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...

Orphanage director sold kids 25/02/2006 20:49  - (SA)    Beijing - A Chinese orphanage director and nine others have been found guilty of buying and selling scores of infants, later adopted by foreign parents. China's official Xinhua news agency said another 22 officials were fired in the trafficking case in the southern city of Hengyang, Hunan province. Chinese police say the traffickers bought children who had been abducted from their families and sold them to welfare homes in Hengyang for about 4 000 yuan (R3 800) each. The social welfare homes then had the infants adopted by foreigners who made "donations" for the adoptions....

City Colleges fire lecturer with terror ties June 6, 2003 BY ANA MENDIETA, Staff Reporter A Bridgeview man who served five years in an Israeli prison for allegedly channeling funds to Islamic terrorists has been fired from his job at City Colleges for failing to disclose his conviction, officials said Thursday. Mohammed Salah was terminated Wednesday from his job as a part-time lecturer at Olive-Harvey College because he failed to list his conviction on his employment application in February 2002, said Paula Bridges, City Colleges' director of marketing and public relations. Salah, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in Jerusalem in...

Mulitple tests conducted in Iraq by Danish and British experts indicate that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction have finally been discovered, but mainstream news editors either ignored the story Sunday morning or are furiously spinning the news as inconsequential. More than 12 hours after the Fox News Channel, Reuters and the Associated Press carried reports that preliminary tests showed Iraqi mortar shells discovered near Basra contain a deadly liquid blister agent, the New York Times had yet to report the bombshell find on the main page of its Web site – or anywhere in its Sunday morning print edition....

MOSCOW, Aug 10, 2002 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov raised the possibility on Saturday of creating a multinational defense force in the resource-rich Caspian Sea, a Russian news agency reported. "I can't exclude the creation in the Caspian of a military group which would include Russia, Kazakhstan and other Caspian Sea countries," Ivanov was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency. Ivanov is currently in the Caspian Sea city of Kaspiisk in Russia's Dagestan region to observe large-scale naval maneuvers in the disputed Caspian waters. The former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are also...

Robert Ellsberg speaks on whistleblowing, truth-telling and the Pentagon Papers Oct 2, 2019 by Heidi Schlumpf JusticePolitics The autumn of 1969 has been on Robert Ellsberg's mind lately, as the 50th anniversary of a life-changing request from his father approaches. A half century ago, as a 13-year-old, Ellsberg agreed to help his dad photocopy documents from a government report he had worked on. Those documents, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, revealed the United States' role in the build-up to the Vietnam War and the lies told to the American public and to Congress about U.S. actions...

PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: The big question at this hour: Is the U.S. planning to invade Iraq sometime next year? While White House officials are downplaying a "New York Times" report that says the U.S. is considering a major air and ground assault for next year that could include as many as 250,000 American troops. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein celebrated his 65th birthday over the weekend with the usual well-choreographed tributes from the Iraqi people. And, in Baghdad, tens of thousands of people marched as a show of support and defiance in the face of U.S. determination to topple Hussein. Ambassador...

Genocidal Islamic Fascist Republic of Iran - threatening annihilation at least since 1991.COLUMN ONE: Hezbollah: The Latin Connection : Bombings in Argentina and Panama prompt concern over the radical group's growing presence in the region. Experts say lax security and porous borders create a prime base for terrorists, by Tracy Wilkinson, Times Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times, August 04, 1994. The embassy's cultural affairs officer, Imam Mohsen Rabbani, rose. "Israel," he intoned in accented Spanish, "must disappear from the face of the Earth." He and a dozen speakers who followed quoted Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and called for unity...

Symposium: When an Evil Empire Returns By Jamie GlazovFrontPageMagazine.com | June 23, 2006  The Cold War is back. Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, is leading his country back into the dark ages of Soviet totalitarianism and instigating a global confrontation between Russia and the United States -- as well as between Russia and the West as a whole. The Russian President has consistently rolled back democratic freedoms. And he is proving that the genie can be placed back into the bottle: he has centralized authority and suffocated dissent in the media and in the nation at large. Reformers making efforts to build...

President Jiang Zemin gets an update on China´s Terfenol-D project. The U.S. Navy spent millions of dollars to develop Terfenol-D in the early 1980s, and intelligence experts estimate that the People's Republic of China (PRC) has devoted extensive resources to try to steal it. Insight has learned that these PRC efforts have paid off. The spy target is an exotic material made up of two types of rare-earth metals called lanthanides, terbium and dysprosium, plus iron (FE). The NOL stands for Naval Ordnance Laboratory. Hence the name Terfenol-D. Those who have worked with this exotic material call it almost magical....

A burgeoning East Boston-based street gang made up of alleged rapists and machete-wielding robbers has been linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network, prompting Boston police to ``turn up the heat'' on its members, the Herald has learned. MS-13, which stands for La Mara Salvatrucha, is an extremely violent organization with roots in El Salvador, and boasts more than 100 ``hardcore members'' in East Boston who are suspected of brutal machete attacks, rapes and home invasions. There are hundreds more MS-13 gangsters in towns along the North Shore, said Boston police Sgt. Detective Joseph Fiandaca, who has investigated the gang since...

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...

A California man was charged Monday with operating a ring of illegal test-takers who helped dozens of Middle Eastern nationals obtain U.S. student visas by passing proficiency and college-placement exams for them. Eamonn Daniel Higgins, 46, of Laguna Niguel made an appearance in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana on one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud as immigration agents arrested 16 of his suspected clients who remained in Southern California... The allegations revealed a potentially dangerous security breach in the country's student visa system and underscored the vulnerability of a tracking process that relies on schools to verify...

THE Bushmen of the Kalahari — among Africa’s last indigenous peoples — are on the verge of losing their ancestral homeland after the Government of Botswana stepped up a campaign to force them into squalid resettlement camps. The Government has sent heavily armed wildlife guards into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve — an area promised to the Bushmen “in perpetuity”. Some 200 to 250 Gana and Gwi Bushmen live in the area, having drifted back after previous evictions. The Government banned all outsiders, including journalists, from the area. It said a disease had been discovered in the Bushmen’s goats, which...

CARACAS, VENEZUELA - Maria Corina Machado doesn't hesitate when asked her feelings about the possibility of going to prison for up to 28 years for "treason to the nation" and conspiracy. "I'm scared, I'm very scared; I have three kids," the political activist says softly, sitting in her small office in the Caracas headquarters of Sumate, the organization that led last year's unsuccessful bid to recall President Hugo Chávez from office. Mr. Chávez's landslide victory in that vote only added to the troubles of Ms. Machado, Sumate's vice president and the woman who has come to symbolize the anti-Chávez opposition....

Israelis blast church with invisible weapon By Alan Philps in Jerusalem April 16 2002 Daily Telegraph, London Getting an earful ... loudspeakers held up near the Nativity Church pump out the noise. Photo: AFP, The Israeli Army is broadcasting ear-splitting screeches and wails at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, traditional site of Jesus' birth, to force out 200 Palestinians besieged there. Troops brought in a crane to hoist loudspeakers over the ancient basilica, one of the holiest shrines in Christendom, as part of what one person inside called "psycho terror". One of the noises sounds like a car alarm....

WASHINGTON - The trafficking of human beings constitutes a ''growth industry'' in the United States, with more than 15,000 people forced into bondage each year as sex slaves or captive laborers, according to testimony before a Senate panel on Wednesday. Although federal laws enacted over the past three years have enabled prosecutors to crack major trafficking rings, two U.S. attorneys and leaders of victim advocacy groups warned that ''modern-day slavery'' is spread across the nation and appears to be growing. ''It seems like we're just touching the tip of the iceberg,'' said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who presided at Wednesday's...

<p>An Israeli hospital worker is vaccinated last week.</p> <p>September 24, 2002 -- WASHINGTON - Federal officials sent states detailed guidelines yesterday for rapidly vaccinating their entire populations against smallpox should the deadly disease return through an act of terrorism.</p> <p>It's been decades since smallpox was seen in this country and the disease has been eradicated from Earth, so officials would assume that a single case of smallpox means the nation is under attack.</p>

India has killed Abdul Rauf Azhar, the Pakistani Al Qaeda terrorist who brutally beheaded American journalist Daniel Pearl on video in 2002.. Daniel’s last words were: “My name is Daniel Pearl. My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am a Jew.” Thank you India. ... Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is alleged to have been involved in the death of Daniel Pearl, and he is currently in American custody.

What happened in Uzbekistan? The government and opposition protesters are sharply at odds in Uzbekistan days after the eastern city of Andijan exploded into violence. A May 15 AP report claimed some 500 bodies had been laid out in a school in Andijan for identification by relatives, "corroborating witness accounts of hundreds killed" when soldiers opened fire on street protests. Medical authorities also reported some 2,000 wounded in local hospitals. However, a May 18 account on Russia's MosNews.com quotes Uzbek officials denying this very death toll. “Not a single civilian was killed by government forces there,” Prosecutor General Rashid Kadyrov...