Free Republic

While the 2016 presidential race was raging in America, Ukrainian prosecutors ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an investigation into the activities of a nonprofit in their homeland known as the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC). The focus on AntAC(Anti-Corruption Action Center) — was part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic had been improperly diverted. The prosecutors soon would learn the resistance they faced was blowing directly from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, where the Obama administration took the rare...

If President Trump doesn’t demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office. Last week I attended two memorable events that reminded me why we care so very much about this nation and also why our future may be in peril. The first was a change of command ceremony for a storied Army unit in which one general officer passed authority to another. The second event was an annual gala for the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) Society that recognizes past and present members of the intelligence and Special Operations community...

He was a feminine boy, averse to manual work, who was "annoyingly subservient" to superior officers as a young soldier and had nightmares that were "very suggestive of homosexual panic." The mass killings that he later perpetrated stemmed in part from a desperate loathing of his own submissive weakness, and the humiliations of being beaten by a sadistic father. What is believed to be the first psychological profile of Hitler commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, was posted this month by Cornell University Law Library on its Web site (www.lawschool.cornell.edu/library/donovan/hitler/). Although declassified...

Soon after the United States entered World War II, Julia felt the need to serve her country. Too tall to join the military (she was 6’2”), Julia volunteered her services to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the forerunner of today’s Central Intelligence Agency. She was one of 4,500 women who served in the OSS. She started out at OSS Headquarters in Washington, working directly for General William J. Donovan, the leader of OSS. Working as a research assistant in the Secret Intelligence division, Julia typed up thousands of names on little white note cards, a system that...

HALYARD MISSION'S O.S.S. AGENTS FINALLY RECEIVE LONG OVERDUE AND WELL-DESERVED RECOGNITION AND HONOR! Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony in Washington D.C. March 2018Aleksandra's Note:It seems that every positive step in the vindication process for General Draza Mihailovich and his Chetniks and the proper recognitions and honors bestowed takes the long road to fruition. Perhaps it is meant to be that way, but so many of the patriots directly involved in the events that made the Serbian general and his Chetniks a legend in the hearts and minds of those who understand who they were and what they stood and fought for,...

Aleksandra's Note: I sure wish OSS veterans George "Guv" Musulin, Arthur "Jibby" Jibilian, Nick Lalich and others were alive to see this!A great step forward in "official recognition" of rescue operations such as the HALYARD MISSION in WWII Yugoslavia which was made possible by General Draza Mihailovich, his Chetniks, and the Serbian people loyal to them.Bravo!Sincerely,Aleksandra Rebic***** Congressman Latta with OSS Veterans and their families House Passes Legislation to Honor OSS Veterans with Congressional Gold MedalPassage applauded by legislation authors, Congressman Latta, Senator Blunt, and Senator WarnerLegislation to honor veterans of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) with a Congressional...

Once upon a time during WWII a lethal dart gun code name “Bigot” was created to be used by commandos to covertly eliminate sentries, this dart gun was constructed from a M1911 .45 caliber pistol. The Office of Strategic Services predecessors of the CIA developed this clandestine weapon, its unknown as to what advantage this has over a silenced pistol. The weapon never made it out of the research and development department, but this didn't stop Ian McCollum from Forgotten Weapons to get his hands on one to check out, see the video and Ian's observation.

The U.S. intelligence community was responsible for usurping Europeans' right to self-government, in an effort to impose what Obama recently called “one of the greatest political and economic achievements of modern times.” As British voters prepare to vote on secession from the European Union super-state, the Obama administration's bizarre intervention to support the pro-EU side has sparked a fresh examination of the shadowy origins of the controversial European regime. Under scrutiny is the critical backing the EU and its predecessor outfits received at every step of the way from top globalists within the U.S. government, and in particular from the...

In 2003 Sreenivasa Rao Vadalasetty helped write a report for the SANS Institute that was titled "Security Concerns in Using Open Source Software for Enterprise Requirements." To some that title today is almost laughable. The report stated:"Though the open source has potential to be more secure than its closed source counterpart, it should not be taken for granted that open source is more secure because there are some constraining factors. Despite the fact that the source code is available for everyone, several vulnerabilities in open source remain undiscovered ...." In a survey done by Black Duck Software last year, the...

Nick Kukich died last Monday. It may not mean much to you in the scheme of things, but it should. It should because Nick was part of the dwindling number of World War II veterans who went to war to defeat Nazism and Fascism in order to keep America strong, free and democratic. He was, in short, part of the Greatest Generation. Nick, who died in a nursing home in Delaware, was 99 years old and lived a full lif

As our Second World War veterans pass to their eternal rewards, members of Congress are moving to recognize the most secretive of the veterans, the men and women of the Office of Strategic Services.

Scammed, an eBook from Amazon's Kindle Store, bears an eerie resemblance to today's political scene—the author weaves the president's eligibility issues into the plot. In spite of a media blackout, a sheriff and an ex-army doctor take on the occupant of the White House. At every opportunity, the president's supporters try to present the issue as a conspiracy theory—but that is just another scam.

Mitt Romney’s now infamous pledge to eliminate federal funding for PBS despite his affection for Big Bird and Jim Lehrer is getting still more pushback. Today a Los Angeles animation exec and an Idaho student are planning a 'Million Muppet March' for November 3rd at the National Mall in Washington DC three days before the election. Reuters reports Animax’s Michael Bellavia and student Chris Mecham came up with the idea separately during the October 3rd debate. Bellavia bought the Internet address www.millionmuppetmarch.com and discovered Mecham already had the Facebook page. The two fans of Sesame Street connected before the debate...

A tidbit buried within an hour long video: http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA At about 19 minutes, he starts talking about IBM, and how there was a drive to sell Linux. And he goes on to point out how easy to use interfaces just weren't a high priority until the commercial interests came in and did a lot of the boring stuff. They did Q and A. And other things he eludes to but doesn't specifically list. I point this out because I myself have run into a lot of the total anti-commercial venom from various people over the years, and that doesn't have...

Diving icon's ashes spread here today Inventions touched all uses of scuba, re-breathers BY ADAM LINHARDT Citizen Staffalinhardt@keysnews.com The ashes of the man responsible for developing what evolved into the most advanced scuba systems used by today's Special Operations Forces, as well as leading marine researchers and explorers, will be spread this morning in the waters off Key West. Christian J. Lambertsen was a medical student in 1939 when he invented his Lambertsen Amphibious Respirator Unit (LARU), a forerunner of modern dive re-breathers used today by the Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and deep-sea explorers. Lambertsen died on Feb. 11...

Any conviction that open source software (OSS) is somehow inferior to proprietary code, or vice versa, depending on which side of the development fence you sit, is being dispelled by a report from Coverity.The company has been scanning millions of lines of open source code for its 2011 Coverity Scan Open Source Integrity Report. The results show that the free code quality is on a par with in-house-developed products.More thoroughly tested The company said that this year’s study has been massively upgraded with the introduction of the Coverity 5 development testing platform. The new analysis engine incorporates advances in static...

I offer this interview as a token of my appreciation and as a contribution to all the men and women who are currently serving or who have ever served our country in a military or intelligence capacity.Most of us think we know all about soldiers and spies because we follow the actors who play such roles on television and in the movies. Thus, we see actors engaging in a lot of “action,” and we—at least those of us who have not been soldiers or spies—learn to suspend all disbelief. We are used to seeing a month long battle or even...

Have you experienced performance issues when using KDE? If so, then you aren't the only one. While things have been improving as KDE 4 matures, some users still have registered complaints. And one KDE hacker is trying to address them. Martin Gräßlin had begun working towards "rendering at 60 frames" per second. Gräßlin stated in a blog post today, "I could not imagine how a frame could take longer to render than the 16.67 msec." But after some thought he realized where a couple of bottlenecks may be hiding. In testing the effect chain performance, Gräßlin discovered a bug that...

Open source software continues the march toward world domination, but the bright open promise dimsOne of the best ways to see the success of the open source philosophy is to pick up a cellphone. If you happen to grab an Android phone -- the most popular in the smartphone class -- you'll have a device running a package built by Google and sitting on top of Linux. Almost all of the source code in the stack is released under a generous open source license.If you grab an iPhone, you can marvel at the beautiful shell that Apple has wrapped around...

GIMP 2.7.3 has added one of the most requested features in the program’s history: a single window mode. Version 2.7 is part of the development branch, so unfortunately, the feature won't hit most distro repositories for a while. As I said, because 2.7 is a development branch, most distributions won’t add it to their repositories, and this means that you’ll have to build it yourself. It’s a shame, in a way, because the new window mode might be viewed as a ease of use feature that less advanced users would appreciate. According to this(link) page, it looks like version 2.8...