Free Republic

AN ALLEGED attempt to kill a former Russian spy who defected to Britain was being investigated by police last night. Oleg Gordievsky was admitted to a hospital in Guildford after falling ill in November last year. And yesterday he claimed he had been poisoned with the highly toxic metal thallium in a botched assassination attempt. Gordievsky, a KGB double agent who spied on Russia for British intelligence during the 1980s, claims he was targeted by a Russian assassin who visited him at his safe house in Surrey. The 69-year-old was unconscious for 34 hours after falling ill last year and...

Police believe Litvinenko poisoned twice By David Harrison, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 12:29am GMT 07/01/2007 Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy, was the victim of a "double hit" by the assassins who poisoned him with radioactive polonium-210, police believe. Traces of polonium have been found at Pescatori Detectives suspect that Mr Litvinenko, 44, who lived in north London, was first poisoned several days before he was attacked at a central London hotel on November 1. Officers had initially believed he was first poisoned that day at the Itsu sushi bar in Piccadilly, central London, when he met Mario Scaramella, an...

"The dogs bark, the caravan moves on." That Middle Eastern proverb could well describe the events surrounding production of the world's most-hyped dud firecracker, the Iraq Study Group Report. After immense agonies in the mainstream media (MSM), those like myself who predicted the report, once released, would largely be ignored by President George W. Bush, are being proven right and neoconservatives who support a continued commitment to the transformation of Iraq have exhibited renewed influence. Only a couple of lines in the report were worthy of comment. One appears on page 29 of the printed version: "Funding for the Sunni...

WASHINGTON -- Just when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) thought it had its hands around the Iranian nuclear program, NewsMax has learned from intelligence sources that Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps is completing a secret, underground uranium enrichment plant that should begin operating in October 2006. Work on the new plant, located 50 miles outside the northeastern Iranian city of Mashad, was begun with help from Russian engineers in 2003, Iranian intelligence sources said. The facility has been built 150 meters below ground in a rugged highlands valley some 38 kilometers southeast of the city of Nishabour. The nearest inhabited...

For Gays, a Loud New Foe Sacramento's large enclave of immigrant Slavic evangelicals is becoming a force on social issues. Their actions shock many. By Rone Tempest, Times Staff Writer October 13, 2006 SACRAMENTO — Organizers of the annual Rainbow Festival were prepared for trouble. The Q Crew, a local "queer/straight alliance," distributed cards telling people what to do if approached by hostile demonstrators. Sympathetic local church groups formed a protective buffer along the festival ground's cyclone fence. Mounted police were on patrol.

Five-and-a-half years after being convicted of providing material support for terrorism, terror lawyer Lynne Stewart finally received a sentence commensurate with her crime. She was resentenced last week to 10 years. But if George Soros had his way, she would be free today. Stewart made a career out of defending street criminals and terrorists, including Sammy "The Bull" Gravano (pleaded guilty), Weather Underground terrorist David J. Gilbert (convicted), and Larry Davis (acquitted of wounding six policemen and killing several others in 1986, only to be convicted of a later murder and killed in prison). It should have come as...

Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah: When We Were Young, I cannot Forget the Sight of American Forces leaving Vietnam, and the Americans Abandoning their Vietnamese Allies, I Anticipate the Same for our Region Following are excerpts from an interview with Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on October 31, 2006. Hassan Nasrallah: We consider the resistance in Iraq, or in any occupied country - and there is no doubt that Iraq is an occupied country – to be legitimate resistance, which is justified and appropriate. This is the appropriate course, which may lead to the liberation of Iraq,...

Snip In the aftermath of 9/11, when President Bush ordered the U.S. military to remove the Taliban, who had given sanctuary to al-Qaeda and Osama, America was with him. When he identified Saddam as an integral part of an Axis of Evil hell-bent on America’s destruction, the nation supported him. Now America is not so sure. Preventive war as the antidote to terror seems, now that Anbar province has become the world’s newest base camp of terror, to have failed us. Democracy as the surest guarantee of U.S. security, now that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Moqtada al-Sadr are...

Schematic diagram of the test site The upper half of the following image shows where the test was conducted on Oct. 9(on the lower left corner of the map marked with orange flash symbol), and another new site for additional test(on the upper left corner, marked with a small yellow dot) The lower half of the image show the schematic diagram of the test site, with horizontal tunnels looping downward at the end to reach the test chamber. The illustration says that the tunnel is suspected to be from several hundreds meter to one kilometer long.

PARIS (AP) - French customs officers are inspecting a North Korean ship at an Indian Ocean island off the coast of Africa as part of U.N. sanctions prompted by the communist nation's nuclear test, but they found nothing illegal so far, officials said Thursday. It was the first time a country was known to have stopped a North Korean vessel under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718 authorizing searches as part of the sanctions imposed on Pyongyang for its nuclear test. Since the resolution was passed Oct. 14, at least four other North Korean vessels have been stopped, but the countries...

Every weekday at 8 a.m., Kevin Brock hefts a thick white ring binder onto a sleek, oval conference table. Labeled "Read Book," the deceptively plain folder houses the "Threat Matrix," a top-secret compendium of the most troubling reports of possible terrorist activity, drawn from the nation's 16 intelligence agencies. It is thicker than usual on a recent Monday morning, packed with 66 separate items that came in over the weekend. Brock, the principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, is about to brief some of the government's most senior officials on the latest threat information. -snip- Facing a wall...

OAXACA, Mexico — Gunmen shot dead a local leader of Mexico's largest leftist party in the southern state of Oaxaca where at least nine people were killed in political violence last year, police said today. Democratic Revolution Party official Fructuoso Pedro Garcia was shot with nine bullets in the main square of Santo Domingo Morelos, a seaside town about 150 miles south of Oaxaca's colonial state capital, said state police commander Alberto Guzman. The killing occurred last Wednesday, three days after Garcia announced he would run for mayor of Santo Domingo Morelos. Guzman said the killing appeared to be for...

Fear of Too Many Babies is Hard to Bear October 22, 2006 BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist Last Tuesday morning, in a maternity ward somewhere in the United States, the 300 millionth American arrived. He or she got a marginally warmer welcome than Mark Foley turning up to hand out the prizes at junior high. One could have predicted the appalled editorials from European newspapers aghast at yet another addition to the swollen cohort of excess Americans consuming ever more of the planet's dwindling resources. And, when Canada's National Post announced "'Frightening' Surge Brings US To 300m People," you can...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. intelligence community on Tuesday unveiled its own secretive version of Wikipedia, saying the popular online encyclopedia format known for its openness is key to the future of American espionage. The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government's classified Intelink Web much like its more famous namesake on the World Wide Web. A "top secret" Intellipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and...

Congressional Democrats anxious to force a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq are frustrated by their inability to muster a veto-proof majority for legislation that would establish a firm date for retreat. But what they cannot do directly they are now working hard to do indirectly. According to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Incirlik Air Base near Adana, Turkey is the transshipment point for about 70% of all air cargo (including 33% of the fuel) going to supply US forces in Iraq. Included are about 95% of the new “MRAP” -- mine-resistant, ambush-protected -- vehicles designed to save the lives of...

Preacher says GOP delaying 2nd coming Monday, October 09, 2006 Becky Gaylord Plain Dealer Reporter Voters should oust congressional Republican leaders because U.S. foreign policy is delaying the second coming of Jesus Christ, according to a evangelical preacher trying to influence closely contested political races. K.A. Paul railed against the war in Iraq on Sunday before a crowd of 1,000 at the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, his first stop on what he hopes is a 30-city campaign. The Houston-based preacher said he believes that the Bush administration has delayed the second coming because U.S. foreign policy has...

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, with his job on the line because of the spiraling Mark Foley cyberspace page sex scandal, was duped Tuesday into letting a stranger into his Plano home -- a serious security breach. Hastert literally let his guard down and allowed in his house a hustling, self-promoting evangelist little known in this country, the Houston-based K.A. Paul, who at 7:30 a.m. arrived at the speaker's home with a camera-wielding associate. How Paul and his aide, Dennis Ryan, got to Hastert's door is a tale of apparent chance. How the publicity-hungry Paul and Ryan walked through it...

BRITAIN'S top soldier spoke out against the government's handling of the campaign in Iraq because he feared Britain was being "held hostage" by US policy in the region, friends claimed last night. General Sir Richard Dannatt sparked a furious row over Tony Blair's foreign policy last week when he warned that British troops should leave Iraq soon because they were "exacerbating the security problems" there. Allies of Sir Richard last night claimed he had been expressing deep concerns shared by colleagues in the highest ranks of the military - and that the real target of his attack was Washington, not...

The head of the Army is calling for British troops to withdraw from Iraq "soon" or risk catastophic consequences for both Iraq and British society. In a devastating broadside at Tony Blair's foreign policy, General Sir Richard Dannatt stated explicitly that the continuing presence of British troops "exacerbates the security problems" in Iraq. In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Sir Richard also warns that a "moral and spiritual vacuum" has opened up in British society, which is allowing Muslim extremists to undermine "our accepted way of life." The Chief of the General Staff believes that Christian values are...

Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking By Matt Taibbi | November 6, 2014 "It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. "I thought, 'I can't sit by any longer.'" Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing. Back in 2006, as a...