Free Republic

NEWS ANALYSIS: Ostensibly his resignation was a consequence of the leaking of the names of five suspended Vatican officials, but sources tell the Register it was actually triggered by other issues.VATICAN CITY — The resignation of Vatican police commander Domenico Giani on Monday had been long expected, but the background to his removal remains shrouded in intrigue and mystery. The Vatican announced Giani’s replacement today, Gianluca Gauzzi Broccoletti, who has served in the Vatican police corps since 1995 and was appointed Giani’s deputy last year. A former officer in both Italy’s finance police, the Guardia di Finanza, and Italy’s Secret...

Former President Bill Clinton dined with financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 1995, records show—years before the interactions detailed in a statement from his office earlier this week. That statement condemned the wealthy hedge fund manager after his indictment for alleged sex trafficking crimes was unsealed Monday. The statement said Clinton "knows nothing" about Epstein's alleged crimes and included a timeline of Clinton's interactions with him starting in 2002. But according to a story published back in March 1995 by the Palm Beach Post, then-President Clinton attended a “three-hour dinner” at the time with a “very select group of...

The Moscow Military District Court has ruled that it was Colonel Aleksander Zaporozhsky who gave up Robert Hanssen to the CIA. The court ended up giving the former intelligence officer an even stiffer sentence than the prosecutor had demanded. On Wednesday the former Colonel of the Foreign Intelligence Service Aleksander Zaporozhsky was found guilty of high treason in the form of revealing state secrets to the USA. Zaporozhsky was sentenced to 18 years in a high security labour camp and stripped of his military rank and all state decorations, though his property will not be confiscated. During his service, Zaporozhsky...

Litigation: After thwarting a $9.5 billion judgment from an Ecuadorean court, Chevron is going after the entire edifice of environmentalist enablers who make such junk lawsuits possible. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch. To the surprise of many, the oil giant is suing the tony, white-shoe law firm of Patton Boggs for alleged unethical involvement in an all-out legal attack by environmentalists over rainforest pollution in Ecuador. Chevron accuses the oh-so-respected firm of lying, concealing inconvenient facts, running a public smear campaign and miscellaneous other flim-flammery, all for the sake of the dollar signs spinning in their eyes. This poses...

U.S. Links Charity to Chechen RebelsBy Nabi Abdullaev Staff Writer The head of a U.S.-based Islamic charity who is suspected of having ties to Osama bin Laden is in jail facing a grand jury investigation after the FBI showed he had lied about his support for Chechen rebels. Federal officials accused Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen, and his Benevolence International Foundation of perjury last month for claiming they did not provide support to "people or organizations known to engage in violence, terrorist activities or military operations of any nature." Arnaout, 39, was arrested April 30. He had been under...

The marbled crayfish is the only crustacean that reproduces asexually, with the all-female species making clones of itself from eggs unfertilized by sperm... Since its discovery in 1995 in Germany, the marbled crayfish has spread across Europe and into Africa in huge numbers. “They eat anything—rotten leaves, snails or fish broods, small fish, small insects," says Frank Lyko, a molecular geneticist at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. “This crayfish is a serious pest,” ... Lyko and his colleagues sequenced genomes of about a dozen marbled crayfish from different parts of the world and performed less detailed genetic analyses...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV), and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) have introduced the Jerusalem Embassy and Recognition Act, which would move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and therefore recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital city. Currently, the U.S. Embassy is located in Tel Aviv. In a statement, Sen. Cruz said that it was "finally time" to move the embassy. “Jerusalem is the eternal and undivided capital of Israel,” Sen. Cruz said. “Unfortunately, the Obama administration's vendetta against the Jewish state has been so vicious that to even utter this simple truth - let alone the reality...

Say it isn't so. Could this actually be the next US Secretary of State (Hat Tip: Barak Ravid)? Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry met during his visit to Washington Wendy Sherman, an adviser to the US Democratic Party's presidential primary candidate Hillary Clinton, the foreign affairs ministry announced on Thursday. The Egyptian foreign ministry spokesperson Ahmed Abu Zeid stated that during the meeting Sherman listened to Shoukry's evaluations of political and economic developments taking place in Egypt, the country's regional and international relations, as well as the country's efforts to fight terrorism. "The meeting reflected the mutual wish to...

Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said on Tuesday that he's bothered by the Republican National Committee's decision to its reinstate support for GOP Senate candidate and accused child molester Roy Moore, saying that Moore "deserves to lose." "I think he deserves to lose," Cantor said on CNN's New Day. "When I was in office as Majority Leader, I had the policy of zero tolerance for any of this kind of stuff."

Lost in the tumult over Islamic port deals and Katrina video capers is the recently released -- and willfully ignored -- Barrett Report. David Barrett, you'll recall, is the independent counsel appointed in 1995 to investigate allegations of impropriety against President Clinton's Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros. Mr. Barrett found his path mined by the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service and President Clinton's attorneys, even after Mr. Clinton departed the White House. He prepared 18 felony indictments against Mr. Cisneros but had to settle for a guilty plea on a misdemeanor charge (lying to the...

Breakdown of the Connections Between The Working Family Party, SEIU, ACORN, The New Party, The DNC, Democratic Socialists of America, Tides, George Soros and The Obama Administration Patrick Gaspard, the current executive director of the DNC, former director of Obama’s Office of Political Affairs, was an organizer for the New Party, the executive vice president of the SEIU Local 1199, political director for Bertha Lewis the former president of ACORN and a co-chair of the Working Families Party. The New Party’s influential Chicago chapter began to formed in January 1995. Its members consisted mainly of individuals from ACORN, SEIU and...

"These five guys are not a threat to the United States," says Clinton. "They are a threat to the safety and security of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's up to those two countries to make the decision once and for all that these are threats to them. So I think we may be kind of missing the bigger picture here. We want to get an American home, whether they fell off the ship because they were drunk or they were pushed or they jumped, we try to rescue everybody." Last week President Obama traded the Taliban 5, who were being...

I stand by every word of it. And it’s even worse today. Of the thousands of Clinton presidential records released to the public last week, one among them has received of the bulk of attention: a 332-page memo from 1995. The memo, which offers an in-depth analysis of the right-wing media, describes how conservative conspiracy theories about the Clintons passed from the fringes to the mainstream. (...) Let’s go all the way back to the summer of 1995. At the time, my then colleague (and current business partner) Mark Fabiani and I were working at the White House as lawyers...

YT comment "...With all the overblown 2016 election rhetoric it's instructive to watch Bill Clintion's 1995 State of the Union Address. Actually the Clintons and seemingly a bipartisan Congress all supported steps to stop the flow of illegal immigrants across the southern U.S.-Mexico border. Suddenly in 2016 it has become controversial as the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton decided she needed to stake out a position opposite of Donald Trump, now labeling the position as racist or unworkable. However, as this video shows, at one time there was bipartisan agreement on steps needed to enforce existing immigration law. What do you...

OVERVIEW COMMUNICATION STREAM OF CONSPIRACY COMMERCE: The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce refers to the mode of communication employed by the right wing to convey their fringe stories into legitimate subjects of coverage by the mainstream media. This is how the stream works. First, well funded right wing think tanks and individuals underwrite conservative newsletters and newspapers such as the Western Journalism Center, the American Spectator and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Next, the stories are reprinted on the internet where they are bounced all over the world. From the internet, the stories are bounced into the mainstream media through one...

A former U.S. senator in Colorado sees parallels between billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer’s meddling in current Senate elections in the state and his hedge fund’s efforts to drain a small Colorado town’s water supply and sell it to the highest bidder. Former Sen. Wayne Allard (R., Colo.) ... In 1995 Tom Steyer descended on Colorado, standing to make millions by exporting the water under the San Luis Valley and selling it to the highest bidder. Draining this particular aquifer would have had disastrous consequences for farms, wetlands and the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Impact from Steyer’s plan would have...

The man responsible for what the military called the Navy’s biggest betrayal is dead. John Anthony Walker, the former Senior Warrant Officer from Norfolk who supplied the Soviets with damaging tactical and military data, died in federal prison on Thursday in Butner, North Carolina. 29 years ago, Walker’s career as a spy came to an end in Norfolk Federal Court.

Every weekday at 6.30 a.m., Edward McSweegan climbs into his Volkswagen Passat for the hour-long commute to the National Institutes of Health. He has an office in Bethesda, a job title -- health scientist administrator -- and an annual salary of about $100,000. What McSweegan says he does not have -- and has not had for the last seven years -- is any real work. He was hired by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1988, but says his bosses transferred the research grants he administered to other workers eight years later, leaving him with occasional tasks...

Bill Clinton says the same things regarding illegal immigrationas Trump is doing today.https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4351026/clinton-1995-immigration-sotu

"All Americans, not only in the States most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget...