Free Republic

When Pan Am Flight 103 set off from Heathrow to New York, its passengers and crew were looking forward to returning home to celebrate Christmas - but tragically, they never made itThe Lockerbie bombing where 270 people sadly lost their lives is still the deadliest terror attack in the history of the UK, even though it took place more than 30 yeas ago. It was 21 December, 1988, when the Pan Am Flight 103 from Heathrow to New York exploded just 38 minutes into its flight while travelling over Lockerbie, with the wreckage of the plain raining down on the...

OTTAWA - Canadian health authorities are worried an outbreak of West Nile virus infection in Louisiana, which has killed four of 58 infected people, could mean the mosquito-borne illness is changing the way it spreads. "Something seems peculiar about Louisiana with such a large number of human cases," said Harvey Artsob, head of zoonotic diseases at Health Canada. "It's important for us to understand why, so that all our messages of reassurance in other parts of North America still hold. What's changed in Louisiana?" As Canadians head to summer cottages this weekend, the official government message remains that West Nile...

Trump’s presidential blitz is realizing the dreams of conservative intellectuals in the Reagan-Bush era.Imagine a populist president who set out to create, “in the first weeks of his administration, a radically different perception of the presidency.” He could use “far-reaching executive orders” to “give various constituencies throughout the country the immediate conviction that this president, for a change, looks out for them.” The burst of presidential edicts would serve visceral as much as practical purposes: “The nation as a whole needs to be jarred by this newcomer’s determination to protect the country’s vital interests, perhaps by ordering, on national security...

While the media and military have been silent, what the Navy did against a Houthi attack is pretty magnificent. Has the U.S. grown ashamed of its military victories? There are reasons to believe this is true. In April 1988, the U.S. Navy effectively destroyed the Iranian navy following a mine attack on the destroyer USS Roberts. The Navy sank an Iranian frigate, four armed speedboats, blew up two armed oil platforms, and damaged another frigate in one of the shortest and most successful campaigns of the postwar period. Yet even today, there is no actual name attached to the engagement....

ACAPULCO, Mexico (AP) - For generations, leftist activists have fought the Institutional Revolutionary Party in the southern state of Guerrero through the ballot box and the rifle. After skirmishes, massacres and hundreds of martyrs, they were celebrating victory Monday with dancing and the honking of horns in the state's famous resort, Acapulco. Official state election results showed former Acapulco Mayor Zeferino Torreblanca with a stunning victory, 55 to 42 percent, over the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has run Guerrero for 76 years. "After nearly 50 years of social struggle, we have achieved the miracle of the vote," said...

We recently wrote about the Brett Kimberlin saga -- which is long and involved, and which we'd avoided jumping into for a long time, given how complex and nutty it was. If you're not familiar with it, go back and read that post to catch up on it, but the super short version is that Kimberlin has been suing a lot of people, in large part because he doesn't like the way they're characterizing his past. And he's more or less indicated that he intends to tie people up in court for as long as possible, leading some to put...

A drug cartel kingpin, known as the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s top target for his role in the killing of a DEA agent, was moved from Mexico to New York City on Thursday and is expected to face a judge on Friday, according to officials and sources. Rafael Caro Quintero was among 29 cartel members the Mexican government released into US custody as President Trump has threatened to slap imports from Mexico with a 25% tariff on March 4 if the country doesn’t do more to crackdown on illegal immigration drug smuggling. “Obviously, this is one of the biggest days...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — In the 1980s, a young woman from Arroyo Hondo was in the running to be the Taos Fiesta Queen. That summer, she visited the house of a renowned El Prado seamstress many times to get fitted for her elaborate, traditional outfit, always making sure to say “hi” to the woman’s 14-year-old son. She graduated from high school and moved to Albuquerque, where she attended the University of New Mexico. On June 22, 1988, 21-year-old Althea Oakeley was walking home from a party after getting into a disagreement with her boyfriend. It was around 8:15 when she crossed...

Israel on Wednesday made public for the first time some 200,000 pages of documents related to the fate of the 1950s missing Yemenite children, something Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said was meant to “correct the historical injustice” of hiding the fate of the children. “It is difficult to believe that for almost 70 years, people did not know what happened to their children,” Netanyahu said. “And as difficult as the reality may be, we are not willing for this to continue.” Netanyahu's comments came at a ceremony in the Prime Minister's Office where a website was launched with the documentation...

Ethiopia’s brutal Marxist dictator, known as the African Pol Pot, became the first fallen leader to be found guilty yesterday of genocide in his own country after a 12-year trial.Mengistu Haile Mariam, the former President, who fled to Zimbabwe in 1991, was accused along with top members of his military Government of killing thousands during his 17-year rule. The period was marked by vicious crackdowns on opponents, disastrous wars with neighbouring countries and rebel groups and devastating famines in which starvation was used to force peasants into submission. “Members of the Derg [Government] who are present in court today and...

Journalists increasingly see their job as protecting their preferred candidates, not asking tough questions.On September 25, more than two months after entering the presidential race, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris finally sat down for her first one-on-one interview with a national television reporter. It wasn't just any reporter. Stephanie Ruhle, host of a nightly show on the Democrat-cheerleading cable network MSNBC, had, just five days prior, ridiculed the very notion that journalists, let alone voters, needed to hear anything more from the vice president before Election Day. "Let's say you don't like her answer. Are you going to vote for Donald...

More effective and sustainable firearms are on the horizon — but future technology is now banned before it can even come to fruition. For 63 years, the United States Congress has drafted and passed the National Defense Authorization Act. The purpose of this act: to pass the country’s defense budget for the following fiscal year. While Americans are focused on inflation and other trending topics, this bill passes every year under the radar. It’s Congress’s way of slowly chipping away at the constitutional rights of millions of Americans without any pushback — mainly because people don’t know about it. However,...

CANTON, Mass. — A Massachusetts man convicted as a teen of killing a 14-year-old classmate "for the heck of it" in Canton has been granted parole — 37 years after he was sent to prison. Rod Matthews was convicted in 1988 of second-degree murder in the November 1986 beating death of 14-year-old Shaun Ouillette, who he lured into the woods and bludgeoned with a baseball bat. He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. According to court documents, in late October 1986, then-14-year-old Matthews told two classmates that he "wanted to know what it was like...

Hundreds of people in Miami took to the iconic Calle Ocho, the heart of Little Havana, to celebrate former President and now President-elect Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday night, waving American and Cuban flags and dancing in the streets. The former president is the projected winner of the 2024 presidential race, and he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris with a significant victory in the state of Florida. Trump reportedly won nearly 55 percent of the vote in Florida, according to counts at press time. Local media reported that Trump is the first Republican to win Miami-Dade County since 1988, leaning...

Trump on Oprah's show in 1988. Same today as he was back then.

For most days in 2024 I repeated verbally and in print that “if the election were held today, Donald Trump would win.” That was while Joe Biden was his opponent. Now that Kamala Harris is in the race, things have changed dramatically. In very early 2022, I expressed in this column my confusion about why Kamala’s approval ratings were so low (‘From the Great Beyond, Spiro’s Laughing at Kamala’, TNH, Jan. 8, 2022). I wrote: “I don’t have a particular problem with Kamala…when I think of how Kamala is compared to Hillary Clinton in terms of unlikability, I don’t think...

Bangladesh could drop Islam as the country's official religion following a string of extremist attacks against people of other faiths. The supreme court in the South Asia nation has began to hear arguments which challenge Islam's status as the official state religion. It comes after a spate of attacks against people of other religions such as Hindus, Christians, and minorities Shi'ites, which have been blamed on Islamic extremists. When Bangladesh was formed in 1971 after the nation split from Pakistan, it was declared a secular state. However, in 1988 the country's constitution was amended with Islam declared as the state...

For the past 20 years, the best minds in Washington and Jerusalem treated Hamas as a pragmatic political operator whose leaders were satisfied living in the same world as the rest of us. Their charter, first adopted in 1988, endorsed a set of bloodcurdling millenarian goals. But despite the open madness and world-making ambitions of their public pronouncements, Hamas remained a semi-legitimate player, treated as just one unremarkable thread in the Middle East’s rich tapestry of mildly threatening, gun-toting political dreamers. Even to the most hardened Israeli security officials they were a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose extreme rhetoric and regrettably...

Buckets of blood dripped from Ebrahim Raisi, the 8th president of Iran, for his roles on the “Death Committee” and other atrocities under his direction. He wore a black turban to claim that he descended from the Prophet Muhammad. The Shiite president did not survive the helicopter crash of May 19, 2024. Who will mourn the death of an evil man who presided over the death and torture of so many? Dissidents were tortured, subjected to cruel inhuman treatment, and killed. A political purge against political dissidents lasted five months during 1988. Ordered by Ayatollah Khomeini, the “Death Committee” was...

Why Biden thinks the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks” and “not competition for us.” “Biden Gets China,” headlined the January 2, 2012 report in The Atlantic. As author Steve Clemons explained, “Vice President Joe Biden will take the lead on the administrations next phase China policy.” This marked a shift to a “strategy of engagement with Biden at the top,” that allows the US to deal with China’s likely next president from a Vice President to a Vice President/Next President status -- and to continue both the Departments of State’s and Treasury’s ongoing engagement with other designated key Chinese...