2 (Table 1). At KTG a full Neolithic assemblage is found, including a diversity of cultivated cereals, domestic mammals and cardial ceramics. In contrast to the people at IAM, those at KTG are genetically similar to European Early Neolithic populations...Overall, the genetic patterns of local interaction between different groups in northwestern Africa are comparable to those found in Europe: farmers assimilated local foragers' ancestry in a unidirectional admixture process. Cases of hunter-gatherer communities adopting...

The Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF), a French state-owned railroad operator, came to California in hopes of helping the state build a high-speed rail system from Los Angeles to San Francisco but left for North Africa in 2011 because the region was 'less politically dysfunctional' than the Golden State. Within 7 years, they built a functioning high-speed rail system in Morocco, the New York Times reported. California sought to have the first high-speed rail system in the country, but a new report from the Times showed political disagreement on the train's route slowed the ambitious project to...

“Those Cuban-CIA men (Bay of Pigs vets) were as tough, dedicated and impetuous a group of soldiers as I’ve ever had the honor of commanding,” wrote legendary anti-communist mercenary “Mad Mike” Hoare, commander of the “Wild Geese,” in his book Congo Mercenary. ''This is the history of a failure,'' said the oddly frank opening lines of Che Guevara’s Congo Dairies. “I stood above Che Guevara, my boots near his head, just as Che had once stood over my dear friend and fellow 2506 Brigade member, Nestor Pino. ‘We're going to kill you all," Che said to Pino.’ Now, the situation...

The Fezzan is an area of approximately 212,000 square miles of unforgiving desert and valleys. Situated in the south west of modern day Libya it’s not an area you’d easily traverse, let alone live in. Yet in the 1st millennium BCE a people did exactly that. They created art, irrigated the baked earth and sustained a culture. One of the earliest surviving references to the Garamantes is found in Herodotus’ Histories, written in the 5th century BCE[1]. Herodotus’ description was contradictory, they had no weapons, but they hunted a cave dwelling tribe nearby using chariots. He also went on to...

Despite its cool Green parties and ambitious wind and solar agendas, Europe remains by far the world’s largest importer of oil and natural gas. Oil output in the North Sea and off the coast of Norway is declining, and the European Union is quietly looking for fossil fuel energy anywhere it can find it. Europe itself is naturally rich in fossil fuels. It likely has more reserves of shale gas than the United States, currently the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. Yet in most European countries, horizontal drilling and fracking to extract gas and oil are...

A 45-year-old Iraqi migrant .. setting several fires in the center of Graz – Austria’s second largest city after Vienna – including ones at city hall and a district court has been arrested. ... arson attacks started .. at the district court of Graz-West.. the man was seen spraying .. flammable fluid throughout the court’s lobby before setting it on fire ... set another one in front of Graz’s city hall.. The staff saw it on video surveillance and sounded the alarm. ... three separate fires were set and that the smoke became so thick that he wasn’t able to...

MOSCOW - As many as 35 Russian mercenaries are reported to have been killed in Libya while they were fighting for Khalifa Haftar, the military general most associated with the rule of the late leader Muammar Gaddafi, who launched an offensive earlier this year on the Libyan capital of Tripoli, home to the country’s internationally-recognized government, according to a Russian media. The mercenaries are thought to work for the Wagner Group, a military contractor run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman nicknamed Putin’s Chef because he holds lucrative Kremlin catering contracts. Asked by VOA about the reports of the fatalities in...

The British Museum tries to counter an ugly truth long captured in Western art. ... Objectively speaking, the “Slave Market” painting in question portrays a reality that has played out countless times over the centuries: African and Middle Eastern Muslims have long targeted European women—so much so as to have enslaved millions of them over the centuries. The Muslim demand for, in the words of one historian, “white-complexioned blondes, with straight hair and blue eyes,” traces back to the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, who enticed his followers to wage jihad against neighboring Byzantium by citing its blonde (“yellow”) women awaiting...

On April 19, 2019, Frontpage Mag published Milo Yiannopoulos’ lamentation on the burning of the Notre Dame Cathedral. While I share his grief over this irreplaceable loss to Western Civilization and Christianity, I was shocked to discover that he felt the necessity to trash the Jews. He did so under the convenient cover that he is a Jew -- as he states, through matrilineal descent. But, more significant than his bloodline, his belief system seems to be Catholic as evidenced by his adoration of the Virgin Mary: Mary—the ‘Our Lady’ of Notre Dame—is proof of the incarnation. It is her...

The islands’ pioneers likely arrived centuries before European conquest, as part of a large-scale movement of people from North Africa. Today the Canary Islands are a tourist hub, a volcanic archipelago with palm trees and azure beaches, located off the coast of Morocco and governed by Spain. But the history of this paradise is marred by the brutal conquest, enslavement and treatment of its indigenous people by European colonizers beginning around the 15th century. Although scientists know a fair bit about the fate of the islands’ original inhabitants, much is unknown about their origins. Some scholars have debated whether the...

Russia is planning to expand its Syrian bases at Tartus and Hemeimeem to Libya. The possible Russian move into Libya represents the most recent failure stemming from the policies of President Obama that backed Islamist rebels who overthrew and killed Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Mr. Obama has said that the failure to prepare for the aftermath of the ouster of Gadhafi was the worst mistake of his presidency. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also came under fire for failing to provide security for Americans who were attacked and killed in Benghazi after Gadhafi’s fall. The push for a...

A Desert Rat's captivating photo album charting the iconic army unit's epic journey from the North African desert to Germany in the Second World War is being auctioned off. Sergeant Ronald Jenner, of the 7th Armoured Division, fought in North Africa, the Middle East, Italy, France, Holland, Belgium and Germany. His armoured car was one of the first to enter Tripoli during the North African campaign when the city was captured by the Allies in January 1943.

Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency By GINGER THOMPSON and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables. In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be...

The United Kingdom has followed the United States in preventing passengers on flights from some countries in the Middle East and Africa from carrying devices such as laptops and tablets in the cabin. The restrictions affect 14 airlines, six of which are based in the U.K. As in the U.S., the ban covers any electronic devices larger than a typical smartphone.

ABC News is reporting that Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert. The disgrunted intelligence officers even disclosed an actual list of 12 high-value targets allegedly held by the CIA, and ABC is reporting it : Abu Zubaydah: Held first in Thailand then Poland Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi: Held in...

Around 1,100 sub-Saharan African migrants tried to cross into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco on Sunday by storming a border fence, though most were eventually turned back, the Spanish government said. Dozens of migrants made it to the top of the 6 meter barbed wire fence in the early hours of Sunday before being lifted down by cranes,... Only two people were allowed into Ceuta to be taken to hospital while the rest were returned to Morocco, the Spanish government said... Five Spanish police and 50 from Morocco were injured, the government added, after migrants used rocks...

With the latest wars and bombing in the middle east, there will be another wave of refugees from Syria,Iran,Iraq,Pakistan and more.Europe accepted and welcomed a lot of refugees in the past year or more,and since then the crime in Europe as well as bombings,terroristic attacks, and murders. The problem is that over 80% of the villains of the criminal cases come from one of the countries mentioned above,and people are starting to worry that they made one of the biggest mistakes in the 21st century.

Erdogan has boasted that he is proud of boldly blackmailing EU leaders into paying him protection money. Erdogan's threats were almost criminally sinister: "... the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?" According to the agreement, 80 million Turkish citizens will have visa-free access to the European Union. The nightmare scenario for a desperate EU is that no matter how much it bows to extortionist demands from Turkey, the migrant crisis will continue to grow. Even if Turkey closes down...

A security crisis in North Africa is on the verge of exploding while defense bureaucrats in Northern Virginia postpone sending long-promised support to an embattled ally. The crisis centers on Tunisia, which finds itself in the gunsights of an increasingly aggressive ISIS while the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency repeatedly defers deadlines for awarding a desperately needed security contract. The United States pledged support to Tunisia last summer after terrorist gunmen massacred 38 people at the popular Sousse beach resort. At the time, the U.S. offered a “Jordan lite” style program to fortify the porous border between Tunisia and neighboring...