Free Republic

Notwithstanding former President Jimmy Carter's recent statement to the contrary, Undersecretary of State John Bolton's remarks about Cuba's biological weapons capabilities underscore lingering concerns with the rogue island only 90 miles from the United States. Bolton, on May 6, told an audience at the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation that the U.S. is suspicious about Cuban biomedical laboratories and their ability to transfer biological weapons technology to Iraq, Syria and Libya, all countries that Cuban President Fidel Castro visited last year. Bolton also made remarks, which may be interpreted as a clear signal of hardening State Department policy toward Cuba, faulting...

The wreckage of a military plane found this month on an Alaska glacier is that of an Air Force plane that crashed in 1952, killing all 52 people aboard, military officials said Wednesday. Army Capt. Jamie Dobson said evidence found at the crash site correlates with the missing C-124A Globemaster, but the military is not eliminating other possibilities because much investigation still needs to be done. Processing DNA samples from relatives of those on board the plane could take up to six years, Dobson said. "We're still at the very beginning of this investigation," she said. "This is very close...

And now for something a bit more cheerful, Percy Faith and his orchestra playing Delicado. [This post is certified COVID-19 free.]

Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in espionage, and was only a “whistleblower” seeking to expose the overreach of NSA’s information gathering. With the clock ticking on Mr. Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to review what we have learned about his real mission.

As pictures of the destruction in Palestinian areas beam out across the world, it is not surprising that US Secretary of State Colin Powell would see fit to meet with relief agencies and pledge US assistance to help relieve the Palestinians' plight. What is less understandable is America's choosing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as the conduit for $30 million in additional aid. UNRWA was founded 52 years ago as a temporary agency to help the Palestinian refugees from the first Arab war to destroy Israel, in 1948. In a report he submitted in November 1951, UNRWA...

The scientific fact that an abortion ends the life of a living human being isn’t so convenient these days for Planned Parenthood – after all, it is now the largest abortion chain in the country. Back in 1952, before Planned Parenthood was an abortion operation, it sure had a more accurate understanding of science. That would be before the corporation’s twisted abortion ideology of today took over. Just look at this pamphlet below that states that abortion “kills the life of a baby after it has begun.” *****IMAGE ON LINK, CHECK IT OUT!!!******

Many people have been surprised by the level of cooperation these days between Russia and Israel, two seemingly very different countries. Yet this relationship is not just based on current parallel needs but on the history of the creation of Israel in which Russia played a major, if often forgotten, role. The fact that the creation of Israel owed a lot to that well-known anti-Semite, Joseph Stalin, is truly ironic. For Stalin launched the black years of Soviet Jewry (1948-1953) in which thousands of Jews were assailed as "rootless cosmopolitans" and lost their jobs. In 1952 he promoted the vicious...

Radical Islamist group Hizb-ut- Tahrir which cleverly avoided global scrutiny while spreading its ideology may become a more dangerous terrorist group than the ISIS and it's presence in South Asia should be a cause for concern for India, according to a report. "While ISIS runs amok in Syria and Iraq, demanding media attention through acts of barbarous cruelty, HuT (Hizb-ut- Tahrir or the Party of Liberation) is quietly building a global infrastructure of radicalised youth and deep-pocketed Arab support in preparation for the global Khilafat," said the report published in the latest edition of CTX Journal. The group has cleverly...

The Blaze reports Thursday that Dugway Proving Ground, an Army base about 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, was locked down for several hours because a small amount of toxic nerve gas was unaccounted for. According to a statement released by the Army, less than a quarter teaspoon of deadly VX nerve agent went missing. VX, the most toxic nerve agent ever developed, is an odorless, colorless, tasteless liquid that can kill within 15 minutes of exposure, according to a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS). The agent, first developed in 1952, has been designated a "weapon of mass destruction."...

At the Shadow Party’s "Take Back America" conference in Washington on June 3, 2004, following a glowing introduction from Hillary Clinton, George Soros stepped to the podium to explain to the audience that when it came to electoral politics in the USA, he was a newcomer. Only his outrage over Bush’s invasion of Iraq had stirred him to get involved in the partisan struggle. "[I]t is the first time that I feel that I need to stand up and do something, and become really engaged in the electoral process in this country," Soros said.[1] This was far from the truth,...

Walt & Lillian Disney with Richard Nixon and his family at Disneyland, 1959 We tend to think of Hollywood as a bastion of leftism, and rightly so. Books like Ron Radosh’s Red Star Over Hollywood demonstrate the deep-seated left-wing dominance of the entertainment industry. Even with the leftism prevalent in Hollywood’s Golden Age, many unabashed conservatives found success without compromising their principles, including one of the most creative minds in the business — Walt Disney.Several biographers and writers that I’ve read have tried to declare that Walt Disney was apolitical, but I find this conclusion not to be true....

Today being St. Patrick's Day, what better pick for today's feature could there be than this one?

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

African Ice Core Analysis Reveals Catastrophic Droughts, Shrinking Ice Fields, Civilization Shifts COLUMBUS, Ohio – A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. Lastly, the analysis also supports Ohio State University researchers' prediction that these unique bodies of ice will disappear in the next two decades, the victims of global warming. These findings were published today in the journal...

UPI) -- Former U.S. Rep Dan Rostenkowski, who rose to be chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and went to prison in disgrace, died Wednesday. He was 82. Rostenkowski died at his summer home in Powers Lake, Wis., after a long battle with cancer, the Chicago Tribune reported. A onetime Washington political insider and power broker, Rostenkowski represented his Chicago 5th Congressional District in Congress for 36 years, rising to head the powerful tax-writing Ways and Means Committee that rewrote the 1986 U.S. tax code. The son of 32nd Ward Democratic Alderman Joseph Rostenkowski, Daniel was first elected...

Scientists discover global warming linked to increase in tropopause height over past two decades LIVERMORE, Calif. -- Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered another fingerprint of human effects on global climate. Recent research has shown that increases in the height of the tropopause over the past two decades are directly linked to ozone depletion and increased greenhouse gases. The tropopause is the transition zone between the lowest layer of the atmosphere -- the turbulently-mixed troposphere -- and the more stable stratosphere. The tropopause lies roughly 10 miles above the Earth's surface at the equator and five...

Detail by painful detail, the CIA is coming to grips with one of the most devastating episodes in its history, a botched cloak-and-dagger flight into China that stole two decades of freedom from a pair of fresh-faced American operatives and cost the lives of their two pilots. In opening up about the 1952 debacle, the CIA is finding ways to use it as a teaching tool. Mistakes of the past can serve as cautionary tales for today's spies and paramilitary officers taking on al-Qaida and other terrorist targets. At the center of the story are two eager CIA paramilitary officers...