Free Republic

Deep in your heart you knew there are tax-payer’s money wasted somewhere in the whole Russian spy drama. Why did the Obama administration and the Russian government wanted to get rid of them so fast? We may never know. However we can prove that USAID funded the agro- and eco-tourism project in 2004 run by the company 4Vlast for which Anya Chapman and Vasily Kushchenko worked at the time. As you know from the previous research Chapman was the London contact person for the 4Vlast firm, Kushchenko was running their tourism firm and worked for the 4 Vlast Mrs. World...

Saddam Hussein's government provided senior Russian officials with oil rights worth millions of dollars under the oil-for-food program in an effort to lift U.N. sanctions against Iraq, according to a U.S. Senate Committee report released on Monday. The oil allocations were "compensation for support," Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The report, based on documents as well as interviews with Ramadan and Tareq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, pointed to Alexander Voloshin, former chief of staff to President Vladimir Putin in the Russian Presidential Council, and ultranationalist parliamentarian Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Both men had...

Saddam's Shadow Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 Copyright 1997 Indigo Publications Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 SECTION: MINING; DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO; N. 207 LENGTH: 787 words HEADLINE: Saddam's Shadow BODY: It's not only diamonds and base metals that interest big mining companies and the latter are not alone in being interested in Katanga. In the delegation that the United States sent to Kinshasa on June 2 under its ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, the state department's African affairs department was represented by Marc Baas, director for Central Africa. (Susan Rice, director for African...

At Mass in memory of those killed in Tiananmen, Msgr. Joseph Ha, auxiliary bishop of Hong Kong, prayed "that they may find eternal peace in the afterlife, for justice to be done". Hong Kong has had many "June 4ths". Loving God and one's neighbor means that "the value of man is far more important than any other institutional value: the people before the government; the truth before interests". "Could this be the last commemoration mass in memory of June 4th? I do not know"Hong Kong (AsiaNews) - Among the moments scheduled to commemorate the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre...

In 1995, former Iranian president Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani made a little-noticed trip to the neighboring country of Georgia. He spent several hours in Tbilisi, the capital, and then instead of returning to Iran, he made a secret side trip to the breakaway region of Adjara to visit President Aslan Abashidze. The purpose of the detour was not to visit the balmy, palm-treed tourist sea port resort of Batumi on the Black Sea. His purpose was more sinister. The Iranian president was looking for black market sources of chemicals to enrich uranium for building a nuclear bomb. He found a willing...

Isn’t it extraordinary how something long in existence can be suddenly re-proposed as a brilliant new idea? Politicians and educators, hoping we have memory problems, often do this to fool us into thinking they are working hard to improve a situation. Another audacious example of this strategy was recently provided by the Holy See’s support of a proposal for a “United Religions”. The proposal came from former Israeli President and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shimon Peres. At a private audience with Pope Francis this September 4th, Peres “proposed the founding of a United Religions organization — modelled after the United Nations...