Free Republic

The heroic and pioneering American spirit that the world has known for centuries is on full display during the coronavirus outbreak. Our nation’s doctors and nurses—risking and sacrificing their own health—are on the frontlines in the global battle against a viral respiratory disease that still has no cure or vaccine. Cases continue to rise as the virus is highly contagious, but it is all-hands-on-deck at our local hospitals: medical professionals, usually in understaffed rural areas, are working long hours to curb the rise of the disease within our own borders. Medical supplies and protective gear are in short supply, yet...

Four days of meetings in Doha, the capital of Qatar, of Western-backed elements backing the overthrow of the Syrian government began in disarray Sunday, following last week’s demand by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a shakeup within the so-called rebel leadership. Clinton gave the Syrian oppositionists their marching orders last Wednesday, declaring that the Syrian National Council (SNC), formed barely a year ago and recognized by Washington as the “legitimate representative” of the Syrian people, had lost US backing. She dismissed the leadership that the US had previously supported as a gang of irrelevant exiles who had not...

Syria's 'Butcher of Hama' living in £10 million Mayfair townhouse The massacre of civilians in the rebellious Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughur has awoken terrible memories for the people of Hama, 60 miles to the north, where up to 40,000 people were killed during an uprising in 1982. Rifaat al-Assad moved, more than a year ago, to a Georgian mansion off Park Lane By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter 9:00PM BST 12 Jun 2011 Today, Mahar al-Assad, the bloodthirsty brother of President Bashar al-Assad, is the man leading his army on a mission of vengeance against those who have dared to...

IMPORTANT -- This thread is a followup to http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3278876/posts - New Redirect to SMB Flaw in all Windows versions including Windows 10. It contains a list of the specific software packages affected, and there are a LOT of them. What would you say if we told you that your version of Windows is affected by a vulnerability that dates back to 1997? You’d laugh, right? Surely, after all, Microsoft would have patched the fault prior to releasing Windows 98, or at the latest, Windows 2000? Well, not quite. This Redirect to SMB vulnerability has its roots in the identically-named attack...

By John Crewdson, Tribune senior correspondent. Reporting and research assistance was provided by Drew Crosby in Madrid MADRID -- The most sweeping criminal indictment to arise thus far from the Sept. 11 attacks reflects a quiet but dramatic change in understanding by investigators here and across Europe of the terrorist organization known as Al Qaeda, and the international Islamic radical-terrorist network of which, they now agree, it is merely a part. As laid out in the indictment, the defendants' alleged activities--from arranging travel and providing introductions to procuring false documents and, especially, moving money--provide the first detailed look at one...

Police in Hamburg shut down the notorious al-Quds mosque, renamed the Taiba mosque in 2008, led by German-Syrian national and voluntary imam Mamoun Darkazanli. Darkazanli (a.k.a. Abu Ilyas al-Suri) has been a suspected al-Qaeda operative, primarily as a financier and logistician, in the European Union for close to two decades. Long active in al-Qaeda circles, Darkazanli first surfaced on the radar of Western intelligence agencies when he purportedly helped procure a cargo ship named “Jennifer” for Osama bin Laden as early as 1993 (Hamburger Abendblatt, October 16, 2004). Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt (BKA- Federal Criminal Police Office) admitted that it had been...

The European Union’s antitrust chief Neelie Kroes said today she had not yet received all information on Microsoft’s offer to share software codes and comply with a 2004 EU antitrust ruling. She also told European politicians that the software giant could not charge fees for the server protocol and communication codes if it could not prove that the code was innovative. “If no such innovation … no remuneration can be charged by Microsoft,” she said. Microsoft Corp. has until February 15 to reply to the formal charge sheet the Commission sent in December over providing complete and accurate information...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version January 13, 2006, 8:11 a.m. The Butcher with the Terror Ties The evidence mounts. Drip, drip, drip. Drop by drop, isolated news stories and emerging documents are eroding the popular myth that Saddam Hussein had no connections to Islamofascist terrorists. These revelations undermine war critics’ efforts to whitewash Baghdad’s ancien regime — such as when Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid declared: “There was [sic] no terrorists in Iraq.” Likewise, Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) describes a “nonexistent relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.” Reid, Levin, and others who dismiss...

BRUSSELS, Sept 7 (Reuters) - Microsoft said on Wednesday it sued the European Commission in an EU court to gain quick resolution of a question surrounding sanctions imposed by the Commission on the company. The Commission has required Microsoft to share communications protocols -- or software rules of the road -- with rival makers of computer servers, ruling that it abused its dominance of the Windows operating system. Microsoft does not want to share that information with "open source" publishers who might make public what it says is confidential information. "This filing is the result of the agreement reached...

When experts from the US and the IAEA came upon blueprints for a 10-kiloton atomic bomb in the files of the Libyan weapons program earlier this year, they found themselves caught between gravity and pettiness. The discovery gave the experts a new appreciation of the audacity of the rogue nuclear network led by A. Q. Khan, a chief architect of Pakistan's bomb. Intelligence officials had watched Dr. Khan for years and suspected that he was trafficking in machinery for enriching uranium to make fuel for warheads. But the detailed design represented a new level of danger, particularly since the Libyans...