Free Republic

The nomination of Mikhail Fradkov as Russia's next prime minister will do little to soften the Kremlin's increasingly assertive foreign policy, especially in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Mr Fradkov, a long-serving diplomat whose name was put forward on Monday by President Vladimir Putin, will bring to the post considerable experience of international relations. But he will also arrive with a history of close ties with the security services. While his personal views are not known, he is a member of the siloviki, the current and former members of the security services, headed by Mr Putin, who now...

John Solomon just pulled back the curtain on the federal case now surrounding Rep. Ilhan Omar — and his explanation makes the raid look much bigger than a one-day political spectacle. The headline from Monday was dramatic enough: federal agents entered Omar’s Washington, D.C., home with a court-authorized search warrant and carried away boxes of evidence. But Solomon says the most important questions are who the real target is, what investigators were authorized to seize, and whether the endgame could reach far beyond an ordinary criminal charge. Jesse Watters summarized the newest seizure and subpoena details Thursday night: VIDEO AT...

Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes was a feared Mexican drug lord and the leader of a ruthless cartel accused of masterminding efforts to push fentanyl into the United States. Once a police officer, Oseguera went on to become one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, with the United States alone offering a $15 million bounty for information leading to his arrest. Oseguera, who formed and led the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), was an elusive figure who had been considered Mexico’s most powerful cartel boss since Sinaloa kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was arrested last decade. Born in July 1966...

NEW YORK — In recently released testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a key participant at the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. said that he “knows” Hillary Clinton and has a personal relationship with her that dates back to the late-1990s. Besides describing a direct connection to Clinton, Russian-born Washington lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin also testified that he “knew some people who worked on” Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Akhmetshin was one of the participants at the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting that has been the subject of much news media coverage related...

Every August, the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Georgia is accompanied by familiar reflections about missed warning signs, intelligence failures, and a supposedly unexpected turning point in European security. The language has become so standardized that it obscures a far more uncomfortable reality. Georgia did not reveal a new Russia. It exposed a Russia that had been behaving consistently for nearly two decades while much of the West continued searching for evidence that Moscow had fundamentally changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Describing the failure to recognize this trajectory as a collection of mistakes understates what actually occurred....

US oil giant Unocal must stand trial in California for alleged complicity in human rights abuses by Burma's military junta, including forced labour, rape and torture, a judge has ruled. "Prior to its involvement in the pipeline project, Unocal had specific knowledge that the use of forced labour was likely, and nevertheless chose to proceed," Los Angeles Superior Court judge Victoria Chaney said. In the decision, Judge Chaney rejected arguments by the California-based energy firm, which built a gas pipeline in Burma, that the case should be tried at least in part under Burma or Bermuda law. Unocal had made...

Saddam's Ambassador to al-QaedaBy Jonathan SchanzerWeekly Standard | February 23, 2004 A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al-Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan's Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam/al-Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in...

Almost all media commentators seem convinced that Donald Trump’s foreign policy in his second term is a disaster. He is bogged down in Iran, snookered in Ukraine, his tariff agenda has failed and he has alienated his NATO allies. But this consensus has been too hastily formed. Looking at the bigger global picture, Trump’s foreign policy has been a spectacular success. Take the western hemisphere. We have the so-called “Donroe Doctrine,” the updated version of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine. In 1822, president James Monroe, having welcomed South America’s overthrow of Spanish and Portuguese imperial rule, stated that Latin American nations...

Evidence in the trial against HLF showed that Ghassan Elashi, the treasurer of the charity, became the founding board member of CAIR’s Texas chapter and that HLF transferred funds to CAIR for “consulting services.” The prosecution also presented evidence that Hamas provided “seed money” for CAIR, according to a congressional hearing. “The history is very clear,” said Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at GWU. “CAIR was created by this core group of Hamas leaders in the US in the early 1990s. There are FBI wiretaps of a workshop given by the group’s leaders on how to deal...

ALBAWABA- Unconfirmed reports circulating on social media and in several regional media outlets claim that Ahmad Vahidi, commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was killed in recent Israeli airstrikes targeting sites in or around Tehran. On Sunday afternoon, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out an airstrike allegedly on a Hezbollah command centre in the Dahiyeh district of Beirut, following earlier rocket fire launched into northern Israel by Hezbollah. In response, Iran declared that Israel had “crossed all red lines” in Lebanon and launched multiple waves of ballistic missile strikes targeting Israeli territory late on Sunday, June 7...

Earlier today Robert Creamer, the husband of Cong. Jan Schakowsky, (D-IL), was sentenced to five months in prison and 11 months house arrest for his role in a 1990s check-kiting scheme while he was the head of defunct Illinois Public Action Council, a consumer advocacy group. Schakowsky has not been implicated in the scheme. Jan Schakowsky is one of the most liberal members of Congress. She is a member of the far-left Progressive Caucus. Other members of the caucus include such "stars" as Cynthia McKinney, Maxine Waters, Dennis Kucinich, Jim McDermott (Baghdad Jim), Bernie Sanders, and Lynn Woolsey. Schakowsky made...

Teens who use marijuana may be at greater risk of permanent brain damage later in life, a study has revealed. About 18 million Americans report using marijuana daily or nearly every day, and use is on the rise, largely due to recent decriminalisation across the US. From 1992 to 2022, for example, daily and near-daily use saw a 15-fold increase. About one in seven of those users are teenagers, whose brains are still undergoing rapid changes in areas responsible for judgement, decision-making and memory. Now, the largest-ever study of American teenagers has found regular cannabis use restricted vital growth in...

Marrakech – The United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) issued an urgent travel warning for Algeria late on Monday after two suicide bombings struck the town of Blida, roughly 50 kilometers south of the capital Algiers. The FCDO confirmed it is “aware of reports of an explosion on 13 April in the town of Blida” and urged British nationals in the area to “remain vigilant at all times and follow the advice of the local security authorities.” The twin attacks unfolded in the early afternoon. The first explosion targeted the security directorate in central Blida. A second suicide...

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group. The...

KUALA LUMPUR - The radicalisation of former Malaysian army officer Yazid Sufaat, suspected of abetting two Sept 11 hijackers and of being a Jemaah Islamiah bomb-maker, shows that Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's ambitious effort to use Islam as a vehicle for economic progress and social change has backfired, The Asian Wall Street Journal said in a report yesterday. It said that Yazid - the son of a poor rubber tapper and the winner of a government scholarship to study biochemistry in the US - was an 'ideal candidate for transformation into the progressive Muslim professional', a type of citizen that...

Al-Qaida had extensive contacts with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, as well as with an elite military unit which helped the terrorists train and plot attacks against Americans, according to a former intelligence officer who recently fled Iran. Hamid Reza Zakeri, a former inspector and director of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and Ministry of Intelligence, or MOIS, member said models of the World Trade Center, the White House, Pentagon and other United States government buildings "were in our headquarters." In an explosive interview with a London-based Arabic newspaper last week, Zakeri stated that al-Qaida leader and Egyptian terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri,...

At 6:30 p.m. on Sept. 14, Ana Belen Montes, a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), walked into a public telephone booth outside Washington's National Zoo and made two calls to pager numbers later traced by federal agents to Cuba's Directorate of General Intelligence (DGI). She already had compromised the identities of CIA agents, revealed U.S. military secrets and exposed the contents of classified files. But, as Montes sent repeated signals to her DGI handlers during the days immediately following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department inspector general is investigating whether FBI agents involved in espionage and terrorism cases improperly used informants and subjects of investigation to benefit private businesses they were running on the side, according to officials and documents. The allegations, according to court documents reviewed by The Associated Press, include that agents' and intelligence assets' private companies were involved in business deals in China and the Middle East about the same time the FBI was investigating Chinese efforts to acquire sensitive technology. The FBI says it is cooperating with the investigation. "Any time there is a request...

An African church minister who supplements his meagre stipend by scrabbling for minerals in the artisanal mines of eastern Sierra Leone has discovered one of the largest diamonds ever found. The 709-carat stone was extracted this week by Emmanuel Momoh, a pastor in one of the myriad churches that ministers to the mining communities of Kono district, the diamond centre that became the crucible of Sierra Leone’s blood-soaked civil war. It is believed to be the 13th largest uncut diamond ever to be pulled from the ground, industry analysts said. The stone is to be auctioned, the Sierra Leonean government...

Financed by JPMorgan, Jointly Owned by US DoD Under the plan, the U.S. Department of Defense will hold a 40% stake in the JPM Financed smelter joint-venture. GFN – WASHINGTON: Korea Zinc plans a $7.4 billion investment to construct a large-scale non-ferrous metals smelter in Clarksville, Tennessee, a project U.S. officials say will materially expand domestic critical minerals processing capacity and strengthen supply chain security.1 The project, known as the “U.S. Smelter,” is expected to require approximately $6.6 billion in capital expenditures, with total investment reaching $7.4 billion including financing costs. It is being developed in coordination with the U.S....