Free Republic

FTC WARNED INVESTORS OFF HUGE DOLLAR GAINS/TAKE 3Jan 27, 2005 - FreeMarketNews.comby Chris MackWashington’s regulators are supposed to stand up for the little guy. Maybe they also help the little guy stay that way. In the last decade, under the pretense of protecting people from losing their shirts, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released warnings about indium and other strategic metal investing “scams.” Some of these warnings haven’t been updated since - and in any event they are all over the ‘Net. Anyone with a computer and Google can type in “fraud” and “indium” and come up with the following:...

The late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in the mid-2000s attempted to coordinate with Colombian guerrillas to flood the United States with cocaine, according to federal prosecutors' documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal. According to the documents, former Venezuelan Supreme Court Magistrate Eladio Aponte took part in a meeting where Chávez in 2005 convened his closest advisers to draw up plans to ship cocaine to the United States with the help of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). SNIP “During the meeting, Chávez urged the group, in substance and in part, to promote his policy objectives, including to combat...

The Obama administration withdrew updated quarantine regulations in 2010, prompting questions about how the policy change may have impacted the current Ebola situation. In April 2010, Politico reported the administration “quietly dumped quarantine rules that would have required air passengers to submit more information to airlines and strengthened the government’s authority to detain travelers suspected of carrying disease.” Politico initially reported in August of 2009 that the Obama administration examined Bush administration 2005 quarantine regulations, which were criticized by civil liberty advocates. “The proposals to limit liberty represent a dangerous precedent to constitutional theory, particularly when there’s almost no evidence...

Newly resurfaced footage of then-President George W. Bush urgently warning of the risks posed by pandemics in 2005 -- "If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare," Bush said at the National Institutes of Health -- has drawn belated praise from his detractors, and raised new questions as to the state of the federal government's disaster preparedness since his administration. In particular, a USA Today fact-check recently confirmed that the Obama administration had allowed the N95 mask stockpile to deplete following a series of crises, and apparently ignored calls for experts to renew...

NEWPORT, Ind. (AP) - Army contractors halted operations Saturday at a western Indiana complex built to destroy a deadly nerve agent after nearly 500 gallons of caustic wastewater spilled in a contained area. No workers were injured or exposed to the hydrolysate, a byproduct of the destruction of the agent, when it leaked onto the floor of a sealed area at the Newport Chemical Depot, depot spokesman Dennis Lindsey said. The facility was to be shut down until the spill was cleaned up and its cause determined, Lindsey said. The western Indiana facility destroys the Cold War-era chemical weapon VX...

Delingpole: Chloroquine Known as Effective Against Coronavirus Since 2005 21,461 GERARD JULIEN/AFP via Getty James Delingpole19 Mar 20208,759 4:28 The world economy is collapsing because of the terror and mounting death toll caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. But the anti-malarial drug chloroquine is effective both as a prophylactic and treatment for the virus – and the medical establishment has known about this since at least the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2005. What the hell is going on? Yesterday, I reported the existence of three studies, all claiming that chloroquine phosphate had proved effective in treating the COVID-19. This has since...

A nice catch from our friends at Grabien, who got it from Ace [update] and who had to go all the way back to 2005 to find this nugget and the contemporaneous coverage at the NYT. At the time, the US prepared for a predicted epidemic of the avian flu, also known as H5N1, of global proportions. The virus had been identified for 18 years by that time, but by the end of 2004 had only resulted in 36 deaths and 50 known cases over the prior two years, according to WHO data. In 2005, the number of cases would...

A 12-year-old girl kidnapped by a group of seven men in the Ethiopian city of Bita Genet was found several days after her abduction, safe under the watchful eyes of three lions. Not only were the lions guarding her, they allegedly chased off her captors. The girl was reportedly abducted by the seven men with the idea that she would be forced into marrying one of the them. According to the United Nations, about 70 percent of the marriages taking place in Ethiopia are the result of similar kidnappings. And nearly 100 percent of those abduction-marriages are not thwarted by...

Attorneys call videos ‘sickening’ Lawyers for the man known as the "20th hijacker" of 9/11 are suing the U.S. government to release "sickening" videotapes they say show Guantanamo Bay interrogators torturing their client. The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Federal Court on Monday by the Center for Constitutional Rights, said Mohammed Al-Qahtani was a victim “of torture and other profoundly cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment." "The American public should now be permitted to see what occurred for itself," the lawsuit said. Between 2002 and 2003, Al-Qahtani suffered through marathon interrogation sessions and was subjected to severe temperatures, sleep deprivation and other...

According to The New York Times (8 July 2003): "the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks said today that its work was being hampered by the failure of executive branch agencies, especially the Pentagon and the Justice Department, to respond quickly to requests for documents and testimony." Several alternative media have joined the bandwagon. George W. Bush is accused of obstructing the investigation...Former Jersey governor Thomas Kean, the commission's chairman is presented as an honest and uncompromising individual, who is courageously confronting the US government: "Without greater cooperation, Kean said, ''we cannot do the job we are supposed...

LOUISVILLE, KY (WAVE) - U. S. Senator Richard Lugar died Sunday morning, according to a release from the Lugar Center. Lugar was a senator from 1977 to 2013, before that serving as Mayor of Indianapolis from 1968 to 1975. After his career in politics, Lugar continued work through the Lugar Center, focused on global food security and aid effectiveness. He was a professor at Indiana University and led the Richard G. Lugar Symposium for Tomorrow’s Leaders at the University of Indianapolis. He held 46 honorary degrees from universities around the country, and Queen Elizabeth bestowed upon him the rank of...

On a late January afternoon, as press secretary Sean Spicer walked into the White House media briefing room, a tall, thin, bespectacled man poked his head in the doorway for a moment before turning around and heading back into the West Wing. Later that week, at another briefing, the man stayed longer, standing in the corner behind the podium, out of view of the array of television cameras. The reporters peppering Spicer with questions were unlikely to know it, but the wallflower watching over the proceedings happened to be the leading conservative intellectual to argue for the election of Donald...

WASHINGTON - David Margolis, a lawyer at the Justice Department for 40 years, was named Friday to oversee a special prosecutor's investigation of who in the Bush administration disclosed the name of an undercover CIA officer. Margolis, whose title is associate deputy attorney general, is taking the place of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, whose last day of work was Friday. Comey will be Lockheed Martin's new general counsel. Comey made the designation of Margolis. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has stepped aside from the probe because he was White House counsel when Valerie Plame's name was leaked in 2003 and...

The shadowy Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani recently visited Moscow to meet with senior Russian leaders, according to two Western intelligence sources, despite a travel ban and U.N. Security Council resolutions barring him from leaving Iran. On July 24, one week before State Secretary John Kerry testified to Senate Armed Services Committee and faced questions about the newly struck nuclear deal, Soleimani arrived in Moscow for meetings with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and President Vladimir Putin. It was not immediately clear what the Iranian leader discussed, but the revelation comes as the United Nations and European Union arms...

Two Atlanta-area men met with Islamic extremists in Toronto, where they discussed "strategic locations in the United States suitable for a terrorist strike," according to an FBI affidavit made public Friday. Syed Haris Ahmed and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee -- U.S. citizens from the Atlanta area -- met with at least three other targets of FBI terrorism investigations during a trip to Toronto last month, according to the affidavit. The affidavit said the men discussed attacks against oil refineries and military bases. They also planned to travel to Pakistan for military training at a terrorist camp, which authorities said the 21-year-old...

WASHINGTON, September 19, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The White House has once again denied the controversial United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) financial backing – for the fourth year running, despite assurances from the UNFPA that it is not involved in coercive abortion in China. The UNFPA would normally receive $34 million; instead, $25 million will be redirected to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). US law prohibits the country from contributing to any organization that participates in coercive abortion – a practice widely acknowledged in Communist-ruled China. Despite alleging that they have no participation in this practice – as a...

This month’s announcement from Party City that it’s closing more than 40 stores as it grapples with new challenges, including diminishing helium supplies, likely came as unwelcome news to customers who count on the store for their balloon and event planning needs. But for scientists like Mark Elsesser, the announcement was something of a relief, inflating hopes that the public, and the government, might start paying closer attention. “When it comes to helium, we’re at a tipping point,” said Elsesser, who is the associate director of government affairs at the American Physical Society, a nonprofit association of physicists. “Party City...

Yesterday we reported that Clinton and Obama economist and the former President of Harvard, took numerous flights on Jeffrey Epstein’s jet. He even flew on Epstein’s jet to Epstein’s infamous ‘Orgy Island’ ten days after his marriage in 2005. Today we can report that another Clinton elite creep, former Clinton National Security Advisor, took a flight on the Epstein Express from Epstein’s ‘Orgy Island’ as well. Yesterday we uncovered that creepy former President of Harvard, Larry Summers, flew numerous times on Jeffrey Epstein’s jet and even flew to Epstein’s so called ‘Orgy Island’. Flight logs from the previous Epstein trial...

In the early days of the Trump administration, a memo of uncertain origin circulated at the highest levels of the White House laying out a conspiracy theory about "coordinated attacks" on President Trump's foreign policy agenda from a group of former Obama administration officials, according to a memo obtained by The New Yorker's Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow. The memo, which "reads like a U.S. military-intelligence officer's analysis of a foreign-insurgent network," they wrote, posited that "the communications infrastructure ... used to sell ObamaCare and the Iran Deal to the public ('Echo Chamber') has been shifted from the White House...

On Saturday night, billionaire financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on charges that he recruited dozens of underage girls into a sex-trafficking ring in Florida and New York between 2002 and 2005. The details of his indictment became public on Monday morning when federal prosecutors unsealed the sex-trafficking charges against him. Though Epstein is the only person named, many powerful people with ties to the 66-year-old are likely feeling a little nervous about the consequences of the billionaire’s arrest — including Ghislaine Maxwell, a confidante of Epstein’s who has been connected to him for more than two...