Free Republic

Federal authorities Thursday designated the notorious Mara Salvatrucha MS-13 as a “transnational criminal organization,” giving federal authorities more tools to fight the street gang that has its roots in Los Angeles. Under the designation, federal officials said they can now seize assets of gang members found within the United States jurisdiction. The designation is the first for a U.S. street gang. Among the organizations similarly designated are Japan’s Yakuza and Mexico’s Zetas, whose leader, Heriberto Lazcano, was killed by Mexican Marines on Sunday. An armed gang later stole his body from a funeral parlor. ... MS-13 began among El Salvadoran...

Beirut (dpa) - A US-backed alliance of Syrian Kurdish and Arab forces were Saturday closing in on a strategic dam held by Islamic State in northern Syria, a monitoring group said. The Tishreen Dam is located about 22 kilometres from al-Raqqa, Islamic State's de-facto capital in Syria. It is one of three major dams on the Euphrates River that flows from Turkey through Syria and into Iraq, and supplies much of northern Syria with electricity. The Democratic Forces of Syria (DFS), a coalition comprising mainly local Kurds, Arabs and Assyrians, seized the eastern bank of the Euphrates close to Tishreen...

Last week, Newsweek’s Jeff Stein ran a sensationalist story detailing alleged Israeli spy activities in the United States. Stein, citing dubious sources, claimed that Israeli spies attempted to monitor Al Gore’s bathroom activities (an image too frightening to imagine) while drugs and women are routinely employed by Zionist spies to entice U.S. officials into handing over information of value. The sources for these and other absurd allegations contained in the article were mainly anonymous with one notable exception, an obscure ex-intelligence character and former CIA employee named Paul Pillar. One look at Pillar’s past articles, publications and speeches puts the...

Six farm murders have taken place in the Two weeks since 90.000 leftist radicals sang “Kill the Boer” in Johannesburg. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blamed white South Africans for the killing spree. An AfriForum neighborhood watch apprehended four farm attackers outside Pretoria. ... On Tuesday, August 8, the local neighborhood watch of South African civil defense organization AfriForum responded to a farm attack alert in Brits, North West Province, 40 miles west of the capital Pretoria. Local civil defense volunteers were alerted of a vehicle heading east toward Pretoria and established a presence on all roads heading to the...

The evidence and documented testimony is overwhelming. If you study it, there can be no doubt regarding Obama’s ideological preferences and loyalties ... "Our goal as socialists is to abolish private ownership of the means of production,” explained David Green of the DSA National Political Committee. “Our immediate task is to limit the capitalist class’s prerogatives in the workplace….” America under the DSA would resemble the Soviet Union....

Thursday was inauguration day in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez — who has dominated Venezuelan politics one way or another for 14 years — was again sworn in as President. Only this time, the authoritarian populist could not take the oath in person. He departed for cancer surgery in Cuba on Dec. 10, 2012, and has not been seen in public since. This latest surgery is his fourth round of treatment in Cuba. Few expect Chavez to serve out this next six-year presidential term.

The Miami Herald is reporting Hugo Chávez early demise was recognized long before the rest of the world was privvy to the details of a late diagnosed and lethal cancer. With the help of Cuban brothers Fidel and Raúl, and Chávez' hand-picked successor Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan presidential election was moved from December 2012 to October 2012, two months that the report says were crucial. In October Chávez could still stand before his supporters to applaud his re-election, but there was no certainty that he could do so in December. He returned to Cuba for a fourth round of cancer treatments in early...

More workers in Mexico have died from their wounds following a blast that set off a blaze at a gas plant, bringing the death toll to 30. Twenty-five people are still in hospital. State-run oil company Pemex says that all those who had been missing are now accounted for. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has ordered an investigation into Tuesday's blast in northern Tamaulipas state. Pemex has ruled out foul play, saying it was an "unfortunate accident". The plant sustained serious damage and could take a month to restart operations, Pemex said. In an interview with Mexican radio, Pemex executive Carlos...

Rahn+Bodmer Enters into Deferred Prosecution Agreement for Criminal Misconduct; Agrees to Pay $22 MillionAudrey Strauss, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Stuart M. Goldberg, Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Tax Division, and James C. Lee, Chief of the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (“IRS-CI”), announced the filing of a criminal Information against RAHN+BODMER CO. (“R+B”), a financial institution located in Zurich, Switzerland. The Information charges R+B with one count of conspiring to help U.S. accountholders evade their U.S. tax obligations, file false federal tax returns, and otherwise defraud the Internal Revenue Service...

Now that Hugo Chávez is out of the picture, former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich warns President Obama to tread carefully in dealing with the “evil, evil men” that are now running the South American nation. “These guys are so tricky and so evil, quite frankly,” Reich, tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview following the announcement of Chávez’ death on Tuesday. “The people in power in Venezuela today are evil.” … Reich added that Fidel Castro and his brother may be calling the shots in Venezuela. …

CHEYENNE — Already facing serious federal charges for allegedly carrying 18,000 rounds of ammunition through Wyoming, Ricardo Paez-Quinones, 35, dug himself into an even deeper hole on Friday. Paez-Quinones was a no-show for his bond hearing on Friday morning in U.S. District Court, leading Judge Alan Johnson to put out a bench warrant for his arrest. Johnson suspected that the topic of his bond was what led Paez-Quinones to avoid coming to court, leading him to engage “in some form of self-help.” “We can receive an explanation for that at a later time,” Johnson remarked. Paez-Quinones is an illegal immigrant...

A delegation from a Chinese Communist Party-run think tank identified by the U.S. government as carrying out “undercover intelligence gathering” operations and seeking to coerce foreign actors into backing the Chinese Communist Party’s “preferred policies” met with Hillary Clinton and a host of high-level military leaders during the Obama-Biden administration, The National Pulse can reveal.The exchange with the controversial group – China Association for International Friendly Contact (CAIFC) – occurred in October of 2009, while Clinton was serving as Secretary of State. The CAIFC delegation, composed of China’s former top military leaders, visited Clinton after stopping in Hawaii to meet...

The celebrated deal that would have ensured that blind dissident Chen Guangcheng would stay in China began to dissolve publicly with a tweet: “GUANGCHENG TALKED TO ME. WHAT MEDIA REPORTED IS WRONG.” The unsettling Twitter message from Beijing activist Zeng Jinyan began a firestorm of debate over whether Chen had been coerced into the deal with threats to his family, an alarming idea that gutted the most important promise behind the agreement -- that Chen would be kept safe.

McMahon and his accomplice Zhu Yong conducted surveillance to harass and intimidate Americans on behalf of China

Wednesday afternoon, while many were riveted by the heartbreaking remarks of Rachel Morin's mother at the White House Press Briefing, the Department of Justice released information from Kilmar Abrego-Garcia's 2019 arrest and deportation proceedings that should put a lot of the whisperings about the "Maryland Father's" gang affiliations and alleged lack of due process to rest.Abrego-Garcia was detained by Prince Georges County, Maryland officials on March 28, 2019 in a Home Depot parking lot in Hyattsville, Maryland. Here are the highlights of that encounter and a subsequent bond hearing, as found in the documents:Abrego-Garcia was loitering with three other men...

Venezuela’s Vice President Tareck El Aissami, an official of Syrian-Lebanese origin sanctioned by the United States for his connections to drug trafficking, is a “huge” monetary contributor to Iran’s narco-terrorist proxy Hezbollah. Citing sources on the ground in Lebanon during an event late last week hosted on Capitol Hill by the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS), Dr. Vanessa Neumann, a leading expert on drug cartels and terrorist groups in Latin America, told Breitbart News, “Tareck El Aissami is one of Hezbollah’s great bagmen, a sort of huge funder, and the money goes through the networks, and then, as...

When Russia seized Crimea in March, it acquired not just the Crimean landmass but also a maritime zone more than three times its size with the rights to underwater resources potentially worth trillions of dollars. Russia portrayed the takeover as reclamation of its rightful territory, drawing no attention to the oil and gas rush that had recently been heating up in the Black Sea. But the move also extended Russia’s maritime boundaries, quietly giving Russia dominion over vast oil and gas reserves while dealing a crippling blow to Ukraine’s hopes for energy independence. Russia did so under an international accord...

Washington, DC – We all know about the notorious Obama “Kill List.” CIA Director John Brennan proudly told us about that last year when he described how the O-Team decides which Americans should be executed by Hellfire Missile fired from remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs). Why hasn’t the White House used this capability to “take out” those who killed our diplomats in Benghazi, Libya last year? Clip and save this column. Herein are some important events, names, places – facts your children and grandchildren will need to know about these perilous times: Tuesday, September 11, 2012, Benghazi, Libya. The U.S. consulate...

An explosion in southern Lebanon last week destroyed what is believed to have been a Hezbollah weapons depot. This latest in a series of mysterious “accidents” in Hezbollah-controlled precincts proved, as one Israeli official wryly remarked, that those who “sleep with rockets and amass large stockpiles of weapons are in a very unsafe place.” With the Party of God’s overland supply route through Syria choked off by the 22-month-long uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and Israel virtually in total control of the maritime route, Hezbollah’s stockpile is being systematically degraded.Yet the arsenal of Iran’s other regional proxy force, Hamas,...

The Russian government today claimed there are more than 100 American 'mercenaries' from a defense contracting company disguised as Ukrainian troops in the embattled former Soviet nation, a claim the American firm and top U.S. officials deny. ... The latest news relesae from Greystone, as posted on a company blog, is from September 2012, titled "New business in Russia" and simply says the company "provided executive protection services in Russia." In April 2012, the company announced it had been awarded a similar contract in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. ...