Free Republic

He walks with a cane and is a bit hard of hearing. Yet Boris Chertok, 95, a former deputy chief designer in the Soviet bureau that put the first Sputnik satellite into orbit 50 years ago, still has strong opinions on the evolution of the country's space program. Chertok says the free-market changes instituted by President Boris Yeltsin after the Soviet Union fell apart were disastrous for Russian science. "We need to restore what we have lost over 15 years of destructive reforms," said Chertok, whose very name was once a state secret. "The market economy is incapable of fulfilling...

In an apparent lack of confidence in the leadership of Raul Castro, the number of Cubans leaving the island illegally by sea has been rising, according to U.S. officials. The number of people attempting the perilous voyage across of the Florida Straits has risen 21 percent compared to the same period last year. The number intercepted by the Coast Guard increased 65 percent. Since the beginning of October 2007, some 2,891 Cubans have attempted the journey across the straits. While 1,697 successfully reached the United States, 1,194 were intercepted at sea and returned to Cuba. Nearly ten times the number...

The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday it was investigating how engines made by a Canadian subsidiary of United Technologies Corp wound up in prototypes of the Z-10, China's first domestically developed military attack helicopter. State Department spokesman Karl Duckworth said information was being gathered before deciding whether to take any action. "We are reviewing the matter and have no further comments at this time," he said.

A marathon deportation case against two Palestinian immigrants, pursued by the administrations of four U.S. Presidents over 20 years, has been dismissed. The ruling closes a Byzantine legal saga that wound its way through federal appellate courts, the U.S. Supreme Court and federal immigration boards, breaking new legal ground along the way. It ended at the Department of Homeland Security, where the dismissal order was entered Tuesday. One of the defendants, Khader Musa Hamide, said in an interview that he will never get over the experience of being under suspicion for 20 years but now "I can breathe better." A...

Available online at: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2009/01/al_qaedas_operations.php Osama al Kini, also known as Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam. The US killed al Qaeda's chief of operations in the New Year's Day missile strike in Pakistan's Taliban-controlled tribal agency of South Waziristan, according to a report. The Jan. 1 attack in the town of Karikot in South Waziristan killed Osama al Kini and his senior aide Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, intelligence officials told The Washington Post. Two other unnamed operatives were also killed in the airstrike. Osama al Kini's is an alias for Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam, a Kenyan national and a senior al Qaeda...

A New Year's CIA strike in northern Pakistan killed two top al-Qaeda terrorists long sought by the United States, including the man believed to be behind September's deadly suicide bombing at a Marriott hotel in the Pakistani capital, U.S. counterterrorism officials told The Washingon Post today. Agency officials determined in recent days that among the dead in the Jan. 1 missile strike were a Kenyan national who used the name Usama al-Kini and who was described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations in Pakistan and his lieutenant, identified as Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, the sources said. Both men were associated with...

KABKABIYA, Sudan (AP) -- Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter got in a shouting match Wednesday with Sudanese security officials who blocked him from a town in Darfur where he was trying to meet representatives of ethnic African refugees from the ongoing conflict. The 83-year-old Carter walked into this highly volatile pro-Sudanese government town to meet refugees too frightened to attend a scheduled meeting at a nearby compound. Carter was able to make it to a school where he met with one tribal representative and was preparing to go further into the town when Sudanese security services interrupted. "You can't go....

Former Employee of CIA and FBI Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy, Unauthorized Computer Access and Naturalization Fraud DETROIT – Nada Nadim Prouty, a 37-year-old Lebanese national and resident of Vienna, Va., pleaded guilty today in the Eastern District of Michigan to charges of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship, which she later used to gain employment at the FBI and CIA; accessing a federal computer system to unlawfully query information about her relatives and the terrorist organization Hizballah; and conspiracy to defraud the United States. The announcement was made today by Stephen J. Murphy, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan; Kenneth...

SPIEGEL ONLINE talks to historian and Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash about the European Union's weak image in the world, the limits to EU expansion and how Europe should tackle Russia and Iran.Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at St. Antony's College, Oxford, a senior fellow at the Stanford University-based think tank the Hoover Institution and a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a new European think tank. He has earned renown for a genre of writing he calls the "history of the present." His eight books feature historical analysis of transformations undergone in Europe...

If there's one thing the coronavirus experience has taught us, it's that bureaucracies don't function as well as they're supposed to. In New York, the bureaucracy opted to spend $500 million on illegal aliens instead of on ventilators. Likewise, during the Obama administration, after the 2009 H1N1 epidemic, the Obama administration, despite warnings, never bothered to replenish stockpiles of N95. It turns out now that the NIH was also doing the bureaucratic equivalent of twiddling its thumbs when it should have been acting to prepare America for the next pandemic. It's sheer luck — mixed in with Trump's foresight about...

NOTE TO ADMIN MOD: this is not a commercial solicitation. I have no expectations of selling the item for $37,500. The point is to expose the story. After three false FEC returns, the FEC gave Hillary an immunity agreement and ordered her to file a fourth report. She filed a fourth false report and the crime thus continues. FREEPERS --- please ask questions on the item and allow me to tell the story and further skewer her. I hope this story can make the news. Thanks. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Bill Clinton signed directors chair seatback from concert that evidenced a crime Hillary...

Back in 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate was released which all but absolved Iran of suspicions that it was on course to develop nuclear weapons. Rich Lowry writes In November 2007, US intelligence agencies wrote a National Intelligence Estimate concluding, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." . . The 2007 NIE had a very circumscribed definition of a weapons program, but it included "covert conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work." Exactly what Qom is for. What do the Iranians have to do to convince US intelligence they have a weapons program? The...

When it comes to politicized intelligence in the Bush years, the critics may finally have a point. Perhaps the work of America’s intelligence agencies was manipulated to suit the convenience of a small group of willful officials, intent on getting their way against the better judgment of their colleagues. Except the intelligence was about Iran, not Iraq, and the manipulators weren’t conniving neocons but rather the Administration’s internal critics on the left.”

Osama bin Laden's 16-year-old son led a suicide bomb squad sent to kill Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, according to her own claims. Before she was assassinated in December the former prime minister claimed she had been warned that four such death teams would try to kill her. And the naming of bin Laden's teenage son, Hamza, could now strengthen claims that he is being groomed as a future leader of the al Qaeda terror group. In 2001, he appeared in a joint Taliban and al Qaeda video of a militant attack on a Pakistan army camp in South Waziristan,...

Welcome back, Tucker. Really. When Carlson was away, guest host David Shuster sullied Tucker's name-sake show with the tasteless "gotcha" game he sprung on Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), then compounded matters by leading a liberal love-in. Tucker's been back in the saddle for a couple days, and this evening took on Wesley Clark and later a representative of Media Matters. Speaking with Paul Waldman, Senior Fellow and Director of Special Projects of "Media Matters," Carlson displayed the graphic shown here, in which Hillary Clinton stated that she had "helped start" Media Matters. Under close questioning by Carlson, Waldman wound up...

The Caribbean island of St Maarten - part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands - is an important centre for international drug trafficking. The island might also be involved in financing terrorism in the Middle East and Afghanistan. These are two conclusions reached in a confidential report about to be published by the Dutch Research and Documentation Centre (RDC). The report, "Organised crime and law enforcement on St. Maarten", is due to be presented to the Antillean Justice Minister David Dick on Monday, 8 October, but its conclusions are already common knowledge. The RDC itself has declined to comment until...

The Roll Call newspaper in Washington reported on its website this evening that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois intends to resign his House seat later this year. The subscription-only site said Hastert, who had already announced he would not seek reelection in 2008, was calling friends and associates today and telling them of his decision. His early departure would create the need for a special election in his exurban Chicago district, possibly on Illinois' Feb. 5 presidential primary day. The 65-year-old former high school teacher and wrestling coach, first elected to the U.S. House in 1986 after six...

The Long War Journal: Al Douri forms nationalist Sunni coalition; 1920s Revolution Brigades denounces al Qaeda Written by Bill Roggio on October 4, 2007 11:34 AM to The Long War Journal Available online at: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2007/10/al_douri_forms_natio.php The Sunni insurgency continues to fracture as US and Iraqi forces are on the offensive in central and northern Iraq. Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, the most wanted Baathist and leader in the Sunni insurgency, has formed a new insurgent front which is willing to negotiate, while a faction of the 1920s Revolution Brigades openly denounced al Qaeda. A grouping of 22 Sunni insurgent groups have...

Hitler's Muslim Nephew Comes to New York September 24, 2007 FrontPageMagazine.com Kenneth R. Timmerman What was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinking? Apparently the former Democrat believed that escorting Iran’s Hitler-wannabe president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the site of the September 11 memorial at Ground Zero would generate a terrific photo op. “Here I am with world leaders,” that type of thing. After all, Bloomberg has already made his appearance at the “World Leaders Forum” at Columbia University, so he was in the zone. And last year, U.S. News & World Report crowned him as one of America’s “best leaders.” But...

Suspicions by Pakistan's powerful army that the country's civilian leadership is growing too close to the United States are fueling a political crisis that analysts here believe threatens the survival of the government and could divert attention from the battle against Islamic extremists. Military officials believe that secretly taped conversations between Pakistani President Asif Zardari and his ambassador in Washington, prove that it was at Zardari's insistence that a $1.5 billion U.S. aid package passed by Congress in September contained several provisions that angered the Pakistani military. The military publicly protested the aid package last month. "The reaction (from the...