Free Republic

Mexico's leader sees potential in progress of Petrobras Guillermo Najera, a 42-year-old machine operator at Mexican state-controlled oil company Petróleos Mexicanos, gets paid to do nothing all day. Pemex management can't fire the union worker or transfer him from the ammonia plant in Ciudad Camargo, where he still shows up for work even though the plant stopped production in 2002. "We don't have anything else to do except keep our areas clean," Najera says as he and dozens of other idle workers enter the gates of the plant for the 7 a.m. shift. "I want to go back to work."...

The Democratic National Committee’s credentials panel voted Monday to void activist David Hogg’s election to vice chair of the party. Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was elected vice chair in February but has drawn criticism from some Democrats over his plans to spend $20 million to take down long-serving Democratic House lawmakers in primaries. “[It’s] impossible to ignore the broader context of my work to reform the party which loomed large over this vote,” Hogg said in a statement after the vote, according to Politico. “The DNC has...

Astonishing news out of Israel today and confirmed by at least one Israeli TV network that Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Gen. Esmail Qaani, commander of the crack Quds Force, is in Jerusalem after being identified as an Israeli intelligence asset.There's no doubt that Qaani was under suspicion. On Sept. 27, 2024, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, one of the most well-guarded people in the world, was killed when at least 80 bombs were dropped on a bunker in Beirut, where Nasrallah was meeting with top aides. Qaani was placed under house arrest and interrogated, according to Middle East sources. Qaani...

Beirut / Baghdad -- One of the most powerful men in Iraq isn't an Iraqi government official, a militia leader, a senior cleric or a top U.S. military commander or diplomat. He's an Iranian general, and at times he's more influential than all of them. Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani (51) ( pictured) commands the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, an elite paramilitary and espionage organization whose mission is to expand Iran's influence in the Middle East . As Tehran's point man on Iraq , he funnels military and financial support to various Iraqi factions, frustrating U.S. attempts to...

Russian army is embroiled in an embarrassing scandal after 200 of its tanks were found abandoned near a forest in central Russia, unguarded and unlocked. A news website near the city of Yekaterinburg posted a video of the forgotten tanks showing passers-by clambering inside the vehicles and playing with empty ammunition belts. The only items that seemed to be missing were live rounds and the keys to the tanks' ignitions. "There are tanks all over the forest, abandoned," an unnamed reporter on the video says. "If you need one, come and get it." Locals in a nearby village said the...

Lima (AFP) – Peru's opposition-dominated Congress will on Wednesday debate whether to impeach President Pedro Castillo in the third attempt to unseat him since his election a year and a half ago. Castillo, a former school teacher who unexpectedly took power from Peru's traditional political elite, has faced non-stop crises since coming to office, with repeated cabinet reshuffles, multiple corruption investigations and protests against his leadership. The opposition seeks to impeach him for moral incapacity, a constitutional provision that has seen two presidents sacked since 2018.

January 21, 2022 With inflation at a record high, millions of its citizens fleeing the country, and a political opposition recognized by most Western democracies as the legitimate government of Venezuela, the regime of Nicolás Maduro seemed to be on the brink of collapse in 2019. But Maduro regime survived, thanks to a number of factors — among them the external support it received from malign state actors such as Russia and China. Moscow and Beijing never wavered in their political support of the Venezuelan regime, or of Maduro himself, including by refusing to recognize the constitutionally mandated interim presidency...

Last December Belarus approached Russia with a request for a loan aimed at facilitating the switch to the Russian ruble as the main currency for bilateral trade. The global financial crisis depleted the country’s international reserves and put the economy in a rather dire condition, creating a desperate need for more funding, even after the country secured a $2 billion loan earlier in the year. But the Russians made it clear that they were not interested in giving out more money. However, after last week’s meeting of the Higher State Council of the Union of Russia and Belarus, the Assistant...

What is going on?? It appears that a fifth undersea communications cable has been damaged. The latest...an estimated 1.7 million Internet users in the UAE have been affected by the recent undersea cable damage. A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

Volodymyr Zelensky has sacked his wartime minister of defence and replaced him with a trusted political ally who took part in failed peace talks last year with Russia.The dismissal of Oleksii Reznikov, who has headed Ukraine’s defence ministry since Russia invaded in February 2022, needs to be approved by the Ukrainian parliament.“I believe that the Ministry needs new approaches and other formats of interaction with both the military and society at large,” Mr Zelensky said.The 57-year-old Mr Reznikov became one of the most high-profile Ukrainians of the war, representing Ukraine at Nato meetings and dozens of bilateral talks to secure...

Newly declassified documents show informant Stefan Halper was motivated in part by "monetary compensation" and was paid nearly $1.2 million from FBI over three decades. ********************************************************************** Akey FBI informant in the widely-debunked Russia collusion case was paid nearly $1.2 million over three decades, was motivated in part by "monetary compensation," and continued snitching even after agents concluded he told them an inaccurate story about future Trump National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, newly declassified documents show. The nearly 700 pages of once-secret documents, obtained by Just the News, were recently turned over by FBI Director Kash Patel to House Judiciary Committee...

Venezuela’s Tarek El-Aissami The Americas Report | Oct 03, 2008  By Nicole Ferrand [...] Mr. El - Aissami is a Venezuelan national of Syrian descent who, before becoming Minster of Interior and Justice, occupied the position of Deputy Interior Minister for Public Security. His father, Carlos Aissami, is the head of the Venezuelan branch of the Iraqi Baath political party. Before the invasion of Iraq, he held a press conference in which he described himself as a Taliban and called Osama Bin Laden, "the great Mujahedeen, Sheik Osama bin Laden." Tarek's great-uncle Shibli el-Aissami was a prominent ideologist and...

The discovery of a ship, missing for five centuries, in a southwest African desert, filled with gold coins, is one of the most thrilling archaeological finds in recent times. The Bom Jesus (The Good Jesus) was a Portuguese vessel that set sail from Lisbon, Portugal on Friday, March 7, 1533. Its fate was unknown until 2008 when its remains were discovered in the desert of Namibia during diamond mining operations near the coast of the African nation. When it sank in a fierce storm, it was on its way to India laden with treasures like gold and copper ingots. Two...

U.S. security and law-enforcement officials say they have fresh evidence of recent efforts by Iran to evade sanctions and acquire metals from China used in high-tech weaponry, including long-range nuclear missiles. Iran's efforts are detailed in a series of recent emails and letters between Iranian companies and foreign suppliers seen by The Wall Street Journal. Business records show one Iranian company, ABAN Commercial & Industrial Ltd., has contracted through an intermediary for more than 30,000 kilograms (about 66,000 pounds) of tungsten copper -- which can be used in missile guidance systems -- from Advanced Technology & Materials Co. Ltd. of...

Russia could be sliding into dictatorship as Germany did soon after World War I, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves has warned. "There is a mentality of being stabbed in the back that reminds me of the Weimar Republic," Mr Ilves told Russia's Moscow Times newspaper. The Weimar Republic is the name given to the German state in 1919-1933 - before Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Estonia-Russia ties have been tense since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Last year, Tallinn and Moscow had an all-out row over the relocation of a Soviet-era war memorial in the Estonian capital. Amnesty report...

Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves (file photo) Serving as president of Estonia between 2006 and 2016, and foreign minister before that, Toomas Hendrik Ilves has always been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin's Russia. Speaking by Zoom from Estonia, Ilves pours water on the idea of negotiating with Russia and says that Georgia's position on the war in Ukraine is "absolutely despicable." RFE/RL: There are many people who think that the roots of what is going on now in Ukraine, and what happened in Georgia in 2008, go back to the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest and the refusal...

09 September 2009 JIHADIS REPORT OF SYRIAN MEDDLING IN YEMEN Not that I consider jihadis to be a reliable source on such matters, but you know what they say about broken clocks...

Homeland Insecurity: The IRS is diligent to a fault when it comes to vetting conservative groups applying for nonprofit status. But it's out to lunch when vetting employees posing security risks. While the Internal Revenue Service was investigating Tea Party patriots in the run-up to last year's presidential election, it dispensed with basic background checks and hired a convicted Islamist traitor as a high-level official. Mohammad Weiss Rasool, whom the FBI busted last decade for tipping off an al-Qaida terrorist suspect, reportedly now works for the deputy IRS chief financial officer as a financial management analyst, drawing a lucrative salary...

Putin’s Activation of ‘Iskander-M’ Ballistic Missile Is a Message to Obama http://observer.com/2016/10/putins-activation-of-iskander-m-ballistic-missile-is-a-message-to-obama/ Putin’s Activation of ‘Iskander-M’ Ballistic Missile Is a Message to Obama The KGB officer in the Kremlin seeks one last, grand strategic humiliation for our president before he leaves office By John R. Schindler • 10/07/16 11:00am Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Prince Albert II of Monaco (not pictured) at the Kremlin in Moscow on October 6, 2016. / AFP / POOL AND AFP / YURI KADOBNOV Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images It’s long been obvious that Vladimir Putin and his inner circle view Barack...

We hear a lot of talk about how Trump has “upset norms,” and “abandoned our allies” to “side with a dictator,” but so far as I can tell, while Trump is “siding” with Putin, nobody has ever accused him of “wooing” Putin. “Wooing” isn’t even my word. It’s the Washington Post’s and it’s not about Trump. It’s about Obama. In May 2012, having watched Obama debase himself for the better part of four years, the Post had had enough and called it “wooing.” Trump’s been accused of pretty much everything as it relates to Putin, but never “wooing.” In fact,...