Free Republic

German paper says Iranians paid cash to build mid-range missile launch pads on Paraguana Peninsula; Iranian engineers visited site in Feb. BERLIN – The Iranian government is moving forward with the construction of rocket launch bases in Venezuela, the German daily Die Welt wrote in its Friday edition. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is Teheran’s most important South American ally. Iran is building intermediate- range missile launch pads on the Paraguaná Peninsula, and engineers from a construction firm – Khatam al-Anbia – owned by the Revolutionary Guards visited Paraguaná in February. Amir al-Hadschisadeh, the head of the Guard’s Air Force, participated...

MOSCOW, May 27 (Xinhua) -- Russian arms export corporation Rosoboronexport signed a contract with the U.S. Army Forces Command on supplying 21 Mi-17V5 multipurpose helicopters to Afghanistan, a spokesman for the Russian Federal Service of Military-Technical Cooperation said on Friday. The United States and Russia have been in talks for more than a year on the deal to provide the much-needed vehicles for the NATO mission in Afghanistan, RIA Novosti reported. The cost of one helicopter has been agreed earlier at 17.5 million U.S. dollars. The first helicopters will be sent to Afghanistan in October 2011, said the spokesman. Besides,...

Despite a bipartisan federal law prohibiting financial contracts with the Russian government-owned arms giant Rosoboronexport, the Obama administration announced that it would be purchasing another $680 million worth of military helicopters from the state company for the Afghan regime of Hamid Karzai. The contract comes after the Pentagon already spent $411 million with the supplier since May of 2011, bringing the estimated amount of U.S. taxpayer funds funneled to the state-owned behemoth to about $1 billion in recent years. The latest deal, however, drew furious outrage from across the political spectrum. Critics and lawmakers complained that the controversial scheme would...

Mike Lynch, a British tech entrepreneur, and his daughter Hannah are missing after a luxury yacht sunk off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily. After co-founding British tech firm Autonomy in 1996, and backing several successful tech firms, the businessman was regarded by some as the UK's answer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates. One person is dead and six are missing after a 56m superyacht called Bayesian, which has been linked to Mr Lynch's family, sank following bad weather. His wife, Angela Bacares, has been rescued. The British tech tycoon made his riches by selling his company Autonomy...

Hillary Clinton generates events to support her narrative. For example, Clinton accused Trump of creating an atmosphere of violence at his rallies. To support the narrative she paid people to instigate trouble at Trump rallies. She has long had the narrative that Trump is connected with Russia. It began with accusations that Trump’s adviser Paul Manafort was tied to Russia, and that Trump too was tied to Russia. That went nowhere. Now months later the narrative has advanced to Russia hacked the DNC. This claim is based on Dmitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike. Given Clinton’s pattern of generating events to support...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told 7News Reporter Nick Minock that ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Washington, D.C. officers arrested Jose Jairo Rivas-Santiago in June 2026. ICE says 32-year-old Rivas-Santiago is a suspected MS-13 gang associate convicted of first-degree murder and armed robbery. In April 2019, ICE said Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Richmond agents found and arrested Rivas-Santiago on charges of armed robbery and conspiracy related to an MS-13 gang murder. ICE says HSI turned him over to the Richmond City Police Department for prosecution. In April 2021, ICE says a judge convicted him of murder and armed...

President Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday designated four European left-wing groups as terrorist organizations, following through on his vow to crack down on leftists after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The networks targeted by Trump’s Republican administration all appear to be based in Europe, with no operations in the United States. They are an Italian anarchist front that sent explosive packages to the then-president of the European Commission in 2003, two Greek networks believed to have planted bombs outside riot police and labor department buildings in Athens, and an anti-fascist group whose members were prosecuted by German authorities...

(CNSNews.com) – A Muslim civil rights activist told Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) that she stands by the advice posted on her Web site that tells Muslims not to speak with the FBI or other law enforcement personnel unless a lawyer is present. Kyl said he was “stunned” that Farhana Khera, president and executive director of Muslim Advocates, would “issue those kind of instructions,” given the connection between many domestic terror attacks and radical Islam and the importance of cooperation from American Muslims to help thwart those attacks. “I would think that Muslim Americans would feel a special obligation to...

In “response to the spike in anti-Muslim bigotry,” the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has quietly scheduled a special hearing for early next week to better protect Muslim civil rights in America. Organized by Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, who chairs the judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, the event will mark the first-ever congressional hearing on Muslim civil rights. Durbin put it together because he claims there’s been a surge in anti-Muslim bigotry in the last year. As examples he offers Quran burnings, restrictions on mosque construction, hate crimes, hate speech, and other forms of discrimination....

If the point of Sen. Dick Durbin's Tuesday hearing on anti-Muslim discrimination was to undermine Rep. Peter King's hearings on Muslim radicalization, it ended up achieving the opposite -- and highlighting exactly why King's investigation is so necessary. For the last few years, a few small but vocal groups claiming to represent American Muslims have stoked fears that hate crimes against Muslims are a growing epidemic, despite the fact that FBI statistics show nothing of the sort. In fact, anti-Muslim hate crimes have actually dropped since their height right after 9/11. Claims of rising Islamophobia allow certain Muslim "spokesmen" to...

Alert readers have reported that their flight, United Airlines 3681, from St. Louis to Washington Dulles had to make an emergency return to the gate as it prepared for take-off. According to local officials, it was found that two men who had boarded the plane as ‘federal air marshals’ didn’t have the proper credentials. Passengers were deplaned, all luggage was removed and re-scanned. All passengers were also re-screened. Passengers are now in the process of re-boarding. There is no word on the two ‘air marshals.’ BigGovernment has contacted security officials in St. Louis. Ron Meyer, of Young America Foundation, was...

In an excellent documentary called Stolen, which sets out to document a family reunion in the sole region in Africa where Spanish is spoken, filmmakers Ayala and Fallshaw uncover a bigger story than they had originally planned. What they find is a pocket of slavery still practiced in Western Sahara, Morocco, Mauritania, and elsewhere in Arab-African societies. The initial impetus for the film is the re-union of a generational family under UN auspices, a service the UN provides if the correct paperwork is filled out; family members long separated are brought together for a joyous 5-day reunion. What the documentarians...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has technically been banned from visiting China by its communist government, but he accompanied President Donald Trump on his trip to Beijing on Tuesday using a bureaucratic loophole created by the Chinese to let him in. Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles to Florida who was elected to the Senate in 2011, was one of several congressional representatives banned from traveling to China in July 2020 because they spoke out against China’s brutal oppression of the Uyghur Muslims of occupied East Turkistan. The U.S. had previously sanctioned four Chinese officials for herding the Uyghurs into...

Donald Trump is riding high in conservative Republican circles, thanks in part to the wall-to-wall coverage center-right Newsmax, the national magazine and heavily-trafficked website, is giving to his upstart and popular presidential candidacy. Need proof? Time's story on Trump has The Apprentice host waving a copy of a Newsmax poll showing him in the lead and says Trump speaks regularly to conservative "force" Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy. And the liberal media watchdog Media Matters has suggested that the two are in cahoots. So is there a Trump-Newsmax conspiracy? "Yes," cheers Ruddy. "Trump realizes the great potential of Newsmax and has...

What, exactly, is a “US Day of Rage?” Well, on September 17th we may find out for certain, but until then, The Blaze is revealing what information does exist about this very nefarious-sounding campaign. A US Day of Rage is the title given to a day of ostensibly “non-violent” civil disobedience orchestrated by a group of radicals — that reportedly include SEIU’s Stephen Lerner and ACORN founder Wade Rathke (who, coincidentally, formerly served as president of SEIU’s local New Orleans branch) — targeting Wall Street and U.S. capitalism. It’s worth noting that the title of the movement — if its...

In 2013, hundreds of CIA officers — many working nonstop for weeks — scrambled to contain a disaster of global proportions: a compromise of the agency’s internet-based covert communications system used to interact with its informants in dark corners around the world. Teams of CIA experts worked feverishly to take down and reconfigure the websites secretly used for these communications; others managed operations to quickly spirit assets to safety and oversaw other forms of triage. “When this was going on, it was all that mattered,” said one former intelligence community official. The situation was “catastrophic,” said another former senior intelligence...

Leader of White Supremacist Group ‘Maniac Murder Cult’ Recruited Others to Bomb and Poison the Jewish Community and Racial Minorities Defendant Allegedly Planned Scheme to Distribute Poisoned Candy on New Year’s EveGeorgian national Michail Chkhikvishvili, also known as Mishka, Michael, Commander Butcher, and Butcher, 21, of Tbilisi, was extradited to the United States from Moldova on May 22, and will be arraigned in federal court in Brooklyn today. Chkhikvishvili was arrested in Chișinău, Moldova, in July 2024 in connection with a four-count indictment returned in the Eastern District of New York charging him with soliciting hate crimes and acts of...

Iranian authorities have hanged another 30 prisoners at Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad on drug-related charges, says the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. The campaign cites “local knowledgeable sources” saying 12 prisoners were executed on Wednesday June 29 and another 18 were hanged on the following Sunday. The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran say the executions once again were carried out in secret and en masse, with no prior notification of families and attorneys and no official announcement from the judiciary. The report indicates that on June 29, the judiciary announced the execution of one convicted murderer...

James Alex Fields Jr., the driver charged with killing a woman at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, was previously accused of beating his mother and threatening her with a 12-inch knife, according to transcripts from dramatic 911 calls released Monday. Samantha Bloom, who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, repeatedly called police about her son, in 2010 and 2011, telling officers he was on medication to control his temper, transcripts from 911 calls show. Records show that Fields was arrested and put in juvenile detention after his mother reported in 2011 that he stood behind her wielding a knife. Earlier...

Reena Ninan, FOX reporter on Syria today, "While the world was watching the capture, no actually the murder of Osama Bin Laden"....