Free Republic

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. ...

Deep in your heart you knew there are tax-payer’s money wasted somewhere in the whole Russian spy drama. Why did the Obama administration and the Russian government wanted to get rid of them so fast? We may never know. However we can prove that USAID funded the agro- and eco-tourism project in 2004 run by the company 4Vlast for which Anya Chapman and Vasily Kushchenko worked at the time. As you know from the previous research Chapman was the London contact person for the 4Vlast firm, Kushchenko was running their tourism firm and worked for the 4 Vlast Mrs. World...

All citizens in a free society need to understand psychological warfare to protect their property, their freedom, and possibly their lives from tiny self-serving minorities and even lunatic fringe organizations. "Scientists discover tipping point for the spread of ideas" explains how a handful of Nazis could gain control of an advanced, civilized, and educated nation like Germany. "Researchers have found that minority rules; when only ten percent of the public holds a firm opinion, the majority will always follow." Linebarger, however, set the figure at two percent: The Communists had shown that an organization calling itself a party, actually a...

At the tail end of the fiery Oval Office exchange pitting Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky against President Trump and Vice President Vance, Trump spent two heated minutes on a theme the media will likely bury. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” said Trump. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia.” What Trump did not say, but he might have, is that the constant scapegoating of Russia and Putin made America’s proxy war against Russia an easy sell. What Trump might also have said is that before he...

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysia filed criminal charges against Goldman Sachs and two former executives on Monday for their role in the alleged multibillion-dollar ransacking of state investment fund 1MDB. Attorney General Tommy Thomas said the government is seeking several billion dollars in fines from Goldman Sachs for breaches of securities laws that involved it making false and misleading statements to investors. He said his office will seek prison sentences of up to 10 years for the former Goldman executives, Roger Ng Chong Hwa and Tim Leissner, who is married to model Kimora Lee Simmons.

The self-styled “misogynist influencer” Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan, have left Romania on a private jet and are flying to the US after their travel ban was lifted, officials and local media have said. The brothers, who were arrested in Romania three years ago and face trial on charges of rape, people trafficking and money laundering, took off from Bucharest’s Baneasa airport at 5.30am (3.30am GMT) for Florida, 24-hour news channel Antena 3 said. Airport sources confirmed their departure. Romania’s public prosecutor’s office said it had approved the brothers’ request to travel to the US pending investigation, and judicial...

Secret Service Director Julia Pierson House should be ousted from her job, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday, agreeing with the recommendation of the top Democrat on the oversight committee. Mrs. Pelosi, the highest-ranking woman in American politics, said problems go beyond Ms. Pierson, who was put in charge of the Secret Service after a scandal involving agents who hired prostitutes in Cartagena in 2012. But Mrs. Pelosi said she accepts the analysis of Rep Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, who said he was displeased with Ms. Pierson’s leadership.